Freedom and Democracy is Dying

By Paul Craig Roberts 

The media is silent, Congress is absent, and Americans are distracted as George W. Bush openly prepares aggression against Iran.

• US Navy aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran.
• US Air Force jets and missile systems are deployed in bases in countries bordering or near to Iran.
• US B-2 stealth bombers have been refitted to carry 30,000 pound "bunker buster" bombs.
• The US government is financing terrorist and separatist groups within Iran.
• US Special Forces teams are conducting terrorist operations inside Iran.
• US war doctrine has been altered to permit first strike nuclear attack on Iran and other non-nuclear countries.

Bush’s war threats against Iran have intensified during the course of this year. The American people are being fed a repeat of the lies used to justify naked aggression against Iraq.

Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening "the security of nations everywhere" and of the Iraqi resistance for "a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power." [President Bush Addresses the 89th Annual National Convention of the American Legion, August 28, 2007]. Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration. The Pew Foundation’s world polls show that despite all the American and Israeli propaganda against Iran, the US and Israel are regarded as no less threats to world stability than demonized Iran.

Bush has discarded habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions, justified torture and secret trials, damned critics as anti-American, and is responsible, according to Information Clearing House, for over one million deaths of Iraqi civilians, which puts Bush high on the list of mass murderers of all time. The vast majority of "kills" by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan are civilians.

Now Bush wants to murder more. We have to kill Iranians "over there," Bush says, "before they come over here." There is no possibility that Iranians or any Muslims who have no air force, no navy, no modern military technology are going to "come over here," and no indication that they plan to do so. The Muslims are disunited and have been for centuries. That is what makes them vulnerable to colonial rule. If Muslims were united, the US would already have lost its army in Iraq. Indeed, it would not have been able to put an army in Iraq.

Meanwhile the US media focuses on whether Republican Senator Larry Craig is a homosexual or has offended gays by denying being one of them. The run-up for the public’s attention is why a South Carolina beauty queen cannot answer a simple question about why her generation is unable to find the United States on a map.

The war criminal is in the living room, and no official notice is taken of the fact.

Lacking US troops with which to invade Iran, the Bush administration has decided to bomb Iran "back into the stone age." Punishing air and missile attacks have been designed not merely to destroy Iran’s nuclear energy projects, but also to destroy the public infrastructure, the economy, and the ability of the government to function.

Encouraged by the indifference of both the American media and Christian churches to the massive casualties inflicted on Iraqi civilians, the Bush administration will not be deterred by the prospect of its air attacks inflicting massive casualties on Iranian civilians. Last summer the Bush administration demonstrated to the entire world its total disdain for Muslim life when Bush supported Israel’s month-long air attack on Lebanese civilian infrastructure and civilian residences. President Bush blocked the attempt by the rest of the world to halt the gratuitous murder of Lebanese civilians and infrastructure destruction. Clearly, turning the Muslim Middle East into a wasteland is the Bush policy. For Bush, civilian casualties are a non-issue. Hegemony über alles.

The Bush administration has made its war plans for attacking Iraq and positioned its forces without any prior approval from Congress. The "unitary executive" obviously doesn’t believe that an attack on Iran requires the approval of Congress. By its absence and quietude, Congress seems to agree that it has no role in the decision.

In the improbable event that Congress were to make any fuss about Bush’s decision to attack yet another country, the State Department has devised legalistic cover: simply declare Iran’s military to be a "terrorist organization" and go to war under the cover of the existing resolution.

The "Iran issue" has been created by the Bush administration, not by Iran. Iran, like many other countries, has a nuclear energy program to which it is entitled as a signatory to the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty. Inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency have found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran.

The Bush administration has brushed away this fact, which should be determining, just as the Bush administration brushed away the fact that weapons inspectors reported, prior to Bush’s invasion of Iraq, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The Bush administration managed to disrupt the work of the pesky IAEA weapons inspectors in Iran. Iran has been working successfully with the IAEA and has achieved what a senior IAEA official recently described as a milestone agreement. The Bush administration instantly went to work to discredit the agreement and unleashed its new lapdog, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, to threaten "the bombing of Iran." [Iran risks attack over atomic push, French president says By Elaine Sciolino, International Herald-Tribune, August 27, 2007]

The Bush administration’s position is legally untenable and is really nothing but a contrived excuse to start another war. Bush claims that Iran, alone among all the signatories of the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty, must be denied its right under the pact to develop nuclear energy, because Iran, along among all the other signatories, will be the only country able to deceive the IAEA inspectors and develop nuclear weapons. Therefore, Iran must be denied its rights under the agreement.

