Freedom and Democracy is Dying

Source: Jesse, Editor, TvNewsLIES.org 

I have a question for my friends who consider themselves “family values Conservatives and Republicans”: why is it that throughout American history in every situation where America “supports” foreign regimes or supports (or takes an active role in) regime change the beneficiaries of our support turn out to be brutal murderers and our support usually helps them murder or torture so called leftists? Henry Kissinger, one of America’s most nefarious figures, is currently wanted around the world for war crimes related to his support for, enabling of or masterminding atrocities across the globe. Now he is wanted in connection of Operation Condor, where the US backed what was in reality a brutal genocide of leftists in South America.

For those who don’t know what leftists are or what left wing/liberal politics is…it is basically the political position that stands for things like social justice, civil rights, secular government and the right of the people to benefit from their nation’s resources. Our media has been on a long mission to demonize liberals yet they forget to explain what liberalism or left wing politics is all about. They also forget to inform the public that throughout history decent law abiding leftists around the world have fallen victim to American supported brutality and genocide for no other reason than the fact that they stood to defend their freedom, assets and natural resources from financial elitist capitalists, mainly from the US and the UK.

Why is it that you never hear about liberals or leftists brutalizing innocents? Why are brutalizing and genocide always methods used against leftists? What does that tell you about the values of the left versus the values of the right? Christians, who so often align themselves with the right might want to start asking themselves this question and they may also want to once and for all look up the definition of liberalism for they just may find that they themselves are liberal, for the most part. You see liberalism has nothing to do with abortion or homosexuality; although Ann Coulter (who coincidently looks like a transvestite male) and Sean Hannity (who could not be an active homosexual if he wanted to because no self respecting homosexual would give him the time of day), might have you believe otherwise. I have a feeling that if every American was forced to read the definition of the word “liberal” we would have a lot of confused people out there. And I have a feeling a lot of those confused people would feel angry, betrayed and stupid for not doing their homework sooner.

I have experimented with this before. Read about my confrontation with Bush supporters at the huge protest at the RNC convention in NY: http://tvnewslies.org/blog/?p=377 . I have done this sort of thing dozens of times…and I am right about this (no pun intended). Try it for yourself some time.

Unfortunately the stupid idealist liberals keep trying to achieve justice by using fair and legal means against an opponent who does not play by any rules, has no conscience and thinks not twice about brutally eliminating anything that stands between them and complete domination of all around them. Justice will never catch up to the brutes unless you fight their fire with fire. You can not defeat unjust politicians using in the voting booth when those politicians don’t play fair with the electoral system. You can not conduct investigations using corrupt investigative bodies like the US Congress or the US Judiciary and you can not educate the people when the media is under the control of the enemy. There comes a time that you have to fight dirty. There comes a time that you have to use the same tactics as the enemy. There comes a time where you have to stop fooling yourself into thinking the righteous will emerge victorious. The truth is that you will get kicked in the nuts before the bell rings and there is no ref around to disqualify your opponent; you’re all alone in the ring with Mike Tyson, and his gloves are off, his teeth are sharp and he’s in his prime. He owns the judges, the referees, the photographers and ringside doctor; and you are still trying to play by the rules. Who is the ass?

History will look back at our generation as the generation that should have started some kind of revolution. History will show that all the signs were there yet the weak naive leftists stupidly kept playing by the rules even though they could see that the system was rigged. And history will teach many of those on the right that in most ways they were more liberal than they ever knew and that they were unwittingly supporting their own enemy; yet they never stopped to find out what liberalism was and they never bothered to look close enough at their leaders to see that the the terms “Republican”, “Conservative”, “Democracy” and “freedom” were code speak for “Machiavellian”, “Fascists”, “capitalism” and “tyrannical rule”!

Sure these faux leaders want freedom, freedom from rules and regulations that would prevent them from owning and controlling everything on the planet. They don’t even really try to keep this secret, it is just that people don’t want to open their eyes and accept what is happening. The sooner people realize what is going on the better chance history has of recording and passing along our story. But unless the good people of our nation actually do something more than march down a street carrying signs and wearing tee-shirts and hats, history won’t be telling our story because the people who control history, control everything and visa versa! Think about it! – Jesse, Editor, TvNewsLIES.org 

How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America

By Zbigniew Brzezinski

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Original Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/23/AR2007032301613.html

The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The damage these three words have done -- a classic self-inflicted wound -- is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.

But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a "war on terror" did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that "a nation at war" does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being "at war."

To justify the "war on terror," the administration has lately crafted a false historical narrative that could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By claiming that its war is similar to earlier U.S. struggles against Nazism and then Stalinism (while ignoring the fact that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were first-rate military powers, a status al-Qaeda neither has nor can achieve), the administration could be preparing the case for war with Iran. Such war would then plunge America into a protracted conflict spanning Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and perhaps also Pakistan.

The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own -- and can become demoralizing. America today is not the self-confident and determined nation that responded to Pearl Harbor; nor is it the America that heard from its leader, at another moment of crisis, the powerful words "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; nor is it the calm America that waged the Cold War with quiet persistence despite the knowledge that a real war could be initiated abruptly within minutes and prompt the death of 100 million Americans within just a few hours. We are now divided, uncertain and potentially very susceptible to panic in the event of another terrorist act in the United States itself.

That is the result of five years of almost continuous national brainwashing on the subject of terror, quite unlike the more muted reactions of several other nations (Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, to mention just a few) that also have suffered painful terrorist acts. In his latest justification for his war in Iraq, President Bush even claims absurdly that he has to continue waging it lest al-Qaeda cross the Atlantic to launch a war of terror here in the United States.

Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum. The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new threats. That puts a premium on the presentation of credible scenarios of ever-more-horrifying acts of violence, sometimes even with blueprints for their implementation.

That America has become insecure and more paranoid is hardly debatable. A recent study reported that in 2003, Congress identified 160 sites as potentially important national targets for would-be terrorists. With lobbyists weighing in, by the end of that year the list had grown to 1,849; by the end of 2004, to 28,360; by 2005, to 77,769. The national database of possible targets now has some 300,000 items in it, including the Sears Tower in Chicago and an Illinois Apple and Pork Festival.

Just last week, here in Washington, on my way to visit a journalistic office, I had to pass through one of the absurd "security checks" that have proliferated in almost all the privately owned office buildings in this capital -- and in New York City. A uniformed guard required me to fill out a form, show an I.D. and in this case explain in writing the purpose of my visit. Would a visiting terrorist indicate in writing that the purpose is "to blow up the building"? Would the guard be able to arrest such a self-confessing, would-be suicide bomber? To make matters more absurd, large department stores, with their crowds of shoppers, do not have any comparable procedures. Nor do concert halls or movie theaters. Yet such "security" procedures have become routine, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and further contributing to a siege mentality.

