Politics 101: Know the Difference between WE and THEY

WE didn't do this. THEY did this.

Apologies for writing something personal, but this is a special anniversary for me.

I was born in 1957, so I was six years old when President Kennedy was assassinated. At the time, I didn't even  know what the word "assassinated" meant, much less understand what it meant that this particular President had been assassinated. But I saw how the news affected my parents, and all the other adults, and I realized I needed to start paying attention to the news -- and especially to politics, which previously had seemed boring. 

In 1968, when Senator Kennedy was assassinated, I was only eleven, but I had been paying close attention for five years. I knew what "assassinated" meant, and I knew what it meant that this particular Senator had been assassinated. To the country, and to the world, it meant that we were destined for a long and horrible war. For me personally, it meant if I didn't get out of the United States in the next seven years, my life would be in danger. 

Thus Was All Hope Lost, 45 Years Ago Today

Forty-five years ago today, the world was changed by an audacious act of terrorism.

Ensuing events have confirmed the suspicions that arose at the time: the changes that came in the wake of the terror have been forever, and not for better.

Humanity's last reasonable hope for peace and prosperity was dashed. The last real President of the United States was dead. And all the rest has been decline and fall.

John F. Kennedy wasn't perfect -- not by any means. But he was brilliant, compassionate, hopeful of a brighter future for humanity, and willing to fight for that future.

Alone he stood between the American warmongers and their goal of establishing an endless quagmire in Vietnam. He chided the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in private; in public he did the same thing, but more subtly.

All the world wept at the news of his death -- all except for the most vicious and ignorant parts of it, which lie deep in the heart of the Confederacy.

In retrospect, there can be no doubt that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was an inside job, a military coup d'etat, the beginning of the end of America as it once could have been.

A year ago I wrote a three-part series which I hope all my readers will revisit -- or read for the first time.

[1] Two Conspiracies, No Theories

Although I rarely write about it, I probably know more about the murder of John F. Kennedy than I do about any other historical event.

And it's difficult for me not to notice the parallels between that national tragedy and the other one, the more recent one.

Noticing these parallels makes me a multiple-conspiracy theorist, a moonbat lunatard leftwit nutball and so on, according to the keepers of the imperial gates. So be it.

[2] The Coverup Continues: 'JFK Was A Hawk' And Other Stories

My recent post about the JFK assassination, "Two Conspiracies, No Theories", made distinctions between the plot to kill the President and the plot to hide the crime, and it drew a further distinction between the plot to hide the crime and the coverup itself.

The coverup, I argued, was (is!) much bigger than the plot to hide the crime. I used Walter Cronkite as an example; as I understand it, he wasn't "in on" the plot to hide the crime; he was simply part of the coverup: getting bad information and passing it on.

Many others assisted the coverup without being part of any conspiracy. Lies were fed into the echo chamber, so to speak, and when they came out the other end they were absorbed by millions, who passed them on, and continue to do so.

[3] 'Better Than Doyle': Camouflage In The JFK Assassination Would Have Fooled Sherlock

Forty-four years ago, it was relatively easy to get an open shot at the President of the United States, as long as you didn't mind getting caught. John F. Kennedy, the 35th President, used to wander into crowds to shake hands, and there were no metal detectors at the gates. Quite often there were no gates.

But if you wanted to shoot the President and get away with it, your task was more difficult. And the men behind the coup that shook the world forty-four years ago were not about to risk getting caught.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

A Formula For Endless War: The Wounded Shark, The Quest For Victory, And The Illusion Of Success

Yesterday, Chris Floyd posted one of his best pieces ever. It's called "The Wounded Shark: 'Good War' Lost, But the Imperial Project Goes On" and you must read the entire piece, if you haven't already done so. I can wait.

I respect and admire Chris Floyd's analysis -- especially in this case -- but I've also been having some mildly interesting thoughts of my own, about a few of the issues he touched on, and therefore I offer the following excerpts from his post, with extended comments.

I don't think I'm saying anything Chris hasn't already figured out. I think I'm saying things that he couldn't fit into his piece, which was already huge -- and brilliant! And therefore this commentary is not meant as a critique but rather as a companion piece to "The Wounded Shark", which starts this way:

Don't tell Obama and McCain, but the war they are both counting on to make their bones as commander-in-chief -- the "good war" in Afghanistan, which both men have pledged to expand -- is already lost.

This war was always lost; it was never even intended to be "won", in my opinion.

Their joint strategy of pouring more troops, tanks, missiles and planes into the roaring fire -- not to mention their intention to spread the war into Pakistan -- will only lead to disaster.

And this depends on what you mean by "disaster". We must always remember that the interests of the people running the war are not the same as, and in many ways are diametrically opposed to, the interests of the people who are being asked (or forced) to fight it.

In this case, the prognosis of "disaster" comes from

America's biggest ally in the Afghan adventure: Great Britain. This week, two top figures in the British effort in Afghanistan -- Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, UK ambassador to Kabul, and Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the senior British military commander in Afghanistan -- both said that the war was "unwinnable," and that continuing the current level of military operations there, much less expanding it, was a strategy "doomed to fail."

The British seem shocked to discover all this, but it seems to me that the British were never meant to understand the point of this war, nor the reasons for it, nor the conditions under which it might be said to have been "won". And neither were any of our other "allies", and neither -- clearly -- were the American public.

As Reuters reports, the comments from the top figures in the British effort have already been derided as "defeatist" by Pentagon big dog Robert Gates, even though they were

echoed by the top United Nations official in Kabul, who said success was only possible through dialogue and other political efforts.

The basic disconnect here -- as elsewhere -- seems to be that nobody, from the top United Nations official in Kabul on down, has any idea what our Secretary of Defense means when he says:

"While we face significant challenges in Afghanistan, there certainly is no reason to be defeatist or to underestimate the opportunities to be successful in the long run."

Personally, I would want to know: How "long" is "the long run"? And just what do we mean by "successful"?

But simply posing such questions is akin to treason, apparently, because we never see them asked in the major media. So let's skip the questions and go straight to the undeniable facts of the matter.

Casting the outcome of this "mission" in terms of winning and losing, or success and failure, is a sham. It is every bit as false as casting any of our current wars -- or the entire GWOT -- in terms of "good" Christians against "evil" Muslims. And it is done for the same reason -- to obliterate the truth of the matter.

Chris Floyd rightly points out that the reasons given for the invasion of Afghanistan would make no sense, even if the official story of 9/11 were true, which it clearly isn't. But the falsity of the official 9/11 story is beside my point -- or beside this point: Afghanistan was bombed and invaded and remains occupied based on a tangled web of deliberate lies.

These lies obscure not only the causes of the war but also the intentions of the people running it.

Thus our British "allies" think the "mission" is doomed to fail because they're under the impression that the object of the exercise is to bring peace and democracy and progress to Afghanistan, by rooting out the terrorists of global reach who threaten the entire civilized world.

But that's not even close to the truth. We can see this in many different ways: sufficient for the purposes of this analysis is the fact that our tactics have no relation to our declared goals.

The reason for all this deception is simple: if the real aims, goals, and reasons for this war were laid bare, the United States would have no allies at all.

