Freedom and Democracy is Dying

By Muriel Mirak-Weissbach

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid...

Global Research, September 28, 2007

Note: Readers are welcome to cross-post this article with a view to spreading the word and warning people of the dangers of a broader Middle East war. Please indicate the source and copyright note.

The war that Dick Cheney has been planning against Iran, has moved from the back burner to the front, and those who do not see this are either blind or complicit.

Military deployments are in place, as laid out in detail in a Sept. 16 feature by Michel Chossudovsky in Global Research, while the statements of intent to wage war, issued by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, have been hyped in British and American news outlets.

The fact that war is high on the agenda, was denounced by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Dr. Mohammad ElBaradei, who made a dramatic exit from an ongoing meeting of the IAEA board of governors on Sept. 11, in protest against the manifest intent of the U.S. and U.K. delegations, as well as the rotating EU presidency representative, to proceed with military aggression. 

ElBaradei, who was so furious that he initially refused to talk to the press, clearly stated, in his Sept. 10 report to the UN body, that the course chosen by the IAEA, to proceed with diplomacy and inspections, was succeeding in providing the necessary clarifications of outstanding questions about Iran's nuclear energy program. 

The IAEA chief's report reflected a recent agreement struck between the agency and Iran, regarding a framework for resolving all remaining issues, and, step by step, closing the file. ElBaradei stressed, "This is the first time that Iran has agreed on a plan to address all outstanding issues, with a defined timeline.'' He called for a "double time-out,'' meaning the suspension of Iranian enrichment activity along with a suspension of sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, on Sept. 12, welcomed ElBaradei's latest report as a "major step forward,'' and criticized certain states (meaning the U.S. and the U.K) for "questioning the merits of the Iran-IAEA modality agreement.'' That agreement had effectively pulled the rug out from under those warmongers who argued that since Iran's program was military, it had to be stopped by military means. Since the IAEA meeting, ElBaradei has gone to the press almost daily, to reassert his conviction that, there is no reason to attack Iran on the nuclear issue; At the same time ElBaradei underscored that, despite the Iran-IAEA agreement, the intention for a US sponsored attack is being envisaged. On Sept. 17, he told the press: 

"We need always to remember that use of force could only be resorted to when ... every other option has been exhausted. I don't think we are at all there.... There is a UN charter and there are rules for the international use of force. I hope everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation when we see a drama unfolding every day.'' 

ElBaradei noted that thousands of  "innocent civilians [in Iraq] have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country had nuclear weapons.'' He recalled that he had tried to continue inspections in Iraq, but had been prevented by the U.S. war. Now, he said, he was conducting negotiations with Iran, which were bearing fruit:  

"I think what we need now to do is to encourage Iran to work with the agency to clarify the outstanding issues'' in the over four-year-old IAEA investigation. He gave a clear time frame for results to be produced: "by November-December we will be able to know whether Iran is acting in good faith or not, and if not, then obviously we will have a different situation.... But people need to bear with us. People need to understand we are dealing with an issue that has a lot to do with peace and security and regional instability in the Middle East, and I would ask everybody to hold their horses until we go through the process.''

ElBaradei also addressed the climate of hysteria being created by the warmongers, and the complicit role of the media, which deliberately ignores the reality on the ground. "I have made it very clear that I don't see today a clear and present danger in regard to the Iran nuclear program,'' he said.

Then he characterized the talk of war as "a lot of hype'' which reminded him of a statement by George Orwell to the effect that "in a time of hype, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.'' ElBaradei commented: "If that is the case, I will continue, I can promise you, to be a revolutionary by giving the truth in an objective and impartial manner.''

War Mongers of the World Unite 

Due to the fact that the war party did not succeed in Vienna, to corral the IAEA members into endorsing punitive measures against Iran, the Bush-Cheney Administration announced that it would hold a meeting on Sept. 21, to discuss "broadening UN sanctions against Iran for its refusal to suspend nuclear activity,'' as State Department spokesman Sean McCormack put it. The meeting is to bring together the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, the so-called 5+1. At the same time, the drumbeat for war became louder. Over the Sept. 15-16 weekend, the British press worked overtime to promote the cause of war in Southwest Asia. From the {Sunday Observer}, to the {Telegraph} and Sunday {Times}, the message delivered was unequivocal: "Bush Setting Up for War With Iran,'' announced the {Telegraph}, while the {Observer} headlined, "Time Is Running Out To Avoid War With Iran.'' The {Telegraph} retailed the line that the Pentagon had a list of 2,000 targets in Iran, adding that Cheney was committed to deploying nuclear bunker-buster bombs against presumed Iranian nuclear sites. The press also referenced the provocative Israeli strikes over Syria, as part of the regional war process.

Then, on Sept. 16, a bombshell was dropped from Paris. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner (notorious for his endorsement of military interventions on ``humanitarian grounds''), issued a blunt statement that France must be prepared for a war with Iran. Although Prime Minister François Fillon later tried to water down the remarks, the message was clear. And no one could forget President Nicholas Sarkozy's recent visit with the Bushes at Kennebunkport. Following his return to Paris, Sarkozy, according to source reports, started sending notes to various European capitals, that the message he had received from Bush was that war with Iran was inevitable.

The French intelligence leak-sheet, {Le Canard enchainé), lent credence to Kouchner's remarks, reporting that the war against Iran is ready to go. It quotes a former CIA official who said that Israeli officers were lobbying the Pentagon and White House for a military intervention. In addition, {Le Canard} reported that Antonov jets had been leased in Ukraine and Belarus to transport US military hardware from military bases in Iraq, Central Asia, and Djibouti to the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean. The same source also signaled the arrival of stealth bombers to Qatari bases, reinforcing the armada there.

Kouchner's remarks provoked a storm of justified criticism from those quarters seeking to avoid war, including Russia and China. As reported by AFP, as well as Russian wires on Sept. 18, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov lodged his protest in an interview with Vremya Novosti: 

"The bombings of Iran would be a bad move that would end with catastrophic consequences... We are convinced that there is no military solution to the Iranian problem. It's impossible. Besides, it is quite clear that there is no military solution to the Iraq problem either. But in the case of Iran everything could be even more complicated.'' 

He concluded by characterizing any U.S. military action as "a big diplomatic and political error.'' Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also spoke out against all forms of military aggression, and the Chinese foreign ministry issued a statement saying the diplomatic course should be pursued. As reported by ITAR-TASS, Lavrov said that Moscow was alarmed by reports of possible military action. He made these remarks, pointedly, at a joint press conference with visiting French Foreign Minister Kouchner: 

``The multiplying reports that some contemplate the introduction of military sanctions against Iran cause Russia's alarm. It is hard to imagine what this can be fraught with for the region... Russia remains committed to the agreement that the UN Security Council will not go beyond the bounds of supporting the IAEA... Not a single problem has a military solution, and the same applies to Iran's nuclear program.'' 

Regarding renewed talk of sanctions, he said, "Once we have agreed to take collective action, and this agreement materializes as consensus work within the UN Security Council, what objectives does the introduction of unilateral sanctions serve?" We should never forget, Lavrov added, that "part of the agreement, within the framework of the group of six international mediators, that provides for wider dialogue with Iran, including on issues of regional security.'' 

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Liu Jianchao lashed out at Kouchner's views the same day: 

"We should avoid threatening others with military actions,... We are opposed to military actions in dealing with international affairs... We believe that negotiations would be the best option meeting the interests of international community.''

But, in cheerful disregard for such informed warnings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, en route to the Middle East for a round of cosmetic peace diplomacy, aimed at pacifying Arabs in preparation for the Iran war, lashed out at those seeking a diplomatic solution. She targeted the IAEA and ElBaradei in no uncertain terms:. 

"We believe the diplomatic track can work but it has to work both with a set of incentives and a set of teeth... The IAEA is not in the business of diplomacy. The IAEA is a technical agency that has a board of governors of which the United States is a member...It is not up to anybody to diminish or to begin to cut back on the obligations that the Iranians have been ordered to take.'' 

Although she carefully tiptoed around Kouchner's statements regarding the war with Iran option, Rice stated: "The key here is that we are committed to a diploma tic track but the President has not taken any of his options off the table.''

Back to the Drawing Board 

The real script being prepared to justify a new war in the eyes of public opinion, however, is in the making, namely that Iran is responsible for rising casualties among U.S. troops in Iraq. According to this new Hollywood-style fiction, Iran has been sending in weapons, especially the deadly IEDs, to kill American GIs, and train Shi'ite militias to fight American forces in Iraq. Anyone with a brain in his head, or, a functioning Internet connection with access to international news wires from the region, knows that these are lies. of  the same caliber as those churned out by Tony Blair in the months leading up to the war on Iraq that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had sophisticated WMD, which could strike down the West in 45 minutes. Dick Cheney (the man who organized the stove piping of disinformation before the Iraq fiasco) is foremost among those propagating this line. On Sept. 14, Cheney delivered a speech in Grand Rapids, Mich., reiterating his harangue against Islamic terrorists, who, he claimed, seek to "establish a radical empire covering a region from Spain ... to Indonesia.'' According to Cheney, this justifies which the war on terrorism anywhere, everywhere, and forever:

"Coalition forces [in Iraq] have ... conducted operations against extremists supported by Iran--a country whose paramilitary organization traffics in lethal material.''

