NEWSBLAST
December 23, 2003
Terror alerts manufactured? Don't put it past them. According to Jon Dougherty at WorldNetDaily.com , FBI agents say the White House is scripting 'hysterics' for political effect. Tom Delay takes lying into the all-out fantasy zone: He told Tim Russert: "Tax cuts will lower the deficit and bring us back to balance." He calls Democrats "Communists" for trying to balance the budget. See American Family Voices. For help in how to urge your representatives to vote for the Voter Verification Act, click on verifiedvoting.com.
Christmas Eve
December 24, 2003Support our troops. Lance Corporal George Batton of the United States Marine Corps, who returned from Iraq in September (after serving in MP company Alpha), wrote to Michael Moore: "You'd be surprised at how many of the guys I talked to in my company and others believed that the president's scare about Saddam's WMD was a bunch of bullshit and that the real motivation for this war was only about money." U.S. Army Specialist Mike Prysner wrote "I joined the army as soon as I was eligible -- turned down a writing scholarship to a state university, eager to serve my country, ready to die for the ideals I fell in love with. Two years later I found myself moments away from a landing onto a pitch black airstrip, ready to charge into a country I didn't believe I belonged in, with your words (from the Oscars) repeating in my head. My time in Iraq has always involved finding things to convince myself that I can be proud of my actions; that I was a part of something just. But no matter what pro-war argument I came up with, I pictured my smirking commander-in-chief, thinking he was fooling a nation." A private, writing anonymously, wrote, ìI would like to tell you how difficult it is to serve under a man who was never elected. Because he is the president and my boss, I have to be very careful as to who and what i say about him." For more military letters, see MichaelMoore.com. The cover-up of Gore's victory and its discovery by the media consortium that counted the vote: "The Consortium was stunned to discover that the recount revealed Gore won a clear victory. Even after casting aside the controversial butterfly ballots and discarding ballots that were 'iffy', Gore decisively won the recount. While the precise numbers are still unavailable, a New York Times journalist who was involved in the project told one of his former companions that Gore won by a sufficient margin to create 'major trouble for the Bush presidency if this ever gets out'... Gore's victory was large enough that it became apparent he would win prior to the Consortium recount being fully completed. And contrary to a recent claim by the New York Times, the terrorism of September 11 was not the crucial factor that determined whether to release the results to the American people. Prior to that time, the de facto majority shareholders in the publicly traded New York Times Company reportedly intervened on the side of quashing the recount results and convinced the other participants to shelve the story. The executive claims that the most important decisions at the Times are made by the influential money center banks that exercise actual voting control of a majority of stock. These banks are extremely pro-Bush. In addition to their control of the Times, they have substantial financial clout with the Washington Post Company, Dow Jones and Company, and the Tribune Company. As a result, the banks exert tremendous influence on a majority of the Consortium." SeeMake Them Accountable. John Hinckley Sr., father of the attempted assassin of Reagan, was "a Texas oilman who, the records show, strove mightily to get fellow Texas oilman George H.W. Bush the Republican nomination for president. The Bushes and the Hinckleys were frequent dinner companions." Read more at TomFlocco.com
Christmas Day
December 25, 2003Home of the Brave (not)
Now the scare is Mad Cow Disease. Frightened Americans have one more thing to panic about. Since George W. and his band of merry thugs took over the White House it's one scare after the other. And while everyone is distracted, they are walking off with the store.I do believe that my countrymen will yet wake up, and stand up to this menace, the cabal of low-rent low-brow thieves who have hijacked the government. In fact, I believe many Americans have seen through it from its skeevy beginnings, and more and more are catching on every day. The corporate media, which is almost more of the problem than the problem itself, does its best to suppress anything that tends to reveal the sham that holds up the Corporatocracy, but the more they tear the country to pieces and leave it laid waste, the more their mask falls away, revealing the true character of the regime.
