Not So Brave New World

The only way to defeat terrorism is to not allow it to terrorize you. Now, sitting here in my office in Kaua`i, that's a pretty easy thing to say. So let me premise it by saying that I have travelled all over this beautiful planet and, seemingly, wars, revolutions, and conflicts follow me wherever I go. Thank goodness that hasn't happened here.

I was in Greece, during the height of the resistance, just after (US backed)Papadopoulos' brutal military dictatorship ended. I was in Israel/Palestine/Lebanon/Syria during the 2nd Lebanese invasion. I was in a town in Guatemala hours after they killed every man/boy in the town and dumped them in the volcano, (the women were still washing the blood off the street where the men were lined up and executed). I lived in south central Mexico, where the indigenous people of Chiapas weekly blew up the bridge that bordered Guatemala. In Indonesia, the East Timorese were being slaughtered by the military using coordinates supplied to them by the now current National Security Advisor, Gen. James L. Jones.

I'm from New York City and spent my adolescence in Washington D.C. when the mayor was busted for smoking crack with a whore in a motel in S.E. D.C.. At the time, Washington boasted the highest murder rate in the world, comparable only to Watts in the mid-sixties, when an 18 year old black man had a better chance of living to 19 in the Vietnam War, than he did at home. Also I have been an alternative agricultural specialist for over twenty years. Yes, the last twenty years that have been an openly declared war, in my own country, on me. Big helicopters, big guns, and all my friends constantly having the State come and take their children away because they were growing an herb. In my country.

I watched in horror with the rest of the world as the Israelis were killed in Munich. I watched what seemed like monthly hijacking of planes to Cuba, Libya, Somalia. I watched the French and Israelis storm planes, I watched the Basque Separatists blow up trains, the Georgians (Russians) blow up a school of children. I watched our own FBI, during a democratic presidency, burn 80 people to death in Waco, shoot a woman holding her infant son in Idaho.

As all of you alive today know, we have all seen some serious shit.

So why now are willing to throw away our rights to be more "safe"?

Why?

WHY?

We live in a world today where everything has the dubious task of being better, larger, faster, more horrific than anything else, ever, at any time. The best golfer ever. The best home run hitter ever. The worst tragedy in history. The hottest day on record. Worst recession ever.

What do our schools teach children today? Certainly it is not how to read a newspaper or to use proper discernment when coming across information. Knowing your source is a good start. Newspapers have to sell in order to stay in business. But if there is no breaking news that day, then they have nothing to sell. So they make things important so they have something to talk about. Something to sell you. So it has to be sensational in order to get you to buy their product. In order for them to stay in business.

To be an American, to me, has always meant; fuck what the rest of the world does, we are Americans and we will not be deterred in our willingness to live, and/or die, free. You can pry my civil liberties from my cold dead heart, but don't be surprised if I put up a fight even when I'm dead. There have always been factions of individuals and groups that resent what we have, and there always will be. And if they want to come over here and try and pick a fight with us, we will kick their ass back to the stone age.

And yet, the threat to our freedom, our way of life, our Uniquely American Spirit, isn't from the outside at all. It is coming from the inside, in the form of fear mongering, from our own government. Newspapers sell fear. TV sells fear. The government sells fear. Why? Because fear sells. Period. So, in order for you to feel 'safe', you are going to read every fear mongering newspaper and website to prove that you really need to give up all your rights in order to be truly free.

FORGET THAT. DON'T TREAD ON ME. NOT NOW. NOT EVER.

The War on Terror

After watching the brief testimonials,from the returning Iraq War veterans at the Winter Soldier hearings in D.C., it became obvious to me that even the name "War on Terror" is a clear use of newspeak. How does one win a war on terror? A war on poverty? A war on crime, homelessness, drugs, welfare? In short, a war on an idea, or feeling? While the intention may be a good one, the very notion that we can "win" a war on terror, by terrorizing people, is patently absurd. Nevertheless, we are in this so called war on terror,and are constantly being asked to pay for it. As if this war on a feeling could be won with more money,or more troops,or more fire power.

Terror is a matter of the heart. It is a choice we all make every day, all day long. We could be run over by a bus. Hit by lightening. Shot by a stray bullet. Our children could be abducted, die in their sleep, molested by their preacher. We have no job security, health care and our system is as corrupt as any I have witnessed on this planet. Now, or ever. It would be easy to walk around, living in fear of things that we cannot control. But we have all made a conscious choice to go on with our lives the best we can. Of course there are people all over the world that want to see the end of America. But how is that different than at any other time in our history?

I beg the American people to not buy into the notion of National Security. There is none. In the last year we have seen our own banks, corporations and politicians openly rob the bank. Openly. We are witnessing the completion of the corporate take over, not just of this country but the world. And they are using fear and the notion of National Security to advance their cause. Every time there is a so called terrorist action, I beg of every one of you to please, please, look a little deeper and see the smoke for the fire.

See Dick Burn. Burn, Dick. Burn.

Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney have been on the airwaves over the last couple of weeks, pulling out their best Orwell impersonation.


