by Larry Chin

Global Research, July 29, 2010

Since the release of classified US military papers by WikiLeaks, the material has been aggressively spun by various political factions. Meanwhile, virtually no attention has been devoted to investigating the source of this “leak”, or questioning the agenda behind it.

According to the Associated Press, a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity stated that the US government is not certain who “leaked” the 91,000 documents to the online whistle blowing web site.

Unlike a previous WikiLeak exposing the murder of Iraqi civilians in a US airstrike, , nobody has been apprehended, arrested or  pressured by the Pentagon, the CIA or any US agency.

The White House has expressed no intense concern. It did not block the release or deny the material. Government officials, led by President Obama, have almost casually dismissed the expose as nothing new.

The major mainstream newspapers that had full early access to the material—The New York Times, Der Spiegel and the Guardian—also had ample time to frame and steer the discourse surrounding it, and (particularly in the case of the White House-friendly New York Times) conduct damage control.

Leak as anti-war fodder

The new material obviously adds to what is already known for years: US forces are mired in a dirty and horrific war, and committing atrocities and war crimes. Corruption is rampant, allies are despicable and untrustworthy, and there appears no end in sight.

For critics of US policy, the expose reinforces their tired call for the war to end. However, the value of these particular papers (in terms of turning public opinion against the war) is questionable. This is not a potent high-level Pentagon Papers-type leak, and today’s society is a far cry from the 1970s.

Today’s acquiescent, ignorant and grossly manipulated mass populace—one that fully embraces and supports the manufactured “war on terrorism”—wholeheartedly supports any and all means to “prevent another 9/11”. A decade of Bush-Cheney criminality and mass murder failed to trigger any interest from a general US population that has been shocked into servitude, and further brain-addled by ubiquitous corporate right-wing media. Another day, another massacre.

Leak as imperial war propaganda

Where the WikiLeaks papers gain significance is in the detail revealed about the operations of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) and, more specifically, the manner in which leading government figures and the media have interpreted these items.

The ISI is being accused of “undercutting” US operations, “conspiring with’ and aiding the “powerfully resurgent” Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, aiding the killing of US forces, and organizing “networks of militants” across the region. An all-out propaganda attack against Pakistan led by the White House is underway.

Essentially, Pakistan is being branded as a terrorist state and a worthy target of military attack, along with Iran, which is also fingered by the WikiLeak for backing Taliban militants within Afghanistan.

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Hamid Gul, former ISI chief and major regional player, accuses the US of orchestrating the expose to shift attention away from the US government’s “own failings”, in order to “force Pakistan’s hand on policy in Afghanistan”.

According to Gul “they [the Americans] want to bash Pakistan, at this time to come up with this leak. I refuse to believe it is not on purpose.”

The Obama administration, eager for a pretext to escalate the Central Asia/Middle East (resource) war into Pakistan and Iran, has certainly found ammunition with the WikiLeak expose.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the “leak” occurred just prior to a new $33 billion/30,000 troop surge for Afghanistan was signed in the US Congress, and ahead of a possible military attack on Iran, which former CIA Director Michael Hayden says is “inexorable”.

The glaring omission

As accusations and attacks on Pakistan and its “terrorist ISI” rise in intensity, not one mainstream media report mentions the fact that the ISI is a virtual branch of the CIA, and one that operates on behalf of Anglo-American policy.

It is fact that the ISI, with full Anglo-American direction, has long been a driving force behind “Islamic militants” and “terrorists” throughout the world, including “Al-Qaeda”. The CIA and ISI have cooperatively fomented instability and tension throughout Central Asia and the Middle East, playing all sides for geostrategic gain. This “strategy of tension” is one of the hallmarks of the “war on terrorism”. The ISI was also directly involved with the false flag operation of 9/11.

According to Michel Chossudovsky:

“The ISI actively collaborates with the CIA. It continues to perform the role of a ‘go-between’ in numerous intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA. The ISI directly supports and finances a number of terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda.”

If the ISI is responsible for terrorism, the funding and aiding of “Islamic militants”, and the killing of US forces, logic dictates that its big brethren—the CIA and officials in Washington—are also guilty and involved.

The manner in which the ISI is under fire, while omitting any mention of the ISI’s guiding superiors in Washington speaks to a deliberate anti-Pakistan/pro-US bias.

Whose political weapon?

Until the source of this WikiLeak is revealed, along with the motive for the “leak”, all that remains is a political Rohrschach Test, open to interpretation.

The ultimate beneficiary is whatever faction controls the interpretation.

In the end, only Pakistan and Iran have been politically damaged, while the Obama administration has a new pretext to escalate and intensify its continuing resource war.

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Canada’s Fraser Institute
by David Livingstone

Global Research, July 29, 2010

How American right-wing foundations, Big Oil and the CIA collaborate to undermine the social democratic systems of Canada and other countries around the world.

Since the early 1970s, there has been a broad international agenda led by right-wing American foundations to sway public opinion towards greater acceptance of an economic philosophy called Neoliberalism, of which Canada’s Fraser Institute has been a pivotal part.

It is by tracing the connections between the Fraser Institute and several prominent Canadian politicians, like Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and other far-right conservatives, including BC Premier Campbell of British Columbia, that we can identify the source of their disdain for democracy, a penchant for slashing social programs, their unconditional support for American foreign policy expeditions, and an utter refusal to condemn the gross human rights abuses of Zionism in Israel.

Every year, the Fraser Institute announces a Tax Freedom Day, the first day of the year when the country of Canada has theoretically earned enough income to fund its annual tax burden, and its “Report Cards” of schools and the health care system, designed to convince Canadians of the importance of reducing public spending and privatizing these and other social services.

As reported in The Tyee, Paul Shaker, dean of the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University, said recently:

“Part of the international movement of neoliberalism is to treat schools as simply another service that can be commodified and deserve no special place in society. This movement has been coming along since Thatcher and Reagan, and reached a fevered pitch over the last 10 years.” If you want to analyze why things have deteriorated in Vancouver, Shaker said, “it probably has to do with this global and political movement.” The premise of Neoliberalism, and that of Neoclassical Economic theories in general, is the pessimistic view that human beings are selfish creatures. It develops from a crass darwinian attitude, that deems that people aught to be responsible for their own “failings”, like poverty, and therefore, that governments should not provide services to assist them when they are in need.

Ultimately, the pursuit of self-interest is thought to create efficiencies that should be favored over any form of government activity. However, while the profit motive is certainly tolerable in certain cases, it is actually contrary to the public good in others, as in cases of essential human needs, like education, health, water, energy sources and so on.

Essentially, Neoliberalism draws support from the philosophy of Adam Smith, who maintained it was not necessary for governments or any other social organizations to enforce a redistribution of wealth, because the free pursuit of self-interest would create enough surplus to benefit all. The disguised intent is to induce societies to expose what should be publicly held assets or industries to exploitation by private interests, and to then prevent governments from taxing these corporations, or regulating their activities in ways that might restrain their lust for profits.

The chief propagandists of Neoliberalism, were Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, who, in 1947, founded the Mont Pelerin Society, to coordinate the creation of an international network of think-tanks and foundations, to spread their philosophy of corporate greed. The basis of their propaganda was a scare-tactic of equating “big government” with totalitarianism. In Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Milton Friedman proposed that centralized control of the economy was always accompanied with political repression. Similarly, in The Road to Serfdom (1944), Hayek argued that “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends.”

It was at the Rockefeller funded University of Chicago, that Friedman helped build an intellectual community that produced a number of Nobel Prize winners, known collectively as the Chicago School of Economics. In 1975, Friedman accepted the invitation of a private foundation to visit Chile and speak on principles of “economic freedom”, completing the CIA’s mission, following their support of the Pinochet coup against the democratically-elected socialist Allende.

Friedman’s activities were part of a broader strategy for the subversion of cultures and social democratic institutions around the world, carried out by the CIA, assisted through both the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. Frances Stonor Saunders, author of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, details how the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized concerts, sponsored abstract art to counteract art with any social content, and subsidized journals that criticized revolutionary politics throughout the world. Among the more prominent intellectuals benefitting from CIA funding were Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Jackson Pollack, Gloria Steinem.

Another was Irving Kristol, often called the “godfather” of Neoconservatism, a right-wing political philosophy that emerged in the US, and which supports using American economic and military power to purportedly bring liberalism, democracy, and human rights to other countries.

A number of prominent think-tanks and organizations closely related to the neoconservatives include the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Project for the New American Century and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Kristol became a senior fellow at AEI, arriving from the Congress for Cultural Freedom following the widespread revelation of the group’s CIA funding. The stated mission of the AEI is “to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism—limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate.”

The ranks of Kristol’s Neoconservatives were largely composed of former Marxists of mostly Jewish academic origin, who eventually transferred their devotion to an ideal of American military power. Their swing to the right during the sixties and seventies is viewed as a result of the change in Israel’s geopolitical status to military superpower. As political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg describes:

“One major factor that drew them inexorably to the right was their attachment to Israel and their growing frustration during the 1960s with a Democratic party that was becoming increasingly opposed to American military preparedness and increasingly enamored of Third World causes [e.g., Palestinian rights]. In the Reaganite right’s hard-line anti-communism, commitment to American military strength, and willingness to intervene politically and militarily in the affairs of other nations to promote democratic values (and American interests), neocons found a political movement that would guarantee Israel’s security.”