Christmas Day is not really the date of the birth of Jesus. ("The Church, however, does not insist upon December 25 as the actual date of the birth of Christ," says The Daily Catholic. See also Worldwide Church of God; BibleWeb.org, "A Skeptic's Guide to Christianity".) But Christmas Eve is the date when George H.W. Bush, father of our present catastrophe, pardoned several of his buddies who were convicted of crimes related to that series of crimes euphemistically known as "The Iran Contra Scandal." Old Bush, who ran most of the war on Nicaragua that the crimes were a part of, pardoned five of the perpetrators, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger; Elliott Abrams, a former assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs; former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane; Duane Clarridge; Alan Fiers; and Clair George. Except for Weinberger, they were all former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. (For the report, see US News and World Report, 12/24/92.) To learn more about how Reagan and Bush and the gang funded the Contras, who were terrorists who operated death squads that killed women and children and their fathers brutally in order to terrorizing the population and suppressing any resistance to the wanton plundering of their country's resources by the corporate cabal represented by Reagan and Bush, here are some choice links. "Lost History: Dole Nearly Cited in Iran-Contra Report" By Robert Parry on The Consortium. "Pardon Me"on Fortune City "Bush Family and Republican Corruption" "On This Day", The New York Times.
And in other news...
The "Bush Boom", or "the recovery", is a boom for corporate America, not for working people. Harold Meyerson in The Washington Post, says, "As Stephen S. Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, has noted, private-sector hiring in the current recovery is roughly 7 million jobs shy of what would have been the norm in previous recoveries, and U.S. corporations, high-tech as well as low-tech, are busily hiring employees from lower-wage nations instead of from our own." The National 9-11 Visibility Project formed in the Fall of 2003 by a group of concerned citizens in Seattle and Kansas City working to support the efforts of the 9-11 victims' families to obtain a complete and unobstructed investigation into the 2001 terrorist attacks. After learning about each other's activities, the Seattle and Kansas City groups joined together in organizing simultaneous street visibility actions the weekend after Thanksgiving. These public actions were so mutually inspiring and successful that a small group of us decided to launch a national organization/website to expand our efforts and promote the formation of similar 9-11 action groups in other cities. Our mission is to: 1. Raise public awareness of the disturbing, unanswered questions surrounding 9-11; 2. Draw attention to the Bush Admin's ongoing efforts to obstruct the current investigation and stonewall the 9-11 National Commission; 3. Support the victims' families in their efforts to obtain the truth." Septembereleventh.org. "The capture of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had a minimal effect on President George W. Bush's approval ratings, which are hovering at their lowest levels since he took office in January, 2001, according to a poll". See AFB. Over Oath. Bush's Babe, the sveldt Ms Condoleeza Rice, National Security Advisor, refuses to testify for the 9/11 Commission under oath. She will site "national security" concerns, of course. She is National Security personnified, is she not? She also said no one in the government had ever dreamed of airplanes colliding into buildings before as a weapon. But that was clearly not true. See Time for the report. Political Euphemism and Artful Lying -- A board chaired by Bush I's national security adviser Brent Scowcroft concluded that there was "no deliberate effort to fabricate' a story". Instead the board daid the White House was so anxious "to grab onto something affirmative asout Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions that it disregarded warnings from the intelligence community that the claim was questionable." What a foul twisting of language to make a rotten lie sound justifiable! (See the Washington Post). This brings to mind George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" in which he said, "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name something without calling up mental pictures of it. consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I believe in killing of your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.' Probably, therefore, he will say something like this: 'While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.'" LIFE DURING WARTIME
December 26, 2003
Christmas Past
America is Nuts by Michael Aaron Gordon, Freezerbox. "Speaking of lies, when did misleading and misdirecting the American public regarding a potential war become an issue NOT to investigate? We impeached Clinton for getting fellatio and lying about it...should the same thing not happen to Bush? Of course not! Everyone knows that blow-jobs are a massive threat to the nation's security and economy...much more so than an unprecedented, pre-emptive war that's costing billions a month!" Four more Americans, six more Iraqis dead in Iraq on Christmas day. New York Times, Washington Post. Chomsky on the Capture of Saddam: "Selective Memory and False Doctrine" "An indictment of Saddam's atrocities would include not only his slaughter and gassing of Kurds in 1988 but also, rather crucially, his massacre of the Shiite rebels who might have overthrown him in 1991. At the time, Washington and its allies held the 'strikingly unanimous view (that) whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country's stability than did those who have suffered his repression,' reported Alan Cowell in the New York Times... Who would expect that the United States would ever permit an independent Iraqi government to exist? Especially now that Washington has reserved the right to set up permanent military bases there, in the heart of the world's greatest oil-producing region, and has imposed an economic regime that no sovereign country would accept, putting the country's fate in the hands of Western corporations... An honest look would only generalize Thomas Jefferson's observation on the world situation of his day: 'We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations.'" See Z Magazine The Servile Corporate Media Stooges -- David Podvin writes on Make Them Accountable: "When Ted Koppel moderated the recent Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire, he imposed his own special format. Rather than emphasizing questions about public policy, the host of Nightline repeatedly insisted that the candidates who seek to replace George W. Bush attack the frontrunner of their own party. In abandoning any pretense of nonpartisanship and aggressively seeking to divide the Democrats, Koppel once again flaunted the ethical squalor that permeates mainstream journalism in this nation. The response of the Fourth Estate during the early stages of the campaign has mirrored the reaction of Louis XVI’s courtiers to the French Revolution. America’s extremely well fed and zealous defenders of the crown have expressed horror at the emergence of Howard Dean as the leading Democratic candidate. They are offended by his lack of deference to the illicit leader they so admire and unsettled by his opposition to the status quo that serves them so well and appalled that his passion resonates with the peasants they so despise."
December 27, 2003
U.S. death toll in Iraq climbs to 475. Though the New York Post lied and said on its front page that Saddam Hussein "paid for every U.S. death," it obviously didn't make any difference when he was captured. See Truthout On December 13, the day the news media were all bubbly about the capture of Saddam Hussein, key portions of the Patriot II act were signed into law by Bush, giving the FBI even more broad, unconstitutional powers than Patriot I. Beware. See San Antonio Current. The Bush Family's War Business -- See tomflocco.com for a re-posting of an October 2002 article pointing out that Bush Senior, James Baker and other Bush I administration cronies profited from selling chemical weapons to Iraq just months before the outbreak of the Gulf War. Creative Population Control through Terror -- Michel Chossudovsky, on Canada's Global Research, analyzes the use of terror alerts to mold and channel public opinion and how the timing of the alerts coincides with incidents the Bushocracy wants to distract the public from. Four more Americans dead in Iraq on Friday brings the U.S. death toll for the week to 10. Saddam's capture makes virtually no difference. See Associated Press The Bush mob turns its dirty tricks machines loose on Dean. See New York Times. Troop Suicides Raise Red Flag Add 20 to the death toll for soldiers who have taken their own lives. "Suicide experts with military backgrounds say the 20 suicides so far in the Iraq conflict is a very high number. Using the military's 12-month rate of a dozen suicides per 100,000 troops, self-inflicted deaths this year in the Iraq theater should amount to no more than 13 at this point, according to Dr. Paul Ragan, a Vanderbilt University professor who was a Navy psychiatrist for 11 years," says the Chicago Tribune Newspeak Department: Body bags have become "transfer tubes."
December 28, 2003
Two more American soldiers killed. The toll keeps rising. See Associated Press. Despair is not an option. Common Dreams. Noam Chomsky on Iraq, War Profiteers & The Media -- See Democracy Now.
December 30, 2003
Bring on 2004!
All Right New Jersey! While the New York Times still cowers in safe conservative opinions, the New Jersey Star Ledger is getting down to it. See "Conspiracy theories abound in 9/11 probe -- Panel weighs all evidence in sifting for truth," By Robert Cohen.
In today's New York Times print edition there's a photo section called "2003 -- The Year in Pictures" with a full-page reproduction of a photograph on the cover that speaks with magnificent eloquence about the situation we now find ourselves in. It betrays poignantly a reality that the paper's editorial rulemakers rarely let past them in the text. The picture portrays a grand piano in the foreground, battered to a wreck, in a room that is a ruin but was once obviously a place of great beauty and refinement. And up a gloriously crafted wooden spiral staircase run two American soldiers. Congratulations to this photographer and this photo editor for managing to get a message of such power through the filters of the American media. And there you see the real Iraq, not the stone-age squalid zoo portrayed to us on American media, but a very sophisticated society with a deep, dignified history. And we, the American barbarians are trashing it.