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How They Get Away With It

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Walter Yannis [OP]

2005-08-17 07:58 | User Profile

[URL=http://www.amconmag.com/2005_07_04/article.html]The American Conservative[/URL] How They Get Away With It July 4, 2005 Issue

Three reasons Washington’s empire-builders don’t have to worry about ’60s-style dissent—not including the volunteer Army

by Scott McConnell

It was surprising how many people seemed to take genuine pleasure in British MP George Galloway’s contentious appearance before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. He was, after all, only a former left-Labor Party backbencher, a bit pink in his associations. And notwithstanding the vigor of his denials, the nature of his financial relationship to Saddam’s Oil for Food program was not entirely cleared up.

But it wasn’t Galloway’s protestations of innocence or his political character that made his turn noteworthy. What was striking was the sight of a man inside the Senate chamber using the full force of the English language to denounce the pack of lies behind President Bush’s Iraq policy. Galloway didn’t submit to the Democratic Party script and pretend that the war was due to a “massive intelligence failure,” that President Bush was somehow misinformed about Saddam’s weapons (or lack of them). He went instead for the jugular of the whole enterprise, reiterating what he had said well before the war—that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, no connection to 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda—and on these crucial points he was right and Sen. Norm Coleman and the other Republicans hoping to milk his testimony for electoral gain were dead wrong. The fruit of their error, Galloway continued, was 100,000 dead, including 1,600 Americans, and another 15,000 U.S. soldiers wounded, many of them permanently maimed—not to mention that the United States now has the worst international image in its history or that the volunteer army can no longer meet its recruiting goals and may have its back broken by the burdens of an extended Iraq occupation.

One never hears words like this spoken in the Senate. A search for successors to William Fulbright or Wayne Morse or Eugene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy yields only empty chairs. Big-name Democrats scramble for microphone time to denounce as “extremist” judges who are pro-life, but about the fomenters of a foreign policy that is manifestly extremist, they fall into timid silence. Howard Dean, the reputed mad dog of last year’s primaries, has turned toy poodle as head of Democratic National Committee, full of fighting barbs about Tom DeLay’s ethics but silent about a war that is hardly despised by his party’s big donors. It took a Brit to remind Americans turning on the evening news what it might be like to have an opposition party.

The failure of Americans to generate a politically significant domestic opposition to the war is now one of the most important developments in world politics. It means that the Bush administration can contemplate, without any fear of adverse domestic political consequences, expansion of its war to Syria or a large-scale bombing of Iran. The only constraints on its behavior are international.

In the year and a half after September 2001, observant outsiders could intuit much about the administration’s plans. It was clear that the neoconservatives around Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted war not only against Iraq but against six or seven countries in the Middle East. Details were filled in by memoirs such as Richard Clarke’s and the reporting of Bob Woodward. The recent publication of the so-called Downing Street memorandum, recording the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair’s top advisors in July 2002, confirms that Bush had already decided upon war and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” The British document indicates that Bush was lying outright when he told the Congress, in the fall of 2002, “I hope the use of force will not become necessary,” that “if Iraq is to avoid military action … it has the obligation to prove compliance with all the world’s demands,” and further, that the United States would go to war only “as a last resort.” The Iraqis at that point had no way to avoid Bush’s invasion, despite the fact that, in denying that they had any WMD, they were, in the words of U.S. weapons inspector David Kay, “telling the truth.”

Not only was the administration silent about the Blair memorandum, a silence that confirmed its contents, but the rest of the political class ignored it as well—save for Congressman John Conyers and a rump group in the House. There were no major antiwar demonstrations this spring, no campuses shut down by protest, no marches on Washington big enough to notice. In the capital itself, a journalist can go to cocktail parties full of foreign-policy establishment types, all prudently opposed to the war, their talk spiked by witticisms about the failings and hypocrisy of the Bushites. But none are public about it, and the realists now say that an American assault on Iran is a virtual certainty.

For someone who grew up in the 1960s, when protests against the Vietnam War dominated the culture, the question that raises its head almost every day is, “How do they get away with it?” Of course, the wars are different: Vietnam, however much Kennedy and Johnson erred in terms of overestimating what U.S. Armed Forces could accomplish in Southeast Asia, at least corresponded to a general strategy of containment and of maintaining the existing East-West boundaries. On the borders of the Cold War, divided states like Germany and Korea had become a kind of norm, and the United States was protecting in South Vietnam a weak and unstable status quo. Iraq was clearly something completely different: a war initiated under the falsehood that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11 and clearly in violation of international law.