Government at every level has stimulated the paranoia. Consider, for example, the electronic billboards over interstate highways urging motorists to "Report Suspicious Activity" (drivers in turbans?). Some mass media have made their own contribution. The cable channels and some print media have found that horror scenarios attract audiences, while terror "experts" as "consultants" provide authenticity for the apocalyptic visions fed to the American public. Hence the proliferation of programs with bearded "terrorists" as the central villains. Their general effect is to reinforce the sense of the unknown but lurking danger that is said to increasingly threaten the lives of all Americans.

The entertainment industry has also jumped into the act. Hence the TV serials and films in which the evil characters have recognizable Arab features, sometimes highlighted by religious gestures, that exploit public anxiety and stimulate Islamophobia. Arab facial stereotypes, particularly in newspaper cartoons, have at times been rendered in a manner sadly reminiscent of the Nazi anti-Semitic campaigns. Lately, even some college student organizations have become involved in such propagation, apparently oblivious to the menacing connection between the stimulation of racial and religious hatreds and the unleashing of the unprecedented crimes of the Holocaust.

The atmosphere generated by the "war on terror" has encouraged legal and political harassment of Arab Americans (generally loyal Americans) for conduct that has not been unique to them. A case in point is the reported harassment of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for its attempts to emulate, not very successfully, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Some House Republicans recently described CAIR members as "terrorist apologists" who should not be allowed to use a Capitol meeting room for a panel discussion.

Social discrimination, for example toward Muslim air travelers, has also been its unintended byproduct. Not surprisingly, animus toward the United States even among Muslims otherwise not particularly concerned with the Middle East has intensified, while America's reputation as a leader in fostering constructive interracial and interreligious relations has suffered egregiously.

The record is even more troubling in the general area of civil rights. The culture of fear has bred intolerance, suspicion of foreigners and the adoption of legal procedures that undermine fundamental notions of justice. Innocent until proven guilty has been diluted if not undone, with some -- even U.S. citizens -- incarcerated for lengthy periods of time without effective and prompt access to due process. There is no known, hard evidence that such excess has prevented significant acts of terrorism, and convictions for would-be terrorists of any kind have been few and far between. Someday Americans will be as ashamed of this record as they now have become of the earlier instances in U.S. history of panic by the many prompting intolerance against the few.

In the meantime, the "war on terror" has gravely damaged the United States internationally. For Muslims, the similarity between the rough treatment of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military and of the Palestinians by the Israelis has prompted a widespread sense of hostility toward the United States in general. It's not the "war on terror" that angers Muslims watching the news on television, it's the victimization of Arab civilians. And the resentment is not limited to Muslims. A recent BBC poll of 28,000 people in 27 countries that sought respondents' assessments of the role of states in international affairs resulted in Israel, Iran and the United States being rated (in that order) as the states with "the most negative influence on the world." Alas, for some that is the new axis of evil!

The events of 9/11 could have resulted in a truly global solidarity against extremism and terrorism. A global alliance of moderates, including Muslim ones, engaged in a deliberate campaign both to extirpate the specific terrorist networks and to terminate the political conflicts that spawn terrorism would have been more productive than a demagogically proclaimed and largely solitary U.S. "war on terror" against "Islamo-fascism." Only a confidently determined and reasonable America can promote genuine international security which then leaves no political space for terrorism.

Where is the U.S. leader ready to say, "Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia"? Even in the face of future terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which cannot be denied, let us show some sense. Let us be true to our traditions.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, is the author most recently of "Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower" (Basic Books).

Original Source: Jesse, Editor, TvNewsLIES.org

As a human being, putting all politics aside, what is your gut reaction to an individual or group of individuals who only agree to take part in an investigation if their testimony is hidden from the public, not under oath and unrecorded in any way including by stenography? If you have human blood flowing to a human brain, and that brain has not been atrophied by extensive participation if freerepublic.com discussions, watching too much FOX News or listening to too much Sean Hannity, you probably feel that the person or people setting those conditions pretty much have something to hide. You would be correct.

As we watch the US Attorney firing scandal unfold and we watch the standoff between the Bush administration and Congress over who will testify and under what conditions they will do so, I want you to remember back to the 9/11 Commission hearings. You remember the 9/11 Commission; they are the people who neglected to mention in their report that WTC7’s destruction took place on that day. They are also the guys who did not report about the multiple war games taking place in the northeast corridor that day. Anyway, my point is that I want you to recall the conditions set by George W. Bush for his participation in that most important investigation. Bush would only testify if his testimony was private, limited to one hour, not under oath, not recorded in any way shape or form, omitted all 9/11 Commission members except the co-chairman and Dick Cheney would have to be by Bush’s side.

So for those of you who draw the obvious conclusions about the real reason that Bush is setting these tell tale conditions for Rove and company during the attorney general scandal investigation, you may want to apply the same obvious conclusions to Bush’s behavior regarding the 9/11 investigation!

Think about it! – Jesse, Editor, TvNewsLIES.org

by Greg Palast

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Four years ago this week, the tanks rolled for what President Bush originally called, "Operation Iraqi Liberation" -- O.I.L.
I kid you not.

And it was four years ago that, from the White House, George Bush, declaring war, said, "I want to talk to the Iraqi people." That Dick Cheney didn't tell Bush that Iraqis speak Arabic … well, never mind. I expected the President to say something like, "Our troops are coming to liberate you, so don't shoot them." Instead, Mr. Bush told, the Iraqis,

"Do not destroy oil wells."

Nevertheless, the Bush Administration said the war had nothing to do with Iraq's oil. Indeed, in 2002, the State Department stated, and its official newsletter, the Washington Post, repeated, that State's Iraq study group, "does not have oil on its list of issues."


In all the chest-beating about how the war did badly, no one seems to remember how the war did very, very well -- for Big Oil.

The war has kept Iraq's oil production to 2.1 million barrels a day from pre-war, pre-embargo production of over 4 million barrels. In the oil game, that's a lot to lose. In fact, the loss of Iraq's 2 million barrels a day is equal to the entire planet's reserve production capacity.

In other words, the war has caused a hell of a supply squeeze -- and Big Oil just loves it. Oil today is $57 a barrel versus the $18 a barrel price under Bill "Love-Not-War" Clinton.

Since the launch of Operation Iraqi Liberation, Halliburton stock has tripled to $64 a share -- not, as some believe, because of those Iraq reconstruction contracts -- peanuts for Halliburton. Cheney's former company's main business is "oil services." And, as one oilman complained to me, Cheney's former company has captured a big hunk of the rise in oil prices by jacking up the charges for Halliburton drilling and piping equipment.