The same day, the indefatigable VP addressed the Central Command, Special Operations Command and the 6th Air Mobility Wing at the MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. Cheney, reading from the same prepared text, said, "Governments that support of harbor terrorists are complicit in the murder of the innocent, and must be held to account.'' Eager to clarify just whom he had in mind, Cheney again mentioned that it was Iran which was harboring the terrorists.

The "paramilitary organization'' in question, to which Cheney and Bush have referred to on several occasions, is the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, whose Al Quds (Jerusalem) unit they accuse of being involved of terrorist acts inside Iraq. Recent reports suggest that the Bush-Cheney Administration was about to officially designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization, and that this decision would be followed by the imposition of sanctions including the freezing of IRCG assets in the US.  Given that the IRCG probably does not have millions stashed away in accounts at JP Morgan Chase, or elsewhere in the U.S., such a designation would serve to justify moving militarily against its alleged positions, inside Iran or Iraq.

This, in fact, is the new scenario on the drawing boards. Gen. Kevin Bergner was sent by Cheney to Iraq, precisely to cook up some "evidence'' that the Iranians were providing weapons and training anti-U.S. forces inside Iraq. Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker both supported this charge, in their testimony before Congress on Sept. 11.

Dovetailing with this new scenario, is the notion that Iran has been supporting the Shi'ite militia leader Moqtadar al-Sadr, in an internecine Shi'ite battle with the mainstream group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is part of the ruling coalition in Baghdad. Although rivalries among Shi'ite groups do exist, the version presented by the Cheney crew is just short of preposterous. First, it must be stressed that the government of Shi'ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, with SCIRI support, has been aggressively attacked by Washington as incompetent, and calls have been made for it to be replaced. Cheney's candidate to replace Maliki is Ayad Allawi, a man of dubious connections, to say the least, but who would toe Cheney's line.

Secondly, regarding inter-Shi'ite conflicts, it must be noted that al-Sadr announced a unilateral ceasefire--a cessation of {all} armed activities, including against the occupying forces--for six months. Iranian sources told me this was an explicit sign of support by Sadr for the beleaguered government of Maliki. Finally, and most important, Maliki has been consulting with the supreme religious authority of all Shi'ites, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, in an effort to stabilize his government. Maliki went to Najaf on Sept. 5 to meet with Sistani, and, following the talks, told the press: I discussed with him the case of the government. I asked his help in forming a government and nominating new ministers, or if there is the possibility to form a new government based on technocrats. He did not indicate what the cleric's response had been, Reuters reported.

Sistani's role is crucial. His principled stance on the Iraq crisis, from the beginning of the invasion, has been that he would support a democratically elected parliament and government, in hopes that such a government would proceed to end the occupation. On several occasions, Sistani has met with different Shi'ite, and other leaders, in an attempt to forge national reconciliation. For this, he has been rewarded with a series of assassinations of his top aides, the sixth such murder executed just weeks ago.

The talks between Sistani and Maliki were prompted also by a serious crisis that had ensued, following clashes in the Shi'ite holy city of Karbala on Aug. 28, which had been characterized as fighting between rival Shi'ite groups. Maliki said he was considering giving these cities a special status.

"I am considering that holy shrines and sacred cities be peaceful places and disarmed of weapons and under the protection of the Iraqi army,''

Iranian sources told me that the clashes had been instigated by outside forces, not by any of the rival Shi'ite groups, as the press had claimed. Then, on Sept. 13, the Tehran Times came out with a report indicating that the force behind the massacres in Karbala was none other than the Mujaheddin el-Khalq (MKO/MEK), the Iranian terrorist organization which, after having been protected in Iraq by Saddam Hussein, is now protected by the U.S. occupying forces there.

The Tehran Times political desk reported that three months prior to the massacre, "closed-circuit cameras captured a 23-year-old woman and 13-year-old youth who were gathering information about the various entrances to the Imam Hussein (AS) shrine. After their arrest, it became clear that they had been sent by the Mujaheddin Khalq Organization (MKO) to locate ways to sneak into the shrine for terrorist operations.''

The paper described how the attack was planned. Members of Moqtada Sadr's al-Mahdi militia, trying to enter the shrine, were prevented by security forces. Then, clashes began which led to 52 dead and 300 injured. "At first glance, it seemed to be a clash between rival Shia groups seeking to monopolize power and another indication of the extreme insecurity in Iraq, especially in Shia areas,'' the paper commented. But, this is not the case. According to witnesses, large amounts of weapons were distributed to people near the Sadr group's position, giving the impression that that group had been handing out arms. Among the weapons were some made in Iran--to leave a clear lead. The Iraqi Interior Ministry has conducted investigations into the event, concluding that the MKO was behind the incident.

This incident, attributed by the Chenyacs to "Iranian-backed Shi'ite factions inside Iraq,'' is being pushed into the stove pipe of disinformation, to motivate a military attack against Iran.

Within the US military, preparations for confrontation with Iran are proceeding apace. In addition to the detailed information provided by Global Research, noted above, there is the news, released by the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 10, that the U.S. is preparing to build a military base near the Iraq-Iran border, allegedly to intercept the flow of weapons into the country. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, was quoted saying the base would include fortified checkpoints as well as X-ray machines and explosives-detecting sensors. The base is to be placed just four miles from the Iranian border--a blatant provocation. The {Sunday Telegraph} on Sept. 16 reported that Gen. David Petraeus was going to visit London to brief Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others of such plans. Petraeus was expected, according to this account, to press the British to cancel their plans to withdraw 5,000 troops from Iraq, and instead, to deploy them along the border with Iran.

Iran's Version of the Olive Branch

In response to these preparations for yet another war, the Iranian leadership has been seeking ways to avoid a conflict which it knows would be catastrophic. In addition to Iran's overtures to the IAEA, Tehran has dispatched its diplomats to meet with key countries, including Russia and China.

Inside Iran, on Sept. 7, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, now head of the Expediency Council, was elected head of the Assembly of Experts. Iranian sources have stressed that Rafsanjani, a moderate, has the full support of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Al Khamenei.

At the same time, there has been a leadership change in the IRGC. Ali Khamenei, who is also Chief Commander of the Armed Forces, named Brig. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari as the new commander. In his first press conference in his new position, Ali Jafari announced the military's readiness to face threats. "Relying on people's support that is organized within military framework, great intelligence superiority, and its missile capabilities, the IRGC is fully ready to defeat any possible aggressive move.''

Thus, as the political leadership closes ranks, the Military prepares for the worst.

By Richard W. Behan

Source: http://www.alternet.org/story/63632/

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie ... The truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state." --Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the administration of George W. Bush has told and repeated a lie that is "big enough" to confirm Joseph Goebbels' testimony. It is a mega-lie, and the American people have come to believe it. It is the "War on Terror."

The Bush administration endlessly recites its mantra of deceit:

The War on Terror was launched in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It is intended to enhance our national security at home and to spread democracy in the Middle East.

This is the struggle of our lifetime; we are defending our way of life from an enemy intent on destroying our freedoms. We must fight the enemy in the Middle East, or we will fight him in our cities. 

This is classic propaganda. In Goebbels' terms, it is the "state" speaking its lie, but the political, economic, and military consequences of the Bush administration lie are coming into view, and they are all catastrophic. If truth is the enemy of both the lie and George Bush's "state," then the American people need to know the truth.

The military incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were not done in retaliation for 9/11. The Bush administration had them clearly in mind upon taking office, and they were set in motion as early as Feb. 3, 2001. That was seven months prior to the attacks on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon, and the objectives of the wars had nothing to do with terrorism.

This is beyond dispute. The mainstream press has ignored the story, but the administration's congenital belligerence is fully documented in book-length treatments and in the limitless information pool of the internet. (See my earlier work, for example.)

Invading a sovereign nation unprovoked, however, directly violates the charter of the United Nations. It is an international crime. Before the Bush administration could attack either Afghanistan or Iraq, it would need a politically and diplomatically credible reason for doing so.

The terrorist violence of Sept. 11, 2001, provided a spectacular opportunity. In the cacophony of outrage and confusion, the administration could conceal its intentions, disguise the true nature of its premeditated wars, and launch them. The opportunity was exploited in a heartbeat.

Within hours of the attacks, President Bush declared the United States "… would take the fight directly to the terrorists," and "… he announced to the world the United States would make no distinction between the terrorists and the states that harbor them." Thus the "War on Terror" was born.