In terms of the domestic climate, one key difference is the absence of a draft: we fight in Iraq with a volunteer Army, working-class in origin—men and women who may have signed up originally for good pay and benefits or the possibility of a college education they couldn’t otherwise afford. The professional class is hardly represented, the political class not at all. Unlike the 1960s, the children of the establishment don’t have to calculate how they will avoid service or maneuver to find safe spots in the National Guard. This changes the political atmosphere on campus considerably, where there is now as much a likelihood of unrest about something to do with gays and lesbians or the wages of janitors as an aggressive war.

But three other developments, of impact perhaps even greater than the absence of a draft, make a culture of protest harder to sustain than it was in the 1960s.

The first is a different, less industrial, more service-oriented and more globalized American economy, which produces as great a change in the way citizens think about economic life as it does in the goods they consume. The United States of the 1960s was “The Affluent Society” in the John Kenneth Galbraith phrase, and it was a secure affluence. Tens of millions of relatively well-compensated manufacturing jobs were available, it seemed, for anyone willing to take them. You were supposed to finish high school, and a diploma was necessary to get a secure job, but a college diploma was not yet what it is now—the required admission ticket for any kind of upward mobility. So there was no burden on parents to worry about how they were going to afford college for their children—at least in comparison to today. Similarly, no one seemed to worry about health insurance; medicine could obviously accomplish less, but the United States was in that interlude between the time when a family could get wiped out by the costs of a child’s long-term illness and the present, when the cost of health insurance and the fear of losing it weighs on the calculations of nearly everyone in the middle and lower classes.

In the 1960s, therefore, a huge proportion of Americans felt little fear of losing their jobs. In affluent America, one could “drop out” of the regular career train—many did for reasons more cultural than political—and then rejoin the rat race at the time and place of one’s choosing. Those who dropped out didn’t fear slipping into poverty. For those with reasonable modern-economy skills, lower-middle-class jobs were there for the asking—and there was no reserve army of desperate Latin Americans ready to work for almost any price. This was a political economy that not only allowed dissent, but indeed one that seemed to make it, in economic terms, nearly cost-free. The contrast with the present day—where one hears continually from those with a stake in the middle-class that dissent is something only the wealthy (or very poor) can afford—could not be more striking.

[B]A second reason for the low ebb of dissent is an attitudinal shift in the American Jewish community, particularly among those active politically, a shift exemplified by the rise of neoconservatism. I[/B]t is clear to anyone remotely interested in the question that the Old Left (the American Communist Party and its related organizations) was in great part Jewish, the New Left in great part the direct offspring of the Old. [B]Without the radical Jewish children of radical parents, there would have been no early SDS, no Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, no New York kids going South for Freedom Rides to turn the civil-rights movement into a matter of national conscience. [/B] By the late 1960s, the Left was more ethnically diverse, but young Jewish radicals had been its leavening agent.

The Jewish turn from the New Left, marked by such signposts as the collapse of the black-Jewish alliance in the late 1960s and the recognition that the Pentagon and an airlift ordered by Richard Nixon might have been necessary to Israel’s survival in October 1973, may have been a turnabout in the mentality of no more than a few hundred activists and polemicists, but the effect on the political tone of the country shouldn’t be underestimated. The political biographies of Marty Peretz and David Horowitz, two emblematic figures of this sea change, with a corresponding shift in the mentality of thousands of politically astute and engaged people in their cohort, had a huge impact on the country’s political culture.

Of course, it is true that most American Jews are still politically liberal and a majority now tell pollsters they oppose the Iraq War. But this is beside the point. Nowadays, political passion, engagement, and activism are as likely to be found on the Jewish Right—at least a Right favoring a pro-war, pro-imperialist (and very pro-Israel) foreign policy—as they are on the Left. Nothing could be more different from 1968.

A third way in which the America is a very different country today can be traced to the political transformation of American Protestantism. In his outstanding book The New American Militarism, Andrew Bacevich describes how evangelicals—who once were both politically quiescent and skeptical of the culture that surrounded military life—came, in the wake of Vietnam, to embrace the military as a sort of bulwark against national moral decay. With the corresponding decline in political numbers and influence of the mainline Protestant churches, this increased energy on the evangelical Right changed dramatically the way most American Christians regard war. In the hands of evangelicals, Just War principles became, in Bacevich’s words, “not a series of stringent tests but a signal: not a red light, not even a flashing yellow, but a bright green that relieved the Bush administration of any obligation to weigh seriously the moral implications of when and where it employed coercion.”