But before we shed tears for Big Oil's having to hand Halliburton its slice, let me note that the value of the reserves of the five biggest oil companies more than doubled during the war to $2.36 trillion.

And that was the plan: putting a new floor under the price of oil. I've have that in writing. In 2005, after a two-year battle with the State and Defense Departments, they released to my team at BBC Newsnight the "Options for a Sustainable Iraqi Oil Industry." Now, you might think our government shouldn't be writing a plan for another nation's oil. Well, our government didn't write it, despite the State Department seal on the cover. In fact, we discovered that the 323-page plan was drafted in Houston by oil industry executives and consultants.

The suspicion is that Bush went to war to get Iraq's oil. That's not true. The document, and secret recordings of those in on the scheme, made it clear that the Administration wanted to make certain America did not get the oil. In other words, keep the lid on Iraq's oil production -- and thereby keep the price of oil high.

Of course, the language was far more subtle than, "Let's cut Iraq's oil production and jack up prices." Rather, the report uses industry jargon and euphemisms which require Iraq to remain an obedient member of the OPEC cartel and stick to the oil-production limits -- "quotas" -- which keep up oil prices.

The Houston plan, enforced by an army of occupation, would, "enhance [Iraq's] relationship with OPEC," the oil cartel.

And that's undoubtedly why Condoleezza Rice asked Fadhil Chalabi to take charge of Iraq's Oil Ministry. As former chief operating officer of OPEC, the oil cartel, Fadhil was a Big Oil favorite, certain to ensure that Iraq would never again allow the world to slip back to the Clinton era of low prices and low profits. (In investigating for BBC, I was told by the former chief of the CIA's oil unit that he'd met with Fadhil regarding oil at Bush's request. Fadhil recently complained to the BBC. He denied the meeting with the Bush emissary in London because, he noted, he was secretly meeting that week in Washington with Condi!)

Fadhil, by the way, turned down Condi's offer to run Iraq's Oil Ministry. Ultimately, Iraq's Oil Ministry was given to Fadhil's fellow tribesman, Ahmad Chalabi, a convicted bank swindler and neo-con idol. But whichever Chalabi is nominal head of Iraq's oil industry in Baghdad, the orders come from Houston. Indeed, the oil law adopted by Iraq's shaky government this month is virtually a photocopy of the "Options" plan first conceived in Texas long before Iraq was "liberated."

In other words, the war has gone exactly to plan -- the Houston plan. So forget the naïve cloth-rending about a conflict gone haywire. Exxon-Mobil reported a record $10 billion profit last quarter, the largest of any corporation in history. Mission Accomplished.


**********

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans -- Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. A new edition, updated and expanded, will be released April 24.

Palast hits the road with the new Armed Madhouse tour beginning April 21 in Chicago; then to Madison, Portland, Eugene, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, New York (with Randi Rhodes) and Washington. The original tour was sponsored by Code Pink, Buzzflash, Working Assets, DemocracyNow! and many more. Add your group to the list by contacting us.

Watch Palast's original BBC Newsnight Report.

Subscribe to Palast's writings at www.GregPalast.com

A mouse looked through the crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife open a package.

What food might this contain?" The mouse wondered - he was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap.

Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning : There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!"

The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said, "Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me. I cannot be bothered by it."

The mouse turned to the pig and told him, "There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!"

The pig sympathized, but said, I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse, but there is nothing I can do about it but pray. Be assured you are in my prayers." The mouse turned to the cow and said "There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!"

The cow said, "Wow, Mr. Mouse. I'm sorry for you, but it's no skin off my nose."

So, the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer's mousetrap alone.

That very night a sound was heard throughout the house -- like the sound of a mousetrap catching its prey.

The farmer's wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught.

The snake bit the farmer's wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital , and she returned home with a fever.

Everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup's main Ingredient.

But his wife's sickness continued, so friends and neighbours came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig.

The farmer's wife did not get well; she died.

So many people came for her funeral, the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide enough meat for all of them.

The mouse looked upon it all from his crack in the wall with great sadness.

So, the next time you hear someone is facing a problem and think it doesn't concern you, remember -- when one of us is threatened, we are all at risk.

We are all involved in this journey called life. We must keep an eye out for one another and make an extra effort to encourage one another.


Remember, each of us is a vital thread in another person's tapestry; our lives are woven together for a reason.

One of the best things to hold onto in this world is a friend.

by Paul Craig Roberts

Original Source: www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=10684

The Bush administration's greatest success is its ability to escape accountability for its numerous impeachable offenses.

The administration's offenses against US law, the US Constitution, civil liberties, human rights, and the Geneva Conventions, its lies to Congress and the American people, its vote-rigging scandals, its sweetheart no-bid contracts to favored firms, its political firing of Republican US Attorneys, its practice of kidnapping and torturing people in foreign hellholes, and its persecution of whistle blowers are altogether so vast that it is a major undertaking just to list them all.

Bush admits that he violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spied on US citizens without warrants, a felony under the Act. Bush has shown total disrespect for civil liberty and the Constitution and has suffered rebukes from the Supreme Count. The evidence is overwhelming that the Bush administration manufactured false "intelligence" to justify military aggression against Iraq. The Halliburton contract scandals are notorious, as is the use of electronic voting machines programmed to miscount the actual vote.

The chief-of-staff to Vice President Cheney has been convicted for obstructing justice in the outing of a covert CIA officer. Proof of torture is overwhelming, and the Bush administration has even had the temerity to have permissive legislation passed after the fact that permits it to continue to torture "detainees." The Sibel Edmonds and other whistle blower cases are well known. The Senate Judiciary Committee has just issued subpoenas to Justice (sic) Dept. officials involved in the scandalous removal of US Attorneys who refused to be politicized.

Yet the Democrats have taken impeachment "off the table." Many Democrats and Republicans and a great many Christians can contemplate illegal military aggression against Iran, but not the impeachment of the greatest criminal administration in US history. Far from being scandalized by what the entire world views as an unjust invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US, leading Democratic and Republican candidates for the 2008 presidential nomination rushed to inform the Israel Lobby, AIPAC, that they, if elected, will keep US troops in Iraq.

The previous occupant of the White House could not escape being impeached by the House of Representatives for lying about a consensual Oval Office sexual affair. President Nixon and his vice president, a saintly pair compared to Bush-Cheney, were both driven from office for offenses that are inconsequential by comparison. Liberals branded Ronald Reagan the "Teflon President," but the neoconservatives' Iran-Contra scandal was a mere dress rehearsal for their machinations in the Bush regime.

What explains Bush-Cheney invulnerability to accountability?

