1) Ralph Nazareth thought you might like to see Keith Olberman tell
Mr. Bush he's a bold faced liar for 8 minutes. He's very good at it.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18847.htm
2) Sophie Barnes found that the former PM of Italy says 9/11 was an
inside deal. She writes: Attendez!
http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2007/12/former-president-of-italy-911-was.html
Cossiga's key statement is:
all democratic elements of America and Europe, and especially the
Italian center-left, are well aware that the disastrous attack was
planned and executed by the American CIA and the Mossad with help from
organized Zionists in order to accuse the Arab world and to induce the
Western powers to intervene in both Iraq and Afghanistan"
3) Carol Wolman of the New Broom Coalition (the idea being to sweep
Washington clean) has an interesting analysis of the deal the Dems
made with Bush in May 2006 to avoid impeachment. Harold Burbank adds
two comments. See 3 below.
4) If you've had suspicions about the Administration's human rights
interest in Darfur, 4 below is an argument that the purpose is to set
up a blackwater operation that will end up with Sudanese oil in the US
instead of China.
So here are the two long pieces:
3) Evidence for the deal:
In May 2006, the following happened:
Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers both published statements saying that
impeachment was off the table. At the time, they claimed this was
part of a campaign strategy.
The same month, McNerny, a PDA Democrat running against Richard Pombo
(the only PDA Democrat who won) reneged on his public pro-impeachment
stance, and asked our group Impeach Bush-Cheney -IBC- to take his name
off our literature. Two months earlier, he'd sent his campaign
manager to our meeting to ask us to telephone bank for him, and we
did- so we felt personally injured.
The same month, Barbara Lee, who had been supportive, stopped
returning IBC phone calls.
So obviously, some sort of deal taking impeachment off the table went
down in May 2006, and all the Democrats, even the best ones, toed the
party line.
After the election, which clearly was a mandate to impeach, Pelosi
immediately announced that impeachment was off the table, and Conyers
backed her up. So the deal of May 2006 was unaffected by the election
results.
I always wondered what Bush's chip was. Did he threaten ALL their
grandchildren? What did he have in his pocket that forced the Dems to
capitulate?
Biden gave us the answer. Bush has his finger on the button, and
could start WW III any time. The deal was he would refrain if
impeachment is off the table, but if hearings were started, guess
what!
So the threats have all been bluster, but they got so intense that
Biden blew the whistle. And notice, within a week, we find out that
Iran stopped their work toward nukes a couple of years ago, just as
the IAEC has been saying all along. So the war rhetoric has stopped.
I believe that NBC has done a lot to change the energy field so that
Biden could say what he said. Harold, your effort toward the Carter
center has had a good effect. The ether is mysterious, but it really
works.
Onward and upward!
Peace, Carol
This is helpful. I believe that you are correct, Carol. It saddens
me to see these elements. We will need proof beyond reasonable doubt
for impeachment to work. It is essential for government officials
who know the truth to tell it now. I keep asking people who offer me
information from off the record sources to find such people, but
nothing results. Will Biden offer proof of a deal he perhaps
designed? I am not sure. He might have to sacrifice his career to do
so, since he might face some kind of criminal conspiracy charge for
dealing with known criminals (Bushco). But, he would save his country
by holding hearings now and letting the chips fall. I hope his
imipeachment statement last week means he is considering that, even if
Bush does not bomb Iran. Full hearings on what Biden and others
plainly know about Bishco crimes are the only way to purge the
country of those who began the ongoing coup d'etat.
HB
Agreed, but there are many conscientious people working in government
at many levels who must see and know the details of Bushco crimes who
would come forward if they were protected for a stand on principle. I
hope we as a group find means to appeal to them. I keep hearing such
people are talking off the record to writers and scholars. The most
good they could do would be to come forward (at obvious risk). I do
not know what will motvate them, but assume more assurances of
protection and respect for their patriotism would be key. Congress is
not talking about this at all, which suggests they do not want the
public to know all of the facts. I keep asking my friends to persuade
so called witnesses to come forward.
HB
4) http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=453&Itemid=1
Ten Reasons Why "Save Darfur" is a PR Scam to Justify the Next US Oil
and Resource Wars in Africa
Tuesday, 27 November 2007
The star-studded hue and cry to "Save Darfur" and "stop the genocide"
has gained enormous traction in U.S. media along with bipartisan
support in Congress and the White House. But the Congo, with ten to
twenty times as many African dead over the same period is not called a
"genocide" and passes almost unnoticed. Sudan sits atop lakes of oil.
It has large supplies of uranium, and other minerals, significant
water resources, and a strategic location near still more African oil
and resources. The unasked question is whether the nation's Republican
and Dem ocratic foreign policy elite are using claims of genocide, and
appeals for "humanitarian intervention" to grease the way for the next
oil and resource wars on the African continent.
