← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Texas Dissident
Thread ID: 4039 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2002-12-16
2002-12-16 08:35 | User Profile
[url=http://pilger.carlton.com/print/124759]http://pilger.carlton.com/print/124759[/url]
by John Pilger
The threat posed by US terrorism to the security of nations and individuals was outlined in prophetic detail in a document written more than two years ago and disclosed only recently. What was needed for America to dominate much of humanity and the world's resources, it said, was "some catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the "new Pearl Harbor", described as "the opportunity of ages". The extremists who have since exploited 11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when far-right groups and "think-tanks" were established to avenge the American "defeat" in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial of a "peace dividend" following the cold war. The Project for the New American Century was formed, along with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others that have since merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush regime.
One of George W Bush's "thinkers" is Richard Perle. I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about "total war", I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America's "war on terror". "No stages," he said. "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
Perle is one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century, the PNAC. Other founders include Dick Cheney, now vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, I Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, William J Bennett, Reagan's education secretary, and Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan. These are the modern chartists of American terrorism. The PNAC's seminal report, Rebuilding America's Defences: strategy, forces and resources for a new century, was a blueprint of American aims in all but name. Two years ago it recommended an increase in arms-spending by $48bn so that Washington could "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars". This has happened. It said the United States should develop "bunker-buster" nuclear weapons and make "star wars" a national priority. This is happening. It said that, in the event of Bush taking power, Iraq should be a target. And so it is.
As for Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass destruction", these were dismissed, in so many words, as a convenient excuse, which it is. "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification," it says, "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." How has this grand strategy been implemented? A series of articles in the Washington Post, co-authored by Bob Woodward of Watergate fame and based on long interviews with senior members of the Bush administration, reveals how 11 September was manipulated.
On the morning of 12 September 2001, without any evidence of who the hijackers were, Rumsfeld demanded that the US attack Iraq. According to Woodward, Rumsfeld told a cabinet meeting that Iraq should be "a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism". Iraq was temporarily spared only because Colin Powell, the secretary of state, persuaded Bush that "public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible". Afghanistan was chosen as the softer option. If Jonathan Steele's estimate in the Guardian is correct, some 20,000 people in Afghanistan paid the price of this debate with their lives.
Time and again, 11 September is described as an "opportunity". In last April's New Yorker, the investigative reporter Nicholas Lemann wrote that Bush's most senior adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told him she had called together senior members of the National Security Council and asked them "to think about 'how do you capitalise on these opportunities'", which she compared with those of "1945 to 1947": the start of the cold war. Since 11 September, America has established bases at the gateways to all the major sources of fossil fuels, especially central Asia. The Unocal oil company is to build a pipeline across Afghanistan. Bush has scrapped the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, the war crimes provisions of the International Criminal Court and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. He has said he will use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states "if necessary". Under cover of propaganda about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the Bush regime is developing new weapons of mass destruction that undermine international treaties on biological and chemical warfare.
In the Los Angeles Times, the military analyst William Arkin describes a secret army set up by Donald Rumsfeld, similar to those run by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and which Congress outlawed. This "super-intelligence support activity" will bring together the "CIA and military covert action, information warfare, and deception". According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld, the new organisation, known by its Orwellian moniker as the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG, will provoke terrorist attacks which would then require "counter-attack" by the United States on countries "harbouring the terrorists".
In other words, innocent people will be killed by the United States. This is reminiscent of Operation Northwoods, the plan put to President Kennedy by his military chiefs for a phoney terrorist campaign - complete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans - as justification for an invasion of Cuba. Kennedy rejected it. He was assassinated a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but with resources undreamt of in 1963 and with no global rival to invite caution. You have to keep reminding yourself this is not fantasy: that truly dangerous men, such as Perle and Rumsfeld and Cheney, have power. The thread running through their ruminations is the importance of the media: "the prioritised task of bringing on board journalists of repute to accept our position".
"Our position" is code for lying. Certainly, as a journalist, I have never known official lying to be more pervasive than today. We may laugh at the vacuities in Tony Blair's "Iraq dossier" and Jack Straw's inept lie that Iraq has developed a nuclear bomb (which his minions rushed to "explain"). But the more insidious lies, justifying an unprovoked attack on Iraq and linking it to would-be terrorists who are said to lurk in every Tube station, are routinely channelled as news. They are not news; they are black propaganda.
This corruption makes journalists and broadcasters mere ventriloquists' dummies. An attack on a nation of 22 million suffering people is discussed by liberal commentators as if it were a subject at an academic seminar, at which pieces can be pushed around a map, as the old imperialists used to do.
The issue for these humanitarians is not primarily the brutality of modern imperial domination, but how "bad" Saddam Hussein is. There is no admission that their decision to join the war party further seals the fate of perhaps thousands of innocent Iraqis condemned to wait on America's international death row. Their doublethink will not work. You cannot support murderous piracy in the name of humanitarianism. Moreover, the extremes of American fundamentalism that we now face have been staring at us for too long for those of good heart and sense not to recognise them.
With thanks to Norm Dixon and Chris Floyd
2002-12-17 04:53 | User Profile
Originally posted by AntiYuppie@Dec 16 2002, 22:06 **On a related note, Justin Raimondo (according to an announcement at AntiWar.com) is currently working on a book about 9/11 and the Israel connection.
That the neoconservative wish for an Arab/Muslim "Pearl Harbor" finally came true seems quite eerie in retrospect. Somehow I suspect that it wasn't just the Israeli "art students" who were dancing with joy when the planes hit the towers, but also Richard Perle and his crew. At the very least they danced for joy in their minds, as did the whole Israeli lobby.**
I don't doubt that the real story may turn out to be identical to that of Pearl Harbor, where the commies also managed to snooker us into war. I also suspect that, just like with Pearl Harbor, respectable opinion in the U.S. will always try to cover things up.
[url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?act=ST&f=11&t=4761&h]The Pearl Harbor Deception[/url]
2002-12-27 20:43 | User Profile
RENSE.COM
America 'Pearl Harbored' Exclusive to American Free Press By Christopher Bollyn 12-27-2
Fanatical Warhawks Drafted Blueprint for Bloody U.S. World Domination Years Ago.
The cabal of war fanatics advising the White House secretly planned a "transformation" of defense policy years ago, calling for war against Iraq and huge increases in military spending. A "catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor"-was seen as necessary to bring this about.
The huge increases in U.S. military spending that have occurred since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were planned before President George W. Bush was elected by the same men who are pushing the administration's "war on terrorism" and the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Billions of dollars in additional defense spending are but the first step in the group's long-term plan to transform the U.S. military into a global army enforcing a terroristic and bloody Pax Americana around the world.
A neo-conservative Washington-based organization known as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), funded by three foundations closely tied to Persian Gulf oil and weapons and defense industries, drafted the war plan for U.S. global domination through military power.
One of the organization's documents clearly shows that Bush and his most senior cabinet members had already planned an attack on Iraq before he took power in January 2001.
The PNAC was founded in the spring of 1997 by the well-known Zionist neo-conservatives Robert Kagan and William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.
The PNAC is part of the New Citizenship Project, whose chairman is also William Kristol, and is described as "a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership."
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz signed a Statement of Principles of the PNAC on June 3, 1997, along with many of the other current members of Bush's "war cabinet."
Wolfowitz was one of the directors of PNAC until he joined the Bush administration.
The group's essential demand was for hefty increases in defense spending. "We need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future," the statement's first principle reads.
The increase in defense spending is to bring about two of the other principles: "to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values" and "to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles."
A subsequent PNAC plan entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century," reveals that the current members of Bush's cabinet had already planned, before the 2000 presidential election, to take military control of the Gulf region whether Saddam Hussein is in power or not.
The 90-page PNAC document from September 2000 says: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. 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."
"Even should Saddam pass from the scene," the plan says U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain, despite domestic opposition in the Gulf states to the permanent stationing of U.S. troops. Iran, it says, "may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests as Iraq has."
A "core mission" for the transformed U.S. military is to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars," according to the PNAC.
The strategic "transformation" of the U.S. military into an imperialistic force of global domination would require a huge increase in defense spending to "a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually," the PNAC plan said.
"The process of transformation," the plan said, "is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event-like a new Pearl Harbor."
American Free Press asked Christopher Maletz, assistant director of the PNAC about what was meant by the need for "a new Pearl Harbor."
"They needed more money to up the defense budget for raises, new arms, and future capabilities," Maletz said. "Without some disaster or catastrophic event" neither the politicians nor the military would have approved, Maletz said.
The "new Pearl Harbor," in the form of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, provided the necessary catalyst to put the global war plan into effect. Congress quickly allocated $40 billion to fund the "war on terrorism" shortly after 9-11.
A Pentagon spokesman told AFP that $17.5 billion of that initial allocation went to defense.
The U.S. defense budget for 2002, including a $14.5 billion supplement, came to $345.7 billion, a nearly 12 percent increase over the 2001 defense budget.
Similar significant increases in defense spending are planned for 2003 (to $365 billion) and 2004 (to at least $378 billion) in line with the PNAC plan.
Veteran journalist John Pilger recently wrote about one of PNAC's founding members, Richard Perle: "I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan, and when he spoke about 'total war,' I mistakenly dismissed him as mad," Pilger wrote. "He recently used the term again in describing America's 'war on terror.' 'No stages,' he said. 'This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now.' "
"This is a blueprint for U.S. world domination-a new world order of their making," Tam Dalyell, British parliamentarian and critic of the war policy from the Labor Party said. "These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world.
"This is garbage from think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks," Dalyell said, "men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war.
[url=http://www.americanfreepress.net/12_24_02/Ameri]http://www.americanfreepress.net/12_24_02/Ameri[/url]
2002-12-27 22:19 | User Profile
We American taxpayers are simply paying with our dollars and with our soldiers blood for the expansion of a Greater Israel. :(