The fraudulence of the "War on Terror," however, is clearly revealed in the pattern of subsequent facts:

• In Afghanistan the state was overthrown instead of apprehending the terrorist. Offers by the Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden were ignored, and he remains at large to this day.
• In Iraq, when the United States invaded, there were no al Qaeda terrorists at all.
• Both states have been supplied with puppet governments, and both are dotted with permanent U.S. military bases in strategic proximity to their hydrocarbon assets.
• The U.S. embassy nearing completion in Baghdad is comprised of 21 multistory buildings on 104 acres of land. It will house 5,500 diplomats, staff and families. It is ten times larger than any other U.S. embassy in the world, but we have yet to be told why.
• A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate shows the war in Iraq has exacerbated, not diminished, the threat of terrorism since 9/11. If the "War on Terror" is not a deception, it is a disastrously counterproductive failure.
• Today two American and two British oil companies are poised to claim immense profits from 81 percent of Iraq's undeveloped crude oil reserves. They cannot proceed, however, until the Iraqi Parliament enacts a statute known as the "hydrocarbon framework law."
• The features of postwar oil policy so heavily favoring the oil companies were crafted by the Bush administration State Department in 2002, a year before the invasion.
• Drafting of the law itself was begun during Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, with the invited participation of a number of major oil companies. The law was written in English and translated into Arabic only when it was due for Iraqi approval.
• President Bush made passage of the hydrocarbon law a mandatory "benchmark" when he announced the troop surge in January of 2007.

When it took office, the Bush administration brushed aside warnings about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Their anxiety to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq was based on other factors.

Iraq

The Iraqi war was conceived in 1992, during the first Bush administration, in a 46-page document entitled Draft Defense Planning Guidance.

The document advocated the concept of preemptive war to assure the military and diplomatic dominance of the world by the United States. It asserted the need for "… access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil." It warned of "… proliferation of weapons of mass destruction." And it spoke of "… threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism." It was the template for today's war in Iraq.

The Draft Defense Planning Guidance was signed by the secretary of defense, Richard Cheney. It was prepared by three top staffers: Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad-all of whom would fill high-level positions in the administration of George W. Bush, nine years in the future.

In proposing global dominance and preemptive war, it was a radical departure from the traditional U.S. policy of multilateral realism, and it was an early statement of the emerging ideology of "neoconservatism."

The document was too extreme. President George H.W. Bush publicly denounced it and immediately retracted it. Many in his administration referred to its authors as "the crazies."

But the ideology survived. Five years later William Kristol and Robert Kagan created a neoconservative organization to advocate preemptive war and U.S. global dominion to achieve, in their words, a "benevolent global hegemony." It was called the Project for the New American Century, quickly abbreviated as PNAC. Among the founding members were Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld and Jeb Bush.

In a letter to President Clinton on Jan. 26, 1998, the Project for the New American Century once more urged the military overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime.

President Clinton ignored the letter, apparently viewing this iteration of the proposal as no less crazy than the original.

As the presidential campaign of 2000 drew to a close, the PNAC produced yet another proposal for U.S. world dominion, preemptive war and the invasion of Iraq. It was a document called "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources For a New Century" (PDF).

Weeks later, in January of 2001, 29 members of the Project for the New American Century joined the administration of George W. Bush. Their ideology of world dominion and preemptive war would dominate the Bush administration's foreign and defense policies.

Within 10 days of his inauguration, President Bush convened his National Security Council. The PNAC people triumphed when the invasion of Iraq was placed at the top of the agenda for Mideast foreign policy. Reconciling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, long the top priority, was dropped from consideration.

The neoconservative dream of invading Iraq was a tragic anachronism, an ideological fantasy of retrograde imperialism. A related and far more pragmatic reason for the invasion, however, would surface soon.

No administration in memory had been more closely aligned with the oil industry. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were intimately tied to it, and so was National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice. So were eight cabinet secretaries and 32 other high-level appointees.

By early February, Vice President Cheney's "Energy Task Force" was at work. Federal agency people were joined by executives and lobbyists from the Enron, Exxon-Mobil, Conoco-Phillips, Shell and BP America corporations.

Soon the task force was poring over detailed maps of the Iraqi oil fields, pipelines, tanker terminals, refineries and the undeveloped oil exploration blocks. It studied two pages of "foreign suitors for Iraqi oil field contracts" -- foreign companies negotiating with Saddam Hussein's regime, none of which was a major American or British oil company.

The intent to invade Iraq and the keen interest in Iraqi oil would soon converge in a top secret memo of Feb. 3, 2001, from a "high level National Security Council official." The memo: "… directed the NSC staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the 'melding' of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: 'the review of operational policies toward rogue states' such as Iraq and 'actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.'"

As early as Feb. 3, 2001, the Bush administration was committed to invading Iraq, with the oil fields clearly in mind.

The terrorist attacks on Washington and New York were still seven months in the future.

Afghanistan

The issue in Afghanistan was the strategically valuable location for a pipeline to connect the immense oil and gas resources of the Caspian Basin to the richest markets. Whoever built the pipeline would control the Basin, and in the 1990s the contest to build it was spirited.

American interests in the region were promoted by an organization called the Foreign Oil Companies Group. Among its most active members were Henry Kissinger, a former secretary of state but now an advisor to the Unocal Corp.; Alexander Haig, another former secretary of state but now a lobbyist for Turkmenistan; and Richard Cheney, a former secretary of defense, but now the CEO of the Halliburton Corp.

Late in 1996, however, the Bridas Corp. of Argentina finally signed contracts with the Taliban and with Gen. Dostum of the Northern Alliance to build the pipeline.

One American company in particular, Unocal, found that intolerable and fought back vigorously, hiring a number of consultants in addition to Kissinger: Hamid Karzai, Richard Armitage, and Zalmay Khalilzad. (Armitage and Khalilzad would join the George W. Bush administration in 2001.)

Unocal wooed Taliban officials at its headquarters in Texas and in Washington, D.C., seeking to have the Bridas contract voided, but the Taliban refused. Finally, in February of 1998, John J. Maresca, a Unocal vice president, asked in a congressional hearing to have the Taliban replaced by a more stable regime.

The Clinton administration, having recently refused the PNAC request to invade Iraq, was not any more interested in a military overthrow of the Taliban. President Clinton did, however, shoot a few cruise missiles into Afghanistan, after the al Qaeda attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa. And he issued an executive order forbidding further trade transactions with the Taliban.

Maresca was thus twice disappointed: The Taliban would not be replaced very soon, and Unocal would have to cease its pleadings with the regime.

Unocal's prospects rocketed when George W. Bush entered the White House, and the Project for the New American Century ideology of global dominance took hold.

The Bush administration itself took up active negotiations with the Taliban in January of 2001, seeking secure access to the Caspian Basin for American companies. The Enron Corp. also was eyeing a pipeline to feed its proposed power plant in India.) The administration offered a package of foreign aid as an inducement, and the parties met in Washington, Berlin and Islamabad. The Bridas contract might still be voided.

But the Taliban would not yield.

Anticipating this in the spring of 2001, the State Department had sought and gained the concurrence of India and Pakistan to take military action if necessary. The PNAC people were not timid about using force.

At the final meeting with the Taliban, on Aug. 2, 2001, State Department negotiator Christine Rocca, clarified the options: "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." With the futility of negotiations apparent, "President Bush promptly informed Pakistan and India the U.S. would launch a military mission into Afghanistan before the end of October."

This was five weeks before the events of 9/11.

Sept. 11, 2001

A tectonic groundswell of skepticism, doubt and suspicion has emerged about the Bush administration's official explanation of 9/11. Some claim the administration orchestrated the attacks. Others see complicity. Still others find criminal negligence. The cases they make are neither extreme nor trivial.

Whatever the truth about 9/11, the Bush administration now had a fortuitous, spectacular opportunity to proceed with its premeditated attacks.

The administration would have to play its hand skillfully, however.

Other nations have suffered criminal acts of terrorism, but there is no precedent for conflating the terrorists with the states that harbor them, declaring a "war" and seeking with military force to overthrow a sovereign government. Victimized nations have always relied successfully on international law enforcement and police action to bring terrorists to justice.

But the Bush administration needed more than this. War plans were in the files. They needed to justify invasions. Only by targeting the "harboring states," as well as the terrorists, did they stand a chance of doing so.

The administration played its hand brilliantly. It compared the terrorist attacks immediately to Pearl Harbor, and in the smoke and rage of 9/11 the comparison was superficially attractive. But Pearl Harbor was the violent expression of hostile intent by a formidably armed nation, and it introduced four years of full-scale land, sea and airborne combat. 9/11 was al Qaeda's violent expression of hostility: 19 fanatics armed with box cutters. Yes, extraordinary destruction and loss of life, but the physical security of our entire nation was simply not at stake.

Though the comparison was specious, the "War on Terror" was born, and it has proven to be an exquisite smokescreen. But labeling the preplanned invasions as a "War on Terror" was the mega-lie, dwarfing all the untruths that followed. The mega-lie would be the centerpiece of a masterful propaganda blitz that continues to this day.