So instead, there's a veneer of lies over everything, including the "agreements" obtained under extreme duress from our so-called "allies". And this is why Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, UK ambassador to Kabul, wrote

"we must tell [the Americans] that we want to be part of a winning strategy, not a losing one.” The American strategy, he is quoted as saying, “is destined to fail.”

Destined to fail? Of course it is! It's designed to fail! Otherwise, the tactics -- and the result -- would have been quite different.

When President Kennedy took office in January of 1961, one of the first things he signed was the foreword for a new book, which had been commissioned under the Eisenhower administration, and was just about to be published. It was a study of counter-insurgency strategy, short enough and interesting enough that I wound up reading it several times in a row, nearly two decades ago.

(That book was part of the military history library of a software development firm for which I used to work; the firm no longer exists and I haven't been able to find the book anywhere else. But I spent quite a few lunch hours reading it and I still remember quite a bit of what I read.)

There were about a dozen chapters, each a case study illustrating a very successful (or very unsuccessful) counter-insurgency strategy as it had been played out in the decade and a half since the end of World War II.

It was good information -- solid lessons about what to do, and what not to do. Kennedy greeted it heartily and predicted that it would be extremely valuable in the guerrilla war which was then threatening to develop in Southeast Asia. But as things turned out, it wasn't.

I would never claim that JFK was assassinated because he said that book was the key to winning in Vietnam. But the facts remain that he was assassinated, and that the war was waged in utter disregard of every single hard-learned lesson embodied in that book.

We knew dropping napalm on civilians wasn't the way to win their hearts and minds. We knew kidnapping innocent people and throwing them out of moving helicopters was going to make their friends and families angry. We knew destroying a village in order to save it was not a reasonable or scalable approach. But we -- by which I mean the people who were running the war -- did all these things anyway, and more, over and over and over again.

In some important and overlooked ways, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the GWOT in general, and even the Wall Street "rescue" reflect the same tactics.

First they find an enemy which must be defeated, preferably at any cost. If no such enemy reports for duty, they'll create one. In some cases, the enemy can be embodied in a supremely evil villain, such as Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. In other cases, such as the Vietnam War and the Wall Street "rescue", the "enemy" is merely a potential outcome which must be avoided at any cost, such as a global depression, or all of Southeast Asia becoming communist.

Next they provide an alternative -- the only alternative, as it always turns out: and it's always and obviously much better than the enemy, which must therefore be thoroughly defeated. Whether we're talking about ensuring economic stability, defeating terrorism, bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East, or saving the world from Communism, the stated goals are always infinitely more desirable than the outcomes that must be avoided, and therefore there can be no argument over the assertion that the ends justify the means.

In other words, we are always being told that what we are trying to do is so righteous -- and what we are trying to defeat (or avoid) is so terrible -- that all methods are acceptable, and nothing is "off the table". But then this "nothing-off-the-table" approach allows the use of tactics which preclude the ends we are allegedly trying to accomplish.

So we invade Iraq and continue to occupy it even though all our intelligence professionals tell us American troops in Iraq are contributing to a rise in terrorism.

We bomb civilian villages in Afghanistan even though we know it sets back the diplomatic "effort" at "reconciliation".

We throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the companies which caused the financial meltdown, while claiming that saving them is essential to preventing the continuation of the meltdown they have caused.

None of it makes any sense except in terms of secret agendas which are completely at odds with the public cover story.

In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the GWOT in general, our "finest" military minds are not only ignoring all the lessons of 20th century counter-insurgency warfare, but also the most time-honored knowledge about war itself, such as the bit of ancient Chinese wisdom that runs, "Know your enemy".

The ancients -- not just the Chinese but all of them -- knew that they could win their wars only by understanding their enemy, by gaining -- and using -- intimate knowledge of who they were fighting against, and what motivated these people to fight.

These days, we can't get a straight answer to any of it: You almost never see anyone mention that our enemies are people too. Nobody -- at least in the official national discourse -- can bear to admit that we're fighting against the best, the bravest, and the most resourceful citizens of the countries that we have invaded. Nor can anyone admit that they're fighting against us because we bombed and invaded and destroyed their countries, and stayed -- all on false pretenses.

It can be said -- and it often is said -- that the war is being run "inefficiently", or that the military has been "blundering", and so on; but when we systematically ignore some of the most valuable lessons of our history, and some of the oldest human knowledge pertaining to warfare, that's not a blunder. That's a telltale sign.

It points to the fact that what we're really doing -- and again by "we", I mean the people who are running the war -- is very different than what we say we're doing.

We're trying to conquer foreign countries, not to bring them democracy, but to bring them under our thumb. We want their natural resources. We want their territory -- and if we can't own it outright then we at least want to be able to move men and material freely and securely through it.

As even a brief study of our history will confirm, we do not now give and we never have given a damn about bringing democracy to any foreign country; in fact we have a tradition of overthrowing democratically elected governments if they don't do what we demand of them. But none of this can possibly be spoken in "polite" society (by which I mean not only television, radio and the mainstream newspapers, but also a disturbingly large number of allegedly dissident websites), where the only permissible talk seems to be about winning and losing.

If the opinion-makers can convince the chumps that the question is one of winning or losing, and that winning is the only acceptable outcome, then the war can go on forever -- especially if all methods are acceptable, including those which are actually intended to prolong the war.

Anti-war types who argue about winning and losing are doomed to fail, because they're playing into the hands of war supporters, who have obvious answers available for either eventuality: if we're winning, then we must be doing something right, and therefore we should do more of it; if we're losing, then we must not be trying hard enough, and therefore we should try harder. Either way, if winning the war is the outcome we seek, we must wage more war.

Furthermore, if we reduce a war of choice to the level of a game, we minimize all the things that matter most about the war: all the suffering we've inflicted becomes "collateral damage", and it doesn't even show up on the "scoreboard". Meanwhile, the false reasons that "justified" the war don't matter anymore, and we're free to proceed as if we hadn't done anything wrong, as if we're only in this "game" because we were "scheduled" to "play" it.

But war is nothing like a game. And the wars we are currently waging -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere in the GWOT -- were all "justified" based on transparent lies. Therefore they are also war crimes, and crimes against all of humanity: these are huge, unforgivable crimes, and we are the guilty parties. And here, when I say "we", I mean not only the people who are running the war, but also the people who are fighting it, and the people who support them -- no matter what form that support may take.

If you voted for George Bush, or for a Congressman or Senator who voted to fund this war; if you "support the troops" in any fashion, even by simply saying you do; if you pay taxes to Uncle Sam; if you believe that we should or must win any or all of our wars, in the sense that the administration and its supporters use the term; then you're part of the problem. And that makes just about all of us. I'm sorry to have to tell you that, but would you rather have me lie to you?

You can get plenty of comforting lies elsewhere -- almost anywhere else, sadly. And perhaps the worst lies of all are the ones that say, "We can win!"

The idea that we can "win" is a sham and its job is to cover up an enormous crime. Winning is impossible, not only in Afghanistan but also in Iraq and in the GWOT in general; and in every one of these cases, the impossibility of winning is a deliberate feature of the grand deception.

For example: the US would consider that it had won the war in Iraq, if Iraq somehow became a peaceful, stable nation with a legitimate, democratically elected government, as long as that government was friendly to "US interests".

But that's not a possible result. That was never a possible result.

