Love for Life

Government Bastardry
by Nutech2000.com
Government Bastardry

Sorry if the name is a bit offensive. It is not part of my usual vocabulary but what else can you call what is going on in Australia at present and for that matter the world.

Most people now sense that something is very wrong in the State of OZ. Perhaps they can't put their finger on it, but something is very wrong.

It is indeed very reassuring to see the massive turn out at the Economic Forum and WTO demonstrations. Sure there maybe a rat bag element at these demonstrations but most were ordinary folk who have had enough of the insane policies that are destroying our Industries and our Kids futures. It is time we reclaimed our sovereignty and developed our Trade on the basis of need. There is far too much waste in our production system and eventually something has to give. .
There is so much information available today but I will try to bring together some key issues and information, which I hope, will be useful an interesting to you. One thing I would like is a list of all the e-mail addresses of every politician so as issues come up we can hammer the poly to really let them know what we think. I may put together a page with all their office addresses so you can take pen to paper. Remember if they get 50 letters on a subject they shake in their boots. The only thing that ultimately matters to them is the next election and dare I be cynical, all the lurks and perks of office. It disgusts me that these traitors ( as they are in many cases ) are supposed to be in service to their country and electorate and they scoop off the cream becoming millionaires with their massive super schemes etc. This is a great reward for selling our country to the foreign corporations. Well lets hope that You Aussies start to Stand Up because if we don't we are headed for a Dark Age and third world status 'a la Banna Republic'. It is getting pretty damn close to that now. Hope you find the info and links of benefit.

ARTICLE INDEX (note: All articles and links are cut & pasted below - Arthur Cristian - Love For Life)

REVIEW OF ADDICTED TO WAR BY JOEL ANDREAS

Why the US can’t kick militarism

“We must march from ocean to ocean, ….It is the destiny of the white race.” …Representative Giles of Maryland.

The leaders of the new independent colonies believed that were preordained to rule all of North America. This was so obvious to them that they called it Manifest De.stiny. This manifest destiny soon led to genocidal wars against the Native American peoples. The U.S. Army ruthlessly seized their land, driving them west and slaughtering those who resisted and they were confined to reservations........... : http://www.nutech2000.com/webtext/govbas/addictedtowar.html

COUP D'ETAT: The Real Reason Tenet and Pavitt Resigned from the CIA on June 3rd and 4th Bush, Cheney Indictments in Plame Case Looming by Michael C. Ruppert additional reporting by Wayne Madsen from Washington.

JUNE 8, 2004 1600 PDT (FTW) - Why did DCI George Tenet suddenly resign on June 3rd, only to be followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)?

The real reasons, contrary to the saturation spin being put out by major news outlets, have nothing to do with Tenet's role as taking the fall for alleged 9/11 and Iraqi intelligence "failures" before the upcoming presidential election.

Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d'etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown. READ THE ARTICLE: http://www.nutech2000.com/webtext/govbas/bushgone.html

The president's real goal in Iraq - By JAY BOOKMAN - The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bushadministration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence.The pieces just didn't fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing. In recent days, those missing pieces have finally begun to fall into place....READ ON HERE:

A JUST WAR A brilliant presentation on this bogus assumption that there is such a thing as a just war which is now being progagated by the u.s.a. A great read. Transcript from the abc Encounter program March 2003. You can log on to the abc Radio web site and listen to it on line if you wish: http://www.nutech2000.com/webtext/govbas/justwarmarch.html

THE HOSSER FILES - Here is a real eye opener about corruption at all levels. A real good read on what is going on right under our eyes but as you can see the authorities are trying to ban these books. You be the judge. Have a good read: http://www.nutech2000.com/webtext/govbas/hossersites.html

OR ARE WE GOING TO WAR? - By: Tamim Ansary - I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing. .... : http://www.nutech2000.com/webtext/govbas/atwar.html

DROP THE DEBT -BACKGROUND BRIEFING FORM AUSTRALIAN ABC - A brilliant run down on how the World Bank and IMF have produced much of the world's poverty and we in Australia are implementing the same insane policies that have driven many other countries to Living Hell. If you did not understand the mechanics of how this EVIL SYSTEM works, then this program will make it crystal clear. You can print out the transcripts or purchase the tape: http://www.nutech2000.com/webtext/govbas/bbdebt.html

CHEM TRAILS OVER AMERICA - Some amazing facts about Chem Trails and other intrigues. I have some photos of a plane going over Melbourne that look very much like Chem Trails, but we have no proof they are. I will post thes photos up when available: http://www.nutech2000.com/webtext/govbas/chemtrail/chemusa.htm

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REVIEW OF ADDICTED TO WAR BY JOEL ANDREAS

Why the US can’t kick militarism

addicted to war

(N.B. This publication is unavailable outside the United States and is endorsed by Veterans for Peace however you may order on the web)

Chapter One : Manifest Destiny

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and assume, among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them….”

-Thomas Jefferson, from the Declaration of Independence, 1776.

“We must march from ocean to ocean, ….It is the destiny of the white race.” …

-Representative Giles of Maryland.

The leaders of the new independent colonies believed that were preordained to rule all of North America. This was so obvious to them that they called it Manifest Destiny. This manifest destiny soon led to genocidal wars against the Native American peoples. The U.S. Army ruthlessly seized their land, driving them west and slaughtering those who resisted and they were confined to reservations.

“I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream …the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered.”

-Black Elk, spiritual leader of the Lakota people and survivor of the Wounded Knee massacte in South Dakota.

By 1848, the United States had seized nearly half of Mexico’s territory. General Zachary Taylor ordered scores of U.S. soldiers executed for refusing to fight in Mexico.

“Our condition at home is forcing us to commercial expansion … Day by day, production is exceeding home consumption … We are after markets, the greatest markets in the world.”

“I firmly believe that when any territory outside the present territorial limits of the United States becomes necessary for our defense or essential for our commercial development, we ought to lose no time in acquiring it.”
-Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut. 1894

To become a world power the U.S. built a world-class navy. A gung-ho Theodore Roosevelt was put in charge of it

“I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”
-T. Roosevelt, 1897

In 1898, taking a fancy to several Spanish colonies, including Cuba and the Phillipines, the US declared war on Spain. Rebels were already fighting for independence in both countries and Spain was on the verge of defeat. Washington declared that it was on the rebels’ side and Spain quickly capitulated. But the U.S. soon made it clear that it had no intention of leaving.

“The Phillipines are ours forever… and just beyond the Phillipines are China’s illimitable markets … the Pacific is our ocean.”

Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana 1900

“ The power that rules the Pacific is the power that rules the world… That power is and will forever be the American Republic.”

Elaborate racist theories were invented to justify colonialism and these theories were adopted enthusiastically in Washington.

“We are the ruling race of the world… We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God of the civilization of the world…He has marked us as his chosen people… He has made us as his chosen people… He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.”

Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana 1900

The Filipinos fought the new invaders just as they had fought the Spanish. The U.S. subjugated the Philippines with brute force. US soldiers were ordered to “Burn all and kill all,” and they did. By the time the Filipinos were defeated, 600,000 had died.

The Phillipines, Puerto Rico, and Guam were made into U.S. colonies in 1898. Cuba was formally given its independence, but along with it the Cubans were given the Platt Amendment, which stipulated that the U.S. Navy would operate a base in Cuba forever, that the U.S. marines would intervene at will, and that Washington would determine Cuba’s foreign and financial policies. During the same period, the US overthrew Hawaii’s Queen Liluokalani and transformed these unspoiled Pacific Islands into a U.S. Navy base surrounded by Dole and Del Monte Plantations. In 1903, after Theodore Roosevelt became president, he sent gunboats to secure Panama’s seperation from Colombia. The Colombian government had refused Roosevelt’s terms for building a canal. The U.S. Marines invaded China, Russia, North Africa, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean between 1898 and 1934. Between 1898 and 1934, the marines specifically invaded Cuba four times, Nicaragua five times, Honduras seven times, the Dominican Republic four times, Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico three times, and Colombia four times. In many countries, the Marines stayed on as an occupying army, sometimes for decades. When the Marines finally went home, they typically left the countries they had occupied in the hands of a friendly dictator, armed to the teeth to suppress his own people.

Behind the marines came legions of U.S. business executives ready not only to sell their goods but also to set up plantations, drill oil wells, and stake out mining claims. The marines returned when called upon to enforce slave-like working conditions and put down strikes, protests, and rebellions.

“ I accept responsibility for] active intervention to secure our capitalists opportunity for profitable investments.”

President William Howard Taft, 1910,

A reporter described what took place after U.S. troops landed in Haiti in 1915 to put down a peasant rebellion: ‘American marines opened fire with machine guns from airplanes on defenseless Haitian villages, killing men, women and children in the open market places for sport. 50,000 Haitians were killed.

“The U.S. would declare war on Germany because it was the only way of maintaining our present pre-eminent trade status.”

Ambassador W.H. Page, Woodrow Wilson’s American ambassador to England 1917

“ I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service… And during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a rackateer, a gangster for capitalism.”

“Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914.. I helped make Haiti and Cuba, a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”

“ I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.”