Perhaps the answer is that Bush has desensitized us. Like kids desensitized to violence by violent video games and movies and pornography addicts desensitized to sex, we have become desensitized by the avalanche of Bush-Cheney crimes, lies, and disdain for Congress, courts, and public opinion.

Our elected representatives, if not the American people, now regard as normal such heinous actions as war crimes, the rape of the Constitution, self-serving use of government office, and the constant stream of lies and propaganda from the highest offices of the executive branch.

Perhaps that is what disillusioned foreigners, who once looked with hope to America, mean when they say that America does not exist anymore.

If the notion has departed that the highest political offices in the land are supposed to be occupied by people who are honest and faithful to their oath to the Constitution, then we are far advanced on the road to tyranny.

In future history books, will Bush-Cheney mark the transition of the United States from constitutional rule to the unaccountable rule of the unitary executive who cancels out Congress with signing statements and silences critics with the police state means that are now part of the US legal code?

Too many of us have done too little to stop the crimes of this White House. We are waking up but what took us so long?

Rebecca Solnit

Wednesday March 14, 2007

Original Source: www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2033238,00.html?gusrc...

Was I a good American? How good an American was I? Did I do what I could to resist the takeover of my country and the brutalisation of my fellow human beings? How much further could I have gone? Were the crimes of the Bush administration those that demand you give up your life and everyday commitments to throw yourself into maximum resistance? If not, then what were we waiting for? The questions have troubled me regularly these last five years, because I was one of the millions of American citizens who did not shut down Guantánamo Bay and stop the other atrocities of the administration.

I wrote. I gave money, sometimes in large chunks. I went to anti-war marches. I demonstrated. I also planted a garden, cooked dinners, played with children, wandered around aimlessly, and did lots of other things you do when the world is not crashing down around you. And maybe when it is. Was it? It was for the men in our gulag. And the boys there. And the rule of law in my native land.

Before the current administration, it had always been easy to condemn the "good Germans" who did nothing while Jews, Gypsies and others were rounded up for extermination. One likes to believe that one will be different, will harbour Anne Frank in one's secret annex, smuggle people across the border, defy the authorities who do evil. Those we scornfully call good Germans merely did little while the mouth of hell opened up.

I now know the way that everyday life can be so absorbing, survival so demanding, that it seems impossible to do more on top of it or to drop the routine altogether and begin a totally different life. There is the garden to be watered, the aged parent in crisis, the deadline looming; but there are also the crimes against humanity waiting to be stopped. Ordinary obligations tug one way even when extraordinary ones tug the other way. The Bush administration is by no means the Third Reich, but it produced an extraordinary time that made extraordinary demands on US citizens, demands that some of us rose to - and too many did not.

Periodically, I would speculate on what was the most extreme and radical thing I could do to stop the illegal prison camp at Guantánamo; picture chaining myself to the gates of the Senate, becoming one of those activists who takes up residence outside the White House or takes over a TV station to get a message out. I wanted to do something so epic that it would turn the tide, stop the crime. Then I would consider that the best approaches were probably already being taken, by the heroic lawyers at the Centre for Constitutional Rights and other human rights organisations, and I would write another cheque and some more letters and feel a little futile and a little corrupt.

These days Americans seem to be waking up one at a time, groggy and embittered, from the hypnotic nightmare that was the Bush administration's one great success - spreading a miasma of fear and patriotic submissiveness that made it possible to mount an illegal and immoral war, piss on the bill of rights, burn the constitution and violate international charters on human rights and prisoners of war with widespread torture. None of the sleepers seems to remember that they were part of the legions who obeyed the orders to fear and hate - but we welcome the latecomers into our ranks anyway.

What took them so long? How could people believe that a fairly defanged country, one we had been bombing since the first Gulf war, was an apocalyptic menace in a world where most nations were well-equipped for mass civilian murder? A year ago, the turning point was marked by the comedian Stephen Colbert's volley of (accurate) insults delivered to Bush's face, in the guise of giving the keynote address at the Washington press corps' annual dinner. He was just aggressively ignored by the mainstream media. Perhaps Katrina turned the tide: the indifference, incompetence, and obliviousness of the federal government was so gross that its pedestal melted.

And there were others who were in resistance all along. I remember with admiration the Japanese-Americans who came out in the months after 9/11 to testify that they had been incarcerated en masse during the second world war, not for what they did but for who they were, and they were not going to remain silent as the same treatment was meted out to Arabs and Muslims. I remember the way that 20,000 of us in San Francisco came out to shut down the business district the day the war broke out, and the huge marches before and after. I remember the few congresspeople - mostly African-American - who dared to stand in opposition early on. I went to Camp Casey outside Bush's vacation home in Texas and spent a day with Cindy Sheehan, who gave her life over to stopping the war after it took her soldier son. Others did as she did. Some of them are my friends.

There is resistance. But if it were enough, the crimes would have stopped, the war would have ended. When it does and they do, some will have been heroes. Some will have been honourable but moderate, in times that did not call for moderation. And some will have consented, through inaction, to crimes against humanity.

· Rebecca Solnit is the author of Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power, and Wanderlust: A history of walking

Former Air Traffic Controller Robin Hordon speaks out on 9/11, NORAD and what should have happened on 9/11.

By Jeremy Baker

Original Source: http://www.communitycurrency.org/robin.html

Within three hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Robin Hordon knew it was an inside job. He had been an Air Traffic Controller (ATC) for eleven years before Reagan fired him and hundreds of his colleagues after they went on strike in the eighties. Having handled in-flight emergencies and two actual hijackings in his career, he is well qualified to comment on what NORAD should have been able to achieve in its response to the near simultaneous hijacking of four domestic passenger carriers on the morning of September 11th, 2001.

“There had to be something huge to explain why those aircraft weren’t shot down out of the sky. We have fighters on the ready to handle these situations twenty-four-seven. We have NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) monitors monitoring our skies twenty-four-seven. We have a lot of human beings, civilian and military, who care about doing their jobs.”

I spoke to Mr. Hordon one afternoon at a coffee shop in Bremerton, Washington.

“You have to understand the emotions, the duty, the job of an ATC. We are paid to watch aircraft go across the country.”

It’s clear that Hordon is passionate about the subject. A lot of people are. The dark questions that the attacks have left lingering in the national psyche have been recorded. 49% of New Yorkers believe that the government had something to do with 9/11. Following an interview with Charlie Sheen, a CNN poll revealed that 82% of respondents believed that there was “a government cover-up of 9/11.” Jay Leno asked Bill Maher on The Tonight Show about the fact that 37% of Americans (according to Scribbs-Howard) believe that the government was involved in some way with the attacks (Maher was definitely not one of them).