Even before "Shock and Awe", even before the destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure, even before the "liberation" overstayed its welcome and showed itself to be an occupation, even before the gradual, unsurprising, "revelations" that all of this hostility was based on deliberately crafted lies ... even before any of this, no legitimate, democratically elected government in Iraq could possibly have been friendly to "US interests", especially when the main US interests are (or are seen to be) building American bases on Iraqi soil and regaining American-multinational control of all that Iraqi oil.

In this sense we cannot possibly "win" in Iraq. But we are constantly told that we mustn't lose. And this means we can never surrender. So therefore the war will go on and on forever -- or until we stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution.

The same is true in Afghanistan, at least in general form, although in this case the particulars are different. We cannot win because the war is based on lies; and because the desired outcome is impossible; and because the tactics used to "approach" our goal only serve to move it farther away, thus prolonging the war.

Again the actual goals are hidden, and again they are very different than what we are told: At the heart of the war in Afghanistan lie vast opium fortunes, strategic bases, and the free passage through foreign territory of valuable resources owned by American-multinational corporations, not necessarily in that order.

Of course, there's also the "intimidation factor".

Every other country in the world must measure each action, plan, or strategic idea according to a number of factors, including whether they think the Americans will stand for it.

The bombing, invasion, destruction and subsequent occupation of Iraq -- based on no credible evidence to support any of the claims which supposedly made this course of action necessary, says to every other nation on the planet:

"Who wants to be next?"

As Jonah Goldberg explained in National Review in 2002:

I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago...

It's noy just Ledeen and Goldberg, of course. A huge segment of the bipartisan policy-making establishment (though they may not say it) act as if they believed the very same thing. So when the US talks about a "rogue state" or a "bully in the schoolyard", the rest of the world rolls its eyes.

In addition there's a common thread running through all our wars: every piece of equipment ruined must be replaced. Every bomb used, every bullet fired, every meal eaten must be supplied by somebody who is making money on the deal.

The longer the war goes on, the better it is for the weapons manufacturers, the defense contractors, and their financiers. These are the people who want the chumps thinking about winning and losing -- and now I mean the chumps in the corridors of power as well as the chumps in the streets.

Chris Floyd quotes an excellent piece from Pankaj Mishra which quotes George Bush telling his commanders in Iraq:

Kick ass! ... We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal ... There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!

Chris notes:

Anyone who has read Hitler's "table talk" will feel a shiver of familiarity -- and revulsion -- when reading Bush's words.

And I agree completely with that, but not with this:

This is the voice of our mud-brain thrashing its way through broken fragments of higher-order thought. This is the voice of an imperial elite -- of our imperial elite.

In my opinion, this is merely the voice of an imperial chump, a "mud-brain", channeling the nonsense he's been fed by the "imperial elite".

In the same way, Adolph Hitler proved to be just another imperial chump in the end, firing a bullet into his head to avoid being hanged for his crimes ... while his financiers skedaddled with the loot, and set up shop ... um ... elsewhere!

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Double False Flags, Shifting Sands: Warrior Nominated For Peace Prize

If you dig into modern terrorism for a while, you will eventually begin to notice two different trends that are almost always happening simultaneously.

Often they are happening so subtly that if you keep digging for a while longer you can almost stop noticing them, as they become part of the background noise.

But you never quite get used to that noise, and sometimes it makes itself evident in jarring ways, as it has done recently for me.

Double False Flag Terror

One of these two subtle trends might be called "double false flagging". In a "single" false flag attack, the real perpetrators are disguised as somebody else. The object is to frame an enemy. This trick is as old as the hills.

The modern twist on the old trick calls for disguising both the perpetrators and victims. And we've seen quite a bit of it in our lifetimes -- almost enough to take it for granted.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, involved very specific and heavily symbolic targets: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon stood for American economic and military dominance over the world, and many Americans were proud to say so.

When they were attacked, it would have been easy to conclude that the attacks had targeted American global dominance and two very visible symbols thereof. But instead we were told incessantly that it was the civilized world itself that had been attacked. Did you believe that?

Whoever "gets to be the victim" of a terrorist attack can use the emotional power of the event for good (theoretically) or ill (as it always seems to happen). I've used quotes around the phrase "gets to be the victim" because, as we all know (or would know if we were thinking), the actual victims of actual terrorist attacks are already dead.

9/11 is a classic case of a double-lie about victims and perpetrators, as people who falsely call themselves the victims wage a seemingly endless war against other people whom they falsely call the perpetrators. How can this happen? When the "news" media are onside with the double-lie, the truth barely has a chance.

Last October 18th, a bomb blast (or two) ripped through a political procession in Karachi, Pakistan, killing more than 130 people. The leader of the procession, Benazir Bhutto, was not injured in the attack -- due to either a remarkable string of coincidences or (dare we say it?) foreknowledge.

I blogged extensively about this attack, and noted many very strange details. But one of the things that struck me most powerfully was the fact that within days, the uninjured Bhutto was referring to herself as the victim of the attack.

In fact, most of the victims had been members of her human shield, and they'd been paid (four pounds a day) to be there.

We saw another example of this cynical ploy last weekend after the Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad.

Barack Obama showed unsurpassed skill at "getting to be the victim" when he said:

"Today’s attack demonstrates the grave and urgent threat that al Qaeda and its affiliates pose to the United States, to Pakistan, and to the security of all nations."

A bomb goes off in front of a hotel and that demonstrates "a grave and urgent threat" to "the security of all nations"?

He's good, isn't he? Scary good.

In the "good old days" of 9/11, only the civilized world was under attack. Now it's all nations, civilized or not. In Obama's world, we all get to be the victims. He's a uniter, not a divider. Barack Obama wants to embroil everyone in the morass...

Well, it turned out that al Qaeda didn't claim responsibility for the Marriott bombing, and another -- totally unknown -- group did. That group didn't have any terrorist history or any obvious affiliation with al Qaeda, but Obama's statement still stands, doesn't it? We're all under grave and imminent threat from ... whoever did it ... aren't we?

The Shifting Sands Of Time

The other parallel and complementary trend, which I call "the shifting sands of time", concerns the way that changes are made to the official stories of major terror attacks. The original story is almost always found wanting and replaced with another one, which turns out to be ludicrous and is replaced, and so on ... but nobody ever seems to draw the logical conclusion from all these changes.

That's not quite true, of course, because some people do notice the shifting stories. But the people who notice the shifts and talk about them are all but barred from public discourse. I've been watching this trend all my life.

In 1963, when JFK was assassinated, we were told the assassin was behind the president and that Kennedy has been shot in the front of the neck. But then people started asking the logical question: How could the president have been shot in the front, from behind?

The New York Times came along with a ready-made explanation: He was turning to wave to someone behind him when he was shot. Fair enough -- or not really?

Not really. JFK had been injured in World War II and he wore a heavy back brace. He could never have turned around and waved to the rear while sitting in a car seat. Or could he?

No, he couldn't! And the Zapruder film showed him being shot while facing forward. Oops! Now the sands had to shift again. The entrance wound in the President's neck became an exit wound, and the NYT's explanation was revealed as a flat-out lie. So that lie was buried under the shifting sands, and the nation moved on... Or did it?

Most did, but not all. One of the people who didn't was a New York attorney named Mark Lane. He made a collection of news clippings, such as the NYT piece I've mentioned, which showed just how much the sands in this case had been shifting ever since the President was shot. And Lane started doing public presentations based on his research.

Eventually he published a book, "Rush To Judgment", which devastated the official story. And for his efforts, his research, his presentations, and his book, Mark Lane was called a kook, a crank, an egomaniac, and a madman. The national "news" media poured scorn on him for years, and even many so-called "JFK researchers" joined in the character abuse -- none of which changed the fact that Mark Lane was right. JFK wasn't shot in the front from behind. He was shot in the front from the front.

The case of Rashid Rauf, the alleged ringleader of the so-called Liquid Bombers, provides another fine example of shifting sands. In August of 2006, when the Liquid Bombers were arrested, we were told that Rauf's arrest in Pakistan had triggered all the arrests in England which followed. But we didn't know much about Rashid Rauf himself.

At the time, furious Googling turned up his home page, and not much else about him. I can recall being frustrated about the scarcity of information, and I started paying close attention, watching for his name to appear on the net. In the past two years I have mirrored more than 300 newspaper articles about Rashid Rauf at my "other" blog, Winter Parking, and I've read more blog posts mentioning his name than I can count.

I've also written more than 30 extensively detailed articles about the plot and the aftermath of the arrests.

"So what?" you may say. And maybe it doesn't matter. But I'm very rarely surprised by anything I read about this man, or about this case -- unless it's false.

And one day I found a post at Long War Journal which called Rashid Rauf an "al Qaeda commander". I had never seen him described as such, so I did some more Googling and found two articles in which it was hinted that perhaps Rashid Rauf had met an al Qaeda commander. But nothing more substantial -- and it's a far cry from allegedly perhaps meeting an al Qaeda commander to becoming one yourself, so I revisited that post and left a comment.

My comment said: "How do you know that Rashid Rauf is an al Qaeda commander?" And I was pleasantly surprised that it was published without any delay for moderation. I was even hoping to learn something from the response. So I stopped by again the next day, and found that my comment had been deleted.

In my opinion, this is how we know whether or not Rashid Rauf is really an al Qaeda commander. It's also a reminder: inquiring minds are very dangerous to the shifters of sand, especially if they're connected to functional memory banks.

All Together, Now

When you see the shifting sands and the double false flags together, you know something special's going on. And that brings us back to Islamabad, where one of the questions that's been in the air lately runs: "Why was the Marriott Hotel attacked?"

Immediately after the attack, Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik produced a fine combination of being the victim and shifting the sands, when he told the media the reason the terrorists had chosen the Marriott was because they were trying to kill the leaders of the government, who had planned to eat together at the hotel that evening.

But instead they'd decided to dine at the Prime Minister's residence, said Malik, in a manner which one scribe reported as sounding "as if they'd saved the entire country".

Given this background, it might have been embarrassing for Rehman Malik when the owner of the Marriott Hotel told the press he knew of no plans for the government leaders to visit his hotel on the fatal evening.

Can you imagine hundreds of the country's most important politicians planning to arrive together at a hotel for dinner, without giving the management advance notice? How could that happen? It wouldn't.

Instead, the sands needed to be shifted again. And on Wednesday the International Human Rights Commission nominated Rehman Malik for an International Peace Award for his role in the "War against Terrorism".

Rehman Malik is now in a magical realm, where he gets to be both "the victim" and "the hero".

According to Dawn,

The award is recognition of the services rendered by Rehman Malik in the area of fighting war against terrorism and extremism and for achieving the lasting peace in the country, strengthening the democratic institution after the establishment of newly elected government under the leadership of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Lasting peace? That's a bad joke. The war against militants in the mountains has already produced scores of thousands of refugees, and now "analysts" are saying they "fear" Pakistan may descend into civil war.

We shall soon see how much lasting peace Rehman Malik and his colleagues have brought to Pakistan. I will be surprised if there is any.

But what else can we expect, when warriors are getting nominated for peace prizes?

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Stack Of Reports Proves It: Office Furnishings Killed Building 7

In a press conference yesterday, Shyam Sunder, who represents the National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] as Lead Investigator of the World Trade Center Disaster, introduced himself and said:

I am here to summarize the findings from our three-year study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7.

The collapse of WTC 7 has been a source of extensive speculation. No planes hit the building. There was damage to the building from the collapse of World Trade Center Tower 1, which was about 370 feet to the south. [...] But despite damage that severed seven exterior columns, Building 7 remained standing.

I've snipped a reference to a map showing the location of WTC 1. I've also snipped other references to visual aids and some more-or-less tangential material, so we can concentrate on Shyam Sunder's explanation of what happened to WTC 7.

Here's how it happened, according to Shyam Sunder:

The debris from Tower 1 [...] started fires on at least 10 floors of the building. The fires burned out of control on six of these ten floors for about seven hours.

The city water main had been cut by the collapse of the two WTC Towers, so the sprinklers in Building 7 did not function for much of the bottom half of the building. Nevertheless, other tall office buildings have burned for as long or longer in similar fires without collapsing—when sprinklers either did not exist or were not functional.

So we knew from the beginning of our study that understanding what happened to Building 7 on 9-11 would be difficult.

It certainly would be. And the difficulty sprang from two sources.

First, NIST had to find a way to dismiss all the evidence that points to the deliberate destruction of the building.

As if that weren't difficult enough, they then had to follow up by "explaining" how the tower could have disintegrated due to "natural" causes.

Shyam Sunder attacks on the first point straight-away, saying:

It did not fit any textbook description that you could readily point to and say, yes, that’s why the building failed.

... except that it did. It fit a textbook description perfectly. But that description was not admissible.

The thing is: we know what happened. We've heard from people who were there that day who were warned in advance; we've seen video of police shooing people away from the building and saying "The building's gonna blow up."

But no...

In August of 2002—exactly six years ago today, with authority and funding from Congress, NIST started its building and fire safety investigation of all three World Trade Center building collapses. The study of Towers 1 and 2 was extremely complex, and as a result, we had to place our study of WTC 7 on hold. In September of 2005, with the study of the towers complete, we began the study of Building 7’s collapse in earnest.

We conducted our study with no preconceived notions about what happened.

That's probably true. But it's clear that they had some powerful preconceived notions about what didn't happen!

We gathered evidence, we analyzed that evidence, we constructed computer models grounded in principles of physics and using detailed data on every aspect of the building’s construction, detailed information on its contents, videos and photos of the event, and witness accounts.

All this evidence would have been carefully selected, to be sure.

Among other damning details, NIST had to ignore:

• witness accounts of bomb damage in the building before the planes hit the other towers,
• witness accounts of evacuation and a countdown before the building was demolished,
• a televised interview with the building's owner, in which he explained when and how and why the decision to destroy the building was made, and
  
• the fact that the demolition was announced to the world by an allegedly reputable international news agency, before it even happened!

In the clip above, the BBC reporter on the scene in Manhattan points to Building 7 while describing the hole in the skyline left by its collapse.

As tough as it may be to make all these anomalies go away, fabricating a counter-story seems to have been even more difficult. We'll get to that part of the task shortly.

First, Shyam Sunder gives an overview of the investigative team:

Our investigation team for this building consisted of about 50 people with expertise in structures, fire science and engineering, metallurgy, explosives, blast analysis, evacuation and emergency response, and other technical fields. Our own technical staff was complemented by world-class private sector experts on contract.

We conducted this study without bias, without interference from anyone and dedicated ourselves to do the very best job possible.

The team's lack of bias is readily apparent in the transcript of their leader's press conference. No doubt it will be equally visible in the final report, which is due to be released next month.

We have had only one single-minded goal during this entire effort. We wanted to determine the probable sequence of events that led to the collapse of Building 7 on 9-11, and then to share that information with the public in order to improve building and fire safety.

Before I tell you what we found, I’d like to tell you what we did not find.

This is Shyam Sunder's emphasis, by the way. And it's an important place to put it.

Watch carefully. Don't miss this next bit. Here comes the magic wand!

We did not find any evidence that explosives were used to bring the building down.

And now the next part is crucial, as we will see ...

We ran detailed computer simulations of blast scenarios. [We determined] the expected air pressures from the smallest possible blast capable of crippling a critical column. This size blast would have produced an incredibly loud sound that was not recorded on videos of the collapse nor reported by witnesses.

There are two problems with this "explanation" and they are very different. The first concerns the content of the argument. Nobody has claimed that WTC was demolished by a single bomb that went "BOOM". You don't need a shock wave that rocks the city to take down a building; you only need to cut some strategic steel in some strategic places. Thermite would do the job quite nicely, as would thermate, and neither would go "BOOM".

This video shows a pound of thermite burning on a frozen lake.

It melted three inches of ice but it didn't make much sound at all.

The second and more telling problem with the NIST explanation is revealed not in the content but in the style.

We can see quite clearly that they didn't "find any evidence that explosives were used to bring the building down" because they weren't looking for "any evidence that explosives were used to bring the building down".

They were looking for a way to rule out any explanation involving the notion that "explosives were used to bring the building down", and this is the "way" that they found:

If the building had been demolished by explosives, the explosion would have made more noise than anybody reported hearing or any video recorded. Therefore the building wasn't demolished by explosives.

We've seen in the previous video how much noise thermite makes when it burns.

So we have no choice but to reject the NIST claim as false. Period.

After three years, this was the best they could come up with!

And sadly, it only "accomplished" half of their "mission".

On the other hand, with a single wave of the magic wand, NIST took us through the looking-glass. And none of the history matters anymore. But if it did, surely something or other in this video would be relevant:

Shyam Sunder continued:

The collapse was also not due to fires from the substantial amount of diesel fuel stored in the building. Such fires from ruptured fuel lines—or from fuel stored in day tanks on the lower floors—could not have been sustained long enough, would not have generated sufficient heat to weaken critical columns, and would have produced copious smoke that was not was not observed on 9-11.

This passage is crucial for two main reasons. First of all, it discredits the vicious serial liars who have claimed for years that WTC 7 collapsed because of "fires from the substantial amount of diesel fuel stored in the building".

Ha! Not even the government agrees with Joey Bananas anymore. Boo-Hoo for vicious idiots everywhere.

But secondly, if fires from the diesel fuel didn't cause the building to collapse, what could have done so?

What we found was that uncontrolled building fires—similar to fires experienced in other tall buildings—caused an extraordinary event, the collapse of World Trade Center 7.

This is the first time that we are aware of, that a building taller than about 15 stories has collapsed primarily due to fires.

Uncontrolled building fires! Very interesting!! What do you suppose fueled those fires? Here's a hint: it doesn't burn nearly as hot as diesel fuel, and it generates an awful lot of dark smoke ...

But nevertheless, NIST

reached [their] conclusion by reconstructing the entire building, beam by beam, column by column, connection by connection into a computer model, a virtual WTC 7 Building.

They "reconstructed" ... "the entire building" .. "into a computer model"! How extraordinary!

Then, they

filled that virtual building with as much detail as possible about exactly what types of furnishings were on each floor.

Yep. Furnishings! They had time and money to find out "what types of furnishings were on each floor", but they couldn't talk to any of the people who had been warned in advance that the building was going to blow up.

It's quite astonishing methodology, isn't it?

No! It's the normal way these sorts of things get covered up. I've been reading about these episodes -- events whose historical importance is routinely denied by people who are allegedly the nation's leading dissidents -- for most of my life.

The NIST approach is almost exactly the same as the approach used by the Warren Commission, which allegedly investigated the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Just like NIST, the Warren Commission prided itself on having produced a huge stack of documents [see photo above]. They were counting on us not reading any of them. But they still hedged their bets.

The Warren Commission never claimed there was no evidence of a conspiracy; instead, the Warren Report said that they had "found no evidence" of a conspiracy.

Former Warren Commissioner Gerald Ford, who became our first unelected president after the resignation of Richard Nixon, stressed the difference in later interviews. He were dumb, but he weren't that dumb!

Back at the computer model, NIST

set fire to those virtual offices on the floors where video and other visual evidence told us the fires burned.

We used a well-validated computer program developed at NIST, for studying the growth and spread of fires, to calculate temperatures throughout the building. [...]

And we used well-established data on the properties of structural steel, the sprayed fire resistive material or fireproofing, and other building materials to determine how those temperatures affected the structure.

This is all theoretical, remember. All they needed to do -- apparently, all they did do -- was to create an animated computer model that looks something like the video of the event itself.

And they spent an incredible amount of time and money trying to develop one. Thus their leader reported that a

typical fire simulation for a single floor of the building took up to two days with a state-of-the-art cluster of Linux computers. The structural model of the building components used to predict the subsequent fire-induced progressive collapse included more than 3 million separate elements and took about 7 to 8 months to complete a single run on some very powerful computers.

Note the wording:

"The ... model ... used to predict the ... collapse ... "

The towers fell in 2001. The NIST study on WTC 7 didn't even get started "in earnest" until 2005. Their final report still hasn't been released. And yet Shyam Sunder can tell a room full of living, breathing, and presumably thinking human beings that his study "predicted" the demise of the building. How astonishing!

As I have discussed in connection with the Keith Seffen hoax, one cannot predict an event which has already happened. The use of such language -- "See! We were able to predict the past!" -- is a sure sign of intellectual dishonesty.

It's an admission that the model was built to specifications -- specifications that must have read like this:

"Explain X without admitting Y or Z"

If there's one thing I agree with the NIST team about, it's their assessment of the difficulty of their task.

It wasn't just difficult; it was impossible!

And that's why it took 50 experts three years to fake it.

What do they say brought down the building? Are you ready?

A critical factor that led to the initiation of collapse was thermal expansion of long-span floor systems located in the east side of the building. [...]

Anyone who has run a tight jar lid under hot water to help loosen it up knows that metal expands when it gets hot. Beyond expansion, heat also causes steel to lose strength and stiffness. In our investigation of the collapse of Towers 1 and 2, loss of strength and stiffness was more important. For WTC 7, thermal expansion was a critical factor. These effects occur at temperatures much lower than those required to reduce steel strength and stiffness.

[...] on the east side of the building, these long beams are connected to a girder here and here, but there are no opposing support beams.

The exterior columns of the building were more closely spaced than the interior ones. When fires heated the floor system, thermal expansion of the floor beams caused damage to connections between the steel beams and concrete slab of the composite floor system. Some of the beams buckled. Others pushed the girders, causing some of them to buckle.

This is very interesting to me personally because I've seen steel columns that had buckled. Not pictures; actual steel. I've inspected it closely; I've held it in my hand. I know what it looks like.

And I've seen hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of pictures from the World Trade Center. Even though I haven't inspected the scene closely or held any of the steel in my hand, I have a good idea of what it looked like, too. And here's a very interesting coincidence:

I've seen many photographs of steel from the World Trade Center that looked as if it had been cut.

I've seen some photographs that showed steel which had obviously been bent.

But I've never seen a single photograph of a single piece of steel that looked as if it had buckled.

And this is a crucial distinction, because if there were photographs of buckled steel from the World Trade Center, you can bet the government and the very complicit media would show them night and day. These photographs would be "proof" that the "conspiracy theorists" are wrong.

But they don't show us anything like that. And do you want to know why? [Click the image to find out.]

Here's the "official" version; see how much sense it makes to you:

A few girders lost their connections to columns, triggering floor failures.

Fires on Floors 7 through 9 and 11 through 13 were particularly severe. Long-span steel beams on the lower floors of the east side of the building, expanded significantly due to these fires, damaging the floor framing on multiple floors. Eventually, a girder on Floor 13 lost its connection to a critical interior column that provided support for the long span floors on the east side of the building. The displaced girder, and other local fire-induced damage, caused Floor 13 to collapse. This began a cascading chain of failures of eight additional floors—many of which already had been at least partially weakened by the fires in the vicinity of the critical column. With the support of these floors gone, column 79 buckled, which initiated the fire-induced progressive collapse of the building.

It's quite something, isn't it?

From a few grainy videos of the demolition, and a made-to-match computer animation, NIST can "pinpoint" the exact floor that "fell" first, and the exact column that "buckled" first.

It's quite incredible, isn't it?

I mean that literally: it's absolutely unbelievable!

This in turn caused the failure of nearby columns 80 and 81 and floor failures up to the roof line. [...]

In quick succession, the remaining interior columns failed from east to west across WTC 7, until the entire core began moving downward. Finally, the remaining outer shell or façade of the building fell. [...]

In general, tall buildings are very safe. We have decades upon decades of real-life experience to prove this. This was a rare event.

Rare? It's unique!! It's an absolutely unprecedented event in the annals of structural failure, and a grotesque understatement to assert that such an event was "rare"!

But if you want to go beyond unique, wait for the explanation:

This study has identified thermal expansion as a new phenomenon that can cause structural collapse.

There's that magic wand again! Did you see it go by?

Now, thanks to 9/11 and the good folks at NIST, there's "a new phenomenon that can cause structural collapse"!

Nothing like this has ever happened before, and nothing like it has ever happened since, but a representative of NIST -- the leader of the NIST investigation -- can claim, with a straight face,

we have shown that fire can induce a progressive collapse.

Straight face or not, that's a dreadful lie. "Shown" is hardly the word for what NIST has done here.

For the first time ever, somebody has claimed that fire can induce a progressive collapse; but nobody -- not NIST, not anybody else, ever, anywhere -- nobody has shown anything of the sort.

Any clown can make a claim. But it takes real evidence to "show" something, especially in the strict engineering or mathematical sense of the term.

But Shyam Sunder doesn't pause to strengthen his very lame argument. Instead he goes on to the waving of the magic cloth: What can we learn from this?

In the building community the term “progressive collapse” means the spread of local damage from a single initiating event, from structural element to element, eventually resulting in the collapse of an entire structure or a disproportionately large part of it. [...]

WTC 7, which included floor spans as long as 54 feet, had a structural system design that is in widespread use in other tall buildings. The length of floor spans is important. Longer beams can be subject to proportionally greater thermal expansion effects, but such effects may also be present in buildings with shorter span lengths depending on the design of the structural system.

We strongly recommend that building owners, operators, and designers evaluate buildings to ensure the adequate fire performance of the structural system. [...]

So far, with all this talk [and much else that I've snipped], the big question has remained unanswered: What fueled the fires that allegedly caused the building to disintegrate?

Are you ready for this?

It was office furnishings.

Can you believe it?

I can't, either. Watch this short video and see what you think!

But ...

Our take-home message today is that the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery. WTC 7 collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings. It did not collapse from explosives or from diesel fuel fires.

It collapsed because fires—similar to those experienced in other tall buildings—burned in the absence of water supply to operate the sprinklers, and burned beyond the ability of firefighters to control fires. It fell because thermal expansion, a phenomenon not considered in current building design practice, caused a fire-induced progressive collapse. [...]

We will be accepting public comments on our final report until September 15, 2008. Directions for submitting these comments are provided on our web site at wtc.nist.gov.

At this point, I’ll be happy to take your questions.

Thank you.

Oh yes ... I have a question for you, sir.

Instead of considering any of the eyewitness and video evidence which shows quite clearly that WTC 7 was deliberately demolished, on a pre-set schedule, and that people were warned and evacuated ahead of time, you and your team have spent three years building and running a computer model so complex that it takes seven to eight months for a single iteration.

You've done all this, knowing it could never prove what actually happened -- that the most it could show would be that one potential explanation for the disintegration of the building was plausible. And your study hasn't even done that.

The impact of your report couldn't possibly be greater. Millions of innocent lives are at stake; and at the same time, the world's most vicious and violent terrorists are still at large.

Instead of helping to rectify the situation, you have led your team to devote three years to building a model and pretending it's reality, while systematically shutting out every conflicting fragment of the real story. You weren't even sly enough to hide it in your press conference.

Your absurd explanation, with its talk of a "new phenomenon", is an insult to the intelligence of all thinking people. It's also a disgrace to the memories of the victims of 9/11, and a betrayal of their families, of all Americans, of all mankind.

So here's my question, sir:

How do you sleep? How can you possibly sleep?

Care to comment on this post? If so, click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Yea Though I Walk Through The Valley Of Endless Spin

Chris Floyd was exactly right about Bush and his address to the Knesset, and you should read "Progressive Vision Failure: The Real Scandal of Bush’s Knesset Speech" in its entirety. Pay particular attention to what Chris has to say about the work of Will Bunch. I'll wait.

As Robert Parry writes:

The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush’s own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis.

Parry has even more detail on the connection between the Bush family and rise of Hitler and the state-sponsored evil we call the Nazis, and you should read "The Bushes and Hitler's Appeasement" too -- especially if you have any doubt as to the correctness of what Floyd wrote in this regard. I don't mind waiting again.

There are ironies galore in this story -- which continues to reverberate despite its lack of newsworthiness -- and in the short time I have available I wish to mention a few of them...

The fixation on the "appeasement" angle -- the focus on one short passage of the speech and the interpretation of that passage as an oblique attack on Barack Obama -- is not only a "progressosphere" phenomenon, although, as Chris Floyd points out, this is the angle you will get from the big "progressive" sites. But it's also an angle that got substantial play in the mainstream -- and even the foreign -- press. I got tired of reading about it in the Washington Post so I turned to a Canadian television network, and they -- CBC -- were saying exactly the same thing -- and treating the story as if nothing mattered in that speech except the angle they were pushing. It seemed strange to me that these independent [sic] news [sic] sources should independently [sic] land on the exact same point and put the exact same interpretation on it. But at the same time other elements within the blogosphere were picking up on that loony-sounding point and amplifying it. Hmm.

The appeasement Bush decries is already happening. But it's Bush who is being appeased. His "commander in chief" presidency has not been seriously tackled by any Democrats, none of whom, apparently, want to end up like Cynthia McKinney, much less Paul Wellstone. (There are of course other reasons why Bush's policies have been largely unopposed by the Democrats.) So the "unitary executive" madness continues to deepen and there's no end in sight.

Bush is also being appeased on the international level, where his doctrine of "preemptive warfare" -- meaning the US can attack anyone anytime for no reason at all -- has the rest of the world scurrying for cover. Nobody wants to become the next Iraq, or the next Afghanistan, or the next Pakistan, or the next Somalia ... so they sit back and watch America destroy one country after another with barely so much as the odd "Tut, tut." (This appeasement is not new, of course. America has been destroying one country after another for more than fifty years.)

Historically speaking, the United States didn't exactly vanquish the evil embodied in the Nazis. The US didn't even vanquish the Nazis. They did arrange war crimes trials for the top leaders, but many of the second-level administrators -- the technicians of the giant evil machine -- were smuggled into the USA after the war and became the nucleus of the CIA. How very convenient is it that this is never mentioned?

The US didn't have a monopoly on the recruitment and absorption of German evil monsters, though: Some professional bad guys went to Russia and worked for the KGB. Others stayed in East Germany and became key figures in the secret police there. Others may have suddenly become British, for all I know.

We were told the Cold War was an epic struggle of good vs. evil. But what if it was a power struggle between two different brands of evil? What if our evil was just a shade more potent than the evil possessed by the Russians? What if we won the Cold War because we had more and better Nazis?

The only thing about the Holocaust that matters to the Knesset is the political cover it gives Israel. Because of the anti-Semitism displayed before and during World War II, Israel can now do anything it wants to do, as long as the Americans don't object too strenuously. And the US almost never objects -- strenuously or otherwise.

With their veto power in the UN Security Council, the Americans can protect Israel from the indignation of the rest of the world, and they do -- every time. So when Bush appears before the Knesset and talks about the evils of appeasement, he's really giving the aggressive Israelis a clear signal that the aggressive Americans still support them to the hilt. Some analysts say the speech encouraged Israel to attack Iran if the Americans don't do it themselves, or if they don't do it soon enough. Thus the American hawks are actually Israel's Number One appeasers in this regard.

There's an interesting parallel between the militarized industrialized Nazis proclaiming "God is with us" while persecuting stateless defenseless Jews ... and the militarized industrialized Israelis claiming to be God's chosen people while persecuting stateless defenseless Palestinians ... and the militarized industrialized United States where the culture is rife with mutant militant Christianity and the prevailing mentality looks approvingly on a nation that wages war wherever it wants, whenever its unelected president says God tells him to smite somebody.

But the experts in the national media don't want to talk about any of this, any more than they want to talk about how the Bush family facilitated the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. And the progressosphere wants the very same thing. Hmmm. Once again. Hmmmmmm.

I've said for a few years now that all the big "liberal" or "progressive" blogs are running psy-ops. Saying things like this brands me as a "conspiracy theorist". But on the other hand you can be called a "conspiracy theorist" for saying that president Bush's grandfather helped to facilitate the rise of Adolph Hitler. You can be called a "conspiracy theorist" for saying that 9/11 was an inside job. You can be called a "conspiracy theorist" for saying that John Kennedy was killed as part of a military coup supported by elements deep within the American power structure. There are a number of other things you can say which are obviously true, any one of which will get you branded as a "conspiracy theorist", which is beginning to seem like a compliment.

So here's my question: Who issues the talking points to the Washington Post and the CBC and Atrios and Digby and Will Bunch? Who feeds the American media, the international media, and all the prog-bloggers to the extent that they can all be found saying the very same thing at the very same time?

Who tells them all:

"This is the passage to concentrate on. This is where Bush attacks Obama. Nothing like this has ever been done before. This is worse than torture. This is worse than indefinite incarceration without charge or trial. This is worse than a war of choice based on lies which has killed more than a million people. When I snap my fingers, you will open your eyes, and you will forget this conversation ever happened."

Who tells them? That's what I want to know.

I promise I'll be polite about it. I won't mention any of the ways in which Israeli and American policies and tactics mimic the policies and tactics employed by Hitler and the Nazis. I won't mention the Reichstag Fire and 9/11 and how similar they appear from a certain perspective. I won't say anything at all about Hitler's Enabling Act and Bush's PATRIOT Act. I won't talk about unprovoked attacks on non-threatening foreign countries. And I won't mention any other false-flag attacks that were staged in order to mobilize political support for war.

... because we all know that it's OK to kill millions of people, provided they're not ours (we can only kill thousands of ours), but it's considered impolite to ask questions about it.

And I would never wish to be impolite. Not in the Valley of Endless Spin.

Vintage Patriot For A Winter Day In Prague

I've been thinking about "Bob in Prague" a lot lately. I think of all my online friends now and then, but especially when somebody close to one of them passes away.

I was recalling how and where and when we "met": at the bradblog, around the time of the 2004 "election". Bob was watching it all -- aghast -- from Eastern Europe, and I was watching it all -- aghast -- from my undisclosed location. And we had the same sorts of reactions to virtually all of it, and we soon became friends, in an online way. In fact, Bob is one of the very few bradblog readers who has continued to read me, even after my services were no longer ... um ... anyway ...

In late 2004, as you may recall, there were huge crowds in the streets of Ukraine, and the American media were making a big deal about how the exit polls didn't match the announced results of the Ukranian election. But they wouldn't say a word about how the exit polls here in the US hadn't matched our announced results. The only nationally known reporter who even mentioned allegations of election fraud was Keith Olbermann, and it seemed all he wanted to do was smear the "conspiracy theorists".

In the only non-war news pertaining to Iraq, the oil-for-food scandal was breaking, and American oilmen were deeply complicit. So they were blaming Kofi Annan and the UN.

On December 27, 2004, "Freebird" posted a comment at bradblog, saying, among other things, "And you right-wingers are after Kofi Annan for oil scandals...shame...shame!" That got me going: I hammered on my keyboard for quite a while and then posted a long comment, excerpts from which you will find below.

It was my first stab at putting 2 and 2 and 2 and 2 together, and putting my thoughts into writing -- or to be more accurate, it was my first stab at doing this with geopolitics. I'd done it with math, but that was different, because everything was either clearly right or clearly wrong, and I could go back and verify every step. But in this case, I had no way to check my work, so to speak. I didn't know whether it was good or bad or what, and after I posted it, I forgot all about it for a while.

Then the memory of it came back to me one day, and I wanted to see it again, so I used the Google, and I found the comment. But it was in a different form, and a different place. Much to my surprise, my comment from the bradblog had been re-posted on a forum hosted in the Czech Republic, where it anchored a heavily commented thread of its own! And guess who had put it there?

I've always appreciated the vote of confidence, but I've never thanked Bob for it. Well, better late than never.

Not to be too self-referential or anything, but most of my current readers were not around at the time, and I thought you might like to see some "vintage WP". So here's a link to the comment in its original context, and the relevant excerpts follow:

Kofi Annan is getting raked over the coals based on entirely unproven allegations. Supposedly in America you are considered innocent until proven guilty. But in some quarters Annan is considered guilty based on discredited allegations, and charges that cannot possibly be proven. [...]