And thus, in the developed world’s most devout country, Christian witness against war “became less effective than in countries thoroughly and probably irreversibly secularized.” Evangelicals have in great part transformed the Christian view of Just War into a crusade theory in which the United States is believed to embody God’s will and its enemies are “God’s enemies.”

For those yearning for a revival of a peace movement that might slow down this administration, there is nothing reassuring about this analysis. It is far from clear that even the revival of the draft could ignite the kind of campus protest that would make an impression on Congress and the administration. Where would the leaders of campus protest come from? For if they are less likely, given the rise of neoconservatism, to come from ranks of activist Jews, it is even more implausible to imagine them emerging from the remains of the WASP establishment, whose children are not the academic and social leaders on the nation’s elite campuses. It is perhaps only slightly more likely to come from the new Asian immigrant groups, who are generally still focused on professional advancement or purely ethnic concerns. And only the wooliest of neo-Marxist romantics can see it emerging from the poor or working classes.

In the absence of an antiwar movement or serious domestic political opposition, only the outside world can put the brakes on American policy—only when Bush’s war plans come up against foreign obstacles that produce a dramatic defeat or humiliation or generate a financial crisis that the administration can’t overcome. Barring that, the American future may be war for as long as anyone can foresee.

July 4, 2005 Issue

il ragno

2005-08-17 11:06 | User Profile

Cross-media ownership...ain't it wunnerful? The people in and out of govt who purport to speak for us view the naked emperor, daily, and continue to praise his tailor. And can't be persuaded to acknowledge that - as far as war and immigration are concerned - the Will of the People is in any way substantially different than the Administration press releases claim it is. Why should they? Demopublicans and Republicrats all agree that Mexicans are as good for you as anti-Semitism is bad.

And wait until European-style hate/thought crime legislation becomes law here - if you think "consent of the governed" is a hollow, corrupted concept now, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Back when the Judge Lefkow murders were grabbing nat'l headlines, I drew some ire here for basically opining good for her - serves her right!, and I added:

"The only reason America has six locks on the front door and Carr Brothers in every quadrant is not enough judges and politicians have been skewered on the knife-point of the 'diversity' they've shoved down the rest of our throats."

Add media figures and our executive elite to the above culprits in the above statement and you have the REAL explanation of How They Get Away With It. These are people almost completely insulated from the consequences of their venality and social engineering....when disastrous policies boomerang, they're way in the back and counting on the boomerang clocking us-not-them on its return path.

Short of experiencing the FEAR of the governed that comes with the sight of their own blood shocking them into awareness, why should any of these people budge one iota from Business As Usual? Patriotism? Don't make me laugh - these folks swear allegiance only to the rate of currency exchange and their own self-importance. Retribution at the ballot box? Meet the new boss; same as the old boss. The judgment of history? Well, that again is where cross-media ownership and information control comes in handy.

Without some old-fashioned Mussolini Justice meted out, we've got as much chance of righting the Western Ship of State as the mayor of Chicago would if he'd asked Capone to give back all the money and sin no more because, gosh-darn it, it's the right thing to do.

Walter Yannis

2005-08-17 11:45 | User Profile

[QUOTE=il ragno]Without some old-fashioned Mussolini Justice meted out, we've got as much chance of righting the Western Ship of State as the mayor of Chicago would if he'd asked Capone to give back all the money and sin no more because, gosh-darn it, it's the right thing to do. .[/QUOTE]

Brillant, Ragman.

We'll get Mussolini Justice when we get an American version of the Italian collapse after WWI.

No shitstorm, no reaction.

No reaction, no challenge to Jewish rule.

Sertorius

2005-08-17 12:26 | User Profile

Il Ragno,

I have always hoped that our "elites" of both parties would be hoisted by their own petard. They need to suffer first hand at the mess they have created. A case in point was a talkradio show host here in Atlanta (Neal Boortz) that used to practice diversity lite. He would go on about who would do the construction without illegals from Mexico and how Somalis were good for us because they were "capitalists". No, he "wasn't going to throw anyone out of the boat". (He'd rather it sink first than to have to deal with the insanity of his left-libertarianism.) Then, one day he started raising hell about illegals and why it is necessary to get them out of the country. I figured his change of heart resulted from finding out that he was indirectly paying for govt. services for them, i.e., emergencey room treatment, etc. or 9/11. It wasn't that which brought about a change of heart, it was something far worse and so appropriate for a person who worships materialism. In turns out that he went to an ATM in Atlanta and withdrew $300.00. He turned around and an illegal "Hispanic" removed the $300.00 from him. Since then, he has been raising hell about this and my comment to him was "you should have been raising hell about this 14 years ago, but, better late than never." Nothing like a good reality based education for fools.