Today, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their controversial bestseller, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, identify the AEI relationship to America’s powerful Zionist lobby, which is dominated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The group, which would eventually furnish 59 members of the Reagan national security team including the president himself, focused on exaggerating the threat of the Soviet Union as a cover for their activities, maintaining: “the principal threat to our nation, to world peace, and to the cause of human freedom is the Soviet drive for dominance” and its “long-held goal of a world dominated from a single center — Moscow.” This Cold War scenario became the rational behind the CIA’s covert support for the Mujahidden war in Afghanistan, beginning American’s entry into a long-lasting battle for control over Central Asia, known as the Great Game.

Their domination of the Reagan administration provided them the opportunity to push their Neoliberal agenda. By the 1970s, many of the world’s economies were suffering as a result of the Oil Crisis and stagflation. This presented the scenario by which Reagan and Thatcher were able to propose their drastic reforms, breaking down trade barriers and reducing government power, to supposedly revitalize their stagnant economies, thus ushering in the modern rush of Neoliberal policy implementations.

Ronald Reagan said of the AEI in 1988:

“The American Enterprise Institute stands at the center of a revolution in ideas of which I, too, have been a part. AEI’s remarkably distinguished body of work is testimony to the triumph of the think tank. For today the most important American scholarship comes out of our think tanks – and none has been more influential than the American Enterprise Institute.”

The Fraser Institute, according to Media Transparency, is heavily funded by the same group of right-wing American foundations who support the AEI. As revealed by Richard Cockett, in his book Thinking the Unthinkable, it was Antony Fisher of the Mont Pelerin Society, who played a critical role in the development of the Fraser Institute in 1974.

Hayek inspired Fisher to establish the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in London during 1955, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., during 1973, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in New York City during 1977 and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in 1981. In turn the Atlas Foundation supports a wide network of think-tanks, including the Fraser Institute.

In a strategy paper written in February 1985, Fisher wrote of the need to transform the “extremist, anti-government, radical free market policies of the Mont Pelerin Society into the “new orthodoxy” through the launching of hundreds of small think tanks on every continent.

The IEA describe their mission as being “…to improve public understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society, with particular reference to the role of markets in solving economic and social problems.” The IEA experienced the height of its influence during the right-wing Tory administration of Margaret Thatcher. Milton Friedman characterised the IEA’s intellectual influence during the period as so strong that, “the U-turn in British policy executed by Margaret Thatcher owes more to him (i.e., Fisher) than any other individual.”

Prominent Mont Pelerin members have included Chancellor Ludwig Erhard of Germany, President Luigi Einaudi of Italy, Chairman Arthur F. Burns of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe of Sri Lanka, Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe of the U.K., Italian Minister of Defence Antonio Martino, Chilean Finance Minister Carlos Cáceres, New Zealand Finance Minister Ruth Richardson and President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic. Eight Mont Pelerin members, including Hayek and Friedman, have won Nobel prizes in economics. Of seventy-six economic advisers on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign staff, twenty-two were from Mont Perelin.

According to Cockett, “on the strength of his reputation with the IEA, [Fisher] was invited in 1975 to become co-director of the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, founded by the Canadian businessman Pat Boyle in 1974. Fisher let the young director of the Fraser Institute, Dr Michael Walker, get on with the intellectual output of the Institute (just as he had given free reign to Seldon and Harris at the IEA) while he himself concentrated on the fund-raising side.”

After his success at the Fraser Institute, Fisher went to found the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., in 1973, and on to New York where in 1977 he set up the International Center for Economic Policy Studies (ICEPS), later renamed the Manhattan Institute. The incorporation documents were signed by prominent attorney Bill Casey, later Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, where he greatly expanded it covert support of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, such that it became the agency’s largest of its kind in history.

The IEA website states that, “since 1974 the IEA has played an active role in developing similar institutions across the globe. Today there exists a world-wide network of over one hundred institutions in nearly eighty countries. All are independent but share in the IEA’s mission.”

In its 2005 Annual Report, the Fraser Institute featured a photograph of Michael Walker with then American neoconservative Vice President Dick Cheney, followed by a photograph of Canada’s “future Prime Minister” Stephen Harper attending the Institute’s annual general meeting. Likewise, on November 23, 2009, at an event celebrating the Institute’s 35th Anniversary, Gordon Campbell served as its “Honourary Chairman”.

The Fraser Institute’s list of Senior Fellows includes Tom Flanagan, professor of political science at the University of Calgary, who was campaign manager to Stephen Harper in federal elections in 2004 and 2005. Other senior fellows include Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party, as well as former Conservative Premier of Ontario, Mike Harris, former Alberta Conservative premier Ralph Klein, and former Liberal cabinet minister and Newfoundland and Labrador premier Brian Tobin.

Typical public policy stances which the Fraser Institute will support are greater free trade throughout the world, the right to own and acquire firearms without controls, marijuana legalization, but most importantly, the privatization of government social programs, including education and health care, which would open them up to ownership by American corporations.

Funding for the Fraser Institute derives from, among others, ExxonMobil, a major portion of which is owned by the Rockefeller foundation, an oil company descended from the family’s original Standard Oil.

The Fraser Institute also receives funding from a number of Rockefeller affiliated American foundations, like the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and John M. Olin Foundation, who are also responsible for funding the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Founded in 1973, by brewery magnate Joseph Coors and Richard Scaife, Heritage published a set of policy recommendations called “Mandate for Leadership” that proved to be the intellectual blueprint for the so-called “Reagan Revolution.”

For nearly four decades, conservative foundations like the Bradley, the Olin and other foundations, have mounted a concerted campaign to reshape politics and public policy according to Neo-Liberal principles. These organizations pursue an agenda based on industrial and environmental deregulation, the privatization of government services, deep reductions in federal anti-poverty spending and the transfer of authority and responsibility for social welfare from the national government to the charitable sector and state and local government.

Three books in particular, written by Bradley-funded writers, played key roles in this effort: Wealth and Poverty, by George Guilder; Losing Ground, by Charles Murray, and Beyond Entitlement, by Lawrence M. Mead. In Losing Ground, Murray argued that poverty is the result, not of economic conditions or injustices, but to individual failings, maintaining that most government-sponsored anti-poverty programs were ill-conceived and should be eliminated. In particular, he called for an end to all government programs that provide economic support for single mothers, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), subsidized housing, or food stamps.

After writing Losing Ground, Murray teamed up with the late Harvard psychologist Richard Hernstein to write the book the Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. The book argued that poverty is the result, not of social conditions or policies, but of the inferior genetic traits of a sub-class of human beings. It relied heavily on research financed by the Pioneer Fund, a Neo-Nazi organization that promoted eugenics research.

In 1978, William Simon, with Irving Kistol, founded the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA), whose purpose was to seek out promising PhD candidates and undergraduate leaders, help the through grants and fellowships to establish themselves with activist organizations, research projects, student publications, federal agencies or leading periodicals. In 1980, IEA merged with the Madison Center, founded in 1986 by William Bennet, Allan Bloom, author of the Closing of the American Mind, and Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield to become the Madison Center for Educational Affairs.

Also in the early 1980s, a number of these foundations, including Scaife and Olin, teamed up to fund right-wing newspapers on college campuses. One notable example was The Dartmouth Review, where a young Dinesh D’Souza, author of Illiberal Democracy, got his start attacking the purported “liberal bias” at U.S. universities.

The AEI recently emerged again as one of the leading architects of the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy. Irving Kristol’s son and successor William founded the Project for the New American Century, one of the leading voices behind that administration’s plan for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

In September 2000, the PNAC published a report titled, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, in which it envisioned an expanded global military role for the U.S., by stipulating, “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein. Presciently, noted the report, the “the process of transformation,” of the U.S. military into an imperialistic force of global domination, “is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”

According to leading neoconservative Michael Ledeen, who held a chair at the American Enterprise Institute, and was also a founding member of JINSA, “regime change” must be achieved by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. In his book, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago, Ledeen proclaimed:

“Change – above all violent change – is the essence of human history.”[80] Ultimately, Ledeen believes that violence in the service of the spread of “freedom” around the world is merely a continuation of America’s revolutionary struggle. “Total war” says Ledeen, “not only destroys the enemy’s military forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely personal point of decision, so that they are willing to accept a reversal of the cultural trends. The sparing of civilian lives cannot be the total war’s first priority… The purpose of total war is to permanently force your will onto another people.”

Through this vast network of influence peddling for American Big Oil and unconditional support for Israel, we find not only the roots of recent Canadian foreign policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but also an explanation for the push recently proposed at the G20 to tighten social spending, which will ultimately undermine the great social democratic tradition which is the foundation of the humanitarian values which are the basis of our collective pride as Canadians.

David Livingstone is an independent historian, author of The Dying God: The Hidden History of Western Civilization.

David Livingstone http://www.thedyinggod.com

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National Ocean Council

National Ocean Council

By Cassandra Anderson
July 28, 2010

NASMIS

Thirty states will be encroached upon by Obama’s Executive Order establishing the National Ocean Council for control over America’s oceans, coastlines and the Great Lakes. Under this new council, states’ coastal jurisdictions will be subject to the United Nations’ Law Of Sea Treaty (LOST) in this UN Agenda 21 program. America’a oceans and coastlines will be broken into 9 regions that include the North East, Mid-Atlantic, South Atlantic, the Gulf Coast, West Coast, the Great Lakes, Alaska, the Pacific Islands (including Hawaii) and the Caribbean.

Because of the decades of difficulty that the collectivists have had trying to ratify the Law Of Sea Treaty (LOST), Obama is sneaking it in through the back door, by way of this Executive Order establishing the Council. Because LOST is a treaty, Obama’s Executive Order is not Constitutional as treaty ratification requires 2/3 approval from the Senate. Michael Shaw said that the Agenda 21 Convention on Biodiversity treaty of 1992 failed to pass Congress so it was executed through soft law and administratively on local levels, and Obama’s Executive Order is a similar soft law tactic to enact the LOST treaty.