“Our boys were sent off to die with beautiful ideals painted in front of them. No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason they were marching off to kill and die.”

General Smedley Butler, who was one of the most celebrated leaders of all these marine expeditions.

World War II left the USA in a position of political, economic and military superiority.

“We must set the pace and assume the responsibility of the majority stockholder in this corporation known as the world”

Leo Welch, former Chairman of the Board Standard Oil of New Jersey (Now Exxon) 1946.

Chapter 2 The “Cold War” and the exploits of the so=called “World Policeman”

The U.S. eagerly assumed responsibility for determining the economic policies and selecting the management of what it considered to be the subsidiary companies that made up the “corporation known as the world.”

To put down insubordination in the world, thus known as the corporation, such as disorder and disloyalty in its sphere, the new majority stockholder also appointed itself the “world policemen”. During the Cold War, Washington intervened militarily in foreign countries more than 200 times.

OTHER WARS EITHER CREATED OR PROMOTED BY THE C.I.A.:

Fortunately, the ambitious plans of the U.S. State Department for Asia and the Pacific were upset by revolutions and anti-colonial wars from China to Malaysia. A major confrontation developed in Korea. Washington decided to intervene directly to show that Western military technology could defeat any Asian army.

U.S. warships, bombers, and artillery reduced much of Korea to rubble. Over 4,500,000 Koreans died; three out of four were civilians. 54,000 U.S. soldiers returned home in coffins. But the U.S. military, for all its technological superiority, did not prevail.

-Dominican Republic, 1965

After a U.S.-backed military coup, Dominicans rose up to demand the re-instatement of the overthrown president (who they had elected in a popular vote). Washington, however, was determined to keep its men in power, no matter who the Dominicans voted for. 22, 000 U.S. troops were sent to suppress the uprising. 3,000 people were gunned down in the streets of Santo Domingo.

-Vietnam, 1964-1973

For ten years, The Pentagon tried to preserve a corrupt South Vietnamese regime which had been inherited from the French colonial empire. The U.S. warplanes dropped seven million tons of bombs on Vietnam. That’s the equivalent of one 350-pound bomb per person. 400,000 tonnes of napalm were rained down on the tiny country. Agent Orange and other toxic herbicides were used to destroy millions of acres of farmland and forests. Villages were burned to the ground and their residents massacred. Altogether, two million people died in the Indochina War, most of them civilians killed. Almost 60,000 U.S. soldiers were killed and 300,000 wounded and yet despite the ferocity of the U.S. firepower, they still lost, which in my view is an excellent and justifiable outcome. A pity so many people suffered the carnage unleashed by the Evil Empire.

-Lebanon, 1982-1983

After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the U.S. Marines intervened directly in the Lebanese civil war, taking the side of Israel and the right-wing Falange militia which had just massacred 2000 Palestinian civilians.

241 Marines paid for this intervention with their lives when their barracks were blown up by a truck bomb.

-Grenada, 1983

About 110,000 people live on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada.

But, according to Ronald Reagan, Grenada represented a threat to U.S. security. So he ordered the Pentagon toseize the island and install a new government more to his liking.

-Libya, 1986

Washington loved King Idris, the Libyan monarch who happily turned over his country’s oil reserves to Standard Oil for next to nothing. It hates Colonel Qadhafi, eho threw the king out. In 1986, Reagan ordered U.S. warplanes to bomb the Libyan capital, Tripoli, claiming that Gadhafi was responsible for a bomb attack at a German disco that killed two U.S, soldiers. It’s unlikely that very many of the hundreds of Libyans killed or injured in the U.S. bombing raid knew anything about the German bombing.

OTHER WARS IN WHICH THE C.I.A. AND THE PENTAGON HAVE BEEN INVOLVED:

-ISRAEL

After WWII, Britain was compelled to dispose of its colonial empire in the Middle East. The British gave a huge hunk of the land known as Palestine to European Jews displaced by the Holocaust. The problem was that there were already people living there. The result has been five decades of violence and war. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes in what became Israel. The U.S. provides crucial political support and billions of dollars a year in aid to Israel which includes the most advanced weaponry.

-CENTRAL AMERICA

The Pentagon and the C.I.A. armed and trained security forces and death squads that killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly unarmed peasants, in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala in support of right wing dictatorial regimes.

Many of the military officers responsible for the worst atrocities in Central America were trained at the Pentagon’s School of the Americas in Georgia. The school trains officers from all over Latin America. Its training manuals recommend torture and summary execution. Its graduates have returned to establish military regimes and terrorize their own people.

Today, bloody U.S.-backed counter-insurgency wars continue in Colombia, Mexico, Peru, the Phillipines and other countries. In Colombia, a corrupt U.S.-backed army fights alongside paramilitary forces that have slaughtered whole villages and hundreds of opposition union leaders and politicians. The U.S. has been getting more deeply involved, under the cover of the War on Drugs, providing billions of dollars of arms used to continue the killing.

The C.I.A. and the Pentagon have also organized proxy armies to overthrow governments that are not well-liked in Washington. In 1961, for instance, U.S. warships ferried a small army of mercenaries to Cuba, hoping to reverse the Cuban Revolution, i.e. the Bay of Pigs.

-AFRICA

For years the C.I.A. backed Portugal’s efforts to hang on to its colonies in Southern Africa, helping them stave off independence wars in Angola and Mozambique.

In 1975, after a democratic revolution in Portugal, the Portuguese called it quits.

But the C.I.A. and Pentagon didn’t. Instead it teamed up with the apartheid regime in South Africa to supply a mercenary army to fight the new government in independent Angola. And in Mozambique, top U.S. and South African politicians and ex-military officers sponsored a particularly brutal bunch of mercenaries who massacred tens of thousands of peasants.

-LATIN AMERICA

After the Nicaraguan people overthrew the U.S. backed dictatorship of the Somoza family in 1979, the C.I.A. gathered together the remnants of Somoza’s hated National Guard and sent them back to Nicaragua with all the weapons they could carry- to loot, burn and kill.

“ [ The contras are ] the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.”

Ronald Reagan, 1985.

-AFGHANISTAN

In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up a friendly regime. Soviet occupation met fierce popular resistance. The C.I.A. stepped in to arm, finance and train the Afghan mujahedin guerillas, working closely with the Pakistani and Saudi governments. With generous support from Washington and its allies, the mujahedin defeated the Soviets after a brutal decade-long war.

Among the C.I.A.’s collaborators in this war was a Saudi named Osama bin Laden.

Chapter 3 The “New World Order”

In 1989, as the Eastern Bloc began to crumble, top U.S. government strategists gathered to discuss the world situation. The Soviet Union, they happily agreed, was no longer able or inclined to counter U.S. military intervention abroad. It was time, they decided, to demonstrate U.S. military power to the world.

-PANAMA 1989

Panama was the first country selected to be the much weaker enemy. George H.W. Bush continued this tradition in 1989, sending in 25,000 troops supposedly to arrest a drug dealer. Of course, this was only a pretext to the hidden agenda of ensuring U.S. control over the Panama Canal and the extensive U.S. military bases in that country. A new Panamanian president was sworn in at a U.S. air base moments before the invasion. The man picked for the job, Guillermo Endara, ran a bank that is notorious for money laundering.

According to Panamanian human rights groups, several thousand people were killed in the U.S. invasion. 26 were U.S. soldiers. 50 were Panamanian soldiers. The rest were civilians, cut down by the overwhelming U.S. firepower poured into crowded neighbourhoods in poor sections of Panama City and Colon. Many of the dead were put in garbage bags and secretly buried in mass graves.

-IRAQ

In 1920, hundreds of British soldiers and many more Iraqis died when the British Army suppressed a revolt against British rule. Britain ended up installing a hand-picked “King of Iraq” The new monarch promptly signed a deal with British and American oil companies giving them the right to exploit all of Iraq’s oil for 75 years in exchange for a pittance in royalties.

The Middle East possesses almost two-thirds of the world’s known oil reserves. Control over the flow of oil by U.S. and British companies gave Washington strategic power over Europe, Japan and the developing world. The U.S. State Department declared that Middle Eastern oil was ‘….a stupendous source of strategic power ……one of the greatest prizes in world history’.

In 1958, U.S. and British oil companies were startled when the King of Iraq was overthrown. The new leader, a nationalist military officer named Abdel Karim Qasim,

demanded changes in the sweetheart deals the monarchy had made with the oil companies. He also helped form OPEC, the cartel of oil producing countries.

In 1963, the CIA collaborated with the Ba’ath party to murder Qasim and overthrow his government. The Ba’ath Party was also nationalist. It systematically killed its Leftist opponents and the CIA was happy to help.

Among the CIA’s collaborators in the 1963 coup was a young military officer named Saddam Hussein, who later emerged as the top leader in Iraq. But Hussein soon disappointed his accomplices in the U.S. by nationalizing the Iraqi oil industry. Other Arab leaders followed suit, greatly alarming U.S. officials.

“Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.”

-Henry Kissinger.