I love stories like this and love to hear about people like this getting rolled. Now, if only the thugs of MS 13 would rampage through the editorial offices of the Wall Street Journal!

Kevin_O'Keeffe

2005-08-17 12:32 | User Profile

Walter posted a damn good article by Scott McConnell from [url=http://www.amconmag.com]The American Conservative[/url] and Your Local Spider Man posted a positively gifted reply. I merely note my approval, as there ain't a Hell of a lot more which need be added at this stage. We know the score, and I for one intend to dramatically increase my level of real world activism starting very shortly (not an off-the-cuff remark, but something I've been thinking about quite a bit ever since moving into far more comfortable quarters which include the spacious luxury of my own office). The reaction will come, and millions of innocent White women and children will die along with it. That's a Hell of a price to pay, so let's make really frigign' sure we take full advantage of it! After all, it IS coming, whether we choose to work like activist donkeys on speed, or whether we choose to wach T.V. Land while drinking $3 white zinfandel; we can seize fate, or it can seize us, and I suspect I'm not alone here in preferring the former.

Sieg Heil, Viva il Duce, Christ is Lord, The South Will Rise Again; whatever expands the size of our coalition, that's the slogan I'm inclined to use. I'll worry about ideological specifics once we've got Rumsfeld on bread & water!

Victory or Death: No Longer a Boastful Oath, but Rather a Simple Statement of Fact

Quantrill

2005-08-17 13:08 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Sertorius]It wasn't that which brought about a change of heart, it was something far worse and so appropriate for a person who worships materialism. In turns out that he went to an ATM in Atlanta and withdrew $300.00. He turned around and an illegal "Hispanic" removed the $300.00 from him. Since then, he has been raising hell about this and my comment to him was "you should have been raising hell about this 14 years ago, but, better late than never." Nothing like a good reality based education for fools.[/QUOTE] Sert, I had not heard that story about Boortz. You just completely made my day! I feel like cracking open a bottle of champagne right now (too bad its 9:00 AM). I can only hope the 'undocumented worker' gave Boortz a few well-placed kicks to the head and body while he was at it. :yes:

Sertorius

2005-08-17 18:48 | User Profile

Q,

Well, it is probably around 2:50 P.M. where you're at, so I think you can pop that cork. Or at least a cold beer. Anyway, I'm glad to see that this is one post where mentioning the hideous one gains your approval.

I think the robbery occured two years ago. It was around the time Schwarzenegger was running for governor. Boortz only brought this up six months ago. You know, he gets to jacking that jaw and sometimes lets slip things he wouldn't otherwise say. He was probably too embarrassed at the time after all the stupid comments he has made on immigration.

He didn't say whether he had any violence inflicted upon him. He claims the guy came running up and snatched the money from his hand, he, he. Too bad it wasn't a gang of these thugs. I can imagine this neocon talk radio version of "Dr. Zachery Smith" of Lost in Space" fame trying to pull that "we are all individuals" hyper libertarian nonsense with these animals and having to spend the next six months in the hospital. The thing I despise the most about these clowns is that they have a soapbox they should have used years ago to get folks raising hell about this, but chose to keep their mouths shut and do a disservice to the country.

weisbrot

2005-08-18 05:16 | User Profile

This week I've been traveling in the car some and have been improving my mind with doses of Boortz and Moikel Savage. Tuesday I heard a bright individual- who I imagined might be my compatriot Sertorius- question Boortz on how Iraq could be connected to "IslamoNazi terrorism". This guy was nailing Boortz on the secular Iraq question and on how Bin Laden hated Hussein when Boortz- of course- shut down the feed and started off on a rant about how his "readings" had provided "proof" of the terrorist connection. Including the famed "Indonesian" meeting between Al Queda operatives and Iraqi government officials (he was referring to the discredited Cheney/Chalabi claims of a Prague supersecretspy meeting) and what sounded like a reworking of the yellowcake claims. Amazing to think that millions could hear his mad rants and accept them as any sort of conservative or even libertarian representation.

Then Moikel claims throughout the last couple of evenings that liberal Democratic lawyers are to blame for the botched ID's of Atta and the other "IslamoNazis". Today he even featured the LtCol. claiming to be the stymied official fenced in by Clinton-era SOCOM lawyers- a real blabbermouth claiming to be active military, popping off about his plans to restart the supersecret datamining project Able Danger left off with- only YOU were the first to know, MoikelListener! As if any true active military asset could speak freely on national radio; it only confirms that Rumsfeld's defunded Pentagon propaganda unit still exists in some other form.