In fact, our Constitutional form of government is being completely destroyed because buried in the CLEAR Act (HR 3534) there is a provision for a new council to oversee the outer continental shelf- it appears that this Regional Outer Shelf Council will be part of the National Ocean Council. This means that if Congress makes the CLEAR Act into law, then the implementation of the UN Law Of Sea Treaty, as part of the National Ocean Council’s agenda, will be “ratified” in a convoluted and stealth manner, in full opposition to the Constitution and its intent.

The excuse for this extreme action is because of the emergency in the Gulf of Mexico. Obama and Congress have always had the legal and military power to force BP Oil to take all necessary action to stop the gusher and clean the oil spew. While there is evidence that the problems in the Gulf have been a result of collusion and planned incompetence, it begs the question, why in world should America’s oceans and resources be controlled by Obama appointees?

NATIONAL OCEAN COUNCIL MEMBERS:

John Holdren, Obama’s science and technology advisor, is the co-chairman of this new council. He is also a depopulation enthusiast and advocates sterilization by way of using infertility drugs in water and food as well as forced abortions which he describes in his book “Ecoscience”.

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Department of Interior, and its subagency, MMS (Minerals Management Service) has authority over offshore drilling and responsibility for enforcing spill prevention measures. The Department of Interior’s BLM (Bureau of Land Management) is the entity that controls federally managed land extending across 30% of America in 11 western states. Last week, Congressman Louie Gohmert said that Ken Salazar personally prevented drilling on land in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, thereby also preventing energy independence. In addition, the federal lands have been grossly mismanaged and present fire dangers. The federal government is $3.7 billion in arrears for maintenance of the federally managed lands.

US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, by way of the US Forestry Service and US Fish & Wildlife Service, has been complicit in the decline of our country’s food independence. For example, US Fish & Wildlife (along with the Department of Commerce) shut the water off in California using Endangered Species Act; it was later proven that partially treated sewage was the primary culprit in killing the salmon and delta smelt that was previously blamed on farmers. This is phony environmentalism. The US Forestry Service has also misused the Endangered Species Act to limit farmers and ranchers. Remember that the USDA co-owns the Terminator Gene patent with Monsanto that makes seeds sterile.

Lisa Jackson is the EPA administrator who has threatened to impose 18,000 pages of new regulations to curb global warming which is based on lies, claiming that carbon dioxide is a danger to human health.

Department of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano: it is unclear how these two federal appointees will enhance environmental ‘sustainability’ over oceans and coasts. Traditionally, national security threats (like the War on Terror) have been used by the federal government to take control of resources. For example, many years ago when the interstate highway systems were first being built, the Feds got in on the action by claiming that they were building a defense highway system, and they encroached into an area that belonged to the states. Interestingly, there were no overhead structures on highways originally because of the Feds’ claim that large missiles would be transported on these “defense” highway systems.

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, a leading globalist, is likely to plunge our country into international entanglements and subjugation, based on her past performance; an example is her support of the UN Small Arms Treaty, which is contrary to the Constitution.

Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Department of Commerce Secretary Gary Locke are logical choices for this destructive council as some of the planned funding for this program will come from permits and leases (oil drilling leases, for example). These agencies will limit America’s energy independence.

Click here to see the full list of the 24 member council.

THE SMOKING GUN:

Agenda 21 Sustainable Development is the overarching blueprint for depopulationa and total control, and the National Ocean Council is clearly an Agenda 21 program:

The National Ocean Council is headed by John Holdren, an avowed eugenicist which is selective breeding through brutal means like forced abortion.

The National Ocean Counci’s own report (Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning, pg. 8) incorporates a section of the 1992 Rio Declaration which is an original UN Agenda 21 document!

In fact, the report says that it will be guided by the Rio Declaration in cases “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” (pg. 8) This means that regulations will be imposed even if the science is not understood or if the science is based on global warming manipulated data.

The 3 primary tools of Agenda 21′s phony environmentalism are global warming, water shortages and the Endangered Species Act; the National Ocean Council intends to exploit all of these tools to their full extent.

The National Ocean Council’s main objective is to sink American sovereignty through the United Nations Law Of Sea Treaty (LOST) with the intended result of domination by the UN over our coasts and the Great Lakes. LOST originated in the 1970s as a wealth redistribution plan to benefit Third World countries. LOST sets rules for commercial activity beneath the high seas and establishes new international bureaucracies and a tribunal to interpret and apply rules to sea activity. And LOST can proceed with those rules, even against US objections! LOST threatens to complicate deep sea mining. LOST sets a precedent that US rights are dependent upon the approval of international entities. LOST also extends to ocean flowing rivers.

REGIONALISM:

Michael Shaw pointed out that non-elected councils are increasingly expanding their jurisdiction through air quality boards, water quality boards, sewer systems, transportation districts, metropolitan planning, etc. to gain control over resources. Often, large corporations and financial interests form Public- Private Partnerships with the government within these councils.

Breaking areas into regions and placing authority with non-elected councils is a Communist trick used to hijack resources, thereby usurping local and state power by re-zoning the areas that do have Constitutional authority. Appointed bureaucrats are untouchable because their jobs are not dependent upon serving the voting population. And they are usually inaccessible to the public and do not have to face those who are affected by their “insider” decisions. When state and local governments become corrupt, the public is able to confront them eye to eye, but distant bureaucrats can avoid accountability. Regionalism is used as a psychological tactic to intimidate state legislatures into creating the system for a new political and economic order.

Obama’s Executive Order that has created the 9 new regions amounts to re-zoning, and his appointed bureaucrats are answerable only to him. In David Horton’s testimony in 1978 on regionalism, he said that the State of Indiana made this declaration, “Neither the states nor Congress have ever granted authority to any branch or agency of the federal government to exercise regional control over the states.” Horton further stated that Congress holds all legislative power that is granted in the Constitution, as opposed to Executive Orders that are not legislative. Therefore, Obama’s Executive Order for re-zoning and appointing a governing body to usurp state and local power is Constitutionally invalid.

The public must become aware of state sovereignty and the Tenth Amendment to demand that state and local governments assert these Constitutional laws and principles.

COASTAL AND MARINE SPATIAL PLANNING REPORT:

This is a general overview of the new National Ocean Council’s goals based on its 32-page report that uses indirect language and acronyms in order to confuse the public and local lawmakers. Depopulation advocates, globalists and collectivists, like John Holdren, faced opposition a few decades ago when they clearly expressed their objectives, so now documents are written in complicated and clouded language to fool those they wish to control.

This report states that the Council’s jurisdiction will extend from the continental shelf to the coast AND additional inland areas will be involved. The National Ocean Council identifies “partners” as members of each regional planning body that will include federal, state, local and tribal authorities, with a top-down hierarchy of control.

The intentions of the Council are stated on page 8 of the report that include implementing LOST and other international treaties.  The report also states that the Counci’s plans shall be implemented by Executive Orders, in addition to federal and state laws.  This section mentions ‘global climate change’ which is a new term used as a substitute for ‘man made global warming’ after manipulated data and lies were exposed in numerous global warming scandals.  ‘Climate change’ is blamed for sea level rise and acidification of oceans; evidence exists that these are more global warming deceptions.

The stated goals of the Council include regulating investments, collaborating with unidentified international agencies, controlling public access to oceans and “protecting” ecosystems. This means that commerce and trade will be controlled by the Council, the UN will gain power over American oceans and the Great Lakes through UN subagencies, public access will be limited and the Endangered Species Act will be unleashed, with heavy regulations. Incidentally, the Endangered Species Act is based on 5 international treaties. It has never had a successful result: of the 60 species that have been de-listed, not a single species was saved as a result of any restrictions stemming from the Endangered Species Act!

The targeted areas for Endangered Species Act regulations are the the Great Lakes, the Gulf Coast, Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, South Florida and the San Francisco Bay (the Bay Delta is where the irrigation water for farmers was was cut off using the Endangered Species Act, causing food shortages, an increase in food imports and massive economic devastation).

While this report does not clearly outline how the National Ocean Council’s schemes will be financed, regulatory permits for all activity on the water and mining (oil) leases will play a part, along with tax increases. The report does indicate that grants and assistance programs will be available so that state, local and tribal authorities will support the Council’s “efforts”. In other words, the Council will try to buy off the state and local governments to “collectively use” them for a base of support and influence. (pg. 28) Strings are always attached to federal money. The federal government and the Council are reliant on state and local governments for implementation through state and local legal authority, which means that state and local authorities hold the power to implement or refuse the Council’s directives, especially under the Tenth Amendment.

However, the report does state that disputes will be settled by consensus, if consensus fails, then the decisions will ultimately be made by the President. He is Commander in Chief of the Navy and has the power of the military behind him. Further, the report indicates that legislative changes and more Executive Orders may be necessary to achieve control.

An important point is made on page 5, which states, “Strong partnerships among Federal, State, tribal and local authorities, and regional governance structures would be essential to a truly forward-looking, comprehensive CMSP effort.” This means that the states, local governments and tribes have power. Our collectivist government needs the consent of the state, local and tribal authorities, to implement this scheme, otherwise, the feds wouldn’t bother to include these Constitutional authorities. If the state, local and tribal authorities are aware of, and willing to act on their Constitutional authority, then they can limit this federal power grab through the Tenth Amendment.