Top Ten Reasons to Suspect "Save Darfur" is a PR Scam to Justify US
Military Intervention in African
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
The regular manufacture and the constant maintenance of false
realities in the service of American empire is a core function of the
public relations profession and the corporate news media. Whether
it's fake news stories about wonder drugs and how toxic chemicals are
good for you, bribed commentators and journalists discoursing on the
benefits of No Child Left Behind, Hollywood stars advocating military
intervention to save African orphans, or slick propaganda campaigns
employing viral marketing techniques to reach out to college students,
bloggers, churches and ordinary citizens, it pays to take a close look
behi nd the facade.
Among the latest false realities being pushed upon the American people
are the simplistic pictures of Black vs. Arab genocide in Darfur, and
the proposed solution: a robust US-backed or US-led military
intervention in Western Sudan. Increasing scrutiny is being focused
upon the "Save Darfur" lobby and the Save Darfur Coalition; upon its
founders, its finances, its methods and motivations and its
truthfulness. In the spirit of furthering that examination we here
present ten reasons to suspect that the "Save Darfur" campaign is a PR
scam to justify US intervention in Africa.
1. It wouldn't be the first Big Lie our government and media elite
told us to justify a war.
Elders among us can recall the Tonkin Gulf Incident, which the US
government deliberately provoked to justify initiation of the war in
Vietnam. This rationale was quickly succeeded by the need to help the
struggling infant "democracy" in South Vietnam , and the still useful
"fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight 'em over here"
nonsense. More recently the bombings, invasions and occupations of
Afghanistan and Iraq have been variously explained by people on the
public payroll as necessary to "get Bin Laden" as revenge for 9-11, as
measures to take "the world's most dangerous weapons" from the hands
of "the world's most dangerous regimes", as measures to enable the
struggling Iraqi "democracy" stand on its own two feet, and necessary
because it's still better to "fight them over there so we don't have
to fight them here".
2. It wouldn't even be the first time the U.S. government and media
elite employed "genocide prevention" as a rationale for military
intervention in an oil-rich region.
The 1995 US and NATO military intervention in the former Yugoslavia
was supposedly a "peacekeeping" operation to stop a genocide. The
lasting result of that campaign is Camp Bondsteel, o ne of the largest
military bases on the planet. The U.S. is practically the only
country in the world that maintains military bases outside its own
borders. At just under a thousand acres, Camp Bondsteel offers the US
military the ability to pre-position large quantities of equipment and
supplies within striking distance of Caspian oil fields, pipeline
routes and relevant sea lanes. It is also widely believed to be the
site of one of the US's secret prison and torture facilities.
3. If stopping genocide in Africa really was on the agenda, why the
focus on Sudan with 200,000 to 400,000 dead rather than Congo with
five million dead?
"The notion that a quarter million Darfuri dead are a genocide and
five million dead Congolese are not is vicious and absurd," according
to Congolese activist Nita Evele. "What's happened and what is still
happening in Congo is not a tribal conflict and it's not a civil war.
It is an invasion. It is a g enocide with a death toll of five million,
twenty times that of Darfur, conducted for the purpose of plundering
Congolese mineral and natural resources."
More than anything else, the selective and cynical application of the
term "genocide" to Sudan, rather than to the Congo where ten to twenty
times as many Africans have been murdered reveals the depth of
hypocrisy around the "Save Darfur" movement. In the Congo, where
local gangsters, mercenaries and warlords along with invading armies
from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola engage in slaughter, mass rape
and regional depopulation on a scale that dwarfs anything happening in
Sudan, all the players eagerly compete to guarantee that the
extraction of vital coltan for Western computers and cell phones, the
export of uranium for Western reactors and nukes, along with diamonds,
gold, copper, timber and other Congolese resources continue
undisturbed.
Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young and George H.W. Bush both serve on
the board of Barrcik Gold, one of the largest and most active mining
concerns in war-torn Congo. Evidently, with profits from the brutal
extraction of Congolese wealth flowing to the West, there can be no
Congolese "genocide" worth noting, much less interfering with. For
their purposes, U.S. strategic planners may regard their Congolese
model as the ideal means of capturing African wealth at minimal cost
without the bother of official U.S. boots on the ground.
4. It's all about Sudanese oil.
Sudan, and the Darfur region in particular, sit atop a lake of oil.
But Sudanese oil fields are not being developed and drilled by Exxon
or Chevron or British Petroleum. Chinese banks, oil and construction
firms are making the loans, drilling the wells, laying the pipelines
to take Sudanese oil where they intend it to go, calling far too many
shots for a twenty-first century in which the U.S. aspires to control
the planet's energy supplies. A U.S. and NATO military intervention
will solve that problem for U.S. planners.
5. It's all about Sudanese uranium, gum arabic and other natural resources.
Uranium is vital to the nuclear weapons industry and an essential fuel
for nuclear reactors. Sudan possesses high quality deposits of
uranium. Gum arabic is an essential ingredient in pharmaceuticals,
candies and beverages like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and Sudanese exports
of this commodity are 80% of the world's supply. When comprehensive
U.S. sanctions against the Sudanese regime were being considered in
1997, industry lobbyists stepped up and secured an exemption in the
sanctions bill to guarantee their supplies of this valuable Sudanese
commodity. But an in-country U.S. and NATO military presence is a
more secure guarantee that the extraction of Sudanese resources, like
those of the Congo, flow westward to the U.S. and the European Union.