Then, in 1980, Hussein did something that made him much more popular in Washington. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, American strategists considered Iran the main threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East. The U.S. and its allies, therefore, were happy to provide Hussein with advanced weaponry. U.S. even sold Iraq materials to make chemical and biological weapons, including highly lethal strains of anthrax. Over 100,000 Iranian soldiers were killed or injured by poison gas.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait, George H.W. Bush worried that the huge Iraqi army had become a threat to the U.S. domination of the Middle East.

“Our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom, and the freedom of friendly countries around the world would all suffer if control of the world’s great oil reserves fell into the hands of Saddam Hussein.”

-George H.W. Bush, August 1990.

Bush decided that Saddam had to be punished for trespassing on as oil-rich U.S. protectorate.

The Pentagon and the CIA launched the most intensive bombing campaign in history using conventional bombs, cluster bombs (designed to rip bodies apart), napalm and phosphorus (which cling to and burn skin), and fuel-air explosives (which have the impact of small nuclear bombs). Later, the U.S. used munitions tipped with depleted uranium, which is now suspected of a cause of cancer among both Iraqis and U.S. soldiers and their children. Iraq was bombed back to a pre-industrial age and tens of thousands were killed. Iraq had already begun to withdraw from Kuwait when Bush launched the ground war. The main aim of the ground war was, not to drive the Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, but to keep them from leaving. The gate was closed and tens of thousands of soldiers, who were trying to go home, were systematically slaughtered. Elsewhere, U.S. tanks and bulldozers intentionally buried tens of thousands of soldiers alive in their trenches in a tactic designed mainly to “destroy Iraqi defenders.”

For over a decade, the U.S. insisted on maintaining the most severe economic sanctions regime in history, continuing to strangle the devastated Iraqi economy.

In 1999, UNICEF estimated that infant and child mortality had more than doubled since the war. It attributed this sharp increase in mortality mainly to malnutrition and deteriorating health conditions caused by the war and ongoing sanctions. It estimated that half a million more children died as a result. That’s 5, 200 children a month.

Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, not only kept up the sanctions, but also continued to bomb Iraq regularly for 8 years.

-KOSOVO, 1999

In the late 1990s, after enduring years of abuse at the hands of a Serbian-dominated Yugoslav government, Albanian rebels in Kosovo started a war of secession. The U.S. usually does not support minority groups demanding seperation. But it all depends on whether the U.S. supports the government of the country facing dismemberment. For instance, the U.S. supports Kurdish separatists in Iraq and Iran, but across the border in Turkey, a close ally, Washington has provided tons of arms to crush the Kurds.

Because Yugoslav strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, was being less than cooperative with U.S. efforts to extend its influence in Eastern Europe, breaking up Yugoslavia was a cause the U.S. could warm up to. The Clinton Administration embraced the Kosovo Liberation Army, despite their drug dealing, ethnic extremism and brutality. Following established practice, the Administration issued an ultimatum the Yugoslavs could not possibly accept.

The consequent NATO bombing turned an ugly but small-scale Yugoslav counter-insurgency operation into a massive ethnic cleansing drive. After the bombing began, Serbian soldiers and militia members began driving hundreds of thousands of Albanians out of the country and killed thousands of others. When the Albanians returned under NATO protection, Serbian and Gypsy residents were driven out and killed. Ultimately, the war served U.S. political objectives, while causing tremendous death and suffering on all sides and greatly aggravating ethnic tensions.

Chapter 4 The “War on Terrorism”

After the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden released a videotaped message. He praised the attacks and called for more.

“What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. Our nation (the Islamic world) has been tasting this humiliation and degradation for more than 80 years. His sons are killed, its blood is shed, its sanctuaries are attacked and no-one bears and no-one heeds. Millions of innocent children are being killed Iraq without committing any sins….. To America, I say only a few words to it and its people, I swear to God, who has elevated the skies without pillars, neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it here in Palestine and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad, peace be upon him.”

-Osama bin Laden, Oct. 7, 2001.

NB Remember that George H. Bush embraced Osama bin Laden whilst he was fighting with the Murajahadin against the Russians in Afghanistan and supplied all the weapons and military training needed to defeat them.

The Bush Administration responded according to bin Laden’s script with the declaration of War on Terrorism.

“This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil… This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”

-George W. Bush September 12th. And 16th. 2001.

-CUBA, 1997

For over forty years, Miami has served as the base of operations for well-financed groups of Cuban exiles that have carried out violent terrorist attacks on Cuba. It’s not difficult for the U.S. government to find evidence involving these terrorist organizations because the CIA and the Pentagon trained many of their members. Take, for instance, Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, suspected masterminds of the bombing of a Cuban passenger airliner that claimed the lives of 73 people. Carriles found a job supplying arms to the Contras. Bosch was convicted of a bazooka attack on a ship in Miami harbour but has long been protected from extradition on the insistence of George W.H. Bush’s son Jeb.

“All of Castro’s planes are war planes”

-Orlando Bosch, 1987, defending the bombing of the civilian Cuban plane that claimed the lives of 73 people.

“ My experience in the CIA gave me the right credentials for the job.”

-Orlando Bosch, 1987.

-AFGHANISTAN, 2001

Bush’s War on Terrorism began with U.S. warplanes bombing Afghanistan, the unfortunate country where bin Laden chose to locate his headquarters. The CIA jumped into bed with brutal regional warlords whereby the opium trade once again flourishes.

Iraq 2003

“We can’t wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

-George W. Bush October.2002.

From the day they took office, Bush and his key lieutenants set their sights on Iraq. After 9-11, they packaged an invasion as part of the ‘war on terrorism’. To win U.N. backing, they claimed Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The threat was so imminent, they said, that an immediate invasion was imperative.

“Get those &%#* inspectors out of the way….I’m ready to bomb the place!”

-George W. Bush

“ This doesn’t mean necessarily, that other governments have to fall, they can moderate their behavior.”

-Senior Government US Official, April 2003 .

The Bush Administration had big plans. Based upon Iraq’s tremendous oil wealth and U.S. military might, American officials hoped to create a client regime in Iraq and use it as a base of U.S. power in the heart of the Arab Middle East. They brought in a group of émigré politicians, intending to install them as leaders. Their favorite was Ahmed Chalabi, a wealthy businessman who was convicted of bank fraud in Jordan.

“American companies have a big shot at Iraqi oil.”

-Ahmed Chalabi Sept. 2002.

Chalabi won the hearts of U.S. officials in part by declaring that he favoured pulling Iraq out of OPEC, and then privatizing Iraqi oil and selling it off to foreign companies.

U.S. oil company executives and bankers were assigned to look after the Iraqi oil industry and central bank. U.S. military officers were placed in charge of Iraqi cities.

“We didn’t take on this huge burden not to take significant dominating control”

-Colin Powell US Secretary of State April 2003.

“In a post-war situation like this, if you start holding elections, the people who are rejectionists tend to win.”

-Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, June 2003.

(By ‘rejectionists’ Bremer meant those who oppose US occupation)

“Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land!”

US Attorney General John Ashcroft after he sent a team to rebuild Iraq’s system of courts and prisons in 2003

Facing a hostile population, the U.S. military killed scores of Iraqis as they protested against the occupation. Journalists were gunned down as they covered U.S. military operations. Others, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time were shot at military checkpoints or when soldiers raided their neighbourhoods.

As US soldiers and Iraqis died in daily battles, Bush’s response was swaggering cowboy rhetoric.

“There are some who feel like….they can attack us there. My answer is == bring them on!”

-George W. Bush, Washington, DC July 2003.

The U.S. occupation of Iraq followed the familiar path of previous colonial adventures. Iraqis organized armed resistance and the U.S. military took increasingly harsh punitive measures against the population, inspiring fear.

By Spring, 2004 , it was clear that Bush’s grandiose plans had collapsed.

“They don’t want us here and we don’t want to be here.”

Unidentified American soldier in Baghdad.

By invading and occupying Muslim countries, the U.S. is only inviting more attacks on U.S. soldiers and other American targets. The Pentagon has promised to respond with more violence. Unfortunately, there are some people who profit handsomely from this addiction.

“We will export death and violence to the four corner in defense of our great nation.”
-US Special Forces Officer

Chapter 5 The War Profiteers

Few politicians can match Dick Cheney’s appetite for war. As George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defence he presided over wars against Panama and Iraq.

Over 100,000 companies feed at the Pentagon trough. But the big money goes to a handful of huge corporations during 1999 including :

* United Technologies $ 2.4 billion
* Textron $ 1.4 billion

* General Dynamics $ 4.6 billion

· Boeing $11.6 billion

· Northrop Grumman $ 3.2 billion

· Lockheed Martin $12.7 billion

· Baytheon $ 6.4 billion

· General Electric $ 1.7 billion

· Halliburton $ 1.4 billion

Halliburton is raking in hundreds of millions of dollars for feeding and housing U.S. troops and it got the biggest post-war reconstruction. In 1995, Dick Cheney was named CEO of Halliburton, the biggest oil services company and a major military contractor on the planet, and it got the biggest post-war reconstruction prize – a secret no-bid contract to rebuild Iraqi oil facilities that will likely be worth billions. Cheney pocketed millions in salary and stock options every year.. He ended up with a $45 million stake. Cheney got draft deferments five times to avoid fighting in Vietnam. He’s served on the boards of several huge war contractors, and his wife – Lynne – joined the board of Lockheed Martin. After Cheney returned to the White House in 2001, Lockheed got the biggest plum in Pentagon history – a contract worth hundreds of billions to make the next generation of fighter jets.