They get by the old fashioned way. It's the war of ideas being won in the churches and on the air waves. Any idea of weather conditions in Iceland for the next fifteen or so years...?

xmetalhead

2005-08-18 15:08 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]

The first is a different, less industrial, more service-oriented and more globalized American economy, which produces as great a change in the way citizens think about economic life as it does in the goods they consume. The United States of the 1960s was “The Affluent Society” in the John Kenneth Galbraith phrase, and it was a secure affluence. Tens of millions of relatively well-compensated manufacturing jobs were available, it seemed, for anyone willing to take them. You were supposed to finish high school, and a diploma was necessary to get a secure job, but a college diploma was not yet what it is now—the required admission ticket for any kind of upward mobility. So there was no burden on parents to worry about how they were going to afford college for their children—at least in comparison to today. Similarly, no one seemed to worry about health insurance; medicine could obviously accomplish less, but the United States was in that interlude between the time when a family could get wiped out by the costs of a child’s long-term illness and the present, when the cost of health insurance and the fear of losing it weighs on the calculations of nearly everyone in the middle and lower classes.

In the 1960s, therefore, a huge proportion of Americans felt little fear of losing their jobs. In affluent America, one could “drop out” of the regular career train—many did for reasons more cultural than political—and then rejoin the rat race at the time and place of one’s choosing. Those who dropped out didn’t fear slipping into poverty. For those with reasonable modern-economy skills, lower-middle-class jobs were there for the asking—and there was no reserve army of desperate Latin Americans ready to work for almost any price. This was a political economy that not only allowed dissent, but indeed one that seemed to make it, in economic terms, nearly cost-free. The contrast with the present day—where one hears continually from those with a stake in the middle-class that dissent is something only the wealthy (or very poor) can afford—could not be more striking. [/QUOTE]

Such a huge point by McConnel. There's no doubt that our Cultural Designers saw the freedom of the middle classes as an institution that had to be obliterated in order for their Satanic NWO to take hold. The Jews saw an enemy they couldn't refuse to make economic misery upon.

When the mortgage, car payment, school tuition (cuz pooblic skools suck), electric bill, cell phone bill, credit card bills are all DUE on the same day that your boss is giving you the cold shoulder and you're worried you're going to get canned......well, you know, politics is probably the last damn thing on your mind.

Easier to rah-rah-Amerika with the Saints then to protest with the Sinners over some Middle East policy nonsense.

il ragno

2005-08-18 15:49 | User Profile

[QUOTE]When the mortgage, car payment, school tuition (cuz pooblic skools suck), electric bill, cell phone bill, credit card bills are all DUE on the same day that your boss is giving you the cold shoulder and you're worried you're going to get canned......well, you know, politics is probably the last damn thing on your mind. [/QUOTE]

It's already underway. The lower middle class no longer exists. The upper middle class is thinning as the survivors move up into 'wealthy', and those culled fall a looooong way before landing. You're either making under 25 (often well under 25), or 75 and up. And everywhere you look - a Mex, a Hindu, or an Asiatic stands ready to do it for 50 cents on the dollar or less. And of course, the blacks continue to be the collective hole in the national bucket. If the friggin' Hmong end up in control of America a century from now, [I]you know who [/I] will still be crying "racism" with they hands out an' shit.

Welcome to Vichy America....where there's no government in exile, no allies on the horizon - and Tokyo Rosie and Lord Haw-Haw aren't just on the radio, they're majority stockholders of the stations.

edward gibbon

2005-08-18 15:59 | User Profile

[QUOTE=il ragno]It's already underway. [B]The lower middle class no longer exists[/B]. The upper middle class is thinning as the survivors move up into 'wealthy', and those culled fall a looooong way before landing. You're either making under 25 (often well under 25), or 75 and up. And everywhere you look - a Mex, a Hindu, or an Asiatic stands ready to do it for 50 cents on the dollar or less. And of course, the blacks continue to be the collective hole in the national bucket. If the friggin' Hmong end up in control of America a century from now, [I]you know who [/I] will still be crying "racism" with they hands out an' shit.

Welcome to Vichy America....where there's no government in exile, no allies on the horizon - and Tokyo Rosie and Lord Haw-Haw aren't just on the radio, they're majority stockholders of the stations.[/QUOTE]The largest class in numbers in America is the lower class who think they are middle class. Taint so.