The wars

On Oct. 7, 2001, the carpet of bombs is unleashed over Afghanistan.

Soon, with the Taliban overthrown, the Bush administration installed Hamid Karzai as head of an interim government. Karzai had been a Unocal consultant.

The first ambassador to Karzai's government was John J. Maresca, a vice president of Unocal.

The next ambassador to Afghanistan was Zalmay Khalilzad, another Unocal consultant.

Four months after the carpet of bombs, President Karzai and President Musharraf of Pakistan signed an agreement for a new pipeline. The Bridas contract was moot. The way was open for Unocal.

In February of 2003 an oil industry trade journal reported the Bush administration was ready to finance the pipeline across Afghanistan and to protect it with a permanent military presence. Osama bin Laden remained at large.

The mega-lie, the fabricated "War on Terror" was an easy sell in the Afghanistan adventure. The shock of 9/11 was immense, Osama bin Laden was operating from Afghanistan and the "state," the Taliban, was at least sympathetic to his organization. And the signature secrecy of the Bush Administration had kept from public view its eight months of negotiating with the Taliban. The first premeditated war was largely unopposed.

Selling the Iraq invasion to the American people and to the Congress would be far more difficult.

With the Trade Towers and the Pentagon still smoldering, President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld ordered their staffs to find Saddam Hussein's complicity in the attacks. Of course they could not, so there would need to be a sustained and persuasive selling job -- a professionally orchestrated campaign of propaganda.

Soon after 9/11, fear-mongering propagandizing became the modus operandi of the Bush Administration. It began in earnest with the president's "axis of evil" State of the Union address in 2002, full of terrorism and fear. "The United States of America," the president said, "will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."

No regime anywhere was in fact threatening anyone with anything, but Bush appointed a 10-person "White House Iraq Group" in August of 2002. Chaired by Karl Rove, its members were trusted partisans and communications experts skilled in perception management. Their role was explicitly to market the need to invade Iraq. The group operated in strict secrecy, sifting intelligence, writing position papers and speeches, creating "talking points," planning strategy and timing, and feeding information to the media. This was the nerve center, where the campaign of propaganda was orchestrated and promulgated.

The group chose to trumpet nearly exclusively the most frightening threat-nuclear weapons. Rice soon introduced the litany of the smoking gun and the mushroom cloud, Cheney said hundreds of thousands of Americans might die, and Bush claimed Saddam was "six months away from developing a weapon."

In the 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush uttered the infamous "sixteen words": "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This was typical of White House Iraq Group work: The CIA knew and had said the information was bogus.

The propaganda campaign was ultimately successful, not least because of the axiomatic trust American people extend to their presidents: Nobody could have anticipated the range, intensity and magnitude of the expertly crafted deception. And the campaign was aided by a compliant mainstream press that swallowed and regurgitated the talking points.

The Congress was persuaded sufficiently to authorize the use of military force. The American people were persuaded sufficiently to accept the war and to send Mr. Bush to the White House for a second term. But no other war in the country's history had to be so consciously and comprehensively sold.

Much of the deception, distortion and lies was eventually exposed. The link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, the weapons of mass destruction, the aluminum tubes, the mobile laboratories, the yellowcake from Niger: none of it true. Only the mega-lie, the "War on Terror," survives.

On Feb. 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the Security Council, waving the vial of simulated anthrax and claiming "there is no doubt in my mind" Saddam Hussein was working to produce nuclear weapons.

But the Security Council, not so easily propagandized, refused to authorize American force.

On March 14, 2003, President Bush met in the Azores with Prime Ministers Blair of the United Kingdom and Aznar of Spain. They abandoned the effort for U.N. authorization, claimed the right to proceed without it and a week later launched the war.

Four years of violence. Nearly 4,000 young Americans dead. Seven times that many maimed. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead. Millions fleeing as refugees, their economy and infrastructure in ruins. A raging civil war. Half a trillion dollars and counting.

Stopping the madness

And for what? Neither face of the war has come remotely close to success. The "War on Terrorism" has not suppressed terrorism but has encouraged it instead. The premeditated war -- for ideological dreams of world dominion and the pragmatic capture of hydrocarbon assets -- is a colossus of failure.

The Afghan pipeline is a dead issue. As the warlords and the poppy growers in Afghanistan thrive, and as the Taliban regroups and regains dominance, the country tilts ominously into chaos once more.

The Iraqi hydrocarbon law -- the clever disguise for capturing the oil fields -- is fatally wounded, its true purpose becoming more widely known. Organized resistance is growing quickly, both in Iraq and in the United States. And the factions who need to agree on the law are otherwise engaged in killing each other.

The Iraqi war has not resulted, either, in the global dominance sought by the Project for the New American Century people, but in global repugnance for what their pathetic ideology has wrought.

Clearly the involvement of the U.S. military in the Mideast must cease. Pouring more lives and dollars into the quagmire may keep alive the warped dreams of the Bush administration, but those dreams are illegitimate, indeed criminal.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney reject any alteration in their course. They ask instead for more time, more money and even -- in threatening Iran -- for more targets.

There is no apparent way to the stop madness, to end the hemorrhaging of blood and treasure, but to impeach these men and, if found guilty, to remove them from office.

The integrity of the Constitution and the rule of law are at stake as well, but the Congress continues its indifference to impeachment, effectively condoning the administration's behavior. Should this continue, thinking Americans will discard the last crumbs of respect for the incumbent legislature -- polling shows there's not much left -- and punish its members, Republican and Democrat alike, in next year's election.

Impeachment will expose the fraudulence of the "War on Terror" and liberate us from the pall of fear the Bush administration has deliberately cast upon the country. Both political parties will be free to speak the truth: Terrorism is real and a cause for concern, but it is not a reason for abject fear.

We need only compare the hazard of al Qaeda to the threat posed by the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. On the one hand is a wretched group of sad fanatics -- perhaps 50,000 in all -- clever enough to commandeer airliners with box cutters. On the other was a nation of 140 million people, a powerful economy, a standing army of hundreds of divisions, a formidable navy and air force and thousands of nuclear tipped intercontinental missiles pre-aimed at American targets.

We were a vigilant but poised and confident people then, not a nation commanded to cower in fear. We can and must regain that strength and self-assurance.

Ending the nightmare will take far less courage than the Bush people exhibited in beginning it. Taking a nation to war on distortion, deception and lies is enormously risky in many respects: in lives and in treasure, certainly, but also in a nation's prestige abroad and in the trust and support of its people. The Bush administration risked all this and more, and it has lost.

We risk far less by embracing the truth and acting on it. Our nation cherishes honesty: the fraudulence must end. But Bush and Cheney have shown themselves incapable of honesty, and we also cherish justice. They must be impeached.

Richard W. Behan's last book was Plundered Promise: Capitalism, Politics, and the Fate of the Federal Lands (Island Press, 2001). He is currently working on a more broadly rendered critique, To Provide Against Invasions: Corporate Dominion and America's Derelict Democracy. He can be reached by email at rwbehan@rockisland.com.

by Charley Reese

Source: http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=11686

Ernest Hemingway explained the problem many years ago. The first thing politicians do to hide their mismanagement, he said, is inflate the currency; the second thing they do is go to war.

Our currency has been inflated and we are at war. The demonization of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which you saw take place in New York City and on American television, is just the first step in preparing the country for a third war.

The president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, disgraced himself. Instead of introducing his invited guest speaker, he launched a tirade of abuse and insults. Obviously, he was in hot water with some of Columbia's big donors for inviting Ahmadinejad and chose that petty, shabby way of trying to ingratiate himself to the school's angry sugar daddies. All Bollinger succeeded in doing was making Ahmadinejad look good in comparison with him.

Whether you agree with Iran's president or not, he's the wrong guy to try to demonize. First of all, he is not a dictator. He is an elected president with very little power. He has to get past the legislature, and the real power rests with the senior cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei controls foreign policy and is commander in chief of all of Iran's armed forces. The legislature rejected nearly all of Ahmadinejad's recommendations for ministers. When he tried to allow women to attend soccer games, the clerics overruled him.

The claims that Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust and has called for the destruction of Israel are false. He has called for regime change, which is something American politicians do every time they find a country whose policies they disagree with. Regime change is a change of government, not genocide. As for the Holocaust, he said it raised two questions: Why put people in prison who question details of the official version, which is what several European countries do. Why should the Palestinians be made to pay for it? Both are good questions.

How American politicians can call Iran a dangerous country and claim that it poses a threat to the U.S. is a mystery. On second thought, it is not a mystery. It just tells you that the politicians think you and I are so stupid that we will fall for the exact same parade of lies and exaggerations that was used to justify the war against Iraq.

Think for yourself. Iran has no nuclear weapons, and its military is designed for defense. It has no offensive capability – no air force, no navy to speak of. Israel, on the other hand, is usually ranked as the fifth most powerful military state on the planet. It has more than 200 nuclear weapons and a superb air force.

