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Ref. : Local Newsbriefs
Ref. : Letters to the editor
06.24 Mr. Holder, You Must Hold Torturers Accountable
06.29 Thinking about Climate
06.26 False Health-Scare Ad on CNN
06.25 Louella Learns the Limits of Medicare
06.23 The Simple Answer to America’s Health Care Crisis: Medicare for All
06.23 Tell ABC: Include Single-Payer in Healthcare Debate
06.23 Serving the Medical-Industrial Complex
06.22 Thinking about Recoveries
06.20 Obama's Health Care Waterloo
06.15 Obama, Like Clinton Before Him, is Blowing the Chance for Real Health Care Reform
06.11 Two Key Health-Care Numbers
06.10 Big Breakthroughs for Single Payer Health Care
06.10 Readying Americans for Dangerous, Mandatory Vaccinations
06.29 WP's Connolly Back, on Health Reform
06.17 Hypocrisy and Hope: Western Coverage, Iranian Courage
06.15 Excusing Outrages of the Right
06.11 Tying Obama to Bush's Budget Mess
06.30 Obama's Torture Hypocrisy
06.30 Court Circular: Annals of Imperial Continuity
06.29 Obama, They Want You to Fail
06.26 Who to Trust on a Truth Commission?
06.26 Tarnished Shields: The Morally Bankrupt 'Family Values' Republican Leadership
06.25 America's "Bases of Empire"
06.24 Twelve Angry White People: Jury Nullification in a Pennsylvania Coal Town
06.24 Touring Empire's Ruins
06.23 Employers are Undermining the Economic Stimulus Program
06.19 Criminalizing Dissent: Obama Pot Calls Iranian Kettle Black
06.17 Afghanistan's Operation Phoenix
06.16 Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran?
06.13 Where's the Anger as the Wheels Come Off Obama's and the Democrats' Recovery Program?
06.10 Waiving the Rules for Old Glory
06.10 Obama's Era of Openness Is Closed
07.03 Reviewing Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd's "Rules of Disengagement"
07.01 Iraq: A Bitter Strategic Failure
06.25 It's All Good, Again: 'Uptick' in the American-Made Tides of Violence in Iraq
06.22 Obama Opposes Plame-gate Release
06.21 Dexter's Legions: The "Good" Killers of the "Good" War
06.18 Extending the Tradition: Proudly Taking American Torture Into the Future
06.15 New UN Report Denounces America's Human Rights Record
06.14 Fear Rules
07.01 Michael Hudson's "Super Imperialism:" The Economic Strategy of Imperial America
06.23 Obama's Financial Reform Proposal - A Stealth Scheme for Global Monetary Control
06.10 Cyberscares About Cyberwars Equal Cybermoney
07.01 Pirates of the Mediterranean
06.29 Color Revolutions, Old and New
06.25 Iran Divided & the 'October Suprise'
06.23 Astringent Corrective: AbuKhalil on Iran's Turmoil
06.20 Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated “Color Revolution?”
06.20 Through a Glass Darkly: Sifting Myth and Fact on Iran
06.19 Iran's Election and US - Iranian Elections
06.16 The Ir-Af-Pak War: Obama Looses the Manhunters
06.12 Israeli War Crimes Against Children During Operation Cast Lead
COMMENTARY FROM ABROAD:
Ignorance is Strength
Before the invasion of Iraq, the US had Al-Qaida cornered in Afghanistan and Pakistan, marginalized, ostracized and corralled into a finite ghetto for mad Mullahs only. Today, after three and a half years of war, five hundred billion dollars of squandered treasure, nearly three thousand dead American soldiers and at least one hundred thousand dead Iraqi civilians we have done nothing more than make matters worse--infinitely worse. Bush’s Iraq adventure has been the most counterproductive policy in American history.
This pathetic regime has been unmasked as the spitting image of the dystopian tyranny in George Orwell’s prophetic novel, 1984, a fascist dictatorship organized under three sacred dictums:
Ignorance is strength.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Who leaked the NIE report? A true-blue patriotic American if the truth be known. Senator Ted Kennedy was the first off the mark to sense that it condemned Bush and Cheney’s war to the rubbish bin of history. But, we do not know who blew this particular whistle.