Stanley

2005-08-18 16:50 | User Profile

An astonishingly frank discussion of the Jewish influence on our society and its consequences. Both the left and the right seem willing to speak out loud now, a very good sign.> one hears continually from those with a stake in the middle-class that dissent is something only the wealthy (or very poor) can afford LaBelleDame once pointed out that revolutions are driven by those who have lost their stake in society. Wait until these people are ex-middle class.> the realists now say that an American assault on Iran is a virtual certainty Worse is better, and our rulers are serving up heaping helpings of worse. Now we need a draft.

Walter Yannis

2005-08-18 18:22 | User Profile

[QUOTE=il ragno]You're either making under 25 (often well under 25), or 75 and up. .[/QUOTE]

That's exactly right, which is why it's so vital for every white man with a good IQ gets a college degree and moves up as high and inside as he can. We all need to do this in order to position ourselves to help our less fortunate kin.

P.S. - I love your signature! Another great Wood Man line. I recently bought Casino Royale on DVD, haven't seen it in probably 30 years. I do remember laughing my arse off at his Jewish Dweeb character. He really was funny back then before he started taking himself too seriously. I think that his bit in Sleeper where he disguises himself as a robot and gets stoned on the "orb" has to be one of the best slapstick schticks since Buster Keaton.

Walter Yannis

2005-08-18 18:28 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Stanley]Worse is better, and our rulers are serving up heaping helpings of worse. Now we need a draft. .[/QUOTE]

You're a man after my own heart, Stanley.

On to Teheran!

il ragno

2005-08-18 19:33 | User Profile

I love your signature! Another great Wood Man line.

It's from DECONSTRUCTING HARRY, and I was torn between that one and a few other corkers from it, including these two great exchanges, both delivered to Eric Bogosian as his annoyingly ultraJewish brother-in-law:

Bogosian: Go ahead, tell me again how I'm a paranoid Jew. Woody: You're the opposite of a paranoid. I think you go around with the insane delusion that people like you.

Bogosian: Do you care even about the holocaust, or do you think it never happened? Woody: Not only do I know that we lost 6 million, but the scary thing is that records are made to be broken.

Walter Yannis

2005-08-18 19:39 | User Profile

[QUOTE=il ragno]I love your signature! Another great Wood Man line.

It's from DECONSTRUCTING HARRY, and I was torn between that one and a few other corkers from it, including these two great exchanges, both delivered to Eric Bogosian as his annoyingly ultraJewish brother-in-law:

Bogosian: Go ahead, tell me again how I'm a paranoid Jew. Woody: You're the opposite of a paranoid. I think you go around with the insane delusion that people like you.

Bogosian: Do you care even about the holocaust, or do you think it never happened? Woody: Not only do I know that we lost 6 million, but the scary thing is that records are made to be broken.[/QUOTE]

I liked Deconstructing Harry. He really slams his own Tribe in there big time. I can't imagine what came over him.

BTW, I don't think Bogosian is Jewish, but rather Armenian, although I could be wrong. Bogosian is certainly an Armenian name. He definitely looks Jewish though, as many Armenians do. I checked on that online genetic distance calculator thingy, and Jews and Armenias (along with Kurds, Greeks and Turks) for a nice tight genetic grouping.

Sertorius

2005-08-19 10:33 | User Profile

Weisbrot,

Boortz is either getting senile or he is having problems keeping track of his lies. I wish I had been the caller. The last time I called was when Boortz was complaining about the Germans and French for not sending troops to Iraq. I told his screener I wanted to ask Neal why we couldn't get "our friends, the Israelis" to send three divisions. She thank me for calling and hung up.

The story about "Able Danger" is more interesting and I need more information on this. There may actually be something to this. I've heard this LTC and it sounds plausible for we all know that Clinton was incompetent, yet, there is one question I'd like to ask him. Did he take this information to the Bush Administration? And if he did, what did they do with it? So far I've haven't heard any of the talkradio idiots ask this question and I don't expect them to ask it.

I'm curious about the timing of this. Did this come out because of the Jewgate/Plamegate scandal in an attempt to suppress these stories? The Jewgate trail isn't due to start until September. One opinion I've heard is that this is directed against the Clinton Administration as being primarily responsible for 9/11. I don't think that is the case for they could have went after Sandy Berger when he was caught pifering secret material from the National Archives. Too early to tell with this one.

weisbrot

2005-08-19 10:57 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Sertorius]Weisbrot,

The story about "Able Danger" is more interesting and I need more information on this. There may actually be something to this. I've heard this LTC and it sounds plausible for we all know that Clinton was incompetent, yet, there is one question I'd like to ask him. Did he take this information to the Bush Administration? And if he did, what did they do with it? So far I've haven't heard any of the talkradio idiots ask this question and I don't expect them to ask it.