As far as the “emotions, the duty, the job” of an ATC is concerned, Hordon puts it this way:

“Imagine yourself at a circus, a fair, a crowded sports event. You have in your hand your little child of five or six, you’re amongst hundreds of people and you turn around and see that your child is gone. How do you feel at that moment? You feel panicked. You feel that this is the worst thing possible, so what you do is you engage. When ATCs lose an aircraft, all hell breaks loose. They flip right into motion. We take action and do not wait for other things to happen.”

As a former member of the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization), Hordon’s years as an ATC are particularly relevent to 9/11 researchers.

“I was a certified ATC in Boston west-bound departures, the routing that AA11 and UA175 followed on 9/11. I know it like the back of my hand.”

He even received a letter of commendation for his role in dealing with an actual hijacking. When it became clear that there hadn’t been a systems failure of any kind on the morning of September 11th, Hordon was certain that something had gone terribly wrong within the upper echelons of authority. A pilot (third level air carrier) as well as an ATC, he is well versed on in-flight emergency protocol. He is also adamant that if these procedures had been followed on 9/11 not one of the hijacked planes would have reached their targets.

“I’m sorry but American 11 should have been intercepted over southwest Connecticut—bang, done deal.”

According to Hordon, air emergencies requiring scrambles, or “flushes,” from fighter jets occur 50 to 150 times a year.

“It’s routine. At Otis AFB we would have practice exercises two or three times a year. We’d flush aircraft, get the B-52’s up, get the tankers up, get the fighters up. Just out of Otis there’d be twenty, thirty fighter jets. And on 9/11 there were plenty of fighters as well. They were just diverted over the ocean, tied up in drills, etc.”

The vast majority of air incidents are simple communications or routing failures, common mishaps that are easily remedied. Nonetheless, when a problem does arise, it is treated as an emergency and interceptors are scrambled.

“This is exactly what’s written in our manuals. We alert our immediate supervisors, we get another set of eyes on the scope. We have, two feet away from us, a little button that says ADC, Air Defense Command [nowadays NEADS (Northeast Air Defense Sector)]. Bing, hit the button. ‘Hey, this is me at the Boston Center air space. I just lost a target or I have an erratic target. He is twenty-five miles west of Keene, last reported at such-and-such location.’”

Pilots use similar checklists when responding to problems with their airplanes:

“If I lose an engine in a multi-engine aircraft I know exactly what to do. I start to control the aircraft to fly with one engine, I’ll shut the ailing engine down, I’ll get the aircraft trimmed up. It’s check, check, check.”

Hordon is not persuaded by those who make excuses for the lack of military response on 9/11. U.S. air defenses have been on hair-trigger alert to defend the nation from attack since the early sixties. The idea that, on the morning of 9/11, there was an inexplicable wave of incompetence on the part of his former FAA “brothers in arms” offends him deeply.

“The pilots are in their ready rooms, the planes are in open-ended hangars. You have frontline players, pilots and controllers. I’m there, I’m watching. The pilot is there, he’s flying. We have direct air defense command communications. That’s the way it’s been for fifty years.”

The unfathomable delays seen in military action on 9/11 are inconceivable to those who have painstakingly investigated the matter—and for a man who worked for years keeping air travel over the U.S. safe.

“Military pilots would have their asses off the ground faster than you could imagine. I know how quickly our systems can respond. Why would you design a system that responds slowly to an emergency?”

Claims by authorities that, once a hijacked aircraft’s transponders have been turned off, the plane becomes virtually invisible to radar, is another sore point for Hordon.

“Bottom line, these aircraft were always radar monitored, we were always in communication with them, even if they were hijacked. The only way you can lose an aircraft these days is for the plane to flat out blow up.”

Since any genuine air attack would not likely announce itself as such, NORAD radar has to be able to detect anything. But there’s nothing stealthy about an enormous Boeing passenger liner, whether its transponder is operating properly or not.

“That aircraft is represented on their radar scope from the time it takes off to the time it lands. Even little puddle-jumpers out of our local airports. NORAD tracks all these aircraft. They have the world’s most sophisticated radar.”

After eleven eventful years as an ATC, Hordon naturally reacted with shock when he first heard that fifty years of tried and true in-flight emergency protocol was abruptly altered in June of 2001, just two months before the attacks.

“Rumsfeld put a third party in between the ATC and the Air Defense Controller responsible for scrambling interceptors —the Pentagon.”

He speculates that

“the phone calls went from the FAA to the Pentagon and were not answered. Therefore the Pentagon never reached down to the ADC base to release the aircraft. The Boston Center’s ATCs got so frustrated with the non-answer from the military that they finally said, ‘get these guys going anyways.’ That’s the way it’s been for fifty years. We scramble aircraft. We don’t wait for OK’s from third or fourth parties.”

The no-show status of the U.S. military on the morning of September 11th, 2001, has understandably become the single most compelling point that 9/11 researchers, writers and activists use to support their claims of complicity on the part of the U.S government (and its military and intelligence apparatus) in the attacks. When even those who condemn “conspiracy theory” in regard to 9/11 have questioned the military’s conduct that morning, it’s clear that this anomaly is worthy of intense concern and diligent investigation. Whatever the case may be, there are no doubts that history’s largest and most technologically advanced military was apparently caught completely off guard by four huge hijacked passenger jets that were in the air for almost two hours on the crystal clear morning of 9/11.

9/11 researchers have spent years speculating about what exactly did happen in the cockpits of the hijacked jets on 9/11. Theories run the gamut, from duplicate aircraft taking over the flight plans of the hijacked planes to passenger jets being remotely commandeered in mid-air. Naturally, the technical complexities involved in operating a huge commercial passenger jet can only be fully conveyed by someone with extensive aviation training and experience.

“For years, they have been improving what the common person will call an autopilot. The modern term is a flight director. You can program a flight director basically for your entire flight, before and after you take off.”

Flight directors—high-tech navigational computers—are used in commercial aircraft because they are always sensing every factor that affects an aircraft’s flight (wind speed and direction, fuel weight, atmospheric conditions, etc.) and instantly make the adjustments necessary to sustain the most efficient and economic operation of the plane.

“The Boeing 707 Series, I believe, were the last series of aircraft built where you actually controlled the plane using wires or cables. There are no cables anymore. What we have now are electronic or hydraulic sensors that transmit information to servos and other control devices that apply pressure to the control surfaces.”

The fact that the operation of modern aircraft is primarily computerized essentially makes the controls hackable, either from onboard or, if the proper receivers are installed in the plane, from a remote location.

“Internally the aircraft had to have a separate receiver unit built into it; separate windows of access into the flight director and an ability to disengage the manual controls in the aircraft and take it over with all of the pre-determined information.”

Hordon adds an important caveat:

if a flight director was redirected during a flight, the new flight-plan would not necessarily be communicated to those on the ground.

Obviously, the training required to alter a flight director’s routing is substantial. But, as a student pilot learns to operate increasingly sophisticated aircraft, this knowledge becomes available as needed. Hordon believes that if the hijackers really did take control of the cockpits this may well have been what they were studying in the flight schools they attended.

Much has been made by 9/11 researchers about the seemingly limitless incompetence of the 9/11 hijackers as pilots—amateur aviators who could barely operate light aircraft. This odd fact has led many conspiracy advocates to speculate that the nineteen alleged hijackers may have been merely a gang of patsies or “Oswalds,” groomed by their handlers to take the fall for the attacks without their knowledge or involvement. Some researchers even speculate that these “terrorists” never actually boarded the planes at all. Although this theory may sound outlandish to many, it is however supported by the astonishing fact that none of the hijackers’ names appear on any of the published passenger manifests. But Hordon believes that, if the hijackers really were on the planes and did indeed take over the cockpits as reported, their ability to actually fly the aircraft to their targets is a distinct possibility.

“If anybody thinks that these flight directors weren’t sophisticated enough to be programmed to go to these exact, specific coordinates—WTC One and Two—they’re wrong. It has nothing to do with pilot competence.”

Hordon believes that it would be relatively easy for the hijackers to reroute a commercial jet’s flight director to hit any location with great accuracy, as long as they had acquired the proper training. This is apparently one of the few accurate scenarios portrayed in the Hollywood movie Flight 93, a film Hordon otherwise dismisses as elaborate propaganda designed to deceive the public and sell the official story. This point is intriguing when you consider the fact that a book recently published by the editors of Popular Mechanics magazine—Debunking 9/11 Myths—specifically claims that the hijackers of UA Flight 93 stormed the cockpit, took over the controls and drove the plane by sight, a method that PM and its army of expert technicians and specialists have nicknamed “point and go.” Besides representing a bizarre departure from Hordon’s expert analysis, PM’s “point and go” theory also contradicts the scenario dramatized in Flight 93. Although it’s difficult for many people to believe that such a lack of consensus exists among the “experts” who support the official story, this is really just one of many examples where this kind of unfathomable contradiction has occurred.

Some theorists have speculated that homing beacons may have been transmitting signals to Flights 11 and 175 from within the Twin Towers—all the hijacked planes had to do was follow these signals to their destinations. Although he doesn’t necessarily subscribe to this theory, Hordon elaborates on it as a possibility:

“When a commercial jet approaches its destination, the flight director interfaces with transmitters located at the end of a runway and makes the adjustments. All the pilots have to do is sit back, monitor the controls and watch the airplane land itself, even in “zero-zero” conditions [no ceiling height or visibility].”

This combination of computerized onboard controls and what is essentially a homing signal from the flight’s destination is called “coupling,” a technological dance performed by aircraft thousands of times a day at airports all around the world.

Often criticized by detractors for speculating about the use of “Buck Rogers”-style aviation technology in the attacks, 9/11 researchers are nonetheless vindicated by Hordon who believes that such speculation may not be so outlandish after all. Referring to elaborate experiments done by the military decades ago that involved the remote control commandeering of aircraft, Hordon responds:

“In the seventies, they were extremely sophisticated with aircraft. Could they commandeer an aircraft in mid-flight right now? Absolutely, in a heartbeat. Clearly the technology is there. It’s been there for a long time.”

It only seems reasonable that if this technology were the most efficient, reliable and discrete means to guarantee the success of such an elaborate operation, the conspirators wouldn’t hesitate to make full use of it.

The question of whether or not the hijackers piloted the planes themselves or if control of the aircraft was taken completely out of their hands by operatives from a remote location has always been central to 9/11 researchers. But, to Robin Hordon, it’s, at best, a moot point:

“My answer to you is it’s irrelevant. It’s irrelevant whether the hijackers were real and were actually in the aircraft or whether the aircraft was commandeered by external forces. It could have been either one. One way or another, somebody other than U.S. certified airline pilots took over that aircraft, whether it be a terrorist sitting in the cockpit or someone outside the cockpit.”

Whatever scenarios Hordon may consider in regard to Flights 11, 175 and 93, he is adamant that 9/11 researchers shouldn’t rest until they’ve gotten to the bottom of the alleged crash of Flight 77 into the Pentagon. To many, the idea that a military jet or missile—not Flight 77—actually struck the Pentagon is a bizarre and almost inconceivable assertion. But for many 9/11 researchers, it is a central and compelling focus.

“The particular maneuver that was called upon for this huge Boeing aircraft, OK, it’s highly suspicious that a flight director could pull that one off. We also know that it’s highly suspicious that if it were the pilot that people say was operating the aircraft, we know that that guy couldn’t pull that off. That was completely impossible.”

A common notion to which many defenders of the official account cling (including such notables as Noam Chomsky) is the idea that any conspiracy as vast as 9/11 would have had to involve hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, all in-the-know and willing to go to the grave with their secrets. But well researched claims—that many sizable covert operations have indeed been kept from the public in the past; that state of the art technology can drastically reduce the number of people required for any given “op,” and that systemic “compartmentalization” of duties can effectively exploit many people’s involvement without their knowledge—have convincingly refuted this assertion. In addition, the ability of higher-ups to intimidate and silence potential whistleblowers after the fact is formidable. Naturally, Mr. Hordon has a thing or two to say on the subject.

“I think we all have to agree that, one way or another, the U.S. military was involved in the attacks. The advantage that Rumsfeld had is that he can classify, reshape, make available, make unavailable any information that he wants, at any time and deny that information to the public for any reason, especially national security.”

Hordon believes that one facet of the plan that the conspirators could not control was the individual integrity of the civilians in the FAA—dedicated professionals who would not likely remain silent if they had witnessed something unusual during the attacks. Number one on Hordon’s list are the air traffic controllers: “What part of this whole thing is missing? Is it not the voice tapes from the civilian ATC’s? They had to devise a way to take the loose lips group, the civilian guys, and disengage them. If they are allowed to testify exactly as to their normal protocol behavior, they’re going to prove that the military were the culpable ones.” When he was in the FAA, Hordon was certified as the operator in his facility tasked to secure relevant data after an air emergency; if not entirely because of public safety concerns, certainly for liability reasons. “Whenever we had an incident, an emergency, on-air trouble, some type of a near ‘mid-air’ or a breakdown in aviation rules, we would immediately take the voice tapes and secure them. We would immediately take the radar data on that controller’s scope that day and secure them. Whenever there was an incident, all of the information, all of it was secured. Period.”

Despite this rigid protocol, there have been shocking accounts of ATC records being seized shortly after the attacks and kept far from public scrutiny. Hordon believes that these ATC recordings have either been destroyed or mutilated.

“The reason that they’re not giving us this early-on information is because they want to paint a picture of confusion, and they had to somehow get the civilian eye-witnesses out of it.”

Although the 9/11 Commission, desperate to deflect the public’s attention away from official quarters, scapegoated the FAA for incompetence in regard to the attacks, Hordon believes that the real confusion originated in the Pentagon, a theory that jibes well with the timely and suspicious change in air defense protocol mentioned above.

“The FAA has given us the computerized information about the aircraft being tracked. What the FAA has not given us is the internal tapes from the sectors in the Boston Center who were controlling this aircraft.”

If there were one point Robin Hordon would like to impress most upon 9/11 Truth researchers and activists it would be that the truth about the non-performance of U.S. air defenses on 9/11 lies in a careful examination of the first few minutes after the planes were known to have been hijacked.

“The first fifteen minutes are the key. I have done the math. If we had scrambled some aircraft five or six minutes after we saw this huge deviation, the fighters from Otis would have intercepted American 11 over southwestern Connecticut or just south of Albany, NY. The federal government and the military, for extremely serious reasons, are keeping the public focused on after American 11 hits the tower. But the real focus for 9/11 researchers should be what NORAD was doing five minutes after American 11 lost its transponder and went off course.”

Whatever criticism Hordon may have for NORAD and the Pentagon, it certainly doesn’t extend to the individuals on the frontlines of our nation’s civil defense:

“These are military fighter pilots. These are good guys. They figure stuff out. What do you think the pilots are doing? Ordering coffee and donuts? No. They are up there, their blood is pumping, they are thinking one thing: ‘My country is being invaded. This is why I stand on the ready in the waiting room down at Otis AFB; so that I can get up and defend my country.’ Do you think they’re going to get on the tail of American 11 when it was heading straight for the WTC and let it hit? No. What they’re going to do is say ‘OK, there’s going to be some bodies and shrapnel…boom.’ They’re going to take that risk.”

One of Hordon’s more ambitious proposals for the 9/11 Truth movement is that a support network be developed for the aid and protection of its single most important resource, whistleblowers.

“What the 9/11 movement should do is band together and develop safe lives for whistleblowers.” Legal counsel, moral support, even physical protection could do much to inspire those who are considering stepping forward with potentially explosive insider testimony about the attacks.

Hordon would also like to see young people being told the truth about politics, history and the world in their schools. “The people who are our greatest assets are the kids in high school. If the military is taking advantage of the susceptibility of high school kids to seduce them to kill people, the peace movement needs to offer alternatives. We need to make available, at the end of the high school years, alternatives of thought in regard to the world’s economy and control apparatus.” Hordon’s plan, though idealistic, is not without a certain opportunism:

“I want to go to high school kids because it’s a two for one proposition. First, their ears are wide open. They’re skeptical about this government right now and they’re plugged into the internet. Second, if we give them material to bring home, it winds up on the kitchen table. And what happens when parents find contraband that’s come into the house? They read it. It’s two for one.”

Many 9/11 activists believe that their work on issues related to the attacks has greater potential for true social transformation than any other single issue, and Hordon emphatically agrees.

“I think that this 9/11 thing is the quintessential opportunity to expose all of the infecting poisons; more than Iran Contra weapons for hostages, more than rampant militarism, more than Watergate, more than Enron, more than the dark side of the world’s financial institutions, more than any other similar kind of thing. I think that this is pretty much their last gasp, and the reason is very simple; the internet. We’re going to catch’em.”

Activists with a sense of humor are always a breath of fresh air. After his stint as an ATC, Hordon worked for years at the comedy club Catch a Rising Star in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Something must have rubbed off:

“We have two parties in this country; we have republicans and we have republicans dressed up in blue drag. And when we get the blue outer clothing off of the fake democrats, they stand there in their red Armani underwear.”

Hordon respects humor as a formidable weapon for activists. As an artistic coordinator for up and coming comedians, he once worked with some of the most talented and successful comics of our time including Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. Some of the political comics he once coached are regulars on Air America Radio. Of the reigning powers-that-be, he has this to say:

“They know they’re done with 9/11. They know they’re cooked. They’re just throwing boxes of nails in the road behind their car as it speeds away and they’re hoping that all our tires get flattened. But it’s not happening. They know they’re pretty much done.”

Grounded and well informed, Robin Hordon is not a typical pie-in-the-sky progressive, and he likes what he sees happening around him.

“There’s so much good work being done. There’s such a cool pattern now and there’s so many kids coming up who know not to believe the stories they’re being told.”

His greatest hope is that these young movers and shakers shun the roads previously taken by their less politically savvy forebears.

“Sixty percent of our elected officials are millionaires. Until we change that, we are going to struggle to make our democracy better. And I think that, you now, democracies are OK. I think it’s a pretty good plan. I think we should try to get one.”

Original Source: http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=359614&...

London, March 12: Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has said that the US administration acted like a witch hunter while making out a case to attack Iraq and the British Government replaced "question marks with exclamation marks" in intelligence dossiers.

"They wanted to see anything as evidence that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction," Blix said in an interview broadcast by Britain's Sky News today.

Blix, who led the UN search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq until June 2003, said a later discredited dossier on Iraq's weapons programme had deliberately embellished the case for war.

Tony Blair's government published a dossier before the invasion which claimed Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and could deploy some within 45 minutes.

"I do think they exercised spin. They put exclamation marks instead of question marks," Blix said.

No weapons of mass destruction were found after the war, according to Lord Butler's 2004 official inquiry into intelligence on Iraq.

Blix said: "If they had allowed us to carry on the inspections a couple of months more then we would have been able to go to all the sites suspected of by intelligence-British, American or other."

Bureau Report

By Richard L. Fricker

Original Source: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/030907b.html 

March 10, 2007

Canadian lawmakers have written an Afghanistan version of the Iraq Study Group report, reaching a conclusion that the conditions on that original battlefront in the “war on terror” are grave and deteriorating. 

The 16-page Canadian Senate report, entitled “Taking a Hard Look at a Hard Mission,” foresees a conflict that could drag on for generations and might well fail unless NATO significantly increases its commitment of money and troops.

“It is in our view doubtful that this mission can be accomplished given the limited resources that NATO is currently investing in Afghanistan,” said the report by the Standing Committee on National Security and Defence. “The current NATO contingent doesn’t have enough troops to go toe-to-toe with the Taliban.”

Former Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan Chris Alexander told the committee that it would take five generations to “make a difference in Afghanistan,” while Land Forces Commander Andrew Leslie estimated that it would take at least two decades to complete the mission.

NATO has roughly 32,000 troops in Afghanistan, including 15,000 Americans and 2,500 Canadians. Another 12,000 American troops under U.S. command conduct missions ranging from counter-terrorism to training Afghan forces.

In 2001 after the 9/11 attacks were blamed on al-Qaeda operatives based in Afghanistan, the United States led an invasion of the rugged country, toppling its Taliban government and trapping many al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, in the mountains of Tora Bora along the Pakistani border.

At that crucial moment in December 2001, however, President George W. Bush failed to deploy adequate U.S. military forces to capture bin Laden, who managed to escape on horseback with some of his key lieutenants into Pakistan.

Bush then redirected the attention of the U.S. military and intelligence services toward Iraq in preparation for the invasion on March 19, 2003. Since then, the conflict in Iraq has absorbed the bulk of U.S. military resources and political attention.

Al-Qaeda Resurgence

Over those past five years, al-Qaeda has regrouped in the mountains of Pakistan and the Taliban has reemerged as a potent force inside Afghanistan, where NATO forces are anticipating a fierce spring offensive by Taliban fighters. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Bush Is Losing the War on Terror."]

The deteriorating situation in Afghanistan has ratcheted up political and military pressure on America’s NATO allies who had expected their Afghan deployments to concentrate mostly on peacekeeping and reconstruction, not fighting a major counterinsurgency war.

U.S. aerial assaults also have killed substantial numbers of civilians and thus deepened Afghani resentment of Westerners. That local anger and the broader fury in the Muslim world over the Iraq War have attracted a flow of Islamic militants to Afghanistan as well as to Iraq.

When Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting a U.S. military base in Afghanistan on Feb. 27, a Taliban fighter blew himself apart at the gate of the base, killing 23 people but not directly endangering Cheney. The attack, however, was a reminder of the Taliban’s determination to challenge the presence of Westerners on Afghan territory.

“The Afghans are holding elections in their own minds as to whether or not the Westerners can provide the wherewithal to make life better or let the Taliban come back; at least they are predictable,” Canadian Committee Chairman Colin Kenny told me. “We have a very short window of time in which to show them we can assist them.”

Dawn Black, a member of the House of Commons and the New Democratic Party’s voice on defense and security issues, also expressed doubts about assurances from Canada’s Conservative government regarding what it calls generally positive trends in the conflict.

“The government says things are improving,” Black told me. “I was there last month. The security situation is such that they didn’t feel it was safe enough for us to leave the air base” at Kandahar.

When the Canadian delegation did visit an encampment of Afghans “just beyond the wire, the people are starving,” Black said.

Black also complained that heavy-handed military tactics have alienated the Afghani population and set back the goal of winning hearts and minds.

“How are you winning the hearts and minds of these people when you drive a tank through their farms?” Black said. “The NDP would like to see Canada withdraw from the combat mission.”

Election Chances

Canada’s Senate national security committee is dominated by Liberals and Conservatives, but the NDP could play a pivotal role in future Canadian policy in Afghanistan, especially if the Conservative minority government of Stephen Harper is forced into a new election.

Harper, a staunch ally of President Bush, is struggling in opinion polls, dragged down in part by the increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan. If neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals can win a clear electoral victory, the NDP could be the power broker deciding who will form the next Canadian government. [For more on the politics, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush's Canadian Clone in Jeopardy."]

Harper has proposed an additional $200 million aid package that would go to the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai despite concerns over widespread corruption. Sen. Kenny, a Liberal, questioned the wisdom of pouring money into that black hole.

“Canadians will not be able to see how their tax dollars are being spent,” Kenny told me. “I think there will be a lot of money going to a number of people to enhance their Swiss bank accounts. Perhaps some of it will get through to the Afghan people.”

The committee report, released in February, recommended redirecting aid through the military to ensure that more of the money actually reaches the population.

Overall, the report saw few bright spots.

“Anyone expecting to see the emergence in Afghanistan within the next several decades of a recognizable modern democracy capable of delivering justice and amenities to its people is dreaming in Technicolor,” the report said.

“The three primary forces in Afghan politics [are] armed power, tribal loyalties and corruption,” the report said. “Eliminating corruption in a place like Afghanistan is probably a pipe dream. …

“Any attempts to centralize control are complicated by the fact that Afghanistan’s economy is almost totally dependent on the sale of opium, and the opium marketplace is controlled by the warlords and, increasingly, the Taliban.”

The Canadian senators made little effort to sugarcoat the challenges ahead.

“The Taliban have time and geography on their side,” the report said. “Afghanistan is considerably more backward than other difficult areas like Iraq, Iran and Palestine. Whatever changes are made here are going to take many generations to effect and any early reforms are unlikely to present Canadians with the kinds of successes that might easily be seen to justify our involvement in Afghanistan.”

The report summed up the local situation by saying, “People outside Kabul are generally far more dependent on their traditional Sharia courts and systems of government than they are on the central government. …While NATO is proud of the fact that national elections have taken place, these elections have proven to be all but irrelevant to Afghans in places like Kandahar.”

The committee also took the Canadian International Development Agency to task for insisting “that it has a number of development projects underway in the province, but no one was able to show us.”

Beyond the lack of proof that Canada’s commitment was improving the lives of Afghans, the report noted that “life is clearly more perilous because we are there. That doesn’t mean that Canada shouldn’t be there…but it does mean that the ordinary citizen of Kandahar is living in a war zone that he or she wouldn’t be living in if NATO troops weren’t there.

“The combination of too many innocent lives being lost and too little development assistance coming through the pipeline contributes to making life bleak and dangerous.”

More Troops

While noting that “we cannot succeed in Afghanistan at the point of a bayonet,” the report said security for the population required more troops on the ground. “Some of our allies are doing a lot of saluting, but not much marching,” the report said.

“We don’t need F-18’s; we need boots on the ground,” Sen. Kenny told me, adding that some European allies are reluctant to give more help to the United States in Afghanistan because of objections to U.S. policies in Iraq and in the “war on terror.”

“Europe is getting back at the U.S. because of the failed Iraq policy and the loss of moral high ground because of Gitmo, renditions, etc.,” Kenny said.
 
The Canadian report faulted Germany and France for not supplying troops and more assistance. It also noted that after the Russians left Afghanistan in 1989, the United States “largely abandoned the Afghans” leaving them to the mercy of the Taliban.

Prime Minister Harper reacted to the critical report much the way President Bush responded to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group’s recommendations for a phased withdrawal from Iraq – Harper brushed the bad news aside and made clear he would push ahead with an escalation of the old policy.

Unlike Bush, however, Harper may have to face the voters in the near future. Asked if Afghanistan could be an election issue in the months ahead, Sen. Kenny responded, “It very well could.”

[To read the grim Canadian report, click here.]