Whitelion's Blog

Unimaginable Intentional Human Suffering

By Peter Chamberlin

27/01/08 "ICH" -- - Perhaps one day we shall know the truth about being, and being alive on planet earth, whether life on every living planet is as messed-up as it is here. Earth's problems must be unique, as they are of man's own creation, man-made disasters caused by ambitious men who are allowed to rise to the top, where they dominate us for self-gain. We allow our leaders to take the positions of power that they desire, instead of actually choosing who shall lead us. Humans tend to submit to those who claim authority, since it is easier to believe in symbols of power, than it is to personally submit to the tedium of the reasoning process. As a people, we tend to follow the natural order of things along the path of least resistance. By taking the easy way out, we give our blessing to the law of the jungle.

It is natural for societies to become dominated by powerful elites, who gain control of the inner workings of government and commerce, in order to bend them both to their will. "Meritocracy" and other forms of "social Darwinism," describe the belief that "success" by this definition justifies the survival of the fittest capitalism (globalism) that has decimated the world. The brutal belief system widely promoted as "neoconservatism" is behind the fascist agenda that emerged from the bowels of corporate-owned "think tanks." These elitist thinkers believe that it is necessary for our government to "cull" the "useless eaters" from the face of the earth, through forced population reduction and perpetual war. They are the true radicals, possessed by "extremist belief systems." Their plans for us are the end program of a centuries-old class war between the elitist self-proclaimed neo-aristocrats, who would be masters of mankind and the rest of the human race. The neocons are nothing new, just the latest, most-concentrated form of this egotistical brand of pure evil.

If the elitist "one-worlders" were correct about being the "natural leaders" of the world, dedicated to saving the most noble of mankind from the excesses of the dirty masses, then their cold-blooded plans might be justified by the results, by anyone who survived them. The plan is to kill-off a significant portion of the earth's "dead weight," keep another segment as a labor force and extend their own lives through genetic and eugenic research. They are not being all that secretive about this research, only about where it all is meant to lead us. If the idea of rich men carrying-out a plot to kill-off billions of poor people isn't enough to motivate the masses into torch-carrying mobs, I can't imagine what would be enough.

People with any conscience at all can see the obvious evil inherent in the selective use of genocide as an element of state policy, for the purpose of eliminating entire populations that are in our way, and thereby terrorizing others into submission with our killing power and basic lack of morality. It is unconscionable that a "civilized" nation would seek to force its will upon other nations by terrorizing them into submission under fear of certain death. This is an abomination upon the American spirit, equal to the abomination in which this spirit was founded, when we wiped-out the first Americans, in claiming our parasitic "manifest destiny."

The fact that genocide is an acceptable form of warfare is testimony about the many evils which we have learned to accept. The collective conscience of the human race and the mind of God demand that we act to make genocide unacceptable, once again. Ideas cannot fight against raw power, unless they become a shared idea, driving a political momentum. We have to make our countrymen see the reality beyond the illusions of the nightly dream-weavers and the patriotic drum-beaters.

The people of the United States must be made to understand that, more than ever, genocide is government policy, before they will rise-up in righteous indignation to it. It is a clear-cut case of "good - vs. - evil," with the evil being the world's number one source of state terrorism, the government of the United States of America. The American people can only save themselves if they are made aware of the fact that they are under attack by those who claim to be their trusted leaders. Likewise, all the people of the earth are under attack by their own governments, who serve as American representatives, to help conquer the earth and corrupt all life. The people of every nation must rise-up and become their own governments, the only truly democratic government.

In opposition to the leadership of the elite, which stands leeringly over the dying American corpse, there is another leadership rising-up, the researchers and writers who are exposing and resisting the corrupted power structure. We are those who would dig beneath the official lies to expose the bloody roots of corruption that support all that is hostile to human life. We are the voluntary citizens' press corps, dedicated to taking up the task of reporting on government deceptions, a job that the mainstream media has forsaken. One day, when freedom prevails, the alternative media will replace the sell-outs and the official lie-passers of the nightly news. But, until that blessed day, researchers like Prof. Michel Chossudovsky will keep turning-up the soil for us, exposing the inner workings of our criminal government. His important research on the roots of the Islamic Militant Network and its CIA origins has blown the lid off the most important story of the Twenty-first Century. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7718

The names and keywords that other researchers have associated with the genocidal plans of the elite are too numerous to list or remember here, yet to do so would weave a sordid tale of interconnections and plots that clearly intersect in complicated patterns. By listing the elements of the octopus, we lay-out the proof of an elitist conspiracy for the few who care enough to open their eyes. But, in order to reach the distracted and pre-occupied majority, we must stick to single key issues like the "Global 2000" report, to tell the genocidal plans of our government, while secret war plans like "Operation North Woods," demonstrate just how far they are willing to go to start wars, the key to the war on terror.

The case proving government complicity in the 9/11 attacks which initiated the war on terrorism is becoming stronger every day. In addition to all the forensic evidence from the attacks and the unbelievable string of "coincidences" that made the attacks possible, we now know that Islamist terrorists, "associated with al Qaida" have been key elements of US foreign policy up until, and including, the time of the Trade Center attack. We have begun to understand the depth of US/CIA involvement in the destabilizing of a dozen or more countries with these highly-trained Islamic "insurgencies." This criminal foreign policy of creating radical Islamic militias for the purpose of starting wars in nations now at peace creates ever-expanding bands of Islamic uprisings throughout the Middle East and southeast Asia, justifying genocidal counter-attacks as "fighting terrorism."

The US is following the time-tested strategy developed by the Israelis (who first implemented it as a double-edged sword for waging war to thin-out the Muslims, while increasing the number of Islamists gradually) to justify greater and greater waves of ethnic repression. For, if you plan to one day force an entire population out of their ancient homeland, in order to colonize it, you will first need to rationalize a massive wave of state terrorism that will be needed for the task. For this, you will need an army of credibly bloodthirsty Islamists, to justify the monstrous offensives into civilian populations. This is why Israel created Hamas and the US and Israel created al Qaida.

Our government and many of our people have whole-heartedly embraced Israel's implementation of ethnic cleansing policies in Gaza and Lebanon, seeing them as dress rehearsals for our own genocidal plans against other innocent Muslims around the world.
The barbaric acts committed by Israel against the captive Gaza population are not the acts of moral people. Every act of repression, every secret move to limit the rights of Arabs, is intended to provoke reactions from the mostly defenseless people, in order to justify counter-reactions from the world's fifth most powerful military force. For Israel to "save face" in its international PR campaign, images of terrorists must be created to defend against. If Palestinians do not attempt to defend themselves with primitive weapons, then the Zionist oppressors will be hard-pressed to justify targeted assassinations and other brutal tactics meant to drive them from their homes. Palestinians, like Americans and all other targeted populations must follow the scripts that have been written for them and rise-up in defiant acts of self-defense, so that all the complainers can be bombed into bloody submission. The only difference between modern American/Israeli fascism and classic Nazism is the modern capability to control all information and suppress the truth.