The report further states that signing onto the Council’s plan would be an “express commitment by the partners to act in accordance with the plan…” (pg. 20) Therefore, it is imperative that all of the states be aware of the Council’s intended usurpation and carefully protect their Constitutional jurisdictions and sovereignty. There are 30 states that will be affected by this new council. (pg. 12)

The Council’s strategy plan will go into effect immediately, fully developing Agenda 21 objectives and undue UN influence within 5 years. Interestingly, one article said that if state, local and tribal authorities choose not to participate in in writing the plans, the plans would be written without them. Therefore, it bears repeating that state and local governments must protect their Constitutional authority when dealing with the Council. The Constitutional authority that states and local governments have can only be taken if the power is given away.

SAVING OUR COUNTRY:

If your freedom is important to you, the most effective action that you can take is to e-mail this article and Michael Shaw’s “Understanding Agenda 21 Sustainable Development” booklet to all of your State Legislators, County Commissioners/ Superintendents and City Council members.

Tell all of your friends, co-workers and neighbors about Agenda 21 Sustainable Development and how it is destroying our country. The National Ocean Council is detrimental on so many levels and the time to act is now. If state and local officials refuse to stand up against this federal incursion, they must be thrown out of office in favor of representatives who support the Constitution and the Tenth Amendment.

Be sure to check back with www.MorphCity.com on July 30th to watch a special video presentation about how a local official stood up against encroachment by the federal government.

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SEC Says New Financial Regulation Law Exempts it From Public Disclosure

By Dunstan Prial

Published July 28, 2010

| FOXBusiness

So much for transparency.

Under a little-noticed provision of the recently passed financial-reform legislation, the Securities and Exchange Commission no longer has to comply with virtually all requests for information releases from the public, including those filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The law, signed last week by President Obama, exempts the SEC from disclosing records or information derived from “surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities.” Given that the SEC is a regulatory body, the provision covers almost every action by the agency, lawyers say. Congress and federal agencies can request information, but the public cannot.

That argument comes despite the President saying that one of the cornerstones of the sweeping new legislation was more transparent financial markets. Indeed, in touting the new law, Obama specifically said it would “increase transparency in financial dealings.”

The SEC cited the new law Tuesday in a FOIA action brought by FOX Business Network. Steven Mintz, founding partner of law firm Mintz & Gold LLC in New York, lamented what he described as “the backroom deal that was cut between Congress and the SEC to keep the  SEC’s failures secret. The only losers here are the American public.”

If the SEC’s interpretation stands, Mintz, who represents FOX Business Network, predicted “the next time there is a Bernie Madoff failure the American public will not be able to obtain the SEC documents that describe the failure,” referring to the shamed broker whose Ponzi scheme cost investors billions.

“The new provision applies to information obtained through examinations or derived from that information,” said SEC spokesman John Nester. “We are expanding our examination program’s surveillance and risk assessment efforts in order to provide more sophisticated and effective Wall Street oversight. The success of these efforts depends on our ability to obtain documents and other information from brokers, investment advisers and other registrants. The new legislation makes certain that we can obtain documents from registrants for risk assessment and surveillance under similar conditions that already exist by law for our examinations. Because registrants insist on confidential treatment of their documents, this new provision also removes an opportunity for brokers, investment advisers and other registrants to refuse to cooperate with our examination document requests.”

Criticism of the provision has been swift. “It allows the SEC to block the public’s access to virtually all SEC records,” said Gary Aguirre, a former SEC staff attorney-turned-whistleblower who had accused the agency of thwarting an investigation into hedge fund Pequot Asset Management in 2005. “It permits the SEC to promulgate its own rules and regulations regarding the disclosure of records without getting the approval of the Office of Management and Budget, which typically applies to all federal agencies.”

Aguirre used FOIA requests in his own lawsuit against the SEC, which the SEC settled this year by paying him $755,000. Aguirre, who was fired in September 2005, argued that supervisors at the SEC stymied an investigation of Pequot – a charge that prompted an investigation by the Senate Judiciary and Finance committees.

The SEC closed the case in 2006, but would re-open it three years later. This year, Pequot and its founder, Arthur Samberg, were forced to pay $28 million to settle insider-trading charges related to shares of Microsoft (MSFT: 25.95 ,-0.21 ,-0.80%). The settlement with Aguirre came shortly later.

“From November 2008 through January 2009, I relied heavily on records obtained from the SEC through FOIA in communications to the FBI, Senate investigators, and the SEC in arguing the SEC had botched its initial investigation of Pequot’s trading in Microsoft securities and thus the SEC should reopen it, which it did,” Aguirre said. “The new legislation closes access to such records, even when the investigation is closed.

“It is hard to imagine how the bill could be more counterproductive,” Aguirre added.

FOX Business Network sued the SEC in March 2009 over its failure to produce documents related to its failed investigations into alleged investment frauds being perpetrated by Madoff and R. Allen Stanford. Following the Madoff and Stanford arrests it, was revealed that the SEC conducted investigations into both men prior to their arrests but failed to uncover their alleged frauds.

FOX Business made its initial request to the SEC in February 2009 seeking any information related to the agency’s response to complaints, tips and inquiries or any potential violations of the securities law or wrongdoing by Stanford.

FOX Business has also filed lawsuits against the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve over their failure to respond to FOIA requests regarding use of the bailout funds and the Fed’s extended loan facilities. In February, the Federal Court in New York sided with FOX Business and ordered the Treasury to comply with its requests.

Last year, the network won a legal victory to force the release of documents related to New York University’s lawsuit against Madoff feeder Ezra Merkin.

FOX Business’ FOIA requests have so far led the SEC to release several important and damaging documents:

•FOX Business used the FOIA to obtain a 2005 survey that the SEC in Fort Worth was sending to Stanford investors. The survey showed that the SEC had suspicions about Stanford several years prior to the collapse of his $7 billion empire.

•FOX Business used the FOIA to obtain copies of emails between Federal Reserve lawyers, AIG and staff at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in which it was revealed the Fed staffers knew that bailing out AIG would result in bonuses being paid.

Recently, TARP Congressional Oversight Panel chair Elizabeth Warren told FOX Business that the network’s Freedom of Information Act efforts played a “very important part” of the panel’s investigation into AIG.

Warren told the network the government “crossed a line” with the AIG bailout.

“FOX News and the congressional oversight panel has pushed, pushed, pushed, for transparency, give us the documents, let us look at everything. Your Freedom of Information Act suit, which ultimately produced 250,000 pages of documentation, was a very important part of our report. We were able to rely on the documents that you pried out for a significant part of our being able to put this report together,” Warren said.

The SEC first made its intention to block further FOIA requests known on Tuesday. FOX Business was preparing for another round of “skirmishes” with the SEC, according to Mintz, when the agency called and said it intended to use Section 929I of the 2000-page legislation to refuse FBN’s ongoing requests for information.

Mintz said the network will challenge the SEC’s interpretation of the law.

“I believe this is subject to challenge,” he said. “The contours will have to be figured out by a court.”

SEC Financial Regulatory Law H.R. 4173

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Judge blocks key parts of Arizona immigration law

(Reuters) – A judge on Wednesday blocked key parts of Arizona’s tough new immigration law, granting the Obama administration’s request for an injunction on grounds that immigration matters are the federal government’s responsibility.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton agreed to an injunction on provisions including one that required a police officer to determine the immigration status of a person detained or arrested if the officer believes the person is not in the country legally.

The Republican-controlled Arizona Legislature passed the law in April to try to stem the flow of illegal immigrants over the state’s border with Mexico and cut down on drug trafficking and crime — setting it on a collision course with the federal government.

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Collecting rainwater now illegal in many states as Big Government claims ownership over our water

Monday, July 26, 2010
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) Many of the freedoms we enjoy here in the U.S. are quickly eroding as the nation transforms from the land of the free into the land of the enslaved, but what I’m about to share with you takes the assault on our freedoms to a whole new level. You may not be aware of this, but many Western states, including Utah, Washington and Colorado, have long outlawed individuals from collecting rainwater on their own properties because, according to officials, that rain belongs to someone else.

As bizarre as it sounds, laws restricting property owners from “diverting” water that falls on their own homes and land have been on the books for quite some time in many Western states. Only recently, as droughts and renewed interest in water conservation methods have become more common, have individuals and business owners started butting heads with law enforcement over the practice of collecting rainwater for personal use.

Check out this YouTube video of a news report out of Salt Lake City, Utah, about the issue. It’s illegal in Utah to divert rainwater without a valid water right, and Mark Miller of Mark Miller Toyota, found this out the hard way.

After constructing a large rainwater collection system at his new dealership to use for washing new cars, Miller found out that the project was actually an “unlawful diversion of rainwater.” Even though it makes logical conservation sense to collect rainwater for this type of use since rain is scarce in Utah, it’s still considered a violation of water rights which apparently belong exclusively to Utah’s various government bodies.

“Utah’s the second driest state in the nation. Our laws probably ought to catch up with that,” explained Miller in response to the state’s ridiculous rainwater collection ban.

Salt Lake City officials worked out a compromise with Miller and are now permitting him to use “their” rainwater, but the fact that individuals like Miller don’t actually own the rainwater that falls on their property is a true indicator of what little freedom we actually have here in the U.S. (Access to the rainwater that falls on your own property seems to be a basic right, wouldn’t you agree?)

Outlawing rainwater collection in other states

Utah isn’t the only state with rainwater collection bans, either. Colorado and Washington also have rainwater collection restrictions that limit the free use of rainwater, but these restrictions vary among different areas of the states and legislators have passed some laws to help ease the restrictions.

In Colorado, two new laws were recently passed that exempt certain small-scale rainwater collection systems, like the kind people might install on their homes, from collection restrictions.

Prior to the passage of these laws, Douglas County, Colorado, conducted a study on how rainwater collection affects aquifer and groundwater supplies. The study revealed that letting people collect rainwater on their properties actually reduces demand from water facilities and improves conservation.

Personally, I don’t think a study was even necessary to come to this obvious conclusion. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that using rainwater instead of tap water is a smart and useful way to conserve this valuable resource, especially in areas like the West where drought is a major concern.

Additionally, the study revealed that only about three percent of Douglas County’s precipitation ended up in the streams and rivers that are supposedly being robbed from by rainwater collectors. The other 97 percent either evaporated or seeped into the ground to be used by plants.

This hints at why bureaucrats can’t really use the argument that collecting rainwater prevents that water from getting to where it was intended to go. So little of it actually makes it to the final destination that virtually every household could collect many rain barrels worth of rainwater and it would have practically no effect on the amount that ends up in streams and rivers.

It’s all about control, really

As long as people remain unaware and uninformed about important issues, the government will continue to chip away at the freedoms we enjoy. The only reason these water restrictions are finally starting to change for the better is because people started to notice and they worked to do something to reverse the law.

Even though these laws restricting water collection have been on the books for more than 100 years in some cases, they’re slowly being reversed thanks to efforts by citizens who have decided that enough is enough.

Because if we can’t even freely collect the rain that falls all around us, then what, exactly, can we freely do? The rainwater issue highlights a serious overall problem in America today: diminishing freedom and increased government control.

Today, we’ve basically been reprogrammed to think that we need permission from the government to exercise our inalienable rights, when in fact the government is supposed to derive its power from us. The American Republic was designed so that government would serve the People to protect and uphold freedom and liberty. But increasingly, our own government is restricting people from their rights to engage in commonsense, fundamental actions such as collecting rainwater or buying raw milk from the farmer next door.

Today, we are living under a government that has slowly siphoned off our freedoms, only to occasionally grant us back a few limited ones under the pretense that they’re doing us a benevolent favor.

Fight back against enslavement

As long as people believe their rights stem from the government (and not the other way around), they will always be enslaved. And whatever rights and freedoms we think we still have will be quickly eroded by a system of bureaucratic power that seeks only to expand its control.

Because the same argument that’s now being used to restrict rainwater collection could, of course, be used to declare that you have no right to the air you breathe, either. After all, governments could declare that air to be somebody else’s air, and then they could charge you an “air tax” or an “air royalty” and demand you pay money for every breath that keeps you alive.

Think it couldn’t happen? Just give it time. The government already claims it owns your land and house, effectively. If you really think you own your home, just stop paying property taxes and see how long you still “own” it. Your county or city will seize it and then sell it to pay off your “tax debt.” That proves who really owns it in the first place… and it’s not you!

How about the question of who owns your body? According to the U.S. Patent & Trademark office, U.S. corporations and universities already own 20% of your genetic code. Your own body, they claim, is partially the property of someone else.

So if they own your land, your water and your body, how long before they claim to own your air, your mind and even your soul?

Unless we stand up against this tyranny, it will creep upon us, day after day, until we find ourselves totally enslaved by a world of corporate-government collusion where everything of value is owned by powerful corporations — all enforced at gunpoint by local law enforcement.

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Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Oliver Stone, Adolf Hitler and Hypocritical Outrage

Oliver Stone: Jewish control of the media is preventing free Holocaust debate

Outspoken Hollywood director says new film aims to put Adolf Hitler, who he has called an ‘easy scapegoat’ in the past, in his due historical context
Haaretz (Israeli newspaper) | July 26, 2010
(Michael Hoffman’s observations immediately follow this report)


Oliver Stone

Jewish control of the media is preventing an open discussion of the Holocaust, prominent Hollywood director Oliver Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that the U.S. Jewish lobby was controlling Washington’s foreign policy for years.

In the Sunday (July 25) interview, Stone reportedly said U.S. public opinion was focused on the Holocaust as a result of the “Jewish domination of the media,” adding that an upcoming film of him aims to put Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin “in context.”

“There’s a major lobby in the United States,” Stone said, adding that “they are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington.”

The famed Hollywood director of such films as “Platoon” and “JFK,” also said that while “Hitler was a Frankenstein,” there was also a “Dr. Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support,” Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30 [million killed].”

Referring to the alleged influence of the powerful Jewish lobby on U.S. foreign policy, Stone said that Israel had distorted “United States foreign policy for years,” adding he felt U.S. policy toward Iran was “horrible. Iran isn’t necessarily the good guy,” Stone said, insisting that Americans did not “know the full story.”

Stone’s comments to the Sunday Times echo pervious remarks by the Hollywood director, regarding what he conceives as the distorted view of figures such as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin in U.S. media. Earlier this year, Stone, speaking at the at the Television Critics Association’s semi-annual press tour in Pasadena said that “Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and it’s been used cheaply. He’s the product of a series of actions. It’s cause and effect … People in America don’t know the connection between World War I and World War II,” Stone said, adding that through his documentary work he has been able to “walk in Stalin’s shoes and Hitler’s shoes to understand their point of view.”

“We’re going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them. We want to move beyond opinions … Go into the funding of the Nazi party. How many American corporations were involved, from GM through IBM. Hitler is just a man who could have easily been assassinated,” Stone said.

End quote from Haaretz

HOFFMAN’S OBSERVATIONS

The Gevurah/Right wing Republican neocons are running wild with Stone’s remarks, pointing to them as a manifestation of the Chesed/Left-wing’s incomparably perverted true nature. As part of this Left/Right charade, Mr. Stone is being cast as the unconscionable bad guy possessed of depraved indifference to a genocidal maniac (Hitler). This fire is directed by Zionist lapdogs who regard the Palestinian people as lower than dirt and cheer the Orthodox Judaic rabbinate who encourage Israeli  atrocities in Palestine.

Amid the canned outrage approved by New York and Hollywood, let’s ask, where is the outrage over Rabbi Shapira, who declared, “It is permissable to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation. If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments – because we care about the commandments — there is nothing wrong with the murder.”

Where is the outrage over Goldwin Smith, Judaic Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, who opined, “We Jews regard our race as superior to all humanity, and look forward, not to its ultimate union with other races, but to its triumph over them.”

Where is the outrage over Noel Ignatiev, Harvard professor: “…The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacist…Keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females, too, until the social construct known as the white race is destroyed. Not deconstructed, but destroyed.”

Gee, I’m sorry that I can’t be more “patriotic” and join with “Avodah Zarah” Sarah (Palin) and “Flush Limberger” and the rest of the six-pointed mobsters disguised as Jeffersonian Constitutionalists, in hurling heated epithets at Oliver Stone, when their Zionist heroes are running about advocating killing gentiles while wearing the striped pajamas of Auschwitz inmates.

This theatre of the absurd unfolds against the backdrop of  relentless focus on Islam as the “most evil religion on earth” and a threat to all the other “benign” world religions, such as the warm, fuzzy Judaism whose “holy” book says Jesus Christ is in hell being boiled in feces. With apologies to Sarah and Flush and everyone at The Weekly Standard and Fox Noose, as a Christian I dare not fail to publicly condemn and abominate the disgusting and blasphemous rabbinic religion and still hope for mercy from my Savior on Judgment Day.

Forgetting that Judaism and Islam were allies for centuries, from enforced ignorance about Judaism the faith of Islam emerges as the primary religious menace in the minds of Americans. The reaction against Oliver Stone, who merely pricked the gas bag of the monotonous Holohoax propaganda industry (and then issued the de rigueur apology for telling the truth about it), is out of all proportion because Americans do not study what Orthodox Judaism actually teaches, and care little or nothing for the Nazi-like crimes of the little Hitlers who serve the Israeli war machine while financed by US taxpayers.

Stone says Hitler was a stooge of the corporations. I say he was a stooge of deep cover Kabbalistic Judaism, as manifested in the New Age occult beliefs that were his astrological religion. Dig deeply beneath the Orthodox Judaic surface and you will excavate rabbinic admiration for Hitler as “G-d’s avenging angel” against  the majority of 20th century European Judaics who were in the process of liberating themselves from the prison house of Talmudism. Of this Oliver Stone is as ignorant as any Tea Party tippler.

Michael Hoffman is the author of Judaism Discovered. He writes from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

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Cultural Marxism Has Ruined Our Once Great Country – Here’s How

July 27, 2010 posted by Lorimer Wilson

“The United States has undergone a cultural, moral and religious revolution…  A militant secularism has arisen in this country… We are two countries now – morally, culturally, socially, and theologically. Cultural wars do not lend themselves to peaceful co-existence [because either] one side, or the other, prevails. The truth is that while conservatives won the Cold War with political and economic Communism, we’ve lost the cultural war with cultural Marxism…  It is now the dominant culture. Whereas those of us who are traditionalists, we are, if you will, the counterculture.” Words: 2261

So states Patrick J. Buchanan in the opening scenes of James Jaeger’s new film, “Cultural Marxism: The Corruption of America”. As always, Buchanan is outspoken and splendidly patriotic in his testimony on the present degeneration of our country. Many of us born before the 1960s and its shocking nihilism [i.e. complete denial of all established authority and institutions] agree vehemently with him. We were raised in a land far removed philosophically from the America we are cursed with today, and this disturbing fact weighs heavily upon our hearts and minds.

Lorimer Wilson, editor of www.FinancialArticleSummariesToday.com, provides below further edited [..] excerpts from Nelson Hultberg ’s recent guest editorial* at www.thedailybell.com for the sake of  brevity to ensure a fast and easy read. Wilson has also taken the liberty of supplying definitions for most of the ”big” words in the article where he wasn’t sure of the exact meaning to ensure that nothing would be lost in the understanding of what the author has to say in this superb article. Hultberg goes on, as follows, to explain why

our nation is committing insidious suicide under the guise of erecting the false ideal of social egalitarianism

America’s Social Collapse

We, who were raised in pre-nihilist America, find most of today’s movies, TV programs and literary works hideous and depressing. We cringe at the obsessive sexuality of Hollywood’s cinematic pretensions, at its love affair with anti-heroes, and the reprehensible way it so cavalierly saturates its stories with over-the-top violence. We find ourselves aghast at how much boorish mediocrity and phantasmagorical [i.e. fantastic and incomprehensible] ugliness pulsate through the commercial byways of modern America calling itself “cutting-edge art from the avant-garde” and we wonder:

What is it that has wrought such decadence — where once righteous ideals and a heroic sense of life prevailed?

Why [does] miasma [i.e. an unwholesome atmosphere] and moroseness now dominate the social stream instead of the spirit of magnanimity and unbridled optimism of our ancestors?

Why [have] sweet drug poisons such as “crack ” and “Methamphetamine” invaded the lives of callow [i.e. lacking experience of life] youths in ghetto and country club alike?

Why [do] middle class Americans (who once worshiped self-reliance) now shamefully demand more and more entitlement handouts from government?

Why [have] our elected leaders in Washington become despicable quislings [i.e traitors] slithering around in Machiavellian [i.e. conduct where the end justifies the means] muck?

Why [is] family life and marriage, the very founts of civilization,  treated so shabbily by psycho-babble [i.e. spewing of meaningless, yet supposedly insightful, information] experts?

Why is androgyny [i.e. showing characteristics of both sexes] so zealously promoted by liberals on every other television show and homosexuality  pawned off as a “Marlboro Cowboy life style?”

Why are tradition and honor scorned by professorial elites pontificating [i.e. talking in a dogmatic and pompous manner] endlessly about how America’s original moral principles were repressive?

Cultural Marxism Has Corrupted America

There is indeed a reason why this tragic disintegration of American life’s value has swept over the country this past century. It is called “Cultural Marxism.” It is not the only reason why our culture is collapsing into decadence, but it is perhaps the most important reason.

Cultures are vast mosaics [i.e. assemblies of many different components into a composite whole]  of human aspirations, loves, needs and fears played out within the context of their time, their geography, their natural wealth, and the vision of their most brilliant thinkers. There are always numerous factors that move a culture toward truth and high-minded freedom or toward fallacy and the dust bin of history. Usually, [however,] there are one or two reasons that are paramount while the others are secondary. In this case, the paramount reason is the deliberate ideology of “Cultural Marxism” that invaded our nation back in the 1930s.

What exactly is this horrific ideology that has brought our way of life to such a sorry denouement [i.e.  outcome of a complex sequence of events], and how did it originate? That is what Jaeger’s film is all about; and he paints a riveting portrayal of a great country brought to ruin over an 80 year stretch by patiently sinister minds warped by a Mad Hatter’s view of reality.

In 2007, William S. Lind, a brilliant conservative thinker affiliated with the Free Congress Foundation in Washington, wrote an article titled, “Who Stole Our Culture?” In it he outlined what CulturalMarxism was all about, hammering home for the first time to Americans, in general, what Cultural Marxism had done to America. The article was a political/sociological tour de force because of the exceptional clarity with which Lind explained the ominous goals of the Cultural Marxist theoreticians beginning in the aftermath of World War I in Europe, followed by exportation of their agenda to America in the 1930s.

James Jaeger’s film duplicates the brilliance and lucidity of Lind, only with the visual imagery of film. It gives Americans a perceptive explanation as to why our nation is committing insidious [i.e. spreading in a hidden and usually injurious way] suicide under the guise of erecting the false ideal of social egalitarianism.

Americans are being dumbed down to a vulgarian’s existence with Orwell’s famous reversal of definitions (“Ignorance is Strength, Slavery is Freedom”) infecting everything in which we partake. Jaeger’s film exposes in spades this heartbreaking destruction of the Republic. The film’s power lies in its haunting imagery and conceptual resonance. Thus it offers a wonderful educational tool to spread the word to the populace about how and why we, as a people, are so apathetically condoning enslavement and decadence.

Our most treasured values have been turned upside down in a diabolical [i.e. showing the cunning or ingenuity or wickedness typical of a devil], “behind-the-curtain,” Marxist orchestration that has taken over our schools, churches, movies, publishers and media in the way gangrene spreads its pustules up the length of a man’s legs to invade his body’s core where the lungs and heart reside.

Cultural Marxism Has Spread Throughout America

Philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in his 1955 book, “Eros and Civilization”, promised a new paradise for man when all the trappings of capitalism and traditionalism had been rooted out of society… and then in 1964 came his next book, “One-Dimensional Man”, which led to the New Left Hippie revolution of the 1960s. The famous Chicago Seven protesters in 1968 (Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, et al), along with radical feminist Angela Davis, were greatly influenced by the vitriol [i.e. abusive or venomous language used to express blame or censure or bitter deep-seated ill will] toward American capitalism found in Marcuse’s “One-DimensionalMan”. Yale professor Charles Reich’s “The Greening of America” in 1970 extended the New Left revolt. Earlier lethal contributions, such as Theodor Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality” (1950) and Eric Fromm’s “Escape from Freedom” (1941) continued to further seduce Americans into believing that everything they had formerly held to be true about life, morality and justice was terribly wrong.

[Bevies of Many] articles in the popular magazines attacked the traditions of American society year after year from 1935 to 1975. Subtly degenerate films such as “The Wild Ones”, “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice”, “Midnight Cowboy”, “Easy Rider”, etc. invaded the traditional world of “straight Americans” to introduce them to the alluring joys of violence, mind-bending drugs, wife-swapping, secularism, materialism, relativism, and other new “liberating life choices.” College courses proliferated [i.e. caused to grow or increase rapidly] the “vast injustices” of capitalism and the “aristocratic inhumanity” of the Founding Fathers.

Herbert Marcuse heaped malevolent diatribes [i.e. verbal attacks] relentlessly upon the youth of the 1960s: “The West,” he railed [i.e. complained bitterly], “is guilty of genocidal crimes against every civilization and culture it has encountered. American and Western Civilization are the world’s greatest repositories of racism [i.e. the discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of another race and the prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of other races], sexism [i.e. discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of the opposite sex], nativism [i.e. the philosophical doctrine that some ideas are innate], xenophobia [i.e. the irrational fear of foreigners or strangers], anti-Semitism [i.e. the intense dislike for and prejudice against Jewish people], fascism [i.e. the political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government], and narcissism [i.e. the exceptional interest in and admiration for oneself]. American society is oppressive, evil, and undeserving of loyalty.”

George Lukacs announced to gullible minds everywhere: “I see the revolution and destruction of society as the only solution. A world-wide overturning of values cannot take place without annihilation of the old values and a creation of new ones.”

Did all this “critical devastation” come about conspiratorially? In a sense, yes, because it was behind-the-curtain so to speak. It was orchestrated from a small but fervent coterie of revolutionaries that lived in the thinker / writer world, the world of the Ivory Tower. It was not precisely (or truly) conspiratorial, however, because the term “conspiracy” means something secret and illegal; and the revolutionary goals of the Cultural Marxists were not exactly secret. They openly published books that furthered their goals. Yet their goals of destruction were secret in the sense that they were not divulged in full to the reading audience that flocked to their books. Were their goals illegal? Not in the sense of official law in the courts of mankind, but such goals were certainly illicit in the sense of natural law fashioned by Nature’s God and decipherable by reason. So I think it is fair to say that the advocates of Cultural Marxism were engaging conspiratorially, just not the kind of conspiracy that prosecutors challenge in a courtroom.

Marxism Became User Friendly – and Triumphed

The end result of all this is that from 1920 to 1960, the revolution of Karl Marx was thoroughly redesigned and re-launched. As Jaeger’s film puts it, the Frankfurt School revolutionaries have given us “user friendly Marxism” instead of the draconian Gulag version of the USSR. This new user friendly version took over the intellectual youth of the 1960s and turned them upside down value-wise. These intellectuals now control and administer our schools, media, courts, and legislatures. The cultural Marxists adopted Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values,” in which the Mad Hatter’s world is instituted. Everything that previously was an evil now becomes a virtue while all the old virtues become evils. Individualism, self-reliance, property, profit, family, traditional marriage, fidelity to spouse, strength of will, personalhonor, rising through merit — all these integral pillars of our civilization become distinctive evils that oppress us as humans. They must be rooted out of our existence.

This was the purpose of the ideology of Cultural Marxism — to root out the fundamentals of Judeo-Christian civilization and the splendid Camelot of Freedom it had created in America from 1776 to 1913. What is horrifying is that it has been triumphant. Marx has not buried us in an economic sense as Khrushchev boasted he would; but Marx has buried us in a cultural sense. James Jaeger’s film demonstrates this in lucid fashion that is at once fascinating and abhorrent.

Can the Founding Fathers’ Vision Of America be Resurrected?

Can the traditional, American vision that the Founding Fathers forged from the works of Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, and Jefferson be saved? If it is to be saved, a very valuable tool for such salvation will be this elucidative [i.e. clearly set forth] film. It is a marvelous instrument to put into the hands of a teenager just entering college, or to show to apathetic neighbors who just can’t seem to understand why modernity is in such shambles. It is the kind of film that shakes one up. It sends lightning bolts of insight into the viewer’s mind.

The struggle patriots now face is titanic. It will require a Herculean effort to win, and the struggle is not relegated solely to Americans. All those throughout the West who love freedom and the resplendent values upon which it stands are inescapably drawn into this conflict whether they realize it or not.

We are, all of us, confronted with a dreadful future because of the immense evil and falsity of past thinkers such as Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, and Lukacs. The only alternative to engaging their progeny in battle is to let these destroyers of our culture win by default — which is utterly unacceptable. “Cultural Marxism: The Corruption of America” is a powerful arrow in the quiver of liberty. It needs to be viewed by patriots everywhere and then shared with friends and neighbors throughout one’s circle of influence.

*http://thedailybell.com/1240/Nelson-Hultberg-Cultural-Marxism-The-Corruption-of-America.html (In addition to Patrick Buchanan, also featured in the film are other conservative / libertarian stalwarts of the socio-political scene in America such as Congressman Ron Paul, G. Edward Griffin, Edwin Vieira, and Ted Baehr. You can buy the video at: http://www.CulturalMarxism.org. James Jaeger’s MatrixxEntertainment Corp., the producer of the film, has been engaged in fighting collectivism [i.e. a form of communism based on the writings of Marx and Lenin] in America for many years now by taking on the liberals in Hollywood, in Washington, and on Wall Street.)

Editor’s Note:
- The above article consists of reformatted edited excerpts from the original for the sake of brevity, clarity and to ensure a fast and easy read. The author’s views and conclusions are unaltered.
- Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

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GORDON DUFF AND ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE: BIN LADEN’S DEATH AND PERCEPTIONS OF THE PRESS

July 27, 2010 posted by Gordon Duff

Commentary: Elvis bin Laden  (and editorial response from Veterans Today)

By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE FOR UPI AND GORDON DUFF FOR VETERANS TODAY

“WASHINGTON, July 26 (UPI) — The “Veterans Today” Network, a one-man show on the Internet created and run by Gordon Duff, a 100 percent disabled Marine Vietnam veteran, states flatly that 9/11 was a CIA/Mossad conspiracy and that Osama bin Laden wasn’t involved and died in 2001.This can easily be dismissed as yet another example of deliberately disseminated disinformation riddled with intentionally false or inaccurate data designed to confuse the adversary. But some key intelligence officials are taking bin Laden’s reported demise seriously.  CIA Director Leon Panetta said in early July that the intelligence agency hadn’t been able to positively confirm any specific information on the uber-terrorist since “late 2001.” And all those audio and video tapes broadcast by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera global television network? Clever Israeli forgeries, says Duff.”

Arnaud,

Thank you for you semi-kind words though only roughly accurate in some ways and less accurate in others.  Please note that I have never considered the “Bin Laden Studios” forgeries as “clever.”  Considering the thousands who have died because of them, terms like “tragic” apply but, from a technical standpoint, “inane” or “amateurish” is more accurate.

Arnaud, yes, you are right.  I killed Osama bin Laden.  Too many Americans had died hunting a ghost.  It had to stop, the Bush era “Where’s Waldo” game, branding a phony terrorist mastermind for the lazy media hacks had destroyed too many American families.  As Wiki-Leaks has pointed out, those drone attacks, some supposedly chasing bin Laden, are responsible for more than a bit of “collateral damage,” the term we now apply to children we kill out of carelessness and intolerance.

I am hardly the founder of Veterans Today. Our editorial staff includes Jeff Gates, Dr. Alan Sabrosky, Colonel Eugene Khruschev, Major Bobby Hanifin, Mike Leon, Khalil Nouri, Major Denise Nichols, Colonel James Hanke, Raja Mujtaba, Jim W. Dean, Carol Duff and John Allen. We have over 30 active staff writers and over a dozen guest writers including your good friends Lt. General Hamid Gul, Admiral Sirohey, General Beg and all those other Pakistanis you write about.

We provide a home for those willing to answer to the truth only and not spend their lives as lapdogs to the corporations that now control 95% of the major media outlets, dictating fact into fiction and myth into disinformation for public consumption.

I am far from our most popular writer. I am surrounded by people with genuine talent, something I lack.

The idea that you dismiss Israel’s role in everything on a regular basis is an indication of how ill informed you are. I am certain that you, of all people, have a detailed and accurate knowlege of Israeli history but I am equally certain that you are unfamiliar with much of the subtext.

We would gladly help you in this area.

You are talking to people here, many of whom have fought in the wars you write about. When I sit and talk to my friend Hamid Gul, among others, we share some things in common you may not.  We are patriots and nationalists, hardly neutral.  Gul sides with Pakistan.  I support the United States.

Some on our staff, particularly those from Afghanistan, are deeply suspicious of Gul. I appreciate his intelligence and enjoy his company.  History will tell, if we live long enough to have a history.

You are certainly right to, finally, so many years later, catch on that bin Laden has gone the way of Elvis. You could also start catching on about the Indo-Israeli nexus in Afghanistan, the role of the CIA in drug running there or the long history of false flag operations our Israeli friends have been involved in and still are.

Jeff Gates will gladly brief you on Israel and get you a copy of his book. Col. Khrushchev will glady brief you on CIA drug running in Afghanistan. I can arrange for you to discuss Hamid Gul’s personal proclivities with him if you wish.

Alan Sabrosky can tell you why he believes Israel is responsible for 9/11. Jim Hanke, former attache to Israel can do the same. Not everyone is terrified of AIPAC and the ADL or having their tea poisoned.

Phillip Tourney can tell you what it was like to be on the USS Liberty, napalmed and strafed by Israelis and spending years hearing it lied about. He is one of my friends also.

Ken O’Keefe can tell you about the attack on the Mavi Marmara. First person accounts are so much more “journalistic” than press releases. Ken is a friend also.

Khalil Nouri can tell you about Afghanistan and the reality of Karzai’s rule.  I hope you are following his work.

Admiral Sirohey can tell you about America’s rendition program and Dr. Aafia, kidnapped, tortured and then convicted in at a rigged trial in an American court.

I am simply glad to see someone begin catching on. It would be better were you to examine what your own article means. If bin Laden is dead and Israel is keeping him alive, what does it mean?

I think you understand what it is like working on the “dark side” of journalism. As Oliver Stone recently mentioned, well, can we even discuss that. Mentioning that the media is controlled by Israeli’s with a proclivity for obfuscation can be dangerous to one’s career? Is this why you keep quiet on such things?

As for our readership, yes, we have 310,000 daily subscribers, thousand more each week at Veterans Today. As with your work, we have a few mirror sites. A quick scan of Google will reveal the numbers.  Our mirror subscribers take the numbers a bit further, so much so it is clear why I am being addressed today.  It is a reasonable guess that your article will receive much more readership here than elsewhere.  We are glad to include your voice with our own.

What we need to ask ourselves is why we do what we do? Is it worth turning down the free vacations to Israel, the fat jobs with defense contractors or suffering continual threats simply to tell a truth so many others choose to ignore for a paycheck?  Why would so many writers choose to work for free?  Is it possible that the only real “free press” left is the one that doesn’t have to dance with the devil for pay?  Can you think of a commercial news outlet that isn’t stained by something much worse than bias, we aren’t just talking Fox News here?

Our primary job is to speak for 27 million veteran families in the United States and 1.4 million members of our military. We have a relatively large readership overseas, with most readers in Israel and India for some reason. Don’t ask me why.  Much of our expertise in these areas and others comes from our readers who communicate with us constantly.  This is the great advantage of the internet.  The email trails between our writers and editors include top members of our government and defense establishment on a daily basis.

What is “guff” to you is “gold” to them.  Even the Pentagon “Earlybird” is crippled by its dependence on the “useless news.”

Take our recent stories about missing nuclear weapons. You really think we aren’t well informed? I am certain you have wonderful contacts in the UK. Why would “people” want to make sure we knew that North Korea had exploded a nuclear weapon identical to the September 22, 1979 Indian Ocean test by South Africa and Israel?

What does this mean?

What does it have to do with the murder of Dr. David Kelly? How can a story this big be buried?

Why do Alan Hart and I see things the same way and you see them so differently? Do we have different agendas? Do we have different beliefs? Is one of us delusional? I am certainly less polite. You are, if anything, polite.

Are you too polite to the wrong people?

What I advocate is that you take a new look at people who see things differently than you do. You have already gone out on a limb over Osama bin Laden, though your story has failed to deal with the fallout of 9 years of lies.

If Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11, then why is the United States in Afghanistan at all? Why is nothing written of the $65 billion dollar drug industry? When Sibel Edmonds testified that the US was shipping narcotics on rendition flights, why was that not widely reported or investigated? She is on this email also. It seems my “one man show” has alot of co-conspirators.

If you want to look at something today, take a look at the Wiki-Leaks story. Why were the documents leaked? Who does it serve? What does the timing mean? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to pick up an agenda, one the MSM has missed. Wiki-Leaks got a ton of “chicken-feed” and some carefully crafted disinformation or this is what my “conspiratorial-self” is telling me.

Check.

It is also what members of the intelligence community will tell you. Why isn’t it being reported or even being suggested? I can’t imagine why the question isn’t even mentioned? Why has that kind of power? Is everyone that stupid? Consider the last question less than rhetorical.

Thus we head back to common ground, the death of Osama bin Laden, something I have discussed with many as you have. If you hear what I hear, and I suspect we talk to the same people, they have long been telling you they “suspect” bin Laden has been dead since 2001.