I'm curious about the timing of this. Did this come out because of the Jewgate/Plamegate scandal in an attempt to suppress these stories? The Jewgate trail isn't due to start until September. One opinion I've heard is that this is directed against the Clinton Administration as being primarily responsible for 9/11. I don't think that is the case for they could have went after Sandy Berger when he was caught pifering secret material from the National Archives. Too early to tell with this one.[/QUOTE]

LTC Shaffer is for real- but he's apparently on a scripted mission. Weldon is riding this story for all its worth, with his book and his stated ambition of establishing a centralized intelligence agency that would supercede the NCTC, securing Weldon position and power or whatever his reward would be. I agree that the goal seems to be spinning the blame onto the Clinton administration. Shaffer agreed with Savage that the problem originated with "liberal lawyers" as opposed to foreign policy. The essay below goes into some other implications, stopping just short of making accusations of a conspiracy that would have span both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

It's enough to make you start wondering about Mega again...

[url]http://rawstory.com/news/2005/WhitewashingProtection_of__0818.html[/url] [B]Whitewashing the Protection of Terrorists on US Soil [/B] Nafeez Ahmed

Exclusive: Well known Mid-East expert questions omission of "Able Danger" by 9/11 Commission

Exactly one year before 9/11, a highly classified US Army intelligence unit known as "Able Danger" had already pinpointed four of the 9/11 hijackers. Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid Almidhar, and Nawaf Alhamzi were identified as members of a "Brooklyn" al-Qaeda cell on a detailed chart that included visa photographs. The Army unit was established by the Special Operations Command in 1999 by Gen. Hugh Shelton, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The startling revelations first surfaced in late June, from Congressman. Curt Weldon (R-PA), Vice-Chairman of the House Homeland Security and Armed Services Committees, citing at least three active military and intelligence officials. The story eventually made the New York Times headlines, thrice, the latest report on Tuesday quoting Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who was a liaison with the Able Danger unit at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Lt. Col. Shaffer gave on the record confirmation of the details revealed by Rep. Weldon, but further stated that Able Danger had scheduled three meetings in the summer of 2000 with the FBI's Washington field office to share the findings and recommend to "take out that cell."

Those meetings were unilaterally cancelled by military lawyers at the Defense Department's Special Operations Command, and information sharing was blocked.

The stated reason? Apparently, Atta and his comrades were in the US on "valid entry visas" - the law, it was claimed, bars US citizens and green-card holders from being targeted for intelligence-collection operations. Although, this does not include visa holders, the law supposedly provided a disincentive for sharing intelligence with law enforcement. "We were directed to take those 3M yellow stickers and place them over the faces of Atta and the other terrorists and pretend they didn't exist," said another defense intelligence official.

Terrorists don't get and keep visas:

The explanation was disingenuous. "Mohammed Atta and his terrorist cohorts were clearly and factually established as Al-Qaeda functionaries of a foreign government [Taliban of Afghanistan] with Al-Qaeda itself being a Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (DFTO)", noted Sean Osborne of the US Army's Program Executive Office - Command, Control, Communications Tactical (PEOC3T) within the Special Project Office (SPO).

"Designated terrorist's do not receive and retain 'green card' status, and any card so previously attained would have to be considered a priori fraudulent, null and void," Osborne stated.

In fact, there are 13 exceptions within Executive Order 12333 allowing intelligence-collection on US Persons and bona-fide green card-holders, including for Counterintelligence purposes, allowing for collection of against individuals reasonably suspected of involvement in international terrorism, as well as their associates.

Atta:

But all this is academic. Mohamed Atta was never a green-card holder. Worse still, he never had a valid entry visa. On the contrary, in January 2001, Atta was permitted reentry into the United States after a trip to Germany, despite being in violation of his visa status. He had landed in Miami on January 10 on a flight from Madrid on a tourist visa - yet he had told immigration inspectors that he was taking flying lessons in the US, for which an M-1 student visa is strictly required.

Essentially, Atta had entered the US three times on a tourist visa in 2001, although INS officials knew the visa had expired in 2000, and Atta had violated its terms by taking flight lessons. So Atta was illegal - and the Defense Department lawyers who blocked the FBI from accessing the Able Danger data were lying. So the question remains: why was the Able Danger report prevented by the DoD from circulating in the US intelligence community?

According to the 9/11 Commission report, Atta was not identified as a potential terrorist until after 9/11, and Almidhar and Alhamzi were only identified in late 1999 and 2000 by the CIA - but the FBI was apparently only notified in summer 2001. The Able Danger story demonstrates that the 9/11 Commission's narrative is false - reliable information that four al-Qaeda members were operating within a cell to plan a terrorist attack was available, but its circulation was inexplicably obstructed by the government.

The Able Danger story, however, is only the latest confirmation that the intelligence community had extensive information on many of the 9/11 hijackers years prior to 9/11.

The Miami Herald (6/7/02) reported that the National Security Agency had "monitored telephone conversations before Sept. 11 between the suspected commander of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and the alleged chief hijacker." Anonymous NSA officials told the Herald that "the conversations between Khalid Shaikh Mohammed" - the operational mastermind of 9/11 - "and Mohamed Atta were intercepted", while Atta was in the US. How much was gleaned about the plot was not disclosed. But The Independent (9/15/02) reported that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed "received a telephone call from Mohammed Atta on 10 September", in which he gave Atta "the final approval to launch the strikes." Like Able Danger, these facts were also apparently considered "historically irrelevant" by the Commission.

Las Vegas is not a Muslim destination:

Other facts were also considered irrelevant by the Commission. For instance, the fact that numerous reports in the San Francisco Chronicle, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Los Angeles Times, and numerous other sources, confirmed from multiple eyewitnesses that the hijackers, including Mohamed Atta, had "engaged in some decidedly un-Islamic sampling of prohibited pleasures in America's reputed capital of moral corrosion," in Las Vegas and elsewhere - behavior that just doesn't quite fit with al-Qaeda's puritan salafist ideology of strict adherence to Islamic tenets.

More Terrorist Training:

Or the reports that emerged in Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the New York Times that at least "five of the alleged hijackers received training in the 1990s at secure US military installations", including Mohamed Atta who attended International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

The US Air Force later argued that they "might not" be the same persons, due to some "biographical discrepancies" - which of course were never revealed to the public. When Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) tried to investigate, shocked at the possibility that Pensacola Naval Air Station could have hosted and trained Saeed Alghamdi, Ahmed Alghamdi, among others, he was told by the FBI - after several weeks - that they were trying to work through something "complicated and difficult."

Daniel Hopsicker, a former Producer at PBS Wall Street Week and investigative report at NBC News, decided to investigate. After pressing an official at the Defense Department, he was finally told: "I do not have the authority to tell you who attended which schools" - in other words, terrorists did train at secure US military installations, but who trained where is none of our concern. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these people were, for reasons undisclosed, protected.

Attempts to silence Able Danger revelations:

Such facts have fallen into the memory hole. There is currently an active attempt to achieve the same results for the Able Danger revelations. The 9/11 Commission's attempts to explain its omission of the revelations from its final report were riddled with contradictions.

First the Commission completely denied any knowledge of Able Danger. Allegedly, the staff and panel members simply hadn't been told. When it became clear, from Weldon's military intelligence sources, that the Commission had been officially briefed on the Able Danger report, they relented, and claimed instead that they simply didn't take the material seriously, because it had already established that the hijackers had not been identified at that early time.

When this explanation started to falter, it was stated that the briefing made no mention at all of Mohamed Atta, and thus was not considered to be of value to the investigation.

The Whistleblower:

But Lt. Col. Shaffer has now come on public record confirming that he had personally "provided information about Able Danger and its identification of Mr. Atta in a private meeting in October 2003 with members of the Sept. 11 commission staff when they visited Afghanistan", according to the newspaper of record. Former Commissioners suddenly emerged to chorus the insistence that they had never been briefed so specifically about Able Danger, that the material was vague, and made no mention of Atta.

The backtracking and side-stepping of the now disbanded Commission hardly lends its position further credibility.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is author of four books, including:

The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001 Behind the War on Terror : Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq

He is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London, and a Doctoral Candidate in International Relations at the University of Sussex, Brighton.

Sertorius

2005-08-19 11:18 | User Profile

Interesting. Talkradio flakes like Limbaugh are still making the false claim that Atta was a green card holder. If they are trying to dump all of this on Clinton I have to think that they are trying to distract us from something else they are afraid we'll find out about. I have also heard the opinion that this is scripted.

I saw Curt Weldon on Meet the Press and he came off as a nut. He's pushing the same sort of garbage that Chalabi is infamous for.

I still want someone to ask this LTC if he took the information to the Bush gang. This is was immigration problem and it is not like that in seven months they couldn't find this guy.