Bush’s position on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is as legally untenable as his position on every other issue--the Geneva Conventions, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, habeas corpus, the constitutional separation of powers, and presidential signing statements that he cavalierly attaches to new laws in order to override the legislative power of Congress. Bush’s position is that the meaning of laws and treaties varies with his needs of the moment.

Bush has declared himself to be the "decider." The "decider" decides whether Americans have any rights under the Constitution and whether Iran has any rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As the "decider" has decided that Iran has no such rights, the "decider" decides whether to attack Iran.

No one else has any say about it. The people’s representatives are just so much chaff in the wind.

Whatever form of government Bush is operating under, it is far outside an accountable constitutional democratic government. Bush has transitioned America to Caesarism, and even if Bush leaves office in January 2009, the powers he has accumulated in the executive will remain.

Unless Bush and Cheney are impeached and convicted, there is no prospect of the US Congress and federal judiciary ever again being co-equal branches of government.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington;  Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

By John Doraemi

Source: http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/ 

by Paul Craig Roberts

Source: www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts220.html 

No pullout from Iraq while I’m president, declares George W. Bush.

On to Iran, declares Vice President Cheney.

Israel is a "peace-seeking state" that needs $30 billion of US taxpayers’ money for war, declares State Department official Nicholas Burns.

The Democratic Congress, if not fully behind the Iraqi war, at least no longer is in the way of it.

Nor are the Democrats in the way of the Bush regime’s build up for initiating war with Iran.

The Bush regime says it is going to designate part of Iran’s military – the Revolutionary Guards – a terrorist organization, whose bases and facilities Bush intends to bomb along with Iran’s nuclear energy sites. Three US aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran. B-2 Stealth Bombers are being fitted to carry 30,000 pound "bunker-buster" bombs to use against hardened sites. Politicized US generals assert that Iran is providing arms and aid to the Iraqi resistance to the US occupation. The media is feeding the US population the same propaganda about nonexistent Iranian weapons of mass destruction that they fed us about nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. A former CIA Middle East field officer, Robert Baer, has written in Time magazine that the Bush regime has decided to attack the Revolutionary Guards within the next 6 months. Remember the "cakewalk war"? Well, this time the neocons think that an attack on the Revolutionary Guards will free Iran from Islamic influence and cause Iranians to back the US against their own government.

Lies, unprovoked aggression, and delusional expectations – the same ingredients that produced the Iraq catastrophe – all over again. The entire Bush regime and both political parties are complicit, along with the media and US allies.

According to Baer, the Bush regime has given no consideration to whether Iran’s response to a US attack might be different than to welcome it as liberation. What if Iran really were to arm the Iraqi resistance and/or to sink our aircraft carriers? How can any government, even one as incompetent, delusional and unaccountable as the Bush regime, initiate war without any thought to the consequences?

The Bush regime’s planned war against Iran casts light on the large increase in military armaments that the US is supplying to Israel. With Iraq in chaos and civil war, an attack on Iran leaves as opposition to Israel only Syria and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Israel cannot finish off the Palestinians until Hezbollah is destroyed. An Israeli attack on Syria while the US attacks Iran would leave Hezbollah without supplies in the face of a new Israeli attack.

The agenda unfolding before our eyes may be the neoconservative/Israeli/Cheney plan to rid the Middle East of any check to Israeli territorial expansion.

Nicholas Burns said that the $30 billion in military aid was not conditional on any Israeli concessions or progress toward resolving the conflict with the Palestinians. Israel’s ghettoizing and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian West Bank proceeds apace.

Meanwhile in America, while more money is poured into more war, condemned bridges collapse killing Americans who trusted their government to provide safe infrastructure. Devastated residents of New Orleans remain unaided. Financial difficulties deepen for more Americans as falling home prices and jobs lost to offshoring push more Americans into desperate straits. The US dollar continues to fall as the government’s war debts build up abroad.

Except for the armaments industry, where is the gain to America in Bush’s wars? Before Bush invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban had stamped out drug production. The US invasion has brought it back.