As head of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle was a chief architect

Both the war on Iraq and Donald Rumsfeld’s efforts to ‘revolutionize’ military technology’. In 2001, Perle joined Henry Kissinger and other Washington insiders to form a company called Trireme Partners. Trireme raises venture capital from wealthy individuals and invests it in weapons companies, betting on those it expects will get lucrative government contracts. Perle has also served as an advisor to the Israeli government. His advice is always the same- ‘War is the answer!’ Perle has particularly pushed for war against three countries he considers Israel’s main enemies – Iraq, Iran and Syria.

Cheney, Perle and their friends go back and forth through a revolving door that connects jobs at the Pentagon and The White House. Lots of money changes hands in Washington as weapons manufacturers make generous contributions to politicians and politicians hand out fat Pentagon contracts to weapons manufacturers.

Under the banner of funding the ‘War on Terrorism’, Congress has abandoned efforts to avoid budget deficits. Instead, every year it gives the Pentagon what amounts to a blank check.

Missile defense, like the ‘War on Terrorism’, promises to protect Americans from danger while actually creating a much more dangerous world. China has promised to buy more and better missiles which could overwhelm the U.S. “missile shield.” This will spur a nuclear arms race in Asia. The scenario is if China builds more missiles, then India will. If India does, then Pakistan will and so on…

As potential nuclear targets in Russia have declined, the Pentagon

Chapter 6: The High Price of Militarism:

Since 1948, the U.S. has spent more than $15 trillion ($15,000,000,000,000) to build up its military might. That adds up to more than the cumulative monetary value of all human-made wealth in the U.S. The U.S. spends over $776 billion every year to the cause of feeding its addiction to war at the expense of bridges, roads, schools, other infrastructure and social welfare. Schools are run down and overcrowded. In some inner-city high schools, 80% of the students drop out. More than a fifth of all adults can’t read a job application or a street sign.

Skyrocketing prices are causing a crisis in health care. 43 million people have no insurance and millions more have inadequate insurance. More and more people don’t get the medical care they need because they can’t afford it. Yet public hospitals are being closed and the government has failed to enact any serious health care reform. Every 50 minutes, a child in the U.S. dies as a result of poverty or hunger. Yet Congress has been exceedingly stingy in funding maternal and child health programs.

With rents rising and wages falling, millions of families are living on the verge of eviction. Millions of people end up living on the streets. Yet when it comes to funding for housing and homelessness, most of Washington seems to have adopted Reagan’s attitude.

“Those people want to live on the streets” Reagan.

Drug addiction and alcoholism are crippling millions of people and devastating families and whole communities. Yet there are not enough public treatment centers to handle even a fraction of these seeking help, and many centers are closing their doors for lack of funding.

The price of militarism includes the building of nuclear weapons. More than 100 nuclear weapons plants owned by the Energy Department have been dumping radioactive waste into the air, in rivers, and leaking it into the soil and groundwater for decades.

The government now estimates it will take 25,000 workers at least 30 years to clean up the mess at these plants- at a cost of $300 billion or more.

What’s more, nuclear weapons tests have spread deadly plutonium which is radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years across large tracts of the Southwest and the South Pacific. Many of the 458,000 U.S. soldiers who participated in the atomic testing program are now dying of cancer.

Another cost of militarism is the loss of civil liberties. “Homeland security” has become a slogan for eliminating civil rights protections long deemed inconvenient by the FBI and other police agencies.
In the name of “Homeland security” you can now be jailed indefinitely without trial. The police and the FBI – and even the CIA – can more easily spy on you, reading your mail and email, listening in on your phone, and breaking into your home.

Thousands of immigrants have been called in for questioning simply because they came from predominantly Muslim countries.

Many have been jailed for long periods on baseless suspicions.

The ones who end up on the front lines in this addiction to war are usually kids who can’t find a job or pay for college. Almost all of them are from working-class families, and a disproportionate number are African Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and Native Americans.

Many Gulf War veterans are suffering the effects of Gulf War Syndrome. Those who survive continue to be haunted by the wars they fought in. The number of Vietnam vets who have killed themselves since the war is greater than the number of U.S. soldiers who died in the war. Hundreds of thousands of veterans have ended up living on the streets. Every year, more than a thousand U.S. soldiers and sailors are killed in military accidents. Also, hundreds of active-duty soldiers and sailors commit suicide. Indoctrination into the culture of militarism starts early. Television, videos and video games make killing seem not only glorious, but fun. High school principles lock the doors and hire armed guards, supposedly to protect the kids from drug dealers, pimp, and other dangerous characters. But they roll out the red carpet for the most dangerous characters of all – the military recruiters. The recruiters, who are not quite as honest as used car salesmen, come armed with slick brochures and glossy promises.

Chapter 7 – Militarism and the Media

When it comes to war, the networks discard all pretenses of objectivity. After the 1991 Gulf War, one of the Bush Administration’s top war planners spoke to a group of prominent journalists and thanked them for their help. “[Television was] our chief tool in selling our policy.

Richard Hass, National Security Council, 1991.

Lawrence Grossman, who was in charge of PBS and NBC NEWS for many years, described the role of the press this way: “ The job of the President is to set the agenda and the job of the press is to follow the agenda that the leadership sets.”

The TV networks are owned by some of the largest corporations in the world – NBC is owned by GE, CBS by Viacom, ABC by Disney, Fox by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and CNN by Time Warner. The members of the boards of directors of these corporations also around the world, such as Boeing, Coca-Cola, Texaco, Chevron, EDS, Lucent, Daimler-Chrysler, Citigroup, Xerox, Philip Morris, Worldcom, JP Morgan Chase, Rockwell Automation, and Honeywell. In fact, the corporations that control the television industry are fully integrated into the military-industrial complex.

For example, General Electric has major investments around the world, which it expects the Pentagon to protect. It is also a charter member of the military-industrial complex. GE is the country’s largest military contractor, raking in billions of dollars every year. It produces parts for every nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal, makes jet engines for military aircraft, and creates all kinds of profitable electronic gadgets for the Pentagon. It’s also the company that secretly released millions of curies of deadly radiation from the Hanford nuclear weapons facility in Washington state and produced faulty nuclear power plants that dot the U.S. countryside.

In 1950, President Truman named Charles Wilson, G.E.’s board chairman, to head the Office of Defense Mobilization. In that capacity, Wilson told members of the Newspaper Publishers Association.

“If the people were not convinced [that the Free World is in mortal danger ] it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert this danger. With the support of public opinion, as marshaled by the press, we are off to a good start. It is our job – yours and mine- to keep our people convinced that the only way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build up America’s might.”

-Charles Wilson, 1950.

Under Wilson, G.E. got into the media business itself to promote its pro-war message. In 1954, it hired a floundering actor named Ronald Reagan to be its corporate spokesman. G.E. furnished Reagan with an all-electric house and gave him his own TV show, which was called “G.E. Theater.” The corporation also supplied Reagan with “The Speech”. He continued to deliver variations of “The Speech” throughout his career. Then in 1986, G.E. bought its own TV network – NBC. Good evening, I’m Tom Brokow and is the NBC Nightly News. General Electric and the other huge corporations that own the news media are hardly unbiased sources of information. Yet most of the news available to us - about war and peace and everything else – is filtered through their perspective. This gives them a powerful influence on public opinion.

Chapter 8 Resisting Militarism

The anti-war movement grew especially strong during the war to conquer the Philippines.

“ I have seen that we do not intend to free but to subjugate the Philippines. And so I am an anti-imperialist . I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land… I have a strong aversion to sending our bright boys out there to fight with a disgraced musket under a polluted flag.”

Mark Twain, Vice President, Anti-Imperialist League, 1900

Let’s go back to Charles Wilson’s era, when he and the media were mobilizing support for the Korean War. At first they were very successful. But despite their impressive efforts, the support didn’t last long. After the body bags started coming home, the majority of people turned against the war.

The government and the media once again did their best to whip up support for the war on Vietnam. But as the war escalated, the greatest anti-war movement in U.S. history arose. At first, the opposition was small but determined. By 1969, opposition grew to 750,000 people marching on Washington, and millions more marching in cities across the country.

In May 1970, after police and National Guard troops fired on anti-war demonstrations, killing four students at Kent State in Ohio and two students at Jackson State in Mississippi, students at 400 universities across the country went on strike – the first general student strike in U.S. history.

When police shot and killed three people during the Chicano Moratorium against the war in August 1971, a rebellion raged through East Los Angeles for three days.

Resistance to the war took many forms; people refused to pay war taxes. People burned their draft cards. The most famous draft resister was Muhammid Ali. People blocked the path of trains hauling troops and munitions bound for the war.

14,000 people were arrested when they moved to shut down Washington, D.C., for three days in 1971. It was the largest mass arrest in U.S. history! Even more serious for the Pentagon, discipline was breaking down among the troops in Vietnam. Soldiers saw no reason to fight and they didn’t. By the end of the ‘60s, a virtual civil war simmered between soldiers and officers. Even more serious for the Pentagon, discipline was breaking down among the troops in Vietnam. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state now approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden and dispirited where not near mutinous.”

-Col. Robert Heinl, U.S.M.C. retired, 1971.

Record numbers of soldiers and sailors deserted or went AWOL. Organized resistance was developing among the troops. Contingents of soldiers and sailors were marching at the head of anti-war demonstrations. In April 1971, more than a thousand Vietnam veterans gathered at the Capitol building in Washington and threw back the medals they had received in the war.

“ The weakest chink in our armor is American public opinion. Our people won’t stand firm in the face of heavy losses, and they can bring down the government.”

-President Lyndon Johnson, 1968.

Because U.S. leaders knew that Americans would not stand for large numbers of U.S. war casualties, they had to restrain their military impulse. They kept on bombing other countries, but for almost two decades they did not send large numbers of U.S. soldiers to fight on foreign soil.

Bush’s war against terrorism by invading Iraq ended up polarizing the American population and isolating the United States internationally. And the ugly reality of the American occupation of Iraq has further alienated people here and around the world.

While the killing continues in Afghanistan and Iraq, Pentagon strategists are busy planning the next round of wars. We seemed to have reached a point where war is constantly on the agenda in Washington.

Chapter 9 Do something about it!

Organizations are listed on Frank Dorrel’s website www.addictedtowar.com.

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COUP D'ETAT:
The Real Reason Tenet and Pavitt Resigned from the
CIA on June 3rd and 4th

Bush, Cheney Indictments in Plame Case Looming

by
Michael C. Ruppert

additional reporting by
Wayne Madsen from Washington

© Copyright 2004, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.

JUNE 8, 2004 1600 PDT (FTW) - Why did DCI George Tenet suddenly resign on June 3rd, only to be followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)?

The real reasons, contrary to the saturation spin being put out by major news outlets, have nothing to do with Tenet's role as taking the fall for alleged 9/11 and Iraqi intelligence "failures" before the upcoming presidential election.

Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d'etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown.

Based upon recent developments, it appears that long-standing plans and preparations leading to indictments and impeachment of Bush, Cheney and even some senior cabinet members have been accelerated, possibly with the intent of removing or replacing the entire Bush regime prior to the Republican National Convention this August.

FTW has been documenting this Watergate-like coup for more than fifteen months and almost everything we will discuss about recent events was predicted by us in the following pages: Please see our stories "The Perfect Storm - Part I" (March 2003); "Blood in the Water" (July 2003); "Beyond Bush - Part I" (July 2003); "Waxman Ties Evidentiary Noose Around Rice and Cheney" (July 2003); and "Beyond Bush - Part II" (October 2003).

There were two things we didn't get right. One was the timing. We predicted the developments taking place now as likely to happen after the November election, not before. Secondly, we did not foresee the sudden resignations of Tenet and Pavitt. Understanding the resignations is the key to understanding a deteriorating world scene and that America is on the precipice of a presidential and constitutional crisis that will ultimately dwarf the removal of Richard Nixon in 1974.

So why did Tenet and Pavitt resign? We'll explain why and we will provide many clues along the way as we make our case.

HIGH CRIMES AND REALLY STUPID MOVES

Shortly after the "surprise" Tenet-Pavitt resignations, current and former senior members of the U.S. intelligence community and the Justice Department told journalist Wayne Madsen, a former Naval intelligence officer, that they were directly connected to the criminal investigation of a 2003 White House leak that openly exposed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA officer. What received less attention was that the leak also destroyed a long-term CIA proprietary intelligence gathering operation which, as we will see, was of immense importance to US strategic interests at a critical moment.

The leak was a vindictive retaliation for statements, reports and actions taken by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, which had deeply embarrassed the Bush administration and exposed it to possible charges for impeachable offenses, including lying to the American people about an alleged (and totally unfounded) nuclear threat posed by Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Conservative columnist Robert Novak, the beneficiary of the leak, immediately published it on July 14, 2003 and Valerie Plame's career (at least the covert part) instantly ended. The actual damage caused by that leak has never been fully appreciated.

Wilson deeply embarrassed almost every senior member of the Bush junta by proving to the world that they were consciously lying about one of their most important justifications for invading Iraq: namely, their claim to have had certain knowledge, based on "good and reliable" intelligence, that Hussein was on the brink of deploying a nuclear weapon, possibly inside the United States. It was eventually disclosed that the "intelligence" possessed by the administration was a set of poorly forged documents on letterhead from the government of Niger, which described attempts by Iraq to purchase yellowcake uranium for a nuclear weapons program.

It has since been established by Scott Ritter and others that Iraq's nuclear weapons program had been dead in the water and non-functioning since the first Iraq war.

Wilson was secretly dispatched in February 2002, on instructions from Dick Cheney to the CIA, to go to Niger and look for anything that might support the material in the documents. They had already been dismissed as forgeries by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the CIA, and apparently everyone else who had seen them. The CIA cautioned the administration, more than once, against using them. Shortly thereafter, Wilson returned and gave his report stating clearly that the allegations were pure bunk and unsupportable.

In spite of this, unaware of the booby traps laid all around them, the entire power core of the Bush administration jumped on the Niger documents as on a battle horse and charged off into in a massive public relations blitz. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz and others - to varying degrees - insisted, testified, and swore that they knew, and had reliable, credible and verified intelligence that Saddam was about to deploy an actual nuclear device built from the Niger yellowcake.

It was full court media press and they successfully scared the pants off of most Americans who believed that Saddam was going to nuke them any second.

George Bush made the charge and actually cited the documents in his 2003 State-of-the-Union address, even after he had been cautioned by George Tenet not to rely on them. In a major speech at the United Nations, Colin Powell charged that Iraq was on the verge of deploying a nuke and had been trying to acquire uranium. Dick Cheney charged in several speeches that Saddam was capable of nuclear terror. And shortly before the invasion, when asked in a television interview whether there was sufficient proof and advance warning of the Iraqi nuclear threat, a smug and confident Condoleezza Rice quipped, "If we wait for a smoking gun, that smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud over an American city." Rice was lying through her teeth.

By July of 2003, as the Iraqi invasion was proving to be a protracted and ill-conceived debacle, executed in spite of massive resistance from within military, political, diplomatic and economic cadres, there was growing disgust within many government circles about the way the Bush administration was running things. The mention of Wilson's report came in July though his name was not disclosed. It suggested corroborative evidence of criminal, rather than stupid, behavior by the administration. The San Francisco Chronicle reported:

A senior CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the intelligence agency informed the White House on March 9, 2002 - 10 months before Bush's nationally televised speech - that an agency source who had traveled to Niger could not confirm European intelligence reports that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from the West African country.

Note the reference to an Agency source.

It was inevitable that Wilson would move from no comment, to statements given on condition of anonymity, and finally into the public spotlight. That he did, in a July 6th New York Times Editorial titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa." Soon he was giving interviews everywhere.

On July 14th Novak published the column outing Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. As a result, any criminal investigation of the Plame leak will also go into the Niger documents and any crimes committed which are materially related to Plame's exposure.

Instead of retreating, Wilson advanced. In Septmeber he went public, writing editorials and granting interviews which thoroughly exposed the Bush administration's criminal use of the documents, Cheney's lies about the mission, and all the other lies used to deceive the American people into war.

At the moment he went on the record, Wilson became another legally admissible, corroborative evidentiary source; a witness available for subpoena and deposition, ready to give testimony to the high crimes and misdemeanors he has witnessed.

First Clue: James Pavitt was Valerie Plame's boss. So was George Tenet.

HOW THE TRAP WAS SET

Conflicting news reports suggest that perhaps several sets of the documents were delivered simultaneously to several recipients. I could find only one news story (out of almost 60 I have reviewed) which indicated just when the Niger papers were first put into play. One of the most fundamental questions in journalism, "when?" was omitted from every major press organization's coverage except for a single story from the Associated Press on July 13th.

… [T]he forged Niger government documents, showing attempts by Iraq to purchase yellowcake, were delivered by unknown sources to a journalist working for Italy's Corriere della Sera which then gave them to the Italian intelligence service. She then reportedly gave them to Italian intelligence agents who gave them to the US embassy. Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker also offered this version indicating that the documents had surfaced in Italy in the fall of 2001.

The fall of 2001. That means that the documents were created no more than three and a half months after September 11th.

The earliest press report mentioning the documents was a March 7, 2003 story in The Financial Times. On that day, Mohammed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency reported to the UN Security Council that the documents were forgeries. The story contained a revealing paragraph.

"The allegation about the uranium purchase first surfaced in a UK government dossier published on September 24 last year about Iraq's alleged weapons programmes, though it did not name Niger. Niger was first named when the US State Department elaborated on the allegations on December 19 [2002]…

Canada's Globe and Mail reported on March 8, 2003:

…[T]he forgeries were sold to an Italian intelligence agent by a con man some time ago and passed on to French authorities, but the scam was uncovered by the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] only recently, according to United Nations sources familiar with the investigation. The documents were turned over to the IAEA several weeks ago.

"In fact, the IAEA says, there is no credible evidence that Iraq tried to import uranium ore from the Central African country in violation of UN resolutions.

"Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents, which formed the basis for the reports of these uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger, are, in fact, not authentic," Mr. El Baradei told the UN Security Council Friday….

The Chicago Tribune reported on March 13, 2003, "Forged documents that the United States used to build its case against Iraq were likely written by someone in Niger's embassy in Rome who hoped to make quick money, a source close to the United Nations investigation said.

The Washington Post gave yet a different story, also on March 8, 2003:

…Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away - including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said…"

…The CIA, which had also obtained the documents, had questions about "whether they were accurate," said one intelligence official, and it decided not to include them in its file on Iraq's program to procure weapons of mass destruction.

In a follow-up story on March 13th the Post reported:

It's something we're just beginning to look at," a senior law enforcement official said yesterday. Officials are trying to determine whether the documents were forged to try to influence U.S. policy, or whether they may have been created as part of a disinformation campaign directed by a foreign intelligence service...

…The phony documents - a series of letters between Iraqi and Niger officials showing Iraq's interest in equipment that could be used to make nuclear weapons - came to British and U.S. intelligence officials from a third country. The identity of the third country could not be learned yesterday.

What if it wasn't a foreign intelligence service? I had been suspicious that a Watergate-like coup was forming immediately after reading the first few stories about the documents. I was convinced when the AP reported on March 14, 2003 (just days before the Iraqi invasion) that the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee had called for an FBI investigation of the documents' origins. The Boston Globe reported two days later that the Senator was specifically seeking to determine whether administration officials had forged the documents themselves to marshal support for the invasion.

The request was not nearly as significant to me as who it had come from - Jay Rockefeller of the Standard Oil Rockefellers. An oil dynasty was calling for an investigation of a bunch of oil men. Somebody was screwing up big time.

Seymour Hersh dropped a major bombshell that went virtually unnoticed, 54 paragraphs deep into an October 27, 2003 story for the New Yorker titled "The Stovepipe."

Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that [the Italian intelligence service] Sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.

"Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, 'Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.' He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves. [emphasis added]

Hersh's revelation provided corroboration for something I and others, like the renowned political historian Peter Dale Scott, had been suspecting for a long time. The CIA was fighting back. This was a well orchestrated, long-term covert operation - exactly what the CIA does all over the world.

POINT OF NO RETURN

Willing disclosure of the identity of a covert operative is a serious felony under Federal law, punishable by fine and/or imprisonment. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 makes it a crime for anyone with access to classified information to intentionally disclose information identifying a covert operative. The penalties get worse for doing it to a deep cover Direcorate of Operations (DO) case officer (as opposed to an undercover DEA Agent).

After John Ashcroft was forced to recuse himself from the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, was transferred to Washington and appointed special prosecutor in the Plame case.

Robert Novak, rightly standing by the journalistic code of ethics, has steadfastly refused to identify his White House source. We would do the same thing in his shoes. The investigation is nearing a climax with pending issuance of criminal indictments. Press reports citing sources close to the investigation have directly and indirectly pointed fingers at Dick Cheney and his Chief of Staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, as suspects.

Second clue: The criminal investigation of the Plame leak was investigated after a September 2003 formal request from the CIA, approved by George Tenet.

Not only was Plame's cover blown, so was that of her cover company, Brewster, Jennings & Associates. With the public exposure of Plame, intelligence agencies all over the world started searching data bases for any references to her (TIME Magazine). Damage control was immediate, as the CIA asserted that her mission had been connected to weapons of mass destruction.

However, it was not long before stories from the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal tied Brewster, Jennings & Associates to energy, oil and the Saudi-owned Arabian American Oil Company, or ARAMCO. Brewster Jennings had been a founder of Mobil Oil company, one of Aramco's principal founders.

According to additional sources interviewed by Wayne Madsen, Brewster Jennings was, in fact, a well-established CIA proprietary company, linked for many years to ARAMCO. The demise of Brewster Jennings was also guaranteed the moment Plame was outed.

It takes years for Non-Official Covers or NOCs, as they are known, to become really effective. Over time, they become gradually more trusted; they work their way into deeper information access from more sensitive sources. NOCs are generally regarded in the community as among the best and most valuable of all CIA operations officers and the agency goes to great lengths to protect them in what are frequently very risky missions.

By definition, Valerie Plame was an NOC. Yet unlike all other NOCs who fear exposure and torture or death from hostile governments and individual targets who have been judged threats to the United States, she got done in by her own President, whom we also judge to be a domestic enemy of the United States.

Moreover, as we will see below, Valerie Plame may have been one of the most important NOCs the CIA had in the current climate. Let's look at just how valuable she was.

ARAMCO

According to an April 29, 2002 report in Britain's Guardian, ARAMCO constitutes 12% of the world's total oil production; a figure which has certainly increased as other countries have progressed deeper into irreversible decline.

ARAMCO is the largest oil group in the world, a state-owned Saudi company in partnership with four major US oil companies. Another one of Aramco’s partners is Chevron-Texaco which gave up one of its board members, Condoleezza Rice, when she became the National Security Advisor to George Bush. All of ARAMCO’s key decisions are made by the Saudi royal family while US oil expertise, personnel and technology keeps the cash coming in and the oil going out. ARAMCO operates, manages, and maintains virtually all Saudi oil fields – 25% of all the oil on the planet.

It gets better.

According to a New York Times report on March 8th of this year, ARAMCO is planning to make a 25% investment in a new and badly needed refinery to produce gasoline. The remaining 75% ownership of the refinery will go to the only nation that is quickly becoming America's major world competitor for ever-diminishing supplies of oil: China.

Almost the entire Bush administration has an interest in ARAMCO.

The Boston Globe reported that in 2001 ARAMCO had signed a $140 million multi-year contract with Halliburton, then chaired by Dick Cheney, to develop a new oil field. Halliburton does a lot of business in Saudi Arabia. Current estimates of Halliburton contracts or joint ventures in the country run into the tens of billions of dollars.

So do the fortunes of some shady figures from the Bush family's past.

As recently as 1991 ARAMCO had Khalid bin Mahfouz sitting on its Supreme Council or board of directors. Mahfouz, Saudi Arabia's former treasurer and the nation's largest banker, has been reported in several places to be Osama bin Laden's brother in law. However, he has denied this and brought intense legal pressure to bear demanding retractions of these allegations. He has major partnership investments with the multi-billion dollar Binladin Group of companies and he is a former director of BCCI, the infamous criminal drug-money laundering bank which performed a number of very useful services for the CIA before its 1991 collapse under criminal investigation by a whole lot of countries.

As Saudi Arabia's largest banker he handles the accounts of the royal family and - no doubt - ARAMCO, while at the same time he is a named defendant in a $1 trillion lawsuit filed by 9/11 victim families against the Saudi government and prominent Saudi officials who, the suit alleges, were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

Both BCCI and Mahfouz have historical connections to the Bush family dating back to the 1980s. Another bank (one of many) connected to Mahfouz - the InterMaritime Bank - bailed out a cash-starved Harken Energy in 1987 with $25 million. After the rejuvenated Harken got a no-bid oil lease in 1991, CEO George W. Bush promptly sold his shares in a pump-and-dump scheme and made a whole lot of money.

Knowing all of this, there's really no good reason why the CIA should be too upset, is there? It was only a long-term proprietary and deep-cover NOC - well established and consistently producing "take" from ARAMCO (and who knows what else in Saudi Arabia). It was destroyed with a motive of personal vengeance (there may have been other motives) by someone inside the White House.

From the CIA's point of view, at a time when Saudi Arabia is one of the three or four countries of highest interest to the US, the Plame operation was irreplaceable.

Third clue: Tenet's resignation, which occurred at night, was the first "evening resignation" of a Cabinet-level official since October 1973 when Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, resigned in protest of Richard Nixon's firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Many regard this as the watershed moment when the Nixon administration was doomed.

SAUDI ARABIA

Given that energy is becoming the most important issue on the planet today, if you were the CIA, you might be a little pissed off at the Plame leak. But there may be justification to do more than be angry. Anger happens all the time in Washington. This is something else.

One of the most important intelligence prizes today - especially after recent stories in major outlets like the New York Times reporting that Saudi oil production has peaked and gone into irreversible decline - would be to know of a certainty whether those reports are correct. The Saudis are denying it vehemently but they are being strongly refuted by an increasing amount of hard data. The truth remains unproven. But the mere possibility has set the world's financial markets on edge. Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi came to Washington on April 27th to put out the fires. It was imperative that he calm everybody's nerves as the markets were screaming, "Say it ain't so!"

Naimi said emphatically that there was nothing to worry about concerning either Saudi reserves or ARAMCO's ability to increase production. There was plenty of oil and no need for concern.

FTW covered and reported on that event. Writer and energy expert Julian Darley noted that there were some very important ears in the room, listening very closely. He also noted that Naimi's "scientific" data and promises of large future discoveries did not sit well many who are well versed in oil production and delivery.

[See FTW's June 2nd story, "Saudi's Missing Barrels" and our May 2003 story, "Paris Peak Oil Conference Reveals Deepening Crisis." In that story FTW editor Mike Ruppert was the first to report on credible new information that Saudi Arabia had possibly peaked.]

If anybody has the real data on Saudi fields it is either ARAMCO or the highest levels of the Saudi royal family.

The answer to the Saudi peak question will determine whether Saudi Arabia really can increase production quickly, as promised. If they can't, then the US economy is going to suffer bitterly, and it is certain that the Saudi monarchy will collapse into chaos. Then the nearby US military will occupy the oilfields and the U.S. will ultimately Balkanize the country by carving off the oil fields - which occupy only a small area near the East coast. That U.S. enclave would then provide sanctuary to the leading members of the royal family who will have agreed to keep their trillions invested in Wall Street so the US economy doesn't collapse.

So far the Saudis haven't had to prove that they could increase production due to convenient terror attacks at oil fields, and more "debates" within OPEC.

Fourth clue: Bush and Cheney have both hired or consulted private criminal defense attorneys in anticipation of possible indictments of them and/or their top assistants in the Plame investigation. On June 3, just hours before Tenet suddenly resigned, President Bush consulted with and may have retained a criminal defense attorney to represent him in the Plame case.

According to various press reports Bush has either retained or consulted with powerhouse attorney Jim Sharp, who represented Iran-contra figure retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord; Enron's Ken Lay; and Watergate co-conspirator Jeb Stuart Magruder. All three were facing criminal rather than civil charges. Either way, a clear signal has been sent that Bush expects to be either called to testify (which was a precursor in Watergate to a criminal indictment of Richard Nixon) or be named as a defendant. Either way, the President's men are falling faster than their counterparts fell in Watergate, and the initial targets are much higher up the food chain.

Cheney's attorney is Terrence O'Donnell, a partner of the Williams and Connolly law firm. O'Donnell worked for then White House chief of staff Cheney in the Ford administration and as General Counsel for the Pentagon when Cheney was Defense Secretary under the first President Bush. He has been representing the Vice President in criminal and civil cases involving Cheney's chairmanship of Halliburton. These include a Justice Department investigation of Halliburton for alleged payment of bribes to Nigerian political leaders and a stockholders' fraud law suit against Halliburton. O'Donnell also represented former CIA director John Deutch when he was accused of violating national security by taking his CIA computer home and surfing the Internet while it contained hundreds of highly-classified intelligence documents.

SPRINGING THE TRAP

Now, seemingly all of a sudden, Bush and Cheney are in the crosshairs. Cheney has been questioned by Fitzgerald within the last week.

The CIA Director's job by definition, whether others like it or not, is to be able to go to his President and advise him of the real scientific data on foreign resources (especially oil); to warn him of pending instability in a country closely linked to the US economy; and to tell him what to plan for and what to promise politically in his foreign policy. In light of her position in the CIA's relationship with Saudi Aramco, the outing of Valerie Plame made much of this impossible. In short, the Bush leak threatened National Security.

Former White House Counsel and Watergate figure John Dean, writing for the prestigious legal website findlaw.com on June 4th made some very ominous observations that appear to have gone unnoticed by most.

This action by Bush is a rather stunning and extraordinary development. The President of the United States is potentially hiring a private criminal defense lawyer. Unsurprisingly, the White House is doing all it can to bury the story, providing precious little detail or context for the President's action…

…But from what I have learned from those who have been quizzed by the Fitzgerald investigators it seems unlikely that they are interviewing the President merely as a matter of completeness, or in order to be able to defend their actions in front of the public. Asking a President to testify - or even be interviewed - remains a serious, sensitive and rare occasion. It is not done lightly. Doing so raises separation of powers concerns that continue to worry many…

…If so - and if the person revealed the leaker's identity to the President, or if the President decided he preferred not to know the leaker's identity. - Then this fact could conflict with Bush's remarkably broad public statements on the issue. He has said that he did not know of "anybody in [his] administration who leaked classified information." He has also said that he wanted "to know the truth" about this leak.

If Bush is called before the grand jury, it is likely because Fitzgerald believes that he knows much more about this leak than he has stated publicly.

Perhaps Bush may have knowledge not only of the leaker, but also of efforts to make this issue go away - if indeed there have been any. It is remarkably easy to obstruct justice, and this matter has been under various phases of an investigation by the Justice Department since it was referred by the CIA last summer…

…On this subject, I spoke with an experienced former federal prosecutor who works in Washington, specializing in white collar criminal defense (but who does not know Sharp). That attorney told me that he is baffled by Bush's move - unless Bush has knowledge of the leak. "It would not seem that the President needs to consult personal counsel, thereby preserving the attorney-client privilege, if he has no knowledge about the leak," he told me.

What advice might Bush get from a private defense counsel? The lawyer I consulted opined that, "If he does have knowledge about the leak and does not plan to disclose it, the only good legal advice would be to take the Fifth, rather than lie. The political fallout is a separate issue."

I raised the issue of whether the President might be able to invoke executive privilege as to this information. But the attorney I consulted - who is well versed in this area of law - opined that "Neither 'outing' Plame, nor covering for the perpetrators would seem to fall within the scope of any executive privilege that I am aware of."

That may not stop Bush from trying to invoke executive privilege, however - or at least from talking to his attorney about the option. As I have discussed in one of my prior columns, Vice President Dick Cheney has tried to avoid invoking it in implausible circumstances - in the case that is now before the U.S .Supreme Court. Rather he claims he is beyond the need for the privilege, and simply cannot be sued. [Emphasis added]

Suffice it to say that whatever the meaning of Bush's decision to talk with private counsel about the Valerie Plame leak, the matter has taken a more ominous turn with Bush's action. It has only become more portentous because now Dick Cheney has also hired a lawyer for himself, suggesting both men may have known more than they let on. Clearly, the investigation is heading toward a culmination of some sort. And it should be interesting.

Last and final clue: Under Executive Privilege, a principle intended to protect the constitutional separation of powers, officials in the Executive Branch cannot give testimony in a legal case against a sitting President. The Bush administration has invoked or threatened to invoke the privilege several times. Dick did it over the secret records of his energy task force and George Bush tried to use it to prevent Condoleezza Rice from testifying before the "Independent" Commission investigating September 11th.

Former officials of the Executive Branch are, however, free to testify if they are no longer holding a government office when subpoenaed or when the charges are brought.

[To learn more about Executive Privilege visit www.findlaw.com]

The Bush administration has proved itself to be an insular group of inept, dishonest and dangerous CEO's of the corporation known as America. They have become very bad for business and the Board of Directors is now taking action. Make no mistake, the CIA works for "The Board" - Wall Street and big money. The long-term (very corrupt and unethical) agenda of the Board, in the face of multiple worsening global crises, was intended to proceed far beyond the initially destructive war in Iraq, toward an effective reconstruction and a strategic response to Peak Oil. But the neocons have stalled at the ugly stage: killing hundreds of thousands of people; destroying Iraq's industrial and cultural infrastructure as their own bombs and other people's RPGs blow everything up; getting caught running torture camps; and making the whole world intensely dislike America.

These jerks are doing real damage to their masters' interests.

But (not surprisingly) Tenet and the CIA were and remain much better at covert operations and planning ahead than the Bush administration ever was. Tenet and Pavitt actually prepared and left a clear, irrefutable and incriminating paper trail which not only proves that they had shunned and refused to endorse the documents, the CIA also did not support the nuke charges and warned Bush not to use them.

Where are those documents now? They're part of the Justice Department Plame investigation - and they're also in the hands of the Congressman who will most likely introduce and manage the articles of impeachment, if that becomes necessary: Henry Waxman (D), of California. If you would like to see how tightly the legal trap has been prepared, and how carefully the evidence has been laid out, I suggest taking a look around Waxman's web site at: http://www.house.gov/waxman/.

THE SWARM

There are a multitude of signs that the Bush administration is being "swarmed" in what is becoming a feeding frenzy as opposition is surfacing from many places inside the government, including the military. The signs are not hard to find.

The June 3rd issue of Capitol Hill Blue, the newspaper published for members of Congress, bore the headline "Bush Knew About Leak of CIA Operative's Name". That article virtually guaranteed that the Plame investigation had enough to pursue Bush criminally. The story's lead sentence described a criminal, prosecutable offense: "Witnesses told a federal grand jury President George W. Bush knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a covert CIA operative's name to a journalist in an attempt to discredit her husband, a critic of administration policy in Iraq."

A day later, on June 4th Capitol Hill Blue took another hard shot at the administration. Titled "Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides", the story's first four paragraphs say everything.

President George W. Bush's increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader's state of mind.

In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as "enemies of the state."

Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.

"It reminds me of the Nixon days," says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. "Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That's the mood over there."

The attacks have not stopped. On June 8th, the same paper followed with another story headlined, "Lawyers Told Bush He Could Order Suspects Tortured".

Journalist Wayne Madsen, a Washington veteran with excellent access to many sources has indicated for this story that the Neocons have few remaining friends anywhere. All of this is consistent with a CIA-led coup.