Carry this further to “dead in 2001? and “not involved in the planning and execution of 9/11.” Then I suggest you review the testimony before the 9/11 Commission, in particular that of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.  Most of the press missed it.  We didn’t.

You won’t need to ask about nano-thermite, mysterious WTC7 or the dancing Israelis. You won’t have to recheck those long supposedly “debunked” stories about how many Israeli passport holders missed work that day. Check the edits on Wikipedia last week. When Wikipedia showed no Israeli passport holders among the 9/11 dead, why was it altered?  If you aren’t aware, a staggering number of Israeli passport holders worked in the WTC.  Conspiracy theory or statistical anomaly? I don’t know anything of people being warned of 9/11, I only know that those who claimed there was no warning lied about the numbers.  We caught them.  As for the truth, we may never know the truth.  And so it goes.

Oh, sorry, this crosses the line into areas members of the press are destroyed over.

When John McCain ran for president, were you aware of his connections to organized crime or his presidential pardon? The recent exchange in Tempe (on video) between Jeff Gates and McCain is quite amusing. I would ask why it is never reported but I suggest you know. The last journalist who carried the story had his car blown up with him in it.

Again we return to Osama bin Laden. If he was dead and we knew, and I have been assured by “trusted sources” that we knew, why did we lie? Look at Afghanistan today and guess.

When America found it lost nearly $300 billion in Iraq, why was nothing done? When Iraq found their oil revenues more than a bit shy, ships loaded from the Ceyhan pipeline but nothing paid, why wasn’t it reported? There was a conference on this in Iraq. If you attended, did you note where I was sitting?

I assume we are all good people, or believe we are. Many of the finest people I have met in my life are on this email. We don’t always agree but all are friends.

Gordon Duff

Senior Editor

www.veteranstoday.com

Commentary: Elvis bin Laden

By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE

UPI Editor at Large

WASHINGTON, July 26 (UPI) — The “Veterans Today” Network, a one-man show on the Internet created and run by Gordon Duff, a 100 percent disabled Marine Vietnam veteran, states flatly that 9/11 was a CIA/Mossad conspiracy and that Osama bin Laden wasn’t involved and died in 2001.

This can easily be dismissed as yet another example of deliberately disseminated disinformation riddled with intentionally false or inaccurate data designed to confuse the adversary. But some key intelligence officials are taking bin Laden’s reported demise seriously.

CIA Director Leon Panetta said in early July that the intelligence agency hadn’t been able to positively confirm any specific information on the uber-terrorist since “late 2001.” And all those audio and video tapes broadcast by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera global television network? Clever Israeli forgeries, says Duff.

Many other voices in cyberspace claim the bin Laden myth is kept “alive” to justify the Afghan war and the global war on terror.

Angelo Codevilla, who teaches international relations at Boston University, is a former U.S. intelligence officer who studied Soviet disinformation techniques during the Cold War. He says a close examination of all the alleged bin Laden tapes, including the videos, have convinced him that Elvis Presley is more alive than Osama bin Laden.

By all accounts from those who knew him prior to 9/11, bin Laden was a deeply religious man and his early tapes after 9/11 were sprinkled with references to God and the Prophet Muhammad. Not so the later ones, which were subsequently analyzed by some experts who said they were professional forgeries.

The last time credible intercepts of bin Laden’s voice were made by overhead satellites in early December 2001 as he was escaping through the Tora Bora mountain range from Afghanistan to the sanctuary of Pakistan’s tribal areas.

The late Ajmal Khattak, the head of the Khattak tribe, who had half a million followers in the region, advised this reporter and his Pakistani assistant Ammar Turabi, and our multilingual security, to rent horses and proceed to an exit from Tora Bora in the Tirah Valley. We got there Dec. 11. Local villagers told us bin Laden and some 50 fighters had emerged Dec. 9 and were met by a convoy of utility vehicles that sped off in the direction Peshawar.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton evidently had more recent intelligence on her last visit to Pakistan July 21. She said she believes “elements” of the Pakistani government know bin Laden’s whereabouts. Those with the knowledge, she added, are in the “bowels” of the bureaucracy, not the “top levels of government.” She was clearly referring to some members of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Former ISI chief Gen. Hamid Gull is a personal friend of both bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and bin Laden’s no. 2, the Egyptian doctor Adman al-Zawahiri. Gul is an advocate of Pakistan’s politico-religious extremists and self-declared enemy of the United States.

There are “retired” ISI officers who still see bin Laden as a hero of the joint campaign against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Gul and his followers are also working to hasten an end to the U.S. presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

For the now growing number who believes bin Laden is dead, there is only one valid message from bin Laden. It was his open letter to the “Pakistani people,” on Al Jazeera, dated Sept. 24, 2001, 13 days after 9/11, in which he said:

– “I have already stated that I was not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States.

– “Neither had I any knowledge of these attacks nor do I consider the killing of innocent women and children and other humans, as an appreciable act … Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent … people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle.

– “All that is going in Palestine … is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel.”

Those who believe Osama Bin Laden is alive, and guilty of killing almost 3,000, quote his 2004 talk in which he said he thought of attacking U.S. skyscrapers when he saw Israeli aircraft bombing tower blocks in Lebanon in 1982.

“God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the twin towers,” he said then, “but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind.”

While Duff is mostly guff for those whose job is to keep tabs on all the twists and turns since 9/11, there is also the post 9/11 generation that doesn’t read newspapers or weekly magazines and gets its news fix online. The conspiracy theory coupled with disinformation from all sides makes for more interesting reading. It also gives youngsters a leg up on their “naive” elders.

Bin Laden was suffering from a kidney ailment and some experts say he died Dec. 13, four days after his escape from Tora Bora. Videos since then, neutral experts say, show bin Laden writing with his right hand but he is well known as left-handed. They also detected differences in the shape of the nose, skin color and speech.

Duff does commentary on his conspiracy theories for radio and TV news programs; his provocative articles are carried the world over and his Web site gets 22 million page hits a month. Some of his recent “Top 10 Stories of the Week”: “The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should Be Terminated”; “Does Event Honoring Israeli Spy Suggest Another Israeli Operation?”; “Wikipedia Revisionism to Israeli Pressure Groups.”

Duff’s “Corporate Profile” says, “We are a full service Network of 63 Web sites that service the U.S. Military Veterans’ Community,” which claims “over 310,000 plus unique visitors per month” and recently grew 39 percent in one month.

On the World Wide Web, there are no red lines between information, misinformation and disinformation.

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House Votes to Fund Obama’s War Surge

by Jim Abrams

WASHINGTON – Months behind schedule and stripped of money for domestic stimulus programs, legislation to fund the troop surge in Afghanistan was sent to President Barack Obama on Tuesday after disgruntled Democrats failed to block it.

Democratic leaders had to rely on Republican support to pass the almost $59 billion measure to fund Obama’s additional 30,000 troops in Afghanistan and other programs. The final vote was 308-114. Twelve Republicans and 102 Democrats opposed it. (How did your Congressman vote? full roll call here)

Pentagon leaders have warned that money to fund the troops could run out as early as Aug. 7, prompting the House, which is leaving at the end of the week for its August recess, to accept the pared-down Senate version of the legislation.

Last week the Senate rejected a larger, House-favored bill that would have included billions of dollars to help keep teachers on the job, provide aid for college students and enhance border security.

With the new war spending, the total amount of money that Congress has allotted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan surpasses $1 trillion.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., said he was torn between his obligation to bring the bill to the floor and his “profound skepticism” that the money would lead to a successful conclusion of the war in Afghanistan.

Even if there were greater confidence in the Afghan government, he said, “it would likely take so long it will obliterate our ability to make the kinds of long-term investments in our own country that are so desperately needed.”

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., cited recently released classified documents he said revealed some of the corruption and incompetence of the Afghanistan government.

“We’re told we can’t extend unemployment or pay to keep cops on the beat or teachers in the classroom, but we’re asked to borrow another $33 billion for nation-building in Afghanistan,” he said. “I think we need to do more nation-building here at home.”

Obama urged passage of the war-funding bill, saying in a Rose Garden statement that it was needed “to ensure that our troops have the resources they need and that we’re able to do what’s necessary for our national security.”

The president also addressed the unauthorized release of the sensitive documents – thousands of battlefield reports – saying he was concerned they “could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations.”

Republicans in turn chided Democrats for delaying for months before ending up with the same bill the Senate passed in May. “We’ve been through all of this wrangling, and for what? All we’ve created is more uncertainty for our troops in the field, more uncertainty for the Pentagon, and it’s all unnecessary,” House Republican leader John Boehner said at a news conference.

The president requested the emergency funding last February. After the Senate passed it in May, the House on July 1 approved its own version tacking on more than $20 billion in domestic spending. The Senate last week rejected that approach, falling 14 votes short of what was needed to break a GOP-led filibuster.

The bill includes more than $33.5 billion for the additional 30,000 troops in Afghanistan and to pay for other Pentagon operational expenses, $5.1 billion to replenish the Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief fund, $6.2 billion for State Department aid programs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Haiti, and $13.4 billion in benefits for Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange.

In addition to stripping out money for teachers and student aid, the final bill does not provide more than $4 billion requested by the administration to finance settlements of long-standing lawsuits against the government, including $1.2 billion to remedy discrimination by the Agriculture Department against black farmers and $3.4 billion for mismanaging Indian trust funds.

“We have a moral and legal responsibility to settle those claims,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., adding that he was “very disappointed” Senate Republicans did not go along with paying the settlements, although the costs would not have added to the federal deficit.

Associated Press writer Andrew Taylor contributed to this report.

© 2010 Associated Press

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