On August 22 Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars that US troops are the "greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known." Tell that to the 650,000 dead Iraqis and the 4 million displaced Iraqis, and the tens of thousands of slaughtered Afghans, and the coming civilian deaths in Iran. Tell that to all the bombed civilians from Serbia to Africa who are blown to pieces in order that a US president can make a point. Bush goes far beyond George Orwell’s "Newspeak" in his novel, 1984, when Bush equates US hegemony with liberation.

America’s hegemonic hubris is a sickness. A country that tolerates a war criminal while he openly plans to attack yet another country is definitely not a light unto the world.

Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail] wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is author or coauthor of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He is also coauthor with Karen Araujo of Chile: Dos Visiones – La Era Allende-Pinochet (Santiago: Universidad Andres Bello, 2000).

Published: 25 August 2007

Source: http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2893860.ece 

Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience – just one – whom I call the "raver". Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the "raver" is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a "raver".

His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe you're a free journalist, don't you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don't you tell the truth – that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don't you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows – that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what "all the world knows" (that usually is the phrase) – who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the "raver" is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then – the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd – left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.

Usually, I have tried to tell the "truth"; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim – as the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa'ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. "We disrupted al-Qa'ida, causing them to run," Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named "Operation Lightning Hammer" in Iraq's Diyala province. "Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them." And more of the same, all of it untrue.

Within hours, al-Qa'ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas – which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush's more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.

But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the "raver" bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.

But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.

Source: www.knowledgedrivenrevolution.com/Articles/200708/2007081...

Brent Jessop - Knowledge Driven Revolution.com - August 16, 2007 

Lets assume that Global Warming is real and that man's emissions of greenhouse gasses is the cause. Would a carbon tax work?

Problem Number 1: The Government Likes Your Money

A carbon tax is usually sold along with the promise of tax cuts elsewhere to perfectly counterbalance the increase from any new carbon tax. This is supposed to shift the tax burden to the biggest polluters and not just collectively punish everyone. Sounds nice. But, the government likes your money. So, any initiatives they pursue to reduce carbon emissions would also reduce their income. Not a good way to motivate government bureaucracy, after all, they need your money to pay their salaries and bonuses.

Problem Number 2: Who Keeps Count?

As the elite like to say, a global problem needs a global solution. So, who keeps count of all the carbon emissions? Do national governments? Would you trust communist China to report their carbon quotas honestly? Do you want a gigantic United Nations bureaucracy of inspectors scouring the globe checking every tailpipe and smokestack?

Problem Number 3: Shifting Taxes

I think it is evident to everyone that some groups are more equal than others in the eyes of government. So the burden of this new carbon tax could - and would - be shifted away from a big polluting industry by simply offsetting the new carbon tax. That is, a $100 million carbon tax shortly followed by $100 million in corporate handouts and other tax cuts. The result being the burden of the carbon tax is now on the average driver and home owner instead of the biggest polluters. Later, when the carbon tax is not reducing the country's carbon footprint the way it was originally expected, the environmental lobby begs for an ever higher carbon tax.

Problem Number 4: Who Does the Enforcement?

What happens to all the cheaters? Who becomes the enforcer for the entire world? That is a mighty big stick to hand someone, isn�t it?

Problem Number 5: There is No Problem

Sometimes a rat is harder to smell the bigger it gets. Whenever someone is trying to convince you that there is a major crisis that needs your immediate attention and unwavering loyalty you should always look at the solutions they offer as a way of judging their intent.

The problem was created (yes created) by the United Nations, some of them dressed as scientists, most in suits, and their solution requires huge steps toward and stronger more empowered United Nations. Can you smell the rat now?

Some closing words to ponder:

"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill�" Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution, A Report by the Council of The Club of Rome (1991).

By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Guest Writer

Source: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2308.shtml

"No American president can stand up to Israel."

These words came from feisty Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations (1967-1970) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1970-1974). Moorer was, perhaps, the last independent-minded American military leader.

Admiral Moorer knew what he was talking about. On June 8, 1967, Israel attacked the American intelligence ship, USS Liberty, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 173. The Israelis even strafed the life rafts, machine-gunning the American sailors leaving the stricken ship.

Apparently, the USS Liberty had picked up Israeli communications that revealed Israel's responsibility for the Seven Day War. Even today, history books and the majority of Americans blame the conflict on the Arabs.

The United States Navy knew the truth, but the president of the United States took Israel's side against the American military and ordered the United States Navy to shut its mouth. President Lyndon Johnson said it was all just a mistake. Later in life, Admiral Moorer formed a commission and presented the unvarnished truth to Americans.

The power of the Israel lobby over American foreign policy is considerable. In March 2006, two distinguished American scholars, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, expressed concern in the London Review of Books that the power of the Israel lobby was bending US foreign policy in directions that serve neither US nor Israeli interests. The two experts were hoping to start a debate that might rescue the US and Israel from unsuccessful policies of coercion that are intensifying Muslim hatred of Israel and America. The Israel lobby was opposed to any such reassessment, and attempted to close it off with epithets: "Jew-baiter," "anti-Semitic," and even "anti-American." Today Israeli citizens who oppose Zionist plans for greater Israel are denounced as "anti-Semites."

Many Americans are unaware of the influence of the Israel lobby. Instead they think of the US as "the world's sole superpower," a macho new Roman Empire whose orders are obeyed without question or the insolent nonentity is "bombed back to the stone age." Many Americans are convinced that military coercion serves our interest. They cite Libya, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now they are ready to bring Iran and Pakistan to heel with bombs.

This arrogance results in the murder of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of men, women and children, a fate that many Americans seem to believe is appropriate for countries that do not accept US hegemony.

Coercion is what American foreign policy has become. Macho superpatriots love it. Many of these superpatriots derive vicarious pleasure from their delusions that America is "kicking those sand niggers' asses."

This is the America of the Bush Regime. If some of these superpatriots had their way every "unpatriotic, terrorist supporter" who dares to criticize the war against "the Islamofacists" would be sent to Gitmo, if not shot on the spot.

These Bush supporters have morphed the Republican Party into the Brownshirt Party. They cannot wait to attack Iran, preferably with nuclear weapons. Impatient for Armageddon, some are so full of hubris and self-righteousness that they actually believe that their support for evil means they will be "wafted up to heaven."

It has come as a crippling blow to Democrats that "their" political party is comfortable with Bush's America, and will do nothing to stop the Bush regime's aggression against the Iraqi people or to prevent the Bush regime's attack on Iran.

The Democrats could easily impeach both Bush and Cheney in the House, as impeachment only requires a majority vote. They could not convict in the Senate without Republican support, as conviction requires ratification by two-thirds of Senators present. Nevertheless, a House vote for impeachment would take the wind out of the sails of war, save countless lives and perhaps even save humanity from nuclear holocaust.

Various rationales or excuses have been constructed for the Democrats' complicity in aggression that does not serve America. Perhaps the most popular rationale is that the Democrats are letting the Republicans have all the rope they want with which to produce such a high disapproval rating that the Democrats will sweep the 2008 election.

It is doubtful that the Democrats would assume that men as cunning as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney do not understand the electoral consequences of a low public approval rating and are walking blindly into an electoral wipeout. Rove's departure does not mean that no strategy is in place.

So what does explain the complicity of the Democratic Party in a policy that the American public, and especially Democratic constituencies, reject? Perhaps a clue is offered from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune news report (August 1, 2007) that Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison will spend a week in Israel on "a privately funded trip sponsored by the American Israel Education Federation. The AIEF -- the charitable arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) -- is sending 19 members of Congress to meet with Israeli leaders. The group, made up mostly of freshman Democrats, has plans to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and [puppet] Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The senior Democratic member on the trip is House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who has gone three times. . . . The trip to Israel is Ellison's second as a congressman."

According to the Star-Tribune, a Republican group, which includes Rep. Michele Bachmann (R, Minn.), led by Rep. Eric Cantor (R, Va.) is already in Israel. According to news reports, another 40 are following these two groups during the August recess, and "by the time the year is out every single member of Congress will have made their rounds in Israel." This claim is probably overstated, but it does show careful Israeli management of US policy in the Middle East.

Elsewhere on earth and especially among Muslims, the suspicion is rife that the reason the war against Iraq cannot end, and the reason Iran and Syria must be attacked, is that the US must destroy all Muslim opposition to Israel's theft of Palestine, turning an entire people into refugees driven from their homes and from the lands on which they have lived for many centuries. Americans might think that they are merely grabbing control over oil, keeping it out of the hands of terrorists, but that is not the way the rest of the world views the conflict.

Jimmy Carter was the last American president who stood up to Israel and demanded that US diplomacy be, at least officially if not in practice, even-handed in its approach to Israel and Palestine. Since Carter's presidency, even-handedness has slowly drained from US policy in the Middle East. The neoconservative Bush/Cheney regime has abandoned even the pretense of even-handedness.

This is unfortunate, because military coercion has proven to be unsuccessful. Exhausted from the conflict, the US military, according to former Secretary of State and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, is "nearly broken." Demoralized elite West Point graduates are leaving the army at the fastest clip in 30 years. Desertions are rapidly rising. A friend, a US Marine officer who served in combat in Vietnam, recently wrote to me that his son's Marine unit, currently training for its third deployment to Iraq in September, is short 12-16 men in every platoon and expects to be hit with more AWOLs prior to deployment.

Instead of re-evaluating a failed policy, Bush's "war tsar," General Douglas Lute, has called for the reinstitution of the draft. Gen. Lute doesn't see why Americans should not be returned to military servitude in order to save the Bush administration the embarrassment of having to correct a mistaken Middle East policy that commits the US to more aggression and to debilitating long-term military conflict in the Middle East.

It is difficult to see how this policy serves any interest other than the very narrow one of the armaments industry. Apparently, nothing can be done to change this disastrous policy until the Israel lobby comes to the realization that Israel's interest is not being served by the current policy of military coercion.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

" Most people prefer to believe that their leaders are just, and fair, even in the face evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which he lives is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he, or she will do about it.

To take action in the face of corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones.

To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self image of standing for principals.

Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all. "

By Rodrigue Tremblay
Online Journal Guest Writer

Source: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2284.shtml

Aug 9, 2007, 00:48

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." --Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th US President, Farewell Address, Jan. 17, 1961

“An agreement [with the U.S.] to harmonize trade, security, or defence practices would, in the end, require Canada and Mexico to . . . cede to the United States power over foreign trade and investment, environmental regulation, immigration, and, to a large degree, foreign policy, and even monetary and fiscal policy.” --Roy McLaren, former liberal trade minister

Look for a very strong backlash coming from the Canadian people, but also from the American and Mexican peoples, once they clearly understand what the Bush-Calderon-Harper trio has been concocting in near complete secrecy and with nearly no public debate whatsoever, over the last few years.

Indeed, the three relatively unpopular governments presently in charge in Washington, Ottawa and Mexico, have aligned themselves with very large corporations, most of them American owned, to lay the foundations for a new North American Union, (NAU) also called the "Deep Integration" project. This would be a new permanent alliance that would be de facto placed under American control. Canada and Mexico would have to harmonize many of their laws and regulations to suit the interests of big business and the undemocratic and imperial ambitions of the U.S. government around the world.

With such a plan for an enlarged continental integration at both the economic and political levels, we are far from the initial program of fair and free trade for goods and services and for removing barriers to trade between the three countries, as initially envisaged by the 1988 Free Trade Agreement, (FTA) between Canada and the United States. It has to be remembered that under the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Canada not only accepted that Mexico be incorporated into the North American free trade zone, but made substantial concessions regarding the Investment Canada Act's rules for American takeovers of Canadian companies and for a privileged American access to Canadian energy resources. This should have sufficed to keep the American market open to Canadian exporters. It seems that this is no longer the case. Large corporations and the U.S. administration alike want to take advantage of the terrorist threat to go much further in extracting concessions from Canada.

Indeed, under the leadership of large American owned corporations, which operate freely on both sides of the border, and with the new security concerns of the U.S. administration, the initial trade objective is being further expanded and pushed to a much higher level. The idea now is to turn the trade agreements into some sort of an umbrella political organization that would be parallel to the 27-nation European Union.

In fact, it could mean a more ambitious project that could go even further than the EU toward economic and political integration in North America. In Europe, the more than two dozen participating countries have retained control over their armed forces and over their foreign policies and, what is very important, no single country exercises a hegemonic control over the entire alliance. That would not be the case in North America, however, because of the overwhelming importance of the United States vis-a-vis the other two countries.

Indeed, what has been advanced for Canada, Mexico and the United States -- three countries very much dissimilar in populations, cultures and outlooks -- could go as far as de facto merging the armed forces and foreign policies of all three countries to form a sort of Fortress North America under the protectorate of the United States. Any such deep integration beyond trade relationships would place the United States and its government in the driver's seat, with the other two countries somewhat relegated to the status of near political and economic colonies.

It won't work. For one thing, the Canadian people will never accept that Canada become a colony of the United States, and the current minority government of Stephen Harper could pay dearly politically if it continues pushing in that direction. Canadians do not want their armed forces and their foreign policy to be de facto merged with those of imperial America. Moreover, they do not want their natural resources to be placed under U.S. control and exploited nearly completely by large American corporations, which have little regard for Canada's sovereignty and little concern for the welfare of Canadians. Also, they do not want the Canadian dollar ditched in favor of a less and less attractive U.S. dollar, as some have suggested.

However, all this could be the end result of the secretive efforts that have been deployed at the highest levels under the disguise of the mysterious acronym of "SPP," the so-called program of Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, also referred to by its proponents as "Deep Integration." This integration initiative was officially launched in a summit meeting between George W. Bush (USA), Vicente Fox (Mexico) and Paul Martin (Canada), held in Waco Texas, on March 23, 2005.

Large Canadian corporations and not so "Canadian" corporations any more -- such as Alcan, about to be sold to British owned Rio Tinto -- and many Canadian subsidiaries of American corporations have been the driving force behind the push for a North American Union. In Canada, they are regrouped within the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), which has been lobbying the Harper government in favor of the plan.

Among the 150 corporate members of the Canadian Council of CEOs, alongside large Canadian banks and corporations, one finds many leading American corporations that have branches or subsidiaries in Canada, such as du Pont, FedEx, General Electric, General Motors, Chrysler, Hewlett-Packard, Home Depot, IBM, Imperial Oil, Kodak, 3M, Microsoft, Pratt & Whitney, Suncor, Wyeth, Xerox, etc. These CEOs do not really see Canada as a country separate from the United States, but more as an adjacent market to be occupied and controlled.

It was four years ago, in January 2003, that the CCCE launched its North American Security and Prosperity Initiative (NASPI). The politicians then followed suit. The CCCE's initiative advanced a strategy comprising five major elements:

1- The reinvention of Canada-U.S.-Mexico borders;

2- The maximization of regulatory efficiencies;

3- The negotiation of a comprehensive continental resource security pact;

4- The negotiation of a North American defence alliance;

5- And the creation of a new institutional framework for this new North American Union.

Then the Canadian Council of CEOs enlisted the support of two other organizations, first, the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, a foreign affairs outfit that has been strongly supportive of George W. Bush's war against Iraq and, second, the Mexican Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales.

Their joint task force, called the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America, issued a report in May 2005, whose title was "Building a North American Community." The report contained 39 specific recommendations aimed at de facto erasing borders and at creating a single North American economic and security space within a North American political partnership, involving the United States, Canada and Mexico.

In a nutshell, the Task Force’s central recommendation was to establish, by 2010 (only three years from now!!!), a North American economic and security community, the North American Union, the boundaries of which would be defined by a common external tariff and a common outer security perimeter, including a common border pass. That is the essence of the proposed new "Deep Integration" project: One market, one economic border, and one official security apparatus. Nobody is talking yet of "one flag" or "one currency," but that could come.

This proposal has been discussed at summits held by the leaders of the three involved countries, first in Waco, Texas, in March 2005, to launch the initiative, then one year later in Cancun, Mexico, in March 2006, where it was decided to create the 30-member North American Competitiveness Council (NACC), a tri-national working group responsible for setting priorities for the SPP and to act as a stable driver of the deep integration process through changes in government in all three countries.

On August 20-21 (2007), at Château Montebello, in Montebello, Québec, American President George W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon will again discuss the project during a third (SPP) summit.

For most Canadians, until now, this trilateral initiative seemed simply to pursue the goal of facilitating trade and travel between the three countries, in a way that would not jeopardize the implementation of security measures that have become necessary in the aftermath of 9/11. For sure, if this were the only objective of such trilateral political and bureaucratic consultations (and they started in 2001), most people would understand the need, either for new physical installations at the border and/or for new administrative arrangements designed to reduce transit times, through pre-customs clearing or otherwise. They would not have the fear of seeing their government embarking on a wholesale abandonment of their national sovereignty.

As of now, however, one suspects that the long lines of Canadian trucks frequently observed at the U.S-Canada border, six years after 9/11, reflect some bad faith on the part of the U.S. government. It seems to be using terrorist threats as a excuse to raise its protectionist stance and a reason for applying undue pressures on the relatively inexperienced Harper government. Canadians remember how the Bush-Cheney administration refused to follow the rulings of numerous NAFTA arbitration panels and imposed upon Canada a managed trade deal for softwood lumber trade.

In any case, the objectives being pursued by the "Deep Integration" project go far beyond shortening transit times at the border. They are much more numerous and much more controversial and risky for Canada's national sovereignty than simply building larger installations and harmonizing border controls to enhance trade and travel flows.

Indeed, the real overall goal of the "Deep Integration" project goes much further and would ultimately lead to the creation of a North American Union of a political and not only an economic nature, within which the three countries, but especially a smaller country such as Canada, could lose much of their national sovereignty. It would be an economic and political arrangement resembling the European Union, which encompasses more than two dozen countries, but in North America it is to be feared that such a union would have an imperial twist. It would transform NAFTA into a common market and would force the two smaller partners to change all their relevant laws and regulations to conform to American laws and regulations, including toeing the American line on defense and foreign policies.

As can be seen, we are quite far from the idea of simply having facilitated border controls for products and people. What these secret meetings are envisaging is more like a new political and comprehensive alliance between the United States, Canada and Mexico. But because of the force of gravity, this also means, in practice, that the United States will turn Canada, and to a certain extent Mexico, into quasi colonies of the U.S. Indeed, the United States is a political elephant that does pretty much what it wants, especially under the Bush-Cheney administration, while Canada and Mexico are, at best, a small beaver in one case, and a small fox in the other. This could have the consequence of considerably reducing the quality of democratic life in Canada.

And that's where the rubber hits the road. Once a medium size country accepts a de facto merger of its defence policy with the policy of a much larger one, and all the more so with the United States which is an empire, it becomes very difficult for the former to maintain an independent foreign policy. Its national sovereignty risks being forever diminished and compromised.

Many Canadians justly fear that the kind of "Deep Integration" that is being planned and promoted in relative secrecy could lead to the abandonment of an independent Canadian foreign policy, the loss of independence of the Canadian Armed forces, and the loss of national control over Canada's national resources, forcing Canada to abandon the economic rents over its oil and gas reserves, but also over its water and its hydroelectric power.

Some even fear that the next big step would be the abandonment of the Canadian dollar, in favor of the U.S. dollar, and the loss of independent monetary and fiscal policies. If this is not the case, where are the safeguards for Canada's sovereignty and independence? What are the democratic foundations of such an enlarged political union? What are the political and economic costs relative to the expected economic gains? There exists no study to my knowledge that evaluates these overall questions in order to form the basis for an enlightened public debate.

Therefore, we have to conclude that the plan for a very "Deep Integration" of Canada within North America is basically flawed, if not fundamentally democratically subversive. There has been no thorough public debate on the issue, even though the minority Harper government would certainly have to consult and persuade Canadians before tabling any special legislation that would need to be enacted before the project could be implemented.

Such a public debate has not taken place yet. On the contrary, everything seems to have been planned to keep it away from the public eye with all discussions being held behind closed doors. This should be enough to raise suspicions, even though the ongoing discussions are not yet legally binding. In a more or less near future, however, the ad hoc arrangements so discussed are likely to lead to a new formal agreement or even a new treaty between the three countries. This is presently denied, but the logic of the operation militates in favor of the last option.

I personally think the issue is of such paramount importance that sooner or later we need a countrywide referendum on the entire "Deep Integration" project. A general election is not sufficient to settle such a complicated issue, because a single political party can gather a minority of votes and squeeze into power between numerous opposition parties. No fundamental democratic legitimacy for such an important political project can be obtained through a general election. For that, a special national referendum would be required so that the sovereign people can decide.

http://www.opednews.com

Recent list of URLS re the SPP and the North American Union

Despite the deafening silence in the US and Canadian media (Have they put ANY reporters on this in the lamestream media? one wonders .. hard to find them!!) the purpose of the upcoming conference to be held in Montebello, Quebec is to ratify the Security and Prosperity Protocol (SPP) of North America, which was initiated by Bush, Martin and Fox in 2005.

This so-called ‘partnership’ will result in what the politicians refer to as ‘continental integration’-newspeak for a North American Union- and basically are a harmonization of 100’s of regulations, policies and laws. What we have here, really, is the plan to highjack the North American continent by a very small contingent of industrialists, government cronies and thinktanks. following the clampdown after the 9/11 synthetic terror event. As the slogan says .. Security and Prosperity for WHOM? 

For the rest of the article, click here. 

By Mark Steel

03 August, 2007

The Independent

Here's something they sneaked out this week with hardly anyone noticing - the Americans have announced a "military aid package" of sixty billion dollars for their allies in the Middle East. Or, to be grammatically correct, sixty billion, that's sixty thousand million bastard dollars!!!

How can they spend that? Have Prada moved into tanks? Maybe they now buy these things at fashion shows, where a commentator gasps: "Ooh, my, my!" as down the catwalk comes this exhilarating design for the very latest satellite-guided armour-penetrating missile modelled here by Kate Moss, designed, of course, by Stella McCartney, and "sure to be this summer's big bold hit when it comes to melting the Hizbollah".

This is $250 for every living American, $10 for everyone on the planet. Are they taking each weapon out individually for a meal at the Ivy? And $13bn of this is for Saudi Arabia. Because if there's one family on this earth in need of financial aid, it's the Saudi royal family. Who's getting the rest - the Bee Gees? Anyway, why do the Saudis need military aid at all? Their favourite weapon seems to be the stone. I suppose now if a woman commits adultery or speaks out of turn she'll be battered to death with a bloody great ruby instead.

To get all this in perspective, after the G8 summit two years ago in Scotland, after the Make Poverty History march and concerts, a beaming Tony Blair announced a record-breaking global amount of aid of fifty billion dollars. This time they seem to be a bit more modest. No one came galloping out of the White House joyfully to explain that, after a whole week of negotiating, they've come up with more laser-guided firebombs than ever.

But they shouldn't be so modest. Because a sign of how hard it is to come up with such sums can be seen from this year's G8 summit, when they admitted that instead of the $50bn they promised in Scotland, it was back to $25bn after all. So all those balloons, celebrations, smiley press conferences and declarations of a new start for Africa, were about the entire western world donating to an entire impoverished continent less than half of what one country has quietly coughed up in weapons for the Saudis, Egypt and Israel.

They do it quietly because how many people would agree with these priorities? On Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, when Chris Tarrant asks: "What would you do with the money if you won a million pounds?", very few people say: "I'd buy some cluster bombs." How many people, if they were taken on a tour of the Middle East, through Gaza and the wreckage of Iraq and the slums of Cairo, would say: "I know what this place needs above all else - $60bn-worth of deadly weapons."

How many people would support a charity record called "Death Aid", or a night of TV comedy called "Smiles for Missiles", in which Vernon Kay wandered through Angola grimacing: "This village hasn't had a landmine for over a month. Please, please, please, send your donation so they too can know what it's like to watch someone explode", followed by a special edition of A Question of Sport.

One of the reasons given for the difficulty in providing aid to Africa is their leaders are corrupt, so there's every chance they'll swipe the money. So luckily, when it comes to Saudi Arabia they can rely on that country's rulers, who would never fiddle a billion dollars from British Aerospace or do illegal deals with, to pick someone at random, Jonathan Aitken.

Maybe the complaint about corruption has been misunderstood and the Africans aren't doing enough of it. So the White House gets reports that say: "Some ministers in Malawi go a whole month with barely a single prostitute being procured by the arms companies - how can we possibly do business with such people?" And half this generous gift, $30bn-worth of arms, is being given to Israel. Surely the problem here is where will they put them all? They'll be like parents at Christmas when an over-generous grandparent delivers sacks full of presents, and you have to have a clearout of all the old stuff to make room. So if you want a cheap battleship, nip down to a charity shop in Hebron and you'll be able to pick one up for a score.

But more weapons is the answer to everything. For example, a US defence report on global warming has concluded it could lead to global instability and mass migration, proving the necessity of acquiring more weapons to deal with this.

If anyone from the Pentagon visits Moss Side or Peckham, they'll announce: "Hey, these places are in bad shape. So we've given everyone under 25 a pistol, a sword and a tank." If someone from the Pentagon ever worked as a chef, he'd taste the sauce and say: "Hmm, it needs something - basil, perhaps, or a sprinkle of fennel? I know, it needs a Stealth bomber."

How does anyone get to see the world from the point of view of the Pentagon? Who would look around a world in which 5,000children a day die for lack of clean water and decide that can wait, but the weapons can't?

But the biggest mystery is the official reason given for handing over this fortune to Egypt and Saudi Arabia - that, according to Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador to the United Nations, it's because "Saudi Arabia and others are not doing all they can to help us in Iraq". So they're rewarded like that. Well, I've done bugger all to help America in Iraq. Can I have a helicopter?