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Ref. : Local Newsbriefs
Ref. : Letters to the editor
03.05 Open Letter to Congressman Bart Stupak
Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries
03.20 The Death of American Populism
03.18 Pressure Drop: Brave Sir Dennis Ran Away
03.12 Slick Barry and the $100-Billion Medicaid/Medicare Fraud Claim
03.09 Kill Bill: Death to Obamacare!
03.09 Obama’s Rhetoric May Be “Fiery,” But His Health Care Reform Is Still Lukewarm
03.17 CNN Scrapes Bottom of Right-Wing Barrel With Erickson Hire
03.16 WPost Blames Obama First, on Israel
03.16 Letter to the New York Times' Editor: Stovepiping To Persia
03.12 Cud and Complicity: Burying the Alternatives to Empire's Dominion
03.11 NYT and the ACORN Hoax
03.05 Sorry, Rove, Bush Did Lie About Iraq
03.03 It's Snow News
03.03 The Woeful Washington Post
Ref. : The Daily Howler
02.26 America's Supremes: Court Over Constitution
03.11 Power Rangers: Policing the System With the "Fightin' Progressives"
03.09 Thinking About Countings
03.07 Unnatural Acts: Breaking the Fever of Militarism
02.25 Future Shock: A Better World Beyond the Imperium
03.19 Israel's Troubling Tilt Toward Apartheid
03.18 The Lawfare Project's Anti-Democratic Agenda
03.16 America's Secret Prisons
03.13 Palestinian Dispossession in East Jerusalem
03.12 Israeli Settlement Expansions Continue
03.11 Brutalizing Palestinian Children
03.08 The Russell Tribunal on Palestine: Barcelona Session
03.05 Targeting Israeli Apartheid
03.01 America's Permanent War Agenda
02.25 Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery
03.19 The Growing Movement For Publicly-Owned Banks
03.19 America's "Houdini Recovery" under IMF-Type Austerity
03.14 The Crisis in America's Telecommunications Network
03.09 The Business of Water: Privatizing An Essential Resource
03.05 Is the Recovery Real?
03.04 IMF-Style Austerity Measures come to America: What “Fiscal Responsibility” Means To You
03.04 Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction"
03.01 Thinking About Fees
03.15 Peace Process Hypocrisy: Stillborn from Inception
03.03 Muslim Disunity
03.02 Funding Israeli Militarism, Belligerence and Occupation
02.26 Iran Captures a 'Good' Terrorist
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.