Iran has said it has no desire to attack Israel or any other country. It has said its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and that it has no desire for a nuclear weapon. The head cleric has issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons. And there is not one shred of evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon.

Just remember the lies told to you before Iraq: that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a nuclear weapon; that he had enormous stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. The only thing he really had was oil. That's why we went to war, and that's why the administration wants to go to war with Iran.

I've heard some politicians say that Ahmadinejad has "blood on his hands." Well, our $40 billion worth of intelligence cannot even determine if he was involved in the taking of the American embassy back in 1979. As for blood, American politicians have far more Iranian blood on their hands. We overthrew Iran's democratic government and installed the Shah and his secret police. We sided with and assisted Saddam Hussein when he invaded Iran. Tens of thousands of Iranians are dead because of America's foreign policy.

We truly have a corrupt and incompetent government in Washington.

Source: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/092707a.html

By Ray McGovern
September 27, 2007

It is an exceedingly dangerous time. Vice President Dick Cheney and his hard-core “neo-conservative” protégés in the administration and Congress are pushing harder and harder for President George W. Bush, isolated from reality, to honor the promise he made to Israel to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

On Sept. 23, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned pointedly:

“If we escalate tensions, if we succumb to hysteria, if we start making threats, we are likely to stampede ourselves into a war [with Iran], which most reasonable people agree would be a disaster for us...I think the administration, the president and the vice president particularly, are trying to hype the atmosphere, and that is reminiscent of what preceded the war in Iraq.”

So why the pressure for a wider war in which any victory will be Pyrrhic—for Israel and for the U.S.? The short answer is arrogant stupidity; the longer answer—what the Chinese used to call “great power chauvinism”—and oil.

The truth can slip out when erstwhile functionaries write their memoirs (the dense pages of George Tenet’s tome being the exception). Kudos to the still functioning reportorial side of the Washington Post, which on Sept. 15, was the first to ferret out the gem in former Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan’s book that the Iraq war was “largely about oil.”

But that’s okay, said the Post’s editorial side (which has done yeoman service as the White House’s Pravda) the very next day. Dominating the op-ed page was a turgid piece by Henry Kissinger, serving chiefly as a reminder that there is an excellent case to be made for retiring when one reaches the age of statutory senility.

Dr. Kissinger described as a “truism” the notion that “the industrial nations cannot accept radical forces dominating a region on which their economies depend.” (Curious. That same truism was considered a bad thing, when an integral part of the “Brezhnev Doctrine” applied to Eastern Europe.)

What is important here is that Kissinger was speaking of Iran, which—in a classic example of pot calling kettle black—he accuses of “seeking regional hegemony.”

What’s going on here seems to be a concerted effort to get us accustomed to the prospect of a long, and possibly expanded war.

Don’t you remember? Those terrorists, or Iraqis, or Iranians, or jihadists...whoever...are trying to destroy our way of life.

The White House spin machine is determined to justify the war in ways they think will draw popular support from folks like the well-heeled man who asked me querulously before a large audience, “Don’t you agree that several GIs killed each week is a small price to pay for the oil we need?”

Consistency in U.S. Policy?

The Bush policy toward the Middle East is at the same time consistent with, and a marked departure from, the U.S. approach since the end of World War II.

Given ever-growing U.S. dependence on imported oil, priority has always been given to ensuring the uninterrupted supply of oil, as well as securing the state of Israel. The U.S. was, by and large, successful in achieving these goals through traditional diplomacy and commerce.

Granted, it would overthrow duly elected governments, when it felt it necessary—as in Iran in 1953, after its president nationalized the oil. But the George W. Bush administration is the first to start a major war to implement U.S. policy in the region.

Just before the March 2003 attack, Chas Freeman, U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia for President George H.W. Bush, explained that the new policy was to maintain a lock on the world’s energy lifeline and be able to deny access to global competitors.

Freeman said the new Bush administration “believes you have to control resources in order to have access to them” and that, with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. is uniquely able to shape global events—and would be remiss if it did not do so.

This could not be attempted in a world of two superpowers, but has been a longstanding goal of the people closest to George W. Bush.

In 1975 in Harpers, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger authored under a pseudonym an article, “Seizing Arab Oil.”

Blissfully unaware that the author was his boss, the highly respected career ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins, committed the mother of all faux pas when he told a TV audience that whoever wrote that article had to be a “madman.”  Akins was right; he was also fired.

In those days, cooler heads prevailed, thanks largely to the deterrent effect of a then-powerful Soviet Union. Nevertheless, in proof of the axiom that bad ideas never die, 26 years later Kissinger rose Phoenix-like to urge a spanking new president to stoke and exploit the fears engendered by 9/11, associate Iraq with that catastrophe, and seize the moment to attack Iraq.

It was well known that Iraq’s armed forces were no match for ours, and the Soviet Union had imploded.

Some, I suppose, would call that Realpolitik. Akins saw it as folly; his handicap was that he was steeped in the history, politics, and culture of the Middle East after serving in Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, as well as Saudi Arabia—and knew better.

The renaissance of Kissinger’s influence in 2001 on an impressionable young president, together with faith-based analysis by untutored ideologues cherry picked by Cheney explain what happened next—an unnecessary, counterproductive war, in which over 3,800 U. S. troops have already been killed—leaving Iraq prostrate and exhausted.

A-plus in Chutzpah, F in Ethics

In an International Herald Tribune op-ed on Feb. 25, 2007, Kissinger focused on threats in the Middle East to “global oil supplies” and the need for a “diplomatic phase,” since the war had long since turned sour. Acknowledging that he had supported the use of force against Iraq, he proceeded to boost chutzpah to unprecedented heights.

Kissinger referred piously to the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), which left the European continent “prostrate and exhausted.” What he failed to point out is that the significance of that prolonged carnage lies precisely in how it finally brought Europeans to their senses; that is, in how it ended.

The Treaty of Westphalia brought the mutual slaughter to an end, and for centuries prevented many a new attack by the strong on the weak—like the U.S. attack on Iraq in 2003.

It was, it is about oil—unabashedly and shamefully. Even to those lacking experience with U.S. policy in the Middle East, it should have been obvious early on, when every one of Bush’s senior national security officials spoke verbatim from the talking-point sheet, “It’s not about oil.”

Thanks to Greenspan and Kissinger, the truth is now “largely” available to those who do not seek refuge in denial.

The implications for the future are clear—for Iraq and Iran. As far as this administration is concerned (and as Kissinger himself has written), “Withdrawal [from Iraq] is not an option.” Westphalia? U.N. Charter? Geneva Conventions? Hey, we’re talking superpower!

Thus, Greenspan last Monday with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now:

“Getting him [Saddam Hussein] out of the control position...was essential. And whether that be done by one means or another was not as important. But it’s clear to me that, were there not the oil resources in Iraq, the whole picture...would have been different.”

Can we handle the truth?

“All truth passes through three stages.
“First, it is ridiculed.
“Second, it is violently opposed.
“Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
--Schopenhauer

When the truth about our country’s policy becomes clear, can we summon the courage to address it from a moral perspective? The Germans left it up to the churches; the churches collaborated.

“There is only us; there never has been any other.”
--Annie Dillard

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC.  He was an analyst with the CIA for 27 years and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). His e-mail is RRMcGovern@aol.com.

By Robert Parry
September 25, 2007 (Originally published April 29, 2005)

Editor’s Note: Two-and-a-half years ago, we published a special report on America’s dangerous media imbalance. At the time, there was the Right’s loud and intimidating media machine, a complicit or intimidated mainstream media, and a skimpy messaging apparatus on the Left.

Since then, there have been a few grains of hope sprinkled on the Left side of the scale – Keith Olbermann’s successful MSNBC “Countdown” show, the combination of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central, the growth of Internet blogs, and a struggling Air America Radio – but overall the imbalance remains substantially the same.

As MoveOn’s “General Betray Us” ad debacle revealed, the Right can still make small mistakes by their opponents big and big mistakes by their allies small.

To defend Gen. David Petraeus’s honor, the Senate rushed through a bipartisan condemnation of MoveOn, while a serious debate over George W. Bush’s Iraq War was derailed. Then, the New York Times public editor chastised both MoveOn and his own newspaper for running the ad and not charging MoveOn a higher ad rate.

To add injury to insult, MoveOn agreed to send the Times an additional $77,000 on top of the $65,000 that the activist group had already paid, meaning that the anti-Iraq War movement spent $142,000 on a largely counterproductive ad.

In view of the MoveOn fiasco, we are republishing our April 29, 2005, report, entitled “The Left’s Media Miscalculation,” which explains how this media asymmetry developed:

To understand how the United States got into today’s political predicament – where even fundamental principles like the separation of church and state are under attack – one has to look back at strategic choices made by the Right and the Left three decades ago.

In the mid-1970s, after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and President Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal, American progressives held the upper-hand on media. Not only had the mainstream press exposed Nixon’s dirty tricks and published the Pentagon Papers secrets of the Vietnam War, but a vibrant leftist “underground” press informed and inspired a new generation of citizens.