Let me make this as simple as possible, for all the sheeple out there;

Water boarding is torture.

Torture is illegal, both federally and internationally.

Dick has openly admitted he ordered the implementation of water boarding.

This makes Dick a criminal.

The reasons for why Dick broke the law are irrelevant.

Let me say that again:

The reasons for why Dick broke the law are irrelevant.

Dick broke the law.

Dick is a criminal.

Any other conversation about this is nothing else but doublespeak.

There is no conversation.

None.

Dick broke the law.

Dick is a criminal.

Dick will be easy to prosecute, and anyone who followed Dick's orders are equally culpable.

On both sides of war, torture has been prosecuted: Vietnam, Korea, Civil War, WWI, WWII, Iraq, to name just a few. There is precedent after precedent of the United States of America prosecuting those who were just following orders. The most recent example of this would be the 89 yr old death camp guard, John Demjanjuk. Here is a man who was just following orders.

NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and anyone else who allows these criminals on the airwaves to reinvent what has happened, makes them culpable as well. These major news corporations have been hammering away at us, allowing for these criminals to try and justify a crime. Not just any crime either, but crimes against humanity.

Let me try to make this even simpler:

I have no money.

I owe all kinds of money for school, homes, cars, etc. and cannot makes ends meet.

Hell they’re going to foreclose on my home, repo my car and take my kids, because I cant afford food.

So, I rob a bank.

Now, I can pay all my bills, my kids will be well fed and educated and I get to stay in my home and pay off my car.

I could continue to justify why I robbed the bank, but the reality is that no judge or jury would care for even a second as to the REASONS why I robbed the bank.

The bottom line;

I broke the law and will be going to jail.

Period.

Dick should be tried and easily convicted of war crimes.

Dick is a criminal.

Dick should go to jail in Spandau for the rest of Dick's miserable life.

And then some.

The Crusade

On September 11, 2001, I awoke to find that my birth place, New York City, and my adolescent home, Washington D.C. were 'under attack'. Shaken to my core, I rushed to the nearest T.V. in time to watch the plane hit the second tower. Then, as I watched to see how they would put out the fires, the first tower was demolished.

As I said, I was born in N.Y.C. and for kicks we would watch old apartment buildings get demolished, imploded, collapsed. I had seen it so many times, that when the first tower fell, I knew it was intentionally demolished. I knew what my eyes told me. And I knew what my heart was telling me. And because of the amazing schooling I was afforded, I knew what was happening. This was the final push.

On Sunday, September 16, 2001, less than one week after the towers fell, George Bush Jr. declared a Crusade. Ever since 911, everything that has happened, has happened as a direct result of that day.

Since that day, we have seen the suspension of Habeas Corpus, the right to free speech and dissent, the right to protest, the right to privacy, search and seizure laws, all but vanish. We have had a Supreme Court expanding the rights of corporations while reducing the rights of the individual citizen. We have seen the complete corruption of our Judicial system to justify this war on terror, this Crusade. We watched as the Executive Branch routinely snubbed it's nose at the Congress and continues to this day to claim 'executive privilege' to justify renditions and secret prisons.

As long as we have an ambiguous 'war on terror', we have an Executive Branch that can operate under the War Powers Act and everything can be classified under National Security.

In Orwellian fashion the realities of this crime; this horrible unspeakable act against our own citizenry, have been transformed from an obviously psychopathic, tyrannical evil, that has no place amongst humans, to a question of whether or not we have the moral authority to do whatever is necessary to root out evil. Even the left-leaning media continues this dialogue, as if it had merit to discuss.

What happened on 911 was a crime. If it turns out that this crime was perpetuated in order to justify a Crusade, then what we have is one of the largest atrocities ever known, in any time.

Imagine;

1) Create a catastrophe on your home soil

2) Create one Central Authority to manage FEMA, NSA, CIA, FBI, state and local police, ie; Homeland Security. (How Orwellian is that?)

3) Wage a vengeance war on Afghanistan and take control of the poppy production. (In 2007, opium production out supplied its demand for the first time in recorded history.)

4) Appoint a politically ambitious Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, and stack the Federal Courts with politically appointed judges, Bybee,for one.

5) Seek judicial clearance, from said corrupt judges, to justify torturing confessions from prisoners that Iraq and Al Qaeda were linked.

6) Lie to the Congress to justify a war with Iraq, (based on confessions from tortured children), in order to gain control of their oil fields. (Exxon topped out the Fortune 500 list this quarter, Number 1 on the Charts)

7) Create a private army, to perform assassinations and covert operations, that doesn't answer to military or civilian authority, only to the executive branch.

8) Out a covert CIA operative in a time of war because her husband had proof that the justification for the war was based on faulty intelligence and lies.

9) Bankrupt the country by literally robbing the bank. (The largest withdrawal in U.S. Banking history was made from the New York Federal Reserve, 2.5 billion dollars, in cash, on pallets, loaded into an 18 wheeler and disappeared.)