This is the newest example of a very old tactic. They've been doing it for decades. And they just keep getting better at it. By now it's so well-refined that it's almost an art form. A black art to be sure. "Shame" is right.

Here's how it works: They do something awful, make a big mess and blame it on somebody else -- usually the political opponent they fear the most. Then they use the inevitable backlash as a pretext to attack, without ever doing a proper investigation into what caused the mess in the first place. Of course they can't do a proper investigation -- they can't possibly allow a proper investigation -- because if the truth ever came out in a timely way, there would be royal hell to pay.

I'm reminded of this because I've recently been re-reading some of the best books written about the JFK assassination, and the parallels are all there, in spades, just sitting there waiting to be noticed. For those who are too young to remember the story, JFK was surely the most liberal President ever elected; he wanted to stop the Cold War and work toward 'peaceful coexistence' with the Soviet Union. In November of 1963, he was murdered in Dallas, one of the most conservative -- i.e. oil-soaked -- cities in the country. And the 'official' story -- issued on the day of the assassination and never retracted -- was that he was killed by a dememted communist named Lee Harvey Oswald.

The communists had no grudge with Kennedy. He was -- by their measure -- the most reasonable President ever to sit in the Oval Office. But there were some very powerful internal forces who hated him with a passion, such as CIA and organized crime, who were both ticked because JFK refused to assist CIA in their plan to overthrow Castro and give Havana back to the gamblers.

Virtually every detail of the official story has since been shown to be too absurd for any honest thinking person to believe. But this hasn't stopped the establishment echo-chamber from repeating it endlessly.

And like the official stories of so many other national tragedies, this story is absurd even on the face of it. You don't have to do any digging at all to see it as the farce that it is; all you have to do is think about it a bit. As if a communist would ever want to kill a President who was loved by the left and reviled by the right. As if a communist would prefer to see an oil-soaked Texan -- LBJ -- in the Oval Office, rather than a 'Massachusetts liberal' like JFK. As if you could even find a communist in Dallas in 1963. Yeah, right. Spin me another yarn, boys.

The deeper you dig the more absurd it gets. Kennedy wanted to disengage from Vietnam. Immediately after the assassination we were told that no national policies would be changed. But within three days LBJ had signed an executive order rescinding Kennedy's planned withdrawal. And the US was plunged into a foreign war of aggression, based entirely on transparent lies, without any realistic or reasonable reason or plan or exit strategy. Does any of this sound familiar? That war lasted for another 12 years!

Most of the so-called evidence against Oswald was very obviously fabricated. But the oil-soaked corporate media whores of the day bought it all up, and fed it into the establishment echo chamber, and the echoes still reverberate to this day. [...] These things are all connected. And very deeply so.

The official story of 9/11 has numerous and important parallels to the official story of the JFK assassination. Again the official story is absurd on the face of it, and even more ludicrous the deeper you dig into it. Again we're looking at a national tragedy that somehow happened to benefit an oil-soaked Texan. Again we're looking at a case where the official story came out on the day of the event, long before any reasonable investigation could possibly have been conducted. Again it's a case where no reasonable investigation was ever conducted -- just another oil-soaked whitewash or two.

In this case we are supposed to believe that 19 Islamic fundamentalists armed with cell phones and box cutters somehow managed to outfox the most sophisticated intelligence establishment ever built. Yeah, right. As if jet fuel burning near the 80th story of a 100-story tower could generate enough heat to produce pools of molten steel in the sub-basement. Yeah, right. As if these fires could reduce thousands of tons of concrete to toxic gray dust, while leaving the passport of the supposed ringleader [sic] not only virtually undamaged but just lying there in plain sight. As if a commercial airliner could slam into the Pentagon leaving a hole about 30 feet in diameter, while leaving no trace of its wings or tail or engines outside the building. Yeah, right. Spin me another yarn, boys.

Dig even deeper and the story gets even more ludicrous. But again the oil-soaked corporate media whores bought it hook line and sinker, and fed it to the world through the echo chamber. We were told that no national policies would be changed, because changing our way of life would be admitting that the 'terrorists' had won. But within seven weeks the so-called PATRIOT act was passed, and the shredding of the Bill of Rights had begun. Within a month the US was involved in another foreign war of aggression, against a country which had really never done anything to us, but this time they told us right from the start that the war may not end in our lifetimes. As if we need endless war with the rest of the world. Who does this help? Not us. Not the rest of the world. The only people it helps are a certain oil-soaked Texan and his obscenely wealthy backers. Excuse me for a moment while I puke. Spin me another yarn while I'm gone, will you, boys?

Back to the present national tragedy: an election so obviously fixed that a full 20% of Americans can see that it's rotten to the core, without any publicity from the current generation of oil-soaked media whores. As if the majority of Americans would vote for an oil-soaked Texan whose policies clearly work to their detriment. As if nobody notices, or cares, that we're in another foreign war without any plan or any exit strategy, nor any good reason for being there. As if we approve of a regime that seeks to 'legitimize' torture, and commit cold-blooded murder on an enormous scale, and turn our once-great nation into a pariah in the eyes of the world. As if the majority of Americans would ever want that. Give me a break. Spin me another yarn, boys.

How stupid do they think we are? How stupid are you? How stupid are your neighbors? How many of us do you think really bought into all that Bush-Cheney bullshit? Do we really think we're safer now, that we're waging war on a country that never did anything to us? Do you really think we're less likely to suffer a terrorist attack now, considering that we have the same so-called leadership in place that allowed the 9/11 attacks to succeed? How many Americans do you REALLY think are that stupid? [...]

Again it comes down to the organized criminals and the gamblers and an oil-soaked Texan and his obscenely wealthy friends. Again the country is in the hands of people who have shown quite clearly that they don't give a damn about the voice of the people, nor about policies that would help the people. All they care about is amassing as much power as possible, by any means possible, so they can use it to impoverish America while demolishing foreign countries and enriching their obscenely wealthy oil-soaked backers.

Follow the money; follow the oil; follow the electronic voting machines; follow the corrupt politicians -- they all lead to the same place. It's a place the oil-soaked corporate media whores will never even admit exists, but it's there, and we know about it, and this is one genie that can never be put back in the bottle. Too much is at stake.

No more dreaming. No more waiting for the miracle that never comes. No more hoping that Keith Olbermann will finally decide to stop smearing the people who are trying to tell the truth about these national tragedies. The oil-soaked corporate media whores are enemies of our democracy, as they have always been, and if we are going to do anything for the future of our country then we will have to do it without them.

Since 9/11 too many people have been too frightened to talk about anything that matters. That has to stop and it has to stop right now. We need to keep talking about all this stuff, not only here [...] but everywhere. Bring your friends up to speed; get your family there too. Spread the word in every way you can and don't stop. We the people have enormous untapped power, and most of it is economic. We hardly even have any idea how to use it. So we need to learn how velvet revolutions work in other countries. Look at what happened to Slobodan Milosevic. Look at what happened to Ferdinand Marcos. Look at what's happening in the Ukraine. Could we do something similar? Of course we could.

Thanks, Bob. And hang tough, too. Mysterious ways, my friend.