Besides well-known anti-war magazines, such as Ramparts, and investigative outlets, like Seymour Hersh’s Dispatch News, hundreds of smaller publications had emerged across the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though some quickly disappeared, their influence shocked conservatives who saw the publications as a grave political threat. [For details, see Angus Mackenzie’s Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home.]

Conservatives felt out-muscled on a wide range of public-policy fronts, blaming the media not only for the twin debacles of Watergate and Vietnam but also for contributing to the Right’s defeat on issues such as civil rights and the environment.

Fateful Choices

At this key juncture, leaders of the Right and the Left made fateful choices that have shaped today’s political world. Though both sides had access to similar amounts of money from wealthy individuals and like-minded foundations, the two sides chose to invest that money in very different ways.

The Right concentrated on gaining control of the information flows in Washington and on building a media infrastructure that would put out a consistent conservative message across the country. As part of this strategy, the Right also funded attack groups to target mainstream journalists who got in the way of the conservative agenda.

The Left largely forsook media in favor of “grassroots organizing.” As many of the Left’s flagship media outlets foundered, the “progressive community” reorganized under the slogan – “think globally, act locally” – and increasingly put its available money into well-intentioned projects, such as buying endangered wetlands or feeding the poor.

So, while the Right waged what it called “the war of ideas” and expanded the reach of conservative media to every corner of the nation, the Left trusted that local political action would reenergize American democracy.

Some wealthy progressives also apparently bought into the conservative notion of a “liberal bias” in the media and thus saw no real need to invest significantly in information or to defend embattled journalists under conservative attack. After all, over the years, many mainstream journalists did appear allied with liberal priorities.

In the 1950s, for instance, northern reporters wrote sympathetically about the plight of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South. The anger of white segregationists toward that press coverage was the grievance that sparked the first complaints about media “liberal bias.”

In one 1955 case, negative national coverage followed the acquittal of two white men for murdering black teenager Emmett Till, who supposedly had whistled at a white woman. Reacting to the critical reporting on the Till case, angry whites plastered their cars with bumper stickers reading, “Mississippi: The Most Lied About State in the Union.”

War Over Journalism

The conservative refrain about “liberal bias” grew in volume as mainstream journalists reported critically about the U.S. military strategy in Vietnam and then exposed President Nixon’s spying on his political enemies. The fact that reporters essentially got those stories right didn’t spare them from conservative ire.

Progressives apparently trusted that professional journalists would continue standing up to conservative pressure, even in the 1980s as well-funded right-wing groups targeted individual reporters and Reagan-Bush “public diplomacy” teams went into news bureaus to lobby against troublesome journalists. [For details on this strategy, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]

As those conservative pressures began to take a toll on reporters at the national level, the progressives still emphasized “grassroots organizing” and focused on more immediate priorities, such as filling gaps in the social safety net opened by Reagan-Bush policies.

With the numbers of homeless swelling and the AIDS epidemic spreading, the idea of diverting money to an information infrastructure seemed coldhearted. After all, the social problems were visible; the significance of the information battle was more theoretical.

In the early 1990s, when I first began approaching major liberal foundations about the need to counter right-wing pressure on journalism (which I had seen first-hand at the Associated Press and Newsweek), I received dismissive or bemused responses. One foundation executive smiled and said, “we don’t do media.” Another foundation simply barred media proposals outright.

On occasion, when a few center-left foundations did approve media-related grants, they generally went for non-controversial projects, such as polling public attitudes or tracking money in politics, which condemned Democrats and Republicans about equally.

Brock/Coulter

Meanwhile, through the 1990s, the conservatives poured billions of dollars into their media apparatus, which rose like a vertically integrated machine incorporating newspapers, magazines, book publishing, radio stations, TV networks and Internet sites.

Young conservative writers – such as David Brock and Ann Coulter – soon found they could make fortunes working within this structure. Magazine articles by star conservatives earned top dollar. Their books – promoted on conservative talk radio and favorably reviewed in right-wing publications – jumped to the top of the best-seller lists.

While progressives starved freelancers who wrote for left-of-center publications like The Nation or In These Times, conservatives made sure that writers for the American Spectator or the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page had plenty of money to dine at Washington’s finest restaurants.

(Brock broke away from this right-wing apparatus in the late 1990s and described its inner workings in his book, Blinded by the Right. By then, however, Brock had gotten rich writing hit pieces against people who interfered with the conservative agenda, from law professor Anita Hill, who accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, to President Bill Clinton, whose impeachment troubles were touched off by one of Brock’s articles in 1993.)

As the 1990s wore on, mainstream journalists adapted to the new media environment by trying not to offend the conservatives. Working journalists knew that the Right could damage or destroy their careers by attaching the “liberal” label. There was no comparable danger from the Left.

So, many Americans journalists – whether consciously or not – protected themselves by being harder on Democrats in the Clinton administration than they were on Republicans during the Reagan-Bush years. Indeed, through much of the 1990s, there was little to distinguish the hostile scandal coverage of Clinton in the Washington Post and the New York Times from what was appearing in the New York Post and the Washington Times.

Slamming Gore

The animus toward Clinton then spilled over into Campaign 2000 when the major media – both mainstream and right-wing – jumped all over Al Gore, freely misquoting him and subjecting him to almost unparalleled political ridicule. By contrast, George W. Bush – while viewed as slightly dimwitted – got the benefit of nearly every doubt. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al Gore v. the Media” or “Protecting Bush-Cheney.”]

During the Florida recount battle, liberals watched as even the Washington Post’s center-left columnist Richard Cohen sided with Bush. There was only muted coverage when conservative activists from Washington staged a riot outside the Miami-Dade canvassing board, and scant mention was made of Bush’s phone call to joke with and congratulate the rioters. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush's Conspiracy to Riot.”]

Then, once five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a state-court-ordered recount and handed Bush the White House, both mainstream and conservative news outlets acted as if it were their patriotic duty to rally around the legitimacy of the new President. [For more on this phenomenon, see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

The protect-Bush consensus deepened after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as the national news media – almost across the board – transformed itself into a conveyor belt for White House propaganda. When the Bush administration put out dubious claims about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, the major newspapers rushed the information into print.

Many of the most egregious WMD stories appeared in the most prestigious establishment newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The New York Times fronted bogus assertions about the nuclear-weapons capabilities of aluminum tubes that were really for conventional weapons. Washington Post editorials reported Bush’s allegations about Iraqi WMD as fact, not a point in dispute.

Anti-war protests involving millions of American citizens received largely dismissive coverage. Critics of the administration’s WMD claims, such as former weapons inspector Scott Ritter and actor/activist Sean Penn, were ignored or derided. When Al Gore offered thoughtful critiques of Bush’s preemptive-war strategy at rallies organized by MoveOn.org, he got savaged in the national media. [See Consortiumnews.com “Politics of Preemption.”]

Smart Investment

Over those three decades, by investing smartly in media infrastructure, the Right had succeeded in reversing the media dynamic of the Watergate-Vietnam era. Instead of a tough skeptical press corps challenging war claims on Iraq and exposing political dirty tricks in Florida, most national journalists knew better than to risk losing their careers.

Many on the Left began acknowledging the danger caused by this media imbalance. But even as the Iraq War disaster worsened, the “progressive establishment” continued spurning proposals for building a media counter-infrastructure that could challenge the “group think” of Washington journalism.

One of the new excuses became that the task was too daunting. When proposals were on the table in 2003 for a progressive AM talk radio network, for example, many wealthy liberals shunned the plan as certain to fail, an attitude that nearly became a self-fulfilling prophecy as an under-funded Air America Radio almost crashed and burned on take-off in March 2004.

Later, the argument was that a media infrastructure would take too long to build and that all available resources should go to oust Bush in Election 2004. To that end, hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into voter registration drives and into campaign commercials. But the consequences of the Left’s longtime media disarmament continued to plague its preferred policies and candidates.

When the pro-Bush Swift Boat Veterans for Truth sandbagged Kerry over his Vietnam War record, the conservative media infrastructure made the anti-Kerry attacks big news, joined by mainstream outlets such as CNN. But liberals lacked the media capacity to counter the charges.

By the time the major newspapers got around to examining the Swift Boat allegations and judged many to be spurious, Kerry’s campaign was in freefall.
Similarly, there was no significant independent media capability to quickly investigate and publicize voting irregularities on Election Day 2004. Ad hoc citizens groups and Internet bloggers tried to fill the void but lacked the necessary resources.

Post-Mortem

Once Election 2004 was over, many progressive funders found a new reason to put off action on a media infrastructure. They said they were financially strapped from the campaign.

Though media issues were part of the post-election post-mortem, actual media plans made little progress. The main activities on the Left centered around arranging more conferences on media and holding more discussions, not implementing concrete proposals to actually do journalism and build new outlets.