In the relatively recent past, Bush’s America has been blessed with a few outstanding whistleblowers modelled on Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower par excellence--who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam Era and brought the presidency of Richard Nixon to its premature close.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, two outstanding women, FBI Agent Colleen Rowley and Intelligence Analyst Sibel Edmonds, blew their whistles. Agent Rowley revealed that the FBI had failed to heed intelligence about the activities of Zacharias Moussaoui--intelligence that would have alerted the agency to the impending threat of a massive terrorist attack on US soil. Colleen Rowley is now a Democratic congressional candidate in Minnesota.
A Turkish language expert, Sibel Edmonds was hired after the attack on the World Trade Center to analyze pre-9/11 intel. What Edmonds found shocked her. She blew the whistle on the fact that--prior to 9/11--the US was holding explosive intelligence that indicated an eminent attack on a major US target. When Sibel Edmonds blew the whistle, her bosses forced her head under the bureaucratic guillotine. They fired her. Today, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Edmonds’ is suing her former employers for sacking her because she told the truth to the American people.
In Britain, Katherine Gun, an employee of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), blew the whistle when she learned of a secret US espionage program to spy on UN delegates in New York in the run-up to the launch of the war against Iraq. First she was terminated--then she was vindicated in court.
An anonymous patriot leaked the Downing Street memo. Written by John Scarlett, the secret Downing Street “Eyes Only” document detailed the sharp shift in American policy in 2002, when British officials detected a new level of intensity in Bush’s policy vis à vis Iraq. Instead of planning for a diplomatic settlement to what was then being hyped as the Iraq crisis, the Brits noticed that we had entered a hall of mirrors--a twilight zone where diplomacy was a mere charade and all policies were being “fixed” around the inevitable axis of impending war.
In the meantime, Bush laments the inescapable fact that the war in Iraq is imposing a psychic strain on the mind of America. In official statements, he laments that Osama Bin Laden has been successful in driving a wedge between the American people and their government. Bush adamantly refuses to recognize that the wedge between the people and their government was not of Bin Laden’s making. Forged by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Bush drove that poisonous wedge deeply into the body politic of America himself when he acquiesced to neoconservative fantasies of imperialist hegemony, a new American century through military conquest and colonial domination leading to dictatorial control of the world’s oil reserves in perpeteum.
The historical record is now perfectly clear. According to our own intelligence analysis, Bush’s war in Iraq has triggered an explosion of Islamic terrorism. Prior to this fateful turning point, the carcinoma of terror was confined to the vastness of Afghanistan and Pakistan. With the launch of the war in Iraq, the cancer of terror metastasized into a global movement predicated on the destruction of America and its front-line client, Israel.
For this tragic outcome, Bush has nobody to blame but himself.
In our immediate future, we can expect more of the same. The Bush-Cheney White House and its minions will eternally repeat their totalitarian mantras:
Ignorance is most assuredly strength;
War is indubitably peace, and
Freedom really and truly is slavery.
And so they shall always be in Brother Bush’s America.
In the web site's "who we are" section, the following is posted:
Established in 2003 the Planetary Movement Limited (PlanetaryTM) is on a mission to inform governments, media and the public about crucial issues related to the expansion and healthy growth of democracy and freedom.
PlanetaryTM works globally. We incorporate the work of existing social and political institutions and integrate our strategies within the growing network of private citizens committed to public action to achieve progress.
We build upon the work of leading social scientists and politicians, in the belief that social scientists are challenged when confronted with realpolitik and politicians need the direction of the leading intellectual trends.
Today, there is a rising tide of concern for the state of democracy. Many citizens feel alienated and disenfranchised, while many more feel let down by their political leadership and the media elites who serve them. PlanetaryTM opens a crucial channel for dialogue between the people of the world and its governments.
References:
- Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat
- Sibel Edmonds: A Patriot Silenced, Unjustly Fired but Fighting Back to Help Keep America Safe
- Coleen Rowley for US Congress
- Coleen Rowley’s Memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller
- GCHQ whistleblower cleared
- The secret Downing Street Memo – Secret & Strictly Personal - UK Eyes Only
- Iraq has fuelled terror threat, US intelligence warns
- Campaign in Iraq has increased terrorism threat, says American intelligence report
- US feeling the strain of war – Bush
- How to look like a failure
- By linking Iraq with the war on terror, Bush has created a dynamic that threatens to destroy him
Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.
This story was published on September 27, 2006.