6. It 's all about Sudan's strategic location
Sudan sits opposite Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, where a large
fraction of the world's easily extracted oil will be for a few more
years. Darfur borders on Libya and Chad, with their own vast oil
resources, is within striking distance of West and Central Africa, and
is a likely pipeline route. The Nile River flows through Sudan before
reaching Egypt, and Southern Sudan has water resources of regional
significance too. With the creation of AFRICOM, the new Pentagon
command for the African continent, the U.S. has made open and explicit
its intention to plant a strategic footprint on the African continent.
From permanent Sudanese bases, the U.S. military could influence the
politics and ecocomies of Africa for a generation to come.
7. The backers and founders of the "Save Darfur" movement are the
well-connected and well-funded U.S. foreign policy elite.
According to a copyrighted Washington Post story this summer
"The "Save Darfur (Coalition) was created in 2005 by two groups
concerned about genocide in the African country - the American Jewish
World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum...
"The coalition has a staff of 30 with expertise in policy and public
relations. Its budget was about $15 million in the most recent fiscal
year...
"Save Darfur will not say exactly how much it has spent on its ads,
which this week have attempted to shame China, host of the 2008
Olympics, into easing its support for Sudan. But a coalition
spokeswoman said the amount is in the millions of dollars."
Though the "Save Darfur" PR campaign employs viral marketing
techniques, reaching out to college students, even to black bloggers,
it is not a grassroots affair, as were the movement against apartheid
and in support of African liberation movements in South Africa,
Namibia, Angola and Mozambique a generation ago. Top heav y with
evangelical Christians who preach the coming war for the end of the
world, and with elements known for their uncritical support of Israeli
rejectionism in the Middle East, the Save Darfur movement is clearly
an establishment affair, a propaganda campaign that spends millions of
dollars each month to manfacture consent for US military intervention
in Africa under the cloak of stopping or preventing genocide.
8. None of the funds raised by the "Save Darfur Coalition", the
flagship of the "Save Darfur Movement" go to help needy Africans on
the ground in Darfur, according to stories in both the Washington Post
and the New York Times.
"None of the money collected by Save Darfur goes to help the victims
and their families. Instead, the coalition pours its proceeds into
advocacy efforts that are primarily designed to persuade governments
to act."
9. "Save Darfur" partisans in the U.S. are not interested in
political negoti ations to end the conflict in Darfur
President Bush has openly and repeatedly attempted to throw monkey
wrenches at peace negotiations to end the war in Darfur. Even
pro-intervention scholars and humanitarian organizations active on the
ground have criticized the U.S. for endangering humanitarian relief
workers, and for effectively urging rebel parties in Darfur to refuse
peace talks and hold out for U.S. and NATO intervention on their
behalf.
The slick, well financed and nearly seamless PR campaign
simplistically depicts the conflict as strictly a racial affair, in
which Arabs, generally despised in the US media anyway, are
exterminating the black population of Sudan. In the make-believe
world it creates, there is no room for negotiation. But in fact, many
of Sudan's 'Arabs", even the Janjiweed, are also black. In any case,
they were armed and unleashed by a government which has the power to
disarm them if it chooses, and can also n egotiate in good faith if it
chooses. Negotiations are never a gurantee of anything, but refusal
to particpate in negotiations, as the U.S. appears to be urging the
rebels in Darfur to do, and as the "Save Darfur" PR campaign
justifies, avoids any path to a political settlement among Sudanese,
leaving open only the road of U.S and NATO military intervention.
10. Blackwater and other U.S. mercenary contractors, the unofficial
armed wings of the Republican party and the Pentagon are eagerly
pitching their services as part of the solution to the Darfur crisis.
"Chris Taylor, head of strategy for Blackwater, says his company has a
database of thousands of former police and military officers for
security assignments. He says Blackwater personnel could set up
perimeters and guard Darfurian villages and refugee camp in support of
the U.N. Blackwater officials say it would not take many men to fend
off the Janjaweed, a militia that is suppo rted by the Sudanese
government and attacks villages on camelback."
Apparently Blackwater doesn't need to come to the Congo, where hunger
and malnutrition, depopulation, mass rape and the disappearance of
schools, hospitals and civil society into vast law free zones ruled by
an ever-changing cast of African proxies (like the son of the late and
unlamented Idi Amin), all under a veil of complicit media silence
already constitute the perfect business-friendly environment for
siphoning off the vast wealth of that country at minimal cost.
Look for the adoption of the Congolese model across the wide areas of
Africa that U.S. strategic planners call "ungoverned spaces". Just
don't expect to see details on the evening news, or hear about them
from Oprah, George Clooney or Angelina Jolie.
Bruce Dixon can be contacted at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com