There also was a new variation on the Left’s three-decade-old emphasis on “grassroots organizing.” MoveOn.org postponed action on media infrastructure in favor of rallying political activists in support of Democratic legislative goals.
When media activist Carolyn Kay presented a comprehensive media reform strategy, MoveOn.org’s founder Wes Boyd responded with an e-mail on April 24, 2005, saying, “Just to be direct and frank, we have no immediate plans to pursue funding for media …

“Our efforts are focused on a few big fights right now, because this is the key legislative season. Later in the year and next year I expect there will [be] more time to look further afield.”

Kay e-mailed Boyd back, saying, “For five years people have been telling me that in just a couple of months, we’ll start addressing the long-term problems. But the day never comes. … Today it’s Social Security and the filibuster. Tomorrow it will be something else. And in a couple of months it will be something else again. There’s never a right time to address the media issue. That’s why the right time is now.”

Boyd’s April 24 e-mail – calling the idea of addressing the nation’s media crisis as wandering “afield” – is typical of the views held by many leaders in the “progressive establishment.” There is no sense of urgency about media.

Still, MoveOn’s blasé attitude may be even more surprising since the organization emerged as a political force during the media-driven impeachment of President Clinton. It also watched as Gore’s MoveOn-sponsored, pre-Iraq-War speeches were trashed by the national news media, reinforcing his decision to forego a second race against Bush.

Indeed, one point many on the Left still fail to appreciate is how much easier it would be to convince a politician to take a courageous stand – as Gore did in those speeches – if the politician didn’t have to face such a hostile media reaction. Already the growth of “progressive talk radio” – on the AM dial in more than 50 cities – appears to have boosted the fighting spirit of some congressional Democrats. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Mystery of the Democrats’ New Spine.”]

Investigative Journalism

At Consortiumnews.com over the past year [2004-05], we have approached more than 100 potential funders about supporting an investigative journalism project modeled after the Vietnam-era Dispatch News, where Sy Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre story. Our idea was to hire a team of experienced investigative journalists who would dig into important stories that are receiving little or no attention from the mainstream news media.

While nearly everyone we have approached agrees on the need for this kind of journalism and most praised the plan, no one has yet stepped forward with financial support. Indeed, the expenses of contacting these potential funders – though relatively modest – have put the survival of our decade-old Web site at risk.

Which leads to another myth among some on the Left: that the media problem will somehow solve itself, that the pendulum will swing back when the national crisis gets worse and the conservatives finally go too far.

But there is really no reason to think that some imaginary mechanism will reverse the trends. Indeed, the opposite seems more likely. The gravitational pull of the Right’s expanding media galaxy keeps dragging the mainstream press in that direction. Look what’s happening at major news outlets from CBS to PBS, all are drifting to the right.

As the Right keeps plugging away at its media infrastructure, the pervasiveness of the conservative message also continues to recruit more Americans to the fold.

Ironically, the conservative media clout has had the secondary effect of helping the Right’s grassroots organizing, especially among Christian fundamentalists. Simultaneously, the progressives’ weakness in media has undercut the Left’s grassroots organizing because few Americans regularly hear explanations of liberal goals. But they do hear – endlessly – the Right’s political storyline.

Many progressives miss this media point when they cite the rise of Christian Right churches as validation of a grassroots organizing strategy. What that analysis leaves out is the fact that the Christian Right originally built its strength through media, particularly the work of televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. What the Right has demonstrated is that media is not the enemy of grassroots organizing but its ally.

Bright Spots & Dangers

Though there have been some recent bright spots for the Left's media – the fledgling progressive talk radio, new techniques for distributing documentaries on DVD, and hard-hitting Internet blogs –  there are also more danger signs. As the Left postpones media investments, some struggling progressive news outlets – which could provide the framework for a counter-infrastructure – may be headed toward extinction.

Just as the echo chamber of the Right’s infrastructure makes conservative media increasingly profitable, the lack of a Left infrastructure dooms many promising media endeavors to failure.

The hard truth for the Left is that the media imbalance in the United States could very easily get much worse. The difficult answer for the progressive community is to come to grips with this major strategic weakness, apply the Left’s organizing talents, and finally make a balanced national media a top priority.

by Paul Craig Roberts

Source: http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=11637

Naïve Americans who think they live in a free society should watch the videos filmed by students at a John Kerry speech Sept. 17, Constitution Day, at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

At the conclusion of Kerry's speech, Andrew Meyer, a 21-year-old journalism student, was selected by Sen. Kerry to ask a question. Meyer held up a copy of BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast's book Armed Madhouse and asked if Kerry was aware that Palast's investigations determined that Kerry had actually won the election. Why, Meyer asked, had Kerry conceded the election so quickly when there were so many obvious examples of vote fraud? Why, Meyer went on to ask, was Kerry refusing to consider Bush's impeachment when Bush was about to initiate another act of military aggression, this time against Iran?

At this point the public's protectors – the police – decided that Meyer had said too much. They grabbed Meyer and began dragging him off. Meyer said repeatedly "I have done nothing wrong," which under our laws he had not. He threatened no one and assaulted no one.

But the police decided that Meyer, an American citizen, had no right to free speech and no constitutional protection. They threw him to the floor and Tasered him right in front of Kerry and the large student audience, who captured on video the unquestionable act of police brutality. Meyer was carted off and jailed on a phony charge of "disrupting a public event."

The question we should all ask is why did a United States senator just stand there while Gestapo goons violated the constitutional rights of a student participating in a public event, brutalized him in full view of everyone, and then took him off to jail on phony charges?

Kerry's meekness not only in the face of electoral fraud, not only in the face of Bush's wars that are crimes under the Nuremberg standard, but also in the face of police goons trampling the constitutional rights of American citizens makes it completely clear that he was not fit to be president, and he is not fit to be a U.S. senator.

Usually when police violate constitutional rights and commit acts of police brutality they do it when they believe no one is watching, not in front of a large audience. Clearly, the police have become more audacious in their abuse of rights and citizens. What explains the new fearlessness of police to violate rights and brutalize citizens without cause?

The answer is that police, most of whom have authoritarian personalities, have seen that constitutional rights are no longer protected. President Bush does not protect our constitutional rights. Neither does Vice President Cheney, nor the attorney general, nor the U.S. Congress. Just as Kerry allowed Meyer's rights to be Tasered out of him, Congress has enabled Bush to strip people, including American citizens, of constitutional protection and incarcerate them without presenting evidence.

How long before Kerry himself or some other senator will be dragged from his podium and Tasered?

The Bush Republicans with complicit Democrats have essentially brought government accountability to an end in the U.S. The U.S. government has 80,000 people, including ordinary American citizens, on its "no-fly list." No one knows why they are on the list, and no one on the list can find out how to get off it. An unaccountable act by the Bush administration put them there.

Airport security harasses and abuses people who do not fit any known definition of terrorist. Nalini Ghuman, a British-born citizen and music professor at Mills College in California, was met on her return from a trip to England by armed guards at the airplane door and escorted away. A Gestapo goon squad tore up her U.S. visa, defaced her British passport, body-searched her, and told her she could leave immediately for England or be sent to a detention center.

Professor Ghuman, an Oxford University graduate with a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, says she feels like the character in Kafka's book The Trial. "I don't know why it's happened, what I'm accused of. There's no opportunity to defend myself. One is just completely powerless." Over one year later there is still no answer.

The Bush Republicans and their Democratic toadies have, in the name of "security," made all of us powerless. While Sen. John Kerry and his Democratic colleagues stand silently, the Bush administration has stolen our country from us and turned us into subjects.

By Paul Craig Roberts

Sep 11, 2007, 00:36

Source: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2401.shtml

The US economy continues its slow death before our eyes, but economists, policymakers, and most of the public are blind to the tottering fabled land of opportunity.

In August, jobs in goods-producing industries declined by 64,000. The US economy lost 4,000 jobs overall. The private sector created a mere 24,000 jobs, all of which could be attributed to the 24,100 new jobs for waitresses and bartenders, and the government sector lost 28,000 jobs.

In the 21st century, the US economy has ceased to create jobs in export industries and in industries that compete with imports. US job growth has been confined to domestic services, principally to food services and drinking places (waitresses and bartenders), private education and health services (ambulatory health care and hospital orderlies), and construction (which now has tanked). The lack of job growth in higher-productivity, higher-paid occupations associated with the American middle and upper middle classes will eventually kill the US consumer market.

The unemployment rate held steady, but that is because 340,000 Americans unable to find jobs dropped out of the labor force in August. The US measures unemployment only among the active work force, which includes those seeking jobs. Those who are discouraged and have given up are not counted as unemployed.

With goods producing industries in long-term decline as more and more production of US firms is moved offshore, the engineering professions are in decline. Managerial jobs are primarily confined to retail trade and financial services.

Franchises and chains have curtailed opportunities for independent family businesses, and the US government’s open borders policy denies unskilled jobs to the displaced members of the middle class.