10) Announce, after losing the election and leaving behind moles in the highest levels of government, that the new President has made the country less safe.

What happens next should be obvious.

And yet, the so-called news outlets entertain the conversation of whether it is viable to prosecute these barbarians, these animals. They are even going so far as to debate whether or not we should be torturing someone, if it provides valuable information.

What George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Carl Rove and everyone else who participated in these atrocities did were crimes against humanity. And as long as this goes unpunished, we are all responsible for these crimes.

We can say that we acquiesced our rights because we were afraid. Because we needed the security of a strong defense. We can say that and we can fool ourselves into believing that we didn't know, that we couldn't believe our own government would do something so horrible, so blatantly evil. We could. And maybe, just maybe, we might even believe it, a little.

But when Orwellian terms like Homeland Security, and devices such as the microwave gun and the crowd dispersing ray gun, and the ever growing population of unmanned, heavily armed, drone aircraft and tanks with ray guns start to become a part of our every day vernacular, we have crossed the line of ignorance, and moved into denial.

Make no mistake about it, this is a Crusade. But it is not the Crusade that has been presented to us. No. It is not the wars and the terror and the clashes of religions, nor the long fought wars over territory or minerals. No. This is a Crusade against us, the people. As long as things continue to blow up, as long as there is an avian flu, or a swine flu, or drug resistant TB, or Aids, as long as there are people starving to death while there are warehouses of food rotting in storage, as long as we continue to entertain a conversation over whether or not torture works, the Crusade continues to be waged. And won. It is a Crusade against our rights as Humans. It is a Crusade being waged in such an Orwellian fashion that we are asking to have our rights taken away from us, in order to have a false sense of security.

But in the end, we will have surrendered our rights to the very people whom aim to enslave us.

The Torture Memos

It has become evident that the secret government, set up during the Reagan years, continues to operate without regard to the law, or the Constitution, or any fear of reprisal.

Admiral Poindexter, several months after 911, was exposed for holding an open betting ring inside the Pentagon, wagering on which leaders would be assassinated, which countries would be overthrown.

Lt. Col. Oliver North has an extreme right wing radio show in Virginia, and is regularly interviewed on the right wing talk shows. He continues his radical rants in open support of secret government operations to further his defense of shredding the constitution during his private Iran-Contra weapons-for-drugs-and-money program.

Dick Cheney has been in the highest levels of government since Reagan until present day. And even now, it has been revealed that he left several high ranking bureaucratic moles inside the Pentagon, NSA, NSC, CIA, Homeland Security, et al. It has been openly discussed that Dick had (HAS?) his own 'hit squad' that operated outside of military and civilian law

George Bush Sr. has been in the deepest darkest levels of our government since Nixon, not to mention his daddy, Prescott Bush. The depth of this man's involvement in the outrages perpetuated in our name is staggering. To list them here is daunting.

This secret government has been involved directly in the overthrow of numerous democratically elected governments; Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mexico, Indonesia, Yugoslavia, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Haiti, Palestine, Lebanon, just off the top of my head. They have been involved in the assassinations of untold heads of state, movement leaders, union organizers, and potential whistle blowers.

And now the absolute smoking gun; the so-called "Torture Memos".
No one should be surprised by the complete lack of morality, the shuddering cold and calculated, premeditated and systematic torture of, admittedly known to be innocent, people.

Will there be any prosecutions? History says no. My heart tells me that if our government does not aggressively pursue criminal convictions of those that broke our collective moral code, it will be the end of the Republic. If there is no accountability for crimes of the worst nature committed by people in the highest offices that they were elected to, then the people who elected them will inevitably behave the same way. And that, my friends, is the end of the Empire.

Separation of Powers

The separation of powers is the foundation of America. Having a corrupted, politicized and incompetent Judicial branch allows for the other two branches of government to enact laws, or break them, with impunity. The American Attorney General, Eric Holder, has no choice but to prosecute to the full extent of the law those who tortured and those who authorized torture.

When a criminal mastermind plans to rob a bank, but gets others to do the actual bank robbing, do we not still want to catch the planner? Won't he just do it again? I use the term 'criminal mastermind' because I believe 911, Afghanistan, Iraq, the economic , social and moral collapse of my country was designed. Yes, planned. The smoking guns are everywhere; nano thermite at ground zero in NYC, Osama Bin Laden planning and pulling off the largest terrorist action against the strongest country in the world from a cave in Afghanistan, the outing of Valery Plame because her husband had debunked the yellow cake from Africa to Iraq story and the bogus linking of Saddam Hussein to 911 and Al Qaeda, to Alan Greenspan lying to a Senate sub-committee hearing on the largest withdrawal in United States banking history (2.5 billion dollars in cash) which simply disappeared, to the decision to let Lehman Bros. fail and not Goldman Sachs, on which board Henry Paulson and Timothy Geitner reside (both Secretaries of the Treasury).

Not only is it Eric holder's duty to prosecute to the full extent of the law those that transgressed them, but he is also bound by international law to do so. And if he chooses not to, then he will legally be an accessory to war crimes.