Ahmed Chalabi

Madsen reported that the Plame probe comes amid another high-level probe of Pentagon officials for leaking classified National Security Agency cryptologic information to Iran via Iraqi National Congress head Ahmed Chalabi. FBI agents have polygraphed and interviewed a number of civilian political appointees in the Pentagon in relation to the intelligence leak, said to have severely disrupted the National Security Agency's ability to listen in on encrypted Iranian diplomatic and intelligence communications.

Chalabi's leak has once again forced Iran to change equipment, resulting in impaired U.S. intelligence gathering of Iran's sensitive communications. The probe into the Chalabi leak is centering on Pentagon officials who have been close to Chalabi, including Office of Net Assessment official Harold Rhode, Director of Policy and Plans officials Douglas Feith and William Luti, Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. In addition, some former Pentagon advisers are also targeted in the probe.

Many press reports throughout 2003 indicated that Chalabi, distrusted and virtually discarded by the CIA, had been resurrected and inserted into the Iraqi political mix on the orders of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the other Neocons listed above.

Abu Ghraib and Torture

A former CIA official told Madsen that between the Plame leak and the Abu Ghraib torture affair, the Bush administration is facing something that will be "worse than Watergate."

PLANNING FOR SUCCESSION

If both Bush and Cheney are removed or resign, what happens? Madsen reported that lobbyists and political consultants in Washington are dusting off their copies of the Constitution and checking the line of presidential succession.

One lobbyist said he will soon pay a call on Alaska Republican Senator Ted Stevens, who, as President pro tem of the Senate, is second in line to House Speaker Dennis Hastert to become President in the event Bush and Cheney both go.

It is one of the greatest ironies of the Plame affair that the Bush administration, spawned and nurtured by oil, might have committed suicide by vindictively, cruelly and unthinkingly exacting personal retribution on an intelligence officer who had committed no offense, and who was, quite possibly, providing the administration with critical oil-related intelligence which the President needed to manage our shaky economy and affairs of state for a while longer to squeak through to re-election. In our opinion, nothing better epitomizes the true nature of the Neocons.

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Sunday at 7.10am, repeated Wednesday at 7.10pm

on Sunday 2/3/2003

Just War - LISTEN TO AUDIO

Summary:
Since Christians first found themselves in control of an empire in AD 313, they've grappled with the ethics of war and state violence. Christian leaders are obliged to protect their citizens, by military force if need be. But how does this obligation square with the example of Jesus, who chose death over violent resistance? 1500 years of theological pondering on this question have given us the Just War tradition, which sets out the circumstances under which Christians can legitimately take up arms. But the times are changing fast. How useful is Just War theory today, in addressing such conflicts as America/Iraq and the "war against terror"?

Details or Transcript:
David Rutledge: Hello, and welcome to Encounter. And welcome to the first program in Encounter’s Ethos series. I’m David Rutledge, and on the first Encounter of every month, I’ll be presenting a program specially dedicated to ethics – looking how we live, how we perhaps want to live but don’t, and exploring the role that religious traditions play in clarifying the issues – or perhaps blurring them, as the case may be.

This week, as clouds gather over the Middle East, we’re looking at war.

STORM, MUSIC

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.
- Catullus

Stanley Hauerwas: What I think Christianity is about, is always learning how to die early for the right reasons. And Americans just – that’s a thought that is unthinkable.

John Elford: The morals of Jesus aren’t a blueprint for evermore. Jesus’ message is a message about the imminence of the Kingdom of God. But the great thing about Christian religion – as other great religions of the world – it goes on developing.

David Rutledge: British theologian and author John Elford, and before him American pacifist Stanley Hauerwas, and we’ll be hearing more from both of them later in the program.

Much of the theology and the politics of the last couple of months in the West has invoked the just war tradition, and specifically the question of whether or not an attack on Iraq would be in keeping with just war principles. And by now most of us have heard those principles set out: for a war to be morally justified, there has to be just cause, it has to be declared by a proper authority and for the right reasons, it has to be waged as a last resort, and there has to be a reasonable chance of success. A just war is also one in which harm to civilians is minimised – you can’t just go in and indiscriminately carpet-bomb cities and villages, even if there are enemy soldiers hiding in them.

Just war is one of the great traditions of Christian ethics, with a history stretching back to St Augustine in the 4th century – but it really took root in Western politics as a response to the horrors of religious war. After centuries of butchery in the name of God – culminating in the wars of the early 1600s that turned central Europe into a bloodbath for thirty years – any philosophy that set moral limits on human savagery seemed worth pursuing.

James Johnson: The just war tradition – all the way back into the Middle Ages, from the time it first came together and then began developing on – was never easy with the idea of war for religion. and in fact, as early as the 13th century, the medieval canonists rejected the authorisation of war by any religious leader except the Pope, and even then, only under very very restricted circumstances – so restricted that in fact subsequent Popes really never were allowed to authorise the use of force. So the uneasiness with the use of force on behalf of religion goes back very very early in the just war tradition. And it’s essentially a way of saying “no, never again, we’re not going to have this kind of carnage, this kind of fratricidal combat ever again, and the reason we had it was because we allowed religion to rule politics – and we’re not going to let that happen again”.

David Rutledge: That’s James Turner Johnson, a religious historian based at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He’s the author of a number of books on Western and Islamic traditions of war. Well when we think of Islamic traditions of war, the word jihad springs immediately to mind, and right at the moment in the popular imagination, jihad is more or less a byword for terrorism. Even a more considered assessment of jihad will still equate it with religious war, and we in the West generally associate religious war with the dark days before the Enlightenment. But James Johnson points out that jihad has its own just war tradition, it’s a tradition that limits when and how war might be waged, and it throws some interesting light on the legitimacy of the jihad currently being declared against the West by al-Qaeda.

James Johnson: There is an important tradition in Islam, going back to the time of the early Abbassid dynasty in the 9th/10th centuries, when the theorists of this period defined basically two kinds of jihad (meaning jihad of the sword): they defined it as being either a collective duty or an individual duty. Now, the jihad of the sword as a collective duty was very much a rule-governed activity. The Caliph or the Imam of the Muslim community had to declare it; it had to be announced to the people on the other side, so that they would have a chance to accept the sovereignty of the Islamic state without fighting, and if they did accept it, they couldn’t be fought against; there were very extensive rules having to do with non-combatants – and there’s essentially no important difference between the list of non-combatants you find in Islamic history, and the list of non-combatants you find in the just war idea. There were not many rules on the means you could use. The one thing that sort of leaps off the lage at you is concern that fire should not be used as a weapon, because that’s God’s weapon that he will use in the Last Days, when he judges between the good and the evil. But the whole notion that war is to be fought by the community meant that there were some who would fight and there were some who would stay home. And you would not fight against everybody among the enemy, you would only fight against those who were fighting against you, or capable of fighting against you.

Now, that’s the jihad of collective duty. There is this other kind of jihad, though, that comes to pass when you have a situation of emergency. Imagine that you and your family and your neighbours are living out on the edge of the Islamic territory, and you get up one morning, and here comes an army from the territory of war, marching across the boundary into the territory of Islam. What do you do? Do you send your youngest off to Baghdad to the Caliph, to raise an army to come out to fight? Well, yes, you do – you send your youngest off on your fastest camel or donkey to do that. But at the same time, you have an obligation as an individual to fight against this aggression – you, and in addition to you, all the people in the area you’re in, even people who would normally not be involved in fighting. So your wife must fight, your young children must fight, your aged father must get up off his sickbed and fight. And in this kind of emergency jihad, the rules are really pretty much out of the picture, because it’s assumed that everybody who’s engaging in the aggression is in fact somebody that you may lawfully kill.

David Rutledge: And this is essentially the kind of jihad that Osama bin Laden has invoked, then?

James Johnson: Exactly, exactly. That’s what I was going to say – and in fact I have written to that effect.

David Rutledge: That’s something we have to be very clear about, then, isn’t it – that September 11th and the related terrorist attacks are not part of the normative jihad tradition. They’re part of a kind of subsidiary jihad, or emergency jihad?

James Johnson: Yes. And we have to realise, too, I think, that the reason that the classical jurists – the jurists of the 9th and 10th centuries – didn’t spend a lot of time on this, is that thinking this thing through, it turns out that it’s pretty dangerous. Because it means that you’ve really abrogated the rule of law in your own society, in order to fight against this aggression. There’s a rule in collective jihad, jihad of collective duty, that a son must get permission from this father, and he must ask and get permission from his mother, not once but three times, before he can go to war. You don’t have to do this in the jihad of emergency duty, of individual duty. So the point that I’m trying to make is that the emergency is not to be understood as the way things ought to always be, because there are real problems for the structure, the order of the Islamic community itself.

David Rutledge: And is the main problem there, perhaps, the problem of legitimate authority, it seems that essentially anybody can declare an emergency jihad?

James Johnson: That’s exactly right. And in fact, that’s effectively what bin Laden and his lieutenants in that famous fatwa of 1998 did – they arrogated authority to themselves to make this judgement, and in so doing, they simply rode roughshod over all the