When US companies offshore their production for US markets, the consequences for the US economy are highly detrimental. One consequence is that foreign labor is substituted for US labor, resulting in a shriveling of career opportunities and income growth in the US. Another is that US Gross Domestic Product is turned into imports. By turning US brand names into imports, offshoring has a double whammy on the US trade deficit. Simultaneously, imports rise by the amount of offshored production, and the supply of exportable manufactured goods declines by the same amount.

The US now has a trade deficit with every part of the world. In 2006 (the latest annual data), the US had a trade deficit totaling $838,271,000,000.

The US trade deficit with Europe was $142,538,000,000. With Canada the deficit was $75,085,000,000. With Latin America it was $112,579,000,000 (of which $67,303,000,000 was with Mexico). The deficit with Asia and Pacific was $409,765,000,000 (of which $233,087,000,000 was with China and $90,966,000,000 was with Japan). With the Middle East the deficit was $36,112,000,000, and with Africa the US trade deficit was $62,192,000,000.

Public worry for three decades about the US oil deficit has created a false impression among Americans that a self-sufficient America is impaired only by dependence on Middle East oil. The fact of the matter is that the total US deficit with OPEC, an organization that includes as many countries outside the Middle East as within it, is $106,260,000,000, or about one-eighth of the annual US trade deficit.

Moreover, the US gets most of its oil from outside the Middle East, and the US trade deficit reflects this fact. The US deficit with Nigeria, Mexico, and Venezuela is 3.3 times larger than the US trade deficit with the Middle East despite the fact that the US sells more to Venezuela and 18 times more to Mexico than it does to Saudi Arabia.

What is striking about US dependency on imports is that it is practically across the board. Americans are dependent on imports of foreign foods, feeds, and beverages in the amount of $8,975,000,000.

Americans are dependent on imports of foreign Industrial supplies and materials in the amount of $326,459,000,000 -- more than three times US dependency on OPEC.

Americans can no longer provide their own transportation. They are dependent on imports of automotive vehicles, parts, and engines in the amount of $149,499,000,000, or 1.5 times greater than the US dependency on OPEC.

In addition to the automobile dependency, Americans are 3.4 times more dependent on imports of manufactured consumer durable and nondurable goods than they are on OPEC. Americans no longer can produce their own clothes, shoes, or household appliances and have a trade deficit in consumer manufactured goods in the amount of $336,118,000,000.

The US “superpower” even has a deficit in capital goods, including machinery, electric generating machinery, machine tools, computers, and telecommunications equipment.

What does it mean that the US has a $800 billion trade deficit?

It means that Americans are consuming $800 billion more than they are producing.

How do Americans pay for it?

They pay for it by giving up ownership of existing assets -- stocks, bonds, companies, real estate, commodities. America used to be a creditor nation. Now America is a debtor nation. Foreigners own $2.5 trillion more of American assets than Americans own of foreign assets. When foreigners acquire ownership of US assets, they also acquire ownership of the future income streams that the assets produce. More income shifts away from Americans.

How long can Americans consume more than they can produce?

American over-consumption can continue for as long as Americans can find ways to go deeper in personal debt in order to finance their consumption and for as long as the US dollar can remain the world reserve currency.

The 21st century has brought Americans (with the exception of CEOs, hedge fund managers and investment bankers) no growth in real median household income. Americans have increased their consumption by dropping their saving rate to the depression level of 1933 when there was massive unemployment and by spending their home equity and running up credit card bills. The ability of a population, severely impacted by the loss of good jobs to foreigners as a result of offshoring and H-1B work visas and by the bursting of the housing bubble, to continue to accumulate more personal debt is limited to say the least.

Foreigners accept US dollars in exchange for their real goods and services, because dollars can be used to settle every country’s international accounts. By running a trade deficit, the US insures the financing of its government budget deficit as the surplus dollars in foreign hands are invested in US Treasuries and other dollar-denominated assets.

The ability of the US dollar to retain its reserve currency status is eroding due to the continuous increases in US budget and trade deficits. Today the world is literally flooded with dollars. In attempts to reduce the rate at which they are accumulating dollars, foreign governments and investors are diversifying into other traded currencies. As a result, the dollar prices of the Euro, UK pound, Canadian dollar, Thai baht, and other currencies have been bid up. In the 21st century, the US dollar has declined about 33 percent against other currencies. The US dollar remains the reserve currency primarily due to habit and the lack of a clear alternative.

The data used in this article is freely available. It can be found at two official US government sites: Bureau of Economic Analysis: U.S. International Transactions Accounts Data and Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employees on nonfarm payrolls by industry sector and selected industry detail.

The jobs data and the absence of growth in real income for most of the population are inconsistent with reports of US GDP and productivity growth. Economists take for granted that the work force is paid in keeping with its productivity. A rise in productivity thus translates into a rise in real incomes of workers. Yet, we have had years of reported strong productivity growth but stagnant or declining household incomes. And somehow the GDP is rising, but not the incomes of the work force.

Something is wrong here. Either the data indicating productivity and GDP growth are wrong or Karl Marx was right that capitalism works to concentrate income in the hands of the few capitalists. A case can be made for both explanations.

Recently an economist, Susan Houseman, discovered that the reliability of some US economics statistics has been impaired by offshoring. Houseman found that cost reductions achieved by US firms shifting production offshore are being miscounted as GDP growth in the US and that productivity gains achieved by US firms when they move design, research, and development offshore are showing up as increases in US productivity. Obviously, production and productivity that occur abroad are not part of the US domestic economy.

Houseman’s discovery rated a Business Week cover story last June 18, [The Real Cost Of Offshoring, by Michael Mandel] but her important discovery seems already to have gone down the memory hole. The economics profession has over-committed itself to the “benefits” of offshoring, globalism, and the non-existent “New Economy.” Houseman’s discovery is too much of a threat to economists’ human capital, corporate research grants, and free market ideology.

The media has likewise let the story go, because in the 1990s the Clinton administration and Congress overturned US policy in favor of a diverse and independent media and permitted a few mega-corporations to concentrate in their hands the ownership of the US media, which reports in keeping with corporate and government interests.

The case for Marx is that offshoring has boosted corporate earnings by lowering labor costs, thereby concentrating income growth in the hands of the owners and managers of capital.

According to Forbes magazine, the top 20 earners among private equity and hedge fund managers are earning average yearly compensation of $657,500,000, with four actually earning more than $1 billion annually. The otherwise excessive $36,400,000 average annual pay of the 20 top earners among CEOs of publicly-held companies looks paltry by comparison.

The careers and financial prospects of many Americans were destroyed to achieve these lofty earnings for the few.

Hubris prevents realization that Americans are losing their economic future along with their civil liberties and are on the verge of enserfment.

[See also: National Data, Immigrant Displacement Of American Workers Booms Amid The Job Bust, By Edwin S. Rubenstein]

By Robert Parry - September 6, 2007

Source: www.consortiumnews.com/2007/090507.html 

The 9/11 tragedy did become a demarcation point for the United States, although not in the way many Americans understand. Before that date six years ago, there existed an American Republic – albeit one in decline – but afterwards a New Age authoritarian state quickly took shape.

Though some defenders of the old Republic rose up, nobody was strong enough to protect it.

How this historic calamity happened – one of the most under-reported events of modern times – is the centerpiece of our new book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, which looks at the roles of aggressive Republicans, accommodating Democrats, bullying pundits and careerist journalists.

But the fact that the eclipse of the Republic did happen has gained more corroboration from a new book by Jack Goldsmith, the former chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) who clashed with senior White House lawyers over their expansive interpretation of presidential power.

“We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop,” explained Vice President’s Dick Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington, according to Goldsmith’s new book, The Terror Presidency.

Goldsmith wrote that Addington “and, I presumed, his boss viewed power as the absence of constraint.”

However, “the absence of constraint” in the context of political leaders wielding the extraordinary authority of a powerful state is synonymous with tyranny, the antithesis of a democratic Republic with checks and balances, rule of law and respect for the will of an informed electorate.

This Bush tyranny combined its lust for unrestrained power with a parallel contempt for logic and objective information, becoming what might be called an imperial presidency in an anti-empirical world. Rationality and legality were brushed aside; action and toughness were all that mattered.

Even as President Bush stripped away the inalienable rights guaranteed by the Founders in the Constitution, he kept much of the population confused with misdirection, by asserting that he was taking these actions to defend "liberty" and "freedom."

In spring 2003, after becoming assistant attorney general at the influential Office of Legal Counsel, Goldsmith encountered the administration’s sophistry in the legal opinions that were the cornerstones of Bush’s claims of virtually unlimited presidential power in “wartime.”

“As I absorbed the opinions, I concluded that some were deeply flawed, sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the President,” wrote Goldsmith, who regards himself as a conservative Republican though with a rational bent.

Goldsmith also was stunned to encounter the ideological extremism of Bush’s White House, which chafed at even the modest limits put on Bush’s spying power by the secret court created in 1978 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

In