The scale of the intentional suffering being inflicted by supposedly moral human beings, who consider themselves superior to their victims, is unimaginable. What is even more unimaginable is the international spectacle of other supposedly moral nations fawning over the killers, each nation trying harder than the next to suck-up to those who are starving helpless children, depriving them of medicine, and mowing them down with cannon and machine gun fire, in order to wipe them from their land and erase them from the "pages of time." The international horror shows of "diplomacy" and "humanitarianism" are shams, meant to seduce the masses into reveling in the bloodlust that is scheduled to head in their direction. "Negotiations" with pseudo-humanitarians like Bush, Olmert and Cheney can be nothing more than discussing terms of surrender. One day soon, the entire earth will rise-up against this axis of evil. Our actions today will determine if the people of America stand with the rest of the world against our own government, or if we will continue in our surrender to the beasts of the modern jungle, who intend to devour everything we hold dear.

The earth is standing at the edge of a dark precipice; on the other side is the greatest epic in mankind's history, waiting to be written, waiting for those of us who dare to take up the pen and to fight the darkness of the lies. An army of freedom-writers, who are as dedicated to defending life as the enemies of life are dedicated to ending it, can bring forth a new sustaining vision of life. We must first choose to place our own freedom in jeopardy, by stepping forward to stop those who would take us into the void in a vain gamble to crush most of the earth's life for the sake of greater "profit."

It is time for all of God's children to take a stand together. It is time to end the American nightmare (formerly known as the American dream).

The Hidden Cost Of Free Congressional Trips To Israel

Branded as 'educational,' these trips offer Israeli propagandists an opportunity to expose members of Congress to only their side of the story.

By Jim Abourezk

27/01/08 "CSM" -- -- SIOUX FALL, S.D. - Democrats in Congress have moved quickly - and commendably - to strengthen ethics rules. But truly groundbreaking reform was prevented, in part, because of the efforts of the pro-Israel lobby to preserve one of its most critical functions: taking members of Congress on free "educational" trips to Israel.

The pro-Israel lobby does most of its work without publicity. But every member of Congress and every would-be candidate for Congress comes to quickly understand a basic lesson. Money needed to run for office can come with great ease from supporters of Israel, provided that the candidate makes certain promises, in writing, to vote favorably on issues considered important to Israel. What drives much of congressional support for Israel is fear - fear that the pro-Israel lobby will either withhold campaign contributions or give money to one's opponent.

In my own experience as a US senator in the 1970s, I saw how the lobby tries to humiliate or embarrass members who do not toe the line.

Pro-Israel groups worked vigorously to ensure that the new reforms would allow them to keep hosting members of Congress on trips to Israel. According to the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper, congressional filings show Israel as the top foreign destination for privately sponsored trips. Nearly 10 percent of overseas congressional trips taken between 2000 and 2005 were to Israel. Most are paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, a sister organization of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the major pro-Israel lobby group.

New rules require all trips to be pre-approved by the House Ethics Committee, but Rep. Barney Frank (D) of Massachusetts says this setup will guarantee that tours of Israel continue. Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported consensus among Jewish groups that "the new legislation would be an inconvenience, but wouldn't seriously hamper the trips to Israel that are considered a critical component of congressional support for Israel."

These trips are defended as "educational." In reality, as I know from my many colleagues in the House and Senate who participated in them, they offer Israeli propagandists an opportunity to expose members of Congress to only their side of the story. The Israeli narrative of how the nation was created, and Israeli justifications for its brutal policies omit important truths about the Israeli takeover and occupation of the Palestinian territories.

What the pro-Israel lobby reaps for its investment in these tours is congressional support for Israeli desires. For years, Israel has relied on billions of dollars in US taxpayer money. Shutting off this government funding would seriously impair Israel's harsh occupation.

One wonders what policies Congress might support toward Israel and the Palestinians absent the distorting influence of these Israel trips - or if more members toured Palestinian lands. America sent troops to Europe to prevent the killing of civilians in the former Yugoslavia. But when it comes to flagrant human rights violations committed by Israel, the US sends more money and shields Israel from criticism.

Congress regularly passes resolutions lauding Israel, even when its actions are deplorable, providing it political cover. Meanwhile, polls suggest most Americans want the Bush administration to steer a middle course in working for peace between Israelis and the Palestinians.

Consider, too, how the Israel lobby twists US foreign policy into a dangerous double standard regarding nuclear issues. The US rattles its sabers at Iran for its nuclear energy ambitions - and alleged pursuit of nuclear arms - while remaining silent about Israel's nuclear-weapons arsenal.

Members of Congress may not be aware just how damaging their automatic support for Israel is to America's interest. At a minimum, US policies toward Israel have cost it valuable allies in the Middle East and other parts of the Muslim world.

If Congress is serious about ethics reform, it should not protect the Israel lobby from the consequences. A totally taxpayer-funded travel budget for members to take foreign fact-finding trips, with authorization to be made by committee heads, would be an important first step toward a foreign policy that genuinely serves America.

• Jim Abourezk is a former Democratic senator from South Dakota.

NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN

The True Miracle of Israel

What is remarkable is not Israel's creation, but rather the perpetuation of the lies and the injustice upon which it survives

By Ramzy Baroud

27/01/08 "Ahram Weekly" -- -- Israelis and their supporters tend to depict Israel as a country of miracles. What else could explain the country's astonishing "birth" and subsequent survival against all sorts of "existential threats"? How else would Israel develop at such a phenomenal pace, making the "desert bloom" and continually scoring a high ranking amongst developed nations in most noteworthy aspects?

Meanwhile, Palestinians continue to be depicted as "their own worst enemies", a people who "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" and who stand outside the parameters of rational human behaviour. Israel is often, if not always, contrasted against a regional backdrop of "backward", "undemocratic" and essentially violent Arabs and Muslims.

Such depictions -- of luminous, civilised Israelis facing wicked, backward Arabs -- are the building blocks of a polemic sold tirelessly by Israeli, American and Western media. Most often, it goes unchallenged, thus defining the West's understanding of Israel and its moral "right to exist". The argument is rooted in the horrors of the Jewish holocaust; however, Israel's handlers have managed to turn deserved sympathy for that tragedy into an unwarranted assertion, somehow equating Palestinians with Nazi Germany in order to justify a constant state of war in the name of self-defence.

In this specific context, the power of the media cannot be over-emphasised. It has defined a fallacious reality based on a skewed narrative. Never in history has a story been so slanted as that of Palestine and Israel. Never has the victim been so squarely blamed for his own misfortunes as the Palestinian. This is not an arrogant counter-narrative to Israel's concoctions. It's a glaring truth that continues to be either ignored or misunderstood.

The "miracles" often associated with Israel are not random; they are assertions. Miracles are a religious notion, referring to the unexplained and supernatural. Thus they become exempt from rational questioning. This formula has served Israel's strategic purposes well. On one hand, Israel's existence is portrayed as a resurrection of sorts: from near-annihilation to a "miraculous" rebirth. Indeed, considering how the birth of Israel story is offered, the narrative is no less impressive than biblical legends. Such discourse has been used successfully to appeal to a much larger group than those who identify with Israel on ethnic or religious grounds. It has impressed tens of millions of Christian fundamentalists worldwide. In the United States, Christian Zionists represent the popular backbone of the pro-Israeli camp. While American Jews tend to vote based on economic or political interests, Christian Zionists see their allegiance to Israel as a religious duty.

Like all religious miracles, Israeli miracles are "matters of faith". They can either be accepted as one package or rejected as such; the bottom line is that they are beyond argument, beyond the need for tangible proof. Those foolish enough to deconstruct this -- and thus question Israel as a state accountable to law, like all others -- are subjected to the wrath of God (in the case of the "true believer") or the wrath of the media and the Zionist lobby (in the case of the sceptic). When an American politician, for example, is accused of not standing "fully behind Israel", the accusation doesn't warrant justification. It stands on its own, like a biblical command that has survived the test of time and reason: Thou shalt stand fully behind Israel. The accused politician can only defend his record of support for Israel; he cannot question why this is necessary in the first place, or ever acknowledge the fact that the latter's track record is soaked in blood, sullied by illegal occupations, and grounded on human rights violations and defiance of international law.

As the 60th anniversary of the so- called birth of Israel draws near, a most impressive -- albeit grotesque -- misrepresentation of that history will be offered in abundance. Media pundits and politicians will celebrate the miracle, omitting how Israel was delivered on top of the ruins of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages. The killing and ethnic cleansing that became known as the Palestinian Catastrophe -- or Nakba -- was not the work of invisible and miraculous seraphs, but rather well trained and well-armed Zionist gangs and their supporters.

Nor did Palestinians lose the battle due to their laxity or backwardness. Their bravery, for those who care to consult serious historical works (such as those of Israeli historian Ilan Pappe or late Palestinian Professor Edward Said), is a badge of honour that will be carried by Palestinians for years to come. They lost because, as parallel historic experiences demonstrate, neither bravery nor fortitude are enough to withstand so many powerful forces at play, all plotting for their downfall.

Moreover, those celebrating Israel's miraculous efforts in making the desert bloom -- the inference being that "nomadic Palestinians" failed to connect with the "neglected" land, and only the "return" of its rightful owners managed to bring about its renewal -- will most likely forget that its was the Palestinian proletariat -- the cheap, oppressed, and dispossessed labour force -- that mostly worked the land, erected the homes and tended to the gardens of the miracle state. No less than $100 billion of American taxpayers' money contributed to Israel's current economic viability, as well as military preparedness.

All of this is likely to be overlooked as Israel and "friends of Israel" around the world celebrate another miraculous year of survival and affluence. Will they pause to wonder why over five million Palestinian refugees are dispossessed and scattered around the world? Will they lend a moment's silence to the many thousands who were brutally murdered so that Israel could live this fallacious miracle? Will they ever understand the pain and the tears of successive generations dying while holding onto the keys of homes that were destroyed, deeds to land that was stolen, and memories of a once beautiful reality from which they were violently uprooted?

If there is any miracle in Israel's existence it is that the lies upon which it is founded could be perpetuated for so long, despite glaringly obvious truths to the contrary. Indeed, it is a miracle that such grave injustice could reign for so long uncontested.

* The writer is editor of Palestine Chronicle.com .

Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved

NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN

How To Help Feed and Support Children of The Gaza Strip And West Bank

By Tom Feeley

I have been asked by many ICH readers if I can recommend a way for them to help the children of Palestine. I would like to suggest the Palestine Children's Welfare Fund .

The Palestine Children's Welfare Fund is an enterprise that was established by a group of individuals whose goals are to improve the living standards of the children of Palestine in the refugee camps inside Palestine. The group aims to provide the children of the refugee camps with better educational opportunities, health facilities and a bright future without violence, hatred and discrimination. The organization has branches and volunteers in more than ten countries and is not connected with any militant or political association of any kind.

The group is a non-political, non-religious enterprise whose aspirations are purely humanitarian and for the purpose of emancipating the children of Palestine and the human rights of the people and children of Palestine.

One hundred percent of the donations go to the children in Gaza and other children throughout Palestine. There are no administrative costs due to the fact that all staff is made up of all volunteers who work out of or our homes or businesses.

You can make a one time donation by clicking here, or sponsor a child on a monthly basis by clicking here.

Visit their website http://www.pcwf.org/

Charles Goyette Interviews Mohammad Omer

A student in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah and author of the Website RafahToday.

A Taste of Freedom

By Mohammed Omer, reporting from Rafah

27/01/08 "ICH"  -- - "I finally taste freedom now-at least a temporary freedom of movement," a 32 year old Gazan man rejoiced, the Gaza-Egypt border newly opened. Thousands climbed over Israel's downed Wall, a Wall which encompasses and contains the Gaza Strip. The hungry, assaulted, and ignored crowds clamoured into Egypt to stock up on daily goods, basic foods, and medical supplies.

In Rafah, crucial shipments of daily living necessities including even packages of cement, spare auto and vital machine parts and fuel, flowed from Egypt into Gaza across a border rendered wide-open since Wednesday. Early Wednesday, militants blew down portions of the concrete and steel wall, allowing hundreds of thousands of Gazans, many caged-in for nearly 18 months, to stream into Egypt for shopping and a luxurious whiff of freedom.

Egyptian border security guards initially simply stood by as huge crowds surged into Egypt, but on Wednesday, they attempted to ease the chaos of traffic, directing the countless pedestrians, donkey carts and bicycles.

24 Hours Awake!

Rafah has been awake 24 hours a day lately, a new phenomenon: usually by sunset people are home, hoping to avoid being targeted by Israeli attacks. In a border town such as Rafah, in southern Gaza, security is risky, to say the least, after sundown. Yet now, masses -hundreds of thousands!!-of people choose to go shopping even in the middle of the night. If not shopping, then people meander to "breathe fresh air," as one young man replied, en route home with cheese and milk.

Israel declared it would not send emergency shipments of fuel into Gaza on Thursday as it had initially promised earlier in the week. The fuel is vital to running Gaza's main power plant, shut down last week after Israel imposed a complete closure on Gaza in what Israel says was a response to the launching of home-made rockets towards Israel.

With the newly-opened border, Israeli officials have said that as long as Gazans are getting supplies through Egypt there is no need for Israel to send shipments. This step is seen by people around the world as Israel's sneaky way of relinquishing responsibility for 1.5 million Gazans, in a region which until 2005 Israel occupied, but which even now many contend Israel continues to militarily occupy.

The spokesman of Hamas has denied involvement in having blasted holes in the border. Hamas says, however, that it the prison break is a ‘normal reaction' from a population which has been increasingly starving, dying, and destitute since Israel imposed its blockade. The closures, which were tightened after Hamas took control over Gaza last June 2007, have led to internationally-recognized severe shortages of food supplies, drinkable water, cement, fuel and electricity necessary for medical and daily functions, as well as cigarettes and many other basic things. Something as simple as candles has become an impossible luxury in Gaza's markets.

As I write now, Gaza rejoices, enjoying a moment of fresh air, a brief, and unusual, respite, from the near-daily Israeli attacks resulting in Gaza civilian bloodshed. But despite the joy from the open border and the vital goods which can be bought in Egypt, tragedy remains in Gaza: late Thursday night and early Friday morning, Israeli warplanes killed four more Palestinians in the on-going assault on Gaza which has seen 68 killed and over 165 wounded in just the first weeks of January alone. Gaza, as the world, watches with apprehension to see how Israel will react to the act of basic human desperation and frustration which led to breaking down the Wall last Wednesday.

Wall comes tumbling down

The inspiring breakout of Palestinians from their imprisonment in Gaza is a timely reminder that this is a people who cannot be caged or wished away

By Seumas Milne

It has been first and foremost a human triumph. An occupied and imprisoned people has taken its fate into its own hands and broken a shameful blockade, enforced jointly by Israel and Egypt with the support of the Bush administration and the connivance of the US and Israeli-backed rump Palestinian authority in Ramallah.

But it is also a political defeat for the cruelly-enforced attempt to isolate and crush the elected Hamas leadership in Gaza. By tearing down the walls that held 1.5 million people in the world's largest open air prison, Gazans have broken the siege that had become the main weapon to bring the Palestinians to heel and impose a pliant leadership and an occupier's settlement.

Egyptian forces have been struggling to reseal the Rafah border crossing. It was closed last summer in agreement with Israel when Hamas took control of the Gaza strip (see the piece by Yaakov Katz, Khaled Abu Toameh and Herb Keinon in the Jerusalem Post of January 3 2008 on Israel's reaction to the recent more modest breach for Hajj pilgrims). Israel had meanwhile been sharply intensifying the squeeze on supplies through its own closed border crossings since it declared Gaza a "hostile territory" in September, with predictably grim consequences, as UN official Karen Koning AbuZayd spelled out in the Guardian on Wednesday.

But the point has now been clearly demonstrated that it can be re-opened at will. Hamas has been strengthened and the US-Israeli strategy of isolating the Palestinians' most recently elected leaders is in ruins. And the spectacle of Gazans holding candles in Israeli-enforced darkness this week - echoing Yasser Arafat's siege in Ramallah in 2002 - has returned the Palestinian cause to the centre stage of Arab politics.

There was some speculation today - for example, by the commentator Talal 'Awkal in the Palestinian daily al-Ayyam - that Israel appeared to be hoping for a reversion to Gaza's pre-67 status when it was controlled by Egypt, perhaps as a precursor to bringing the West Bank back into the Jordanian orbit. That followed the remarks by Israel's deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai on Thursday that the opening of the Rafah border could pave the way for Israel permanently to hand over all responsibility for supplying Gaza to Egypt.

Neither is a serious option. The Palestinian national genie cannot be put back in the bottle, despite current divisions. And Israel remains the fully responsible occupying power in Gaza, controlling its land access, sea and air space and conducting regular military operations in the territory at will.

Those "incursions" are supposedly carried out to end rocket attacks from Gaza into southern Israel. If so, they are hopelessly ineffective. Benjamin Pogrund asked this week: what can Israel do to stop the rockets, which spread fear and demoralisation in towns like Sderot, even if - unlike Israeli attacks on Gaza - they rarely kill? The obvious answer is to end its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and negotiate a just settlement for the refugees, ethnically cleansed nearly 60 years ago, (who, with their families, make up a majority of the Gaza Strip's population).

All the Palestinian factions, including Hamas, accept that as the basis for a permanent settlement or indefinite end of armed conflict. In the meantime, the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation, whether they choose to exercise it or not. The dominant Palestinian view - though not that of PA president Mahmoud Abbas - has long been that negotiation without some element of armed pressure is, as was once said in a rather different British context, to go naked into the conference chamber.

Even signficant figures on the Israeli right - including Sharon's former security adviser Giora Eiland, former Mossad boss Efraim Halevi and ex-defence minister Shaul Mofaz - are coming to recognise that the refusal to talk or deal with Hamas is going nowhere. And the argument (made, for example, by senior British ministers) that talks with Hamas will have to wait until the organisation has been politically weakened looks increasingly threadbare.

The same goes for the PA leadership. Waiting for Hamas to go away won't work. Only negotiations without preconditions for Palestinian political reconciliation can both restore national dignity and allow the Palestinians out of the dead end they have been forced into by relentless Israeli and US pressure. The magnificent display of popular power this week has shown that there are other ways ahead.

NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN

The End of Privacy

By Elliot Cohen

25/01/08 "Truthdig" -- -- Amid the controversy brewing in the Senate over Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reform, the Bush administration appears to have changed its strategy and is devising a bold new plan that would strip away FISA protections in favor of a system of wholesale government monitoring of every American's Internet activities. Now the national director of intelligence is predicting a disastrous cyber-terrorist attack on the U.S. if this scheme isn't instituted.

It is no secret that the Bush administration has already been spying on the e-mail, voice-over-IP, and other Internet exchanges between American citizens since as early as and possibly earlier than Sept. 11, 2001. The National Security Agency has set up shop in the hubs of major telecom corporations, notably AT&T, installing equipment that makes copies of the contents of all Internet traffic, routing it to a government database and then using natural language parsing technology to sift through and analyze the data using undisclosed search criteria. It has done this without judicial oversight and obviously without the consent of the millions of Americans under surveillance. Given any rational interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, its mass spying operation is illegal and unconstitutional.

But now the administration wants to make these illegal activities legal. And why is that? According to National Director of Intelligence Mike McConnell, who is now drafting the proposal, an attack on a single U.S. bank by the 9/11 terrorists would have had a far more serious impact on the U.S. economy than the destruction of the Twin Towers. "My prediction is that we're going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens," said McConnell. So the way to prevent this from happening, he claims, is to give the government the power to spy at will on the content of all e-mails, file transfers and Web searches.

McConnell's prediction of something "horrendous" happening unless we grant government this authority has a tone similar to that of the fear-mongering call to arms against terrorism that President Bush sounded before taking us to war in Iraq. Now, Americans are about to be asked to surrender their Fourth Amendment rights because of a vague and unsupported prediction of the dangers and costs of cyber-terrorism.

The analogy with the campaign to frighten us into war with Iraq gets even stronger when it becomes evident that along with the establishing of American forces in Iraq, the cyber-security McConnell is calling for was, all along, part of the strategic plan, devised by Dick Cheney and several other present and former high-level Bush administration officials, to establish America as the world's supreme superpower. This plan, known as the Project for the New American Century, unequivocally recognized "an imperative" for government to not only secure the Internet against cyber-attacks but also to control and use it offensively against its adversaries. The Project for the New American Century also maintained that "the process of transformation" it envisioned (which included the militarization and control of the Internet) was "likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event-like a new Pearl Harbor." All that appears to be lacking to make the analogy complete is the "horrendous" cyber-attack-the chilling analog of the 9/11 attacks-that McConnell now predicts.

Apparently, the Bush administration had hoped to continue its mass surveillance program in secret, but as many as 40 civil suits were filed against AT&T and other telecoms, threatening to blow the government's illegal spying activities wide open. Unable to have these cases dismissed in appellate court by once again playing the national-security card, the administration drafted and tried to push through Congress a version of the FISA Amendments Act of 2007 that gave retroactive immunity to telecom corporations for their assistance in helping the government spy en mass on Americans without a court warrant. The administration's plan was to use Congress' passage of this provision of immunity to nullify any cause of civil action against the telecoms, thereby pre-empting the exposure of the administration's own illegal activities.

Two versions of the FISA bill emerged, one from the Senate Intelligence Committee drafted largely by Cheney himself, which contained the immunity provision, and another from the Senate Judiciary Committee that did not contain the provision. Although Senate Majority leader Harry Reid inauspiciously chose the former to bring to the Senate floor, the bill was surrounded by much controversy. There had been well organized grass-roots pressure to stop it from passing, and the House had already passed a version that did not include the retroactive immunity provision. Thus, in the face of a filibuster threat by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), Reid postponed the discussion until the January 2008 session.

Now Reid has tried to put off the FISA Amendments Act once again by asking Republicans to extend, for one more month, the Protect America Act of 2007, an interim FISA reform act that is due to sunset in February. However, Cheney has urged Congress to pass his version of the FISA Amendments Act now. "We can always revisit a law that's on the books. That's part of the job of the elected branches of government," Cheney said. "But there is no sound reason to pass critical legislation ... and slap an expiration date on it."

Cheney's point about the possibility of later revisiting the FISA Amendments Act after it becomes law may foreshadow replacing it in the coming months with a law based on McConnell's plan, which is due to emerge in February. This would mark a gradual descent into divesting Americans entirely of their Fourth Amendment right to privacy-first by blocking their ability to sue the telecoms for violating their privacy and then by giving the government the same legal protection. After all, the FISA Amendments Act still requires the government to get warrants for spying on American citizens even if it does not afford adequate judicial oversight in enforcing this mandate. McConnell's proposal, on the other hand, would make no bones about spying on Americans without warrants, thereby contradicting any meaningful FISA reform.

President Bush has already made clear he would veto any FISA bill that did not give retroactive immunity to the telecoms. However, if McConnell's soon to be unveiled spy-at-will plan is turned into law, a separate law giving retroactive immunity to the telecoms would be unnecessary. All Bush and Cheney would need to do to protect themselves from criminal liability would be to make the new spy-at-will law retroactive in effect from the inception of the illegal NSA surveillance program. This would also be sufficient to deflate the civil suits filed against the telecoms because the past illegal spying activities that these companies conducted on behalf of the government would then become "legal." Indeed, the Bush administration has already done this sort of legal retro-dating and nullifying of civil rights and gotten it through Congress. For example, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 conveniently gave Bush the power to decide whether someone-including himself-is guilty of torture, irrespective of the Geneva Conventions, and it made this authority retroactive to Nov. 26, 1997.

Whatever the final disposition of FISA in the coming weeks or months, the administration is now bracing to take a much more aggressive posture that would seek abridgement of civil liberties in its usual fashion: by fear-mongering and warnings that our homeland will be attacked by terrorists (this time of the menacing hacker variety) unless we the people surrender our Fourth Amendment right to privacy and give government the authority to inspect even our most personal and intimate messages.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the resolve of the Bush administration. But it would be a bigger mistake for Americans not to stand united against this familiar pattern of government scare tactics and manipulation. There are grave dangers to the survival of democracy posed by allowing any present or future government unfettered access to all of our private electronic communications. These dangers must be carefully weighed against the dubious and unproven benefits that granting such an awesome power to government might have on fending off cyber-attacks.

Elliot D. Cohen, PhD, is a media ethicist and critic. His most recent book is "The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America Into a Dictatorship." He is a first-prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

Copyright © 2007 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.

Chomsky On World Ownership

Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. On January 15, Michael Shank interviewed him on the latest developments in U.S. policy toward Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. In the first part of this two-part interview, Chomsky also discussed how the U.S. government's belief in its ownership of the world shapes its foreign policy.

By Michael Shank
Editor: John Feffer

25/01/08 "Foreign Policy In Focus" -- - Michael Shank: Is the leading Democrats' policy vis-à-vis Iraq at all different from the Bush administration's policy?

Noam Chomsky: It's somewhat different. The situation is very similar to Vietnam. The opposition to the war today in elite sectors, including every viable candidate, is pure cynicism, completely unprincipled: "If we can get away with it, it's fine. If it costs us too much, it's bad." That's the way the Vietnam opposition was in the elite sectors.

Take, say, Anthony Lewis, who's about as far to the critical extreme as you can find in the media. In his final words evaluating the war in The New York Times in 1975, he said the war began with "blundering efforts to do good" but by 1969, namely a year after the American business community had turned against the war, it was clear that the United States "could not impose a solution except at a price too costly to itself," so therefore it was a "disastrous mistake." Nazi generals could have said the same thing after Stalingrad and probably did. That's the extreme position in the left liberal spectrum. Or take the distinguished historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger. When the war was going sour under LBJ, he wrote that "we all pray" that the hawks are right and that more troops will lead to victory. And he knew what victory meant. He said we're leaving "a land of ruin and wreck," but "we all pray" that escalation will succeed and if it does "we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government." But probably the hawks are wrong, so escalation is a bad idea.

You can translate the rhetoric almost word by word into the elite, including political elite, opposition to the Iraq war.

It's based on two principles. The first principle is: "we totally reject American ideals." The only people who accept American ideals are Iraqis. The United States totally rejects them. What American ideals? The principles of the Nuremburg decision. The Nuremburg tribunal, which is basically American, expressed high ideals, which we profess. Namely, of all the war crimes, aggression is the supreme international crime, which encompasses within it all of the evil that follows. It's obvious that the Iraq invasion is a pure case of aggression and therefore, according to our ideals, it encompasses all the evil that follows, like sectarian warfare, al-Qaeda Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and everything else. The chief U.S. Prosecutor Robert Jackson, addressed the tribunal and said, "we should remember that we're handing these Nazi war criminals a poisoned chalice. If we ever sip from it we must be subject to the same principles or else the whole thing is a farce." Well, it seems that almost no one in the American elite accepts that or can even understand it. But Iraqis accept it.

The latest study of Iraqi opinion, carried out by the American military, provides an illustration. There is an interesting article about it by Karen DeYoung in the Washington Post. She said the American military is very excited and cheered to see the results of this latest study, which showed that Iraqis have "shared beliefs." They're coming together. They're getting to political reconciliation. Well, what are the shared beliefs? The shared beliefs are that the Americans are responsible for all the horrors that took place in Iraq, as the Nuremberg principles hold, and they should get out. That's the shared belief. So yes, they accept American principles. But the American government rejects them totally as does elite opinion. And the same is true in Europe, incidentally. That's point number one.

The second point is that there is a shared assumption here and in the West that we own the world. Unless you accept that assumption, the entire discussion that is taking place is unintelligible. For example, you see a headline in the newspaper, as I saw recently in the Christian Science Monitor, something like "New Study of Foreign Fighters in Iraq." Who are the foreign fighters in Iraq? Some guy who came in from Saudi Arabia. How about the 160,000 American troops? Well, they're not foreign fighters in Iraq because we own the world; therefore we can't be foreign fighters anywhere. Like, if the United States invades Canada, we won't be foreign. And if anybody resists it, they're enemy combatants, we send them to Guantanamo.

The same goes for the entire discussion about Iranian interference in Iraq. If you're looking at this from some rational standpoint, you have to collapse in ridicule. Could there be Allied interference in Vichy France? There can't be. The country was conquered and it's under military occupation. And of course we understand that. When the Russians complained about American interference in Afghanistan, we'd laugh. But when we talk about Iranian interference in Iraq, going back to viable political candidates, every single one of them says that this is outrageous - meaning, the Iranians don't understand that we own the world. So if anybody disrupts any action of ours, no matter what it is, the supreme international crime or anything else, they're the criminals. And we send them to Guantanamo and they don't get rights and so on. And the Supreme Court argues about it.

In fact, the same is true almost anywhere you look. Since we own the world, everything we do is necessarily right. It can be too costly and then we don't like it. Or there could be a couple of bad apples who do the wrong thing like Abu Ghraib. Going back to the Nuremburg tribunal, they did not try the SS men who threw people into the extermination chambers. The people who were tried were the people at the top, like von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, who was accused of having supported a preemptive war. The Germans invaded Norway to try to preempt a British attack against Germany. By our standards they were totally justified. But Powell is not being tried. He is not going to be sentenced to hanging.

Shank: And with a Democrat president, will that thinking fundamentally change?

Chomsky: It'll change. There's a pretty narrow political spectrum, and in fact, intellectual and moral spectrum. But it's not zero. And the Bush administration is way out at the extreme. In fact, so far out at the extreme that they've come under unprecedented attack from the mainstream.

I quoted Schlesinger on the Vietnam War. To his credit, he is perhaps the one person in the mainstream who took a principled stand on the Iraq War. When the bombing started in 2003, Schlesinger did write an op-ed in which he said that this is a day which will live in infamy, quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as the United States follows the policies of imperial Japan. That's principled.

There was no such principled critique when the liberal Democrats were doing it. But his critique of the invasion of Iraq, from its first days, was unusual. It is probably unique, so much so that it's kind of suppressed. It reflects, first of all, a change of sentiment in the country, and also the fact that the Bush administration is so far out that they're denounced right in the mainstream.

When the Bush administration came out with its National Security Strategy in September 2002, which basically was a call for the invasion of Iraq, Foreign Affairs, which is as respectable as you can get, ran an article just a couple of weeks later by John Ikenberry, a mainstream historian and analyst, in which he pretty sharply condemned what he called this new imperial grand strategy. He said it's going to cause a lot of trouble; it's going to get us in danger. That's quite unusual. But in the case of Bush, there's plenty more like him. So yes, they're way out at the extreme. Any candidate now, maybe anyone except Giuliani, will moderate somewhat the policies.

Shank: With Bush's campaign in the Gulf, rallying Gulf States against Iran, what's the strategy now? What's the importance of the timing of his tour?

Chomsky: First of all, remember that in the United States, which is a rich powerful state which always wins everything, history is an irrelevance. Historical amnesia is required. But among the victims that's not true. They remember history, all over the Third World. The history that Iranians remember is the correct one. The United States has been torturing Iran, without a stop, since 1953. Overthrew the parliamentary government, installed the tyrant Shah Reza Pahlavi, and backed him through horrible torture and everything else. The minute the Shah was overthrown, the United States moved at once to try and overthrow the new regime. The United States turned for support to Saddam Hussein and his attack against Iran, in which hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered with chemical weapons and so on. The United States continued to support Saddam.

In 1989, the Iran-Iraq war was all over. George Bush I, supposedly the moderate, invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in weapons production. Iranians don't forget that. After what they've just been through, they should be able to see the total cynicism of what's happening. Immediately after the war, which the United States basically won for Iraq by breaking the embargo, shooting down Iranian commercial airplanes, and so on, the Iranians were convinced that they couldn't fight the United States. So they capitulated. Immediately after that the United States imposed harsh sanctions, which continue, they got worse. Now the United States is threatening to attack. This is a violation of the UN charter, if anybody cares, which bars the threat of force. But outlaw states don't care about things like that.

And it's a credible threat. Just a couple of weeks ago there was a confrontation in the Gulf. Here the story is: "look how awful the Iranians are." But suppose Iranian warships were sailing through Massachusetts Bay or the Gulf of Mexico. Would we think that's fine? But since we own the world of course it's fine when we do it off their shores. And we're there for the benefit of the world, no matter what we do, so it's fine. But Iranians aren't going to see it that way. They don't like the threats of destruction. They don't like the fact that it's a very credible threat. They're surrounded on all sides by hostile American forces. They've got the American Navy sending combat units to the Gulf.

Take this recent Annapolis meeting about Israel-Palestine. Why did they pick Annapolis? Is that the only meeting place in the Washington area? Well, Iranians presumably notice that Annapolis is the base from which the U.S. Navy is being sent to threaten Iran. You think they can't see that? American editorial writers and commentators can't see it, but I'm sure Iranians can.

So yes, they're living under serious constant threat. It's never ended since 1953. And Bush is now desperately trying to organize what Condoleezza Rice calls the "moderate Arab states," namely the most extreme, fundamentalist tyrannies in the world, like Saudi Arabia. So the "moderate Arab states," they're trying hard to organize them to join the United States in confronting Iran. Well, they're not going along. They don't tell Bush and Rice go home. They're polite and so on but they're not going along. They're continuing to enter into limited but real relations with Iran. They don't want a conflict with them.

Shank: Did the National Intelligence Estimate offer a reprieve, any window at all?

Chomsky: I think so. I think it pulled the rug out from under people like Cheney and Bush who probably wanted to have a war to end up their glorious regime. But it's going to be pretty hard to do it now. Although Olmert just announced again yesterday that Israel is leaving open the option of attacking Iran, if Israel decides that it is a threat. Israel, which is a U.S. client state, is granted a right similar to that of the United States. The United States owns the world and can do anything, and its client states can be regional hegemons. Israel wants to make sure that it dominates the region and therefore can carry out whatever policies it wants to in the occupied territories, invading Lebanon or whatever it happens to be. The one threat that they cannot overcome on their own is Iran.

Israel and Iran had pretty good relations right through the 1980s. They were clandestine relations but not bad. And now they recognize that Iran is the one barrier to their complete domination of the region. So therefore they want the United States, the big boy, to step in and take care of it and if the United States won't, they claim they'll do it. I don't think they would unless the United States authorized it. It's much too dangerous. They would do it only if they're pretty sure they can bring the United States in.

Shank: The presidential candidates in the Democratic Party are trying to one-up each other on who can be more militaristic vis-à-vis Pakistan, who would bomb first if there was actionable intelligence. What's Washington's role in helping Pakistan now? Should it have a role and if it does what should it look like?

Chomsky: Again, there's a little bit of history that matters to people outside centers of power. First of all, the United States supported Pakistani military governments ever since Pakistan was created. The worst period was the 1980s, when the Reagan administration strongly supported the Zia ul Haq regime, which was a brutal harsh tyranny and also a deeply Islamic tyranny. So that's when the madrassas were established, Islamic fundamentalism was introduced, they no longer studied science in schools and things like that, and also when they were developing nuclear weapons.

The Reagan administration pretended that it didn't know about the nuclear weapons development so that it could get congressional authorization every year for more funding to the ISI, the intelligence agencies, the fundamentalist tyranny and so on. It ended up holding a tiger by the tail. It commonly happens. The Reagan administration also helped create what turned into al-Qaeda in Afghanistan at the same time. It's all interrelated. And they left Afghanistan in the hands of brutal, vicious, fundamentalist gangsters, like their favorite Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who got his kicks out of throwing acid in the face of women in Kabul who weren't dressed properly. That's who Reagan was supporting.

The United States also tolerated the Khan proliferation system. In fact the United States is still tolerating it. Khan is under what's called house arrest, meaning just about anything he likes. And it continues with the support of the Musharraf dictatorship. Now the United States is kind of stuck. The population strongly opposes the dictatorship. The United States tried to bring in some kind of compromise with Bhutto, whom they thought would be a pliable candidate. But she was assassinated under what remain unclear circumstances. The ISI, the intelligence agencies who are extremely powerful in Pakistan, have withdrawn support for the extremist militants in the tribal areas and now they're beginning to fight back. In fact it was just reported that one of their leaders has said that they're going to continue to resist the Pakistani Army as they've been doing.

People who know the Middle East like Robert Fisk have been saying for years that Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world, for all kinds of reasons. For one, it's falling apart. There are rebellions in the Baluchi areas. The tribal areas are now out of control of the ISI. There is a Sindhi opposition movement. It could very well be a resistance movement especially after Bhutto's assassination, since she was Sindhi. There are strong anti-Punjabi feelings developing, against the Army, the elite and so on.

So the country is barely being held together. It's got nuclear weapons. It's very anti-American. Take a look at popular opinion; it's very strongly anti-American, because they remember the history. We may forget it. We tell ourselves how nice and wonderful we are, but other people, especially the people who are at the wrong end of the club, they see the world as it is. So it's very anti-American. If the United States wants to do something there it has to get a surrogate to come in and do it. Even the dictator that the United States supports, Musharraf, and the army are strongly against any direct U.S. involvement in the tribal areas, which the United States is now talking about. Who knows what that could lead to, some other war against a country with nuclear weapons?

The Bush administration is really playing with fire. I don't think it has a lot of options at this point. If I were asked to recommend a policy I wouldn't know what to say. Except to try to withdraw support from the dictatorship and allow the popular forces to do something. The United States, for example, gave no support to the lawyers and their opposition. It could have. The United States is not all powerful, but it could have done something. But when Obama says, "Okay we'll bomb them," that's not very helpful.

07/21/04 -- Said by some to be more dangerous than Osama bin-Laden, he has been condemned as a "war maniac," called a "moron" by the Canadian prime minister's chief spokeswoman, ridiculed as "The English Patient" for his struggles with language, and likened to Adolf Hitler. 

Of all the labels hung on George W. Bush, the hardest to shake may be the comparison with Hitler.

Perhaps the clearest likeness between the two men lies in their use of emotionally induced hypnosis to plant in the mass consciousness an image of themselves as protectors of their subjects from threats to national survival both inside and outside the fatherland. 

In a June, 2003 article written for The Nation about Bush's "mastery of emotional language, especially negatively charged emotional language," clinical psychologist Reanna Brooks observed that "Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks in his listeners' minds with a number of linguistic techniques borrowed from hypnosis and advertising to instill the image of a dark and evil world around us." 

His subliminal messages to justify religious war against "evildoers" are right out of Madison Avenue. Writing in The New Yorker of July 12 & 19, David Greenberg tells how Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, "himself an evangelical, laces the President's addresses with seemingly innocuous terms that the devout recognize as laden with meaning: ‘whirlwind,' ‘work of mercy,' ‘safely home,' ‘wonderworking power.'" 

Aspiring political hypnotists would do well to study Hitler as an introduction to Bush. 

"Without in any way straining language we can truthfully say that he (Hitler) was one of the great hypnotists of all time," says George H. Estabrooks in Hypnotism, the ne plus ultra of Hitler hypnosis books. Dr. Estabrooks was chairman of Colgate University's psychology department, and taught at the school from 1927 to 1964. 

Demonizing Saddam 

"The efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of the people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy." Hitler said that, in Mein Kampf. 

Bush could just as easily have said it. Having lost public focus on Osama bin Laden by his inability to capture the wily 9/11 bomber, he found it not just convenient, but necessary, to replace bin Laden with Saddam Hussein as the new "single enemy," a stratagem inherited from the first President Bush who damned Hussein as "worse than Hitler" in the run-up to Desert Storm, the first Iraq war. On the eve of war in early October, 1990, ex-president Ronald Reagan picked up the beat before a crowd of Houston Republicans, denouncing his former Iraqi ally as "the reincarnation of Hitler." 

"Depicting Saddam Hussein as an evil man made it easier to justify U. S. involvement in the Persian Gulf War. Psychology is an important part of any war strategy." from Introduction to Psychology, a textbook by Mark Garrison, Kentucky State University. If demonizing Saddam was effective strategy in the first Gulf war, the current administration worked wonders with it, with a little help from people like 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney and Bill Clinton who, on the David Letterman show, September 11, 2002, called Saddam "a threat, a murderer and thug..." while endorsing his removal. 

Fear Hypnosis 

In search of support for shaky WMD charges against Saddam, Bush found the torture issue and put it on the front burner in his January 2003 State of the Union address: "This dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues and rape." 

Bush went on to urge Americans to come together in an orgy of fear induced self hypnosis by mentally imaging the dreadful prospect of Iraqi sponsored terrorists attacking the U. S., and tried again to link the Iraqi leader to the 9/11 attack on the twin towers: "Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans - this time armed by Saddam....We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes." If Saddam had not existed, Bush would have invented him. 

Press Supports War on Iraq 

With skillful use of fear hypnosis, Bush not only gulled the public, but played a credulous press like a Steinway baby grand. 

The establishment press fell in behind Bush almost to a man in endorsing his war aims against Iraq. This blind procession is amply documented by reporter Chris Mooney in the March/April 2004 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. The L. A. Times and the N. Y. Times weakly dissented from war without UN approval but rolled over when Bush went ahead anyway. Even the usually skeptical The New Yorker saw merit in Bush's war plans, warning that absent "Saddam's abdication, or a military coup...a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all." 

Hypnosis Contagion 

The demonization of Saddam spread like germs. 

"The mob leader will count on emotional contagion....Emotions are far more contagious than the measles. This fact of emotional contagion was very important to Hitler," says Estabrooks. Emotional statements by a hypnotic leader, he avers, are "burned" into receptive subconscious minds with the permanence of an image engraved on a photographic negative. 

To be hypnotized by one such as Bush is to be branded with his ideology and to bend to his will as he so directs. This is true of anyone drawn uncritically to any leader or dominant figure. Be it Bush or Clinton, Hitler or Churchill, Reagan or FDR, the difference in the degree of hypnotically induced allegiance depends on the skill of the hypnotist and the suggestibility of the subject. 

In The Group Mind, first published in 1920 by Putnam, author William McDougall says, "It is well recognized that almost any emotional excitement increases the suggestibility of the individual, though the explanation of the fact remains obscure." 

By putting the horror mask on Saddam, by petrifying U. S. citizens with tales of Saddam's gases and torture chambers and terrorist connections, Bush dusted off and refined an old Hitler trick. 

"The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force." Hitler, Mein Kampf. 

Putting his own spin on Hitler's formula, Bush induced fear-of-Saddam hypnosis in Americans to set them up for repetition hypnosis, to deepen and fix the fear. "Axis of evil" - "weapons of mass destruction" - "torture chambers" - "Iraqi terrorists" - "grave and gathering danger," all gained dominance in the thought patterns of Americans to lure them to Bush's side against the evil Saddam. 

"The influence of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power is seen which it exercises on the most enlightened minds. This power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives of our actions are forged." So said Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd, his seminal study of political hypnosis, published in 1897. 

Bush Power Hypnosis 

Why did Bush thus goad Americans to war by hypnotizing them? The answer seems to be that from day one, he intended the chaos of crisis and war to put in place a domestic agenda that he knew stood little chance of succeeding in peace. 

He gambled that the electorate would be reluctant to change leaders in the crisis of war just as crewmen would hesitate to pull the captain from the bridge of their ship even as he sailed into a field of icebergs. 

Bush's incendiary bluster on taking office would seem to support this scenario. In turn, he dissed North Korean and Iranian leaders, sat by while the intafada exploded into the bloodiest, most enduring sequel of suicide bombings and Israeli retaliation in the history of the war, trashed the Kyoto treaty to reduce global air pollution, unilaterally revoked the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia, and vetoed U. S. support of a world court to try war crimes. 

The Republican ‘Pearl Harbor' 

His actions appeared designed to escalate seething world resentment of America's imperial transgressions to flash point, provoking an outbreak of hostilities that would draw the nation into armed conflict. 

While Bush and his handlers may not have expected a reaction to their warmongering so costly as 9/11, when it came may well have regarded it as God-sent. The twin towers disaster has been called "the Republicans' Pearl Harbor," because of the opportunity it presented to rally the electorate around Bush and continue him in power, as Pearl Harbor did for FDR. 

In Bush's Brain, by James Moore and Wayne Slater, Bush advisor Karl Rove is seen as agitating for the Iraq invasion to keep war fever alive when the hunt for bin Laden faltered and as 9/11 receded in the public consciousness. Other administration figures stepped forward to beat the war drums. 

A March 5, 2004 article in the New York Times said, "Mr. Bush and his aides have planned for more than a year to make the president's response to terrorist attacks the centerpiece of his re-election effort." 

"We are fighting a global war on terrorism," said National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, on "Meet the Press," Sunday, March 14, 2004. 

In early February on "Meet the Press," Bush referred to himself as a "war president" and said he had "war on my mind" when he made decisions in the Oval Office. 

Verbal Confusion Hypnosis 

While Bush may have led the nation into war with Hitler hypnosis he has kept it there with hypnosis of his own making, a technological tour de force of classical, textbook hypnosis that eclipses anything Hitler used and sets Bush apart as a political hypnosis stylist in his own right. 

When it became apparent as time passed that Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq was an illusion, Bush segued smoothly into verbal confusion hypnosis, which is discussed at some length in Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, by Jesse E. Gordon: 

"The verbal confusion technique, which is quite difficult to administer, involves an approximation of double-talk in which instructions of a somewhat contradictory kind are given in rapid succession making it impossible for the attentive subject either to quite comprehend or quite acquiesce to any of them. Finally, he simply gives up all attempts and more or less collapses into a hypnotic state." 

Exactly. A review of the Bush hocus-pocus in his 2004 State of the Union address, for example, shows how nimbly he skipped through a maze of issues such as WMD - deftly changed to "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" - no child left behind, "the sanctity of marriage," senior drug discount cards, invading Iraq in the interests of national survival and world peace, "foreign terrorists," permanent tax relief, jobs, and much, much more. Holding up one theme card after another for public review, before they could "quite comprehend or quite acquiesce to any of them," Bush fanned the deck and flashed yet another card at his bewildered audience. 

A "GOP strategist" complained to the Los Angeles Times, "He's all over the map now, sending a lot of confused messages to the voters." Of course. 

Many now openly wonder how so obvious a lie as WMD could have passed muster with such a large majority of Americans. 

One answer is provided by Hitler in Mein Kampf: "In the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people....will more easily fall victim to a great lie than to a small one." Thus was born the concept of the "Big Lie," yet another Hitler crowd manipulation tool co-opted by Bush. 

Even the most skeptical may succumb to hypnotic contagion but later find the resources to cast off the devil spell, says William McDougall. Among the most fervent Bush supporters have been people now coming forward to say that they are "uncomfortable" with reports that the reasons given for going to war may have been nothing more than a pack of Bush lies. Call them recovering Bush dupes. 

War is Peace 

Perhaps the biggest challenge he has given the public is asking them to think of his war making as, actually, peace making. Think of the Pentagon as the "Ministry of Peace," charged with making perpetual war in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

Bush has been almost studious in application of the hypnotic word "peace" to sugarcoat his designs for war. 

"Peace" has become his slogan. 

"Slogans are both exciting and comforting, but they are also powerful opiates for the conscience....Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases," said Harvard University president James Bryant Conant in the Baccalaureate Address to Harvard College, June 17, 1934. 

"How many people in the confusion of a defeat or crisis have been reassured by one word? Peace. Independence. Reconstruction. Without taking a closer look, they adopt the leader in whose name this ideal has been proposed. It is the ideal that unites them and leads them into the venture. If necessary, technicians will be responsible for conducting it from the inside so long as the figurehead maintains his prestige." Jean Dauven, The Powers of Hypnosis. 

Nixon national security advisor Henry Kissinger intoned "Peace is at hand" as voters prepared to go to the polls in November, 1972 to choose between George McGovern and Richard Nixon as the candidate most likely to end the Vietnam War. In one of the most cynical betrayals of public trust on record, Kissinger the technician lied to a desperate nation about the prospects of peace in order to get the figurehead reelected. 

After Nixon was safely reinstalled in the White House, saturation bombing to coerce North Vietnam to U. S. peace terms started again, with the unspeakable Christmas bombing of Hanoi as the main attraction. 

Author, foreign correspondent and broadcaster William L. Shirer, who witnessed Hitler's rise to power, commented in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on Hitler's masterful use of the peace card. 

"On the evening of May 21 (1935), he delivered another ‘peace' speech....one of the cleverest and most misleading of his Reichstag orations.....He rejected the very idea of war, it was senseless, it was useless, as well as a horror." 

But while the world was lulled by his peace offensive, the master of the Thousand Year Reich plotted the war he said he abhorred. 

George W. Bush misses no chance to reaffirm his dedication to peace and to denounce those who he says threaten peace. 

He mounted the pulpit of the United Nations, September 17, 2002 to bully the international body with his peace message: "The United Nations must act. It's time to determine whether or not they'll be a force for good and peace or an ineffective debating society." 

He stood before Congress and the press, sent an emissary to the Orwellian sounding United States Institute of Peace, went on the radio, appeared at factories and military bases, hawking his peace message while putting U. S. forces in place to invade Iraq. 

Sometimes, to justify keeping the country in a state of war, he combines "peace" with "freedom" and "security" as in his commencement address to the students of Concordia University, May 14 this year when he said, "America works for peace and freedom....For the sake of peace, for the sake of security, we stand for freedom." Administration spokespersons, notably Condoleezza Rice, repeat these buzz words in their own speeches. 

Bush Radio Hypnosis 

With his regular Saturday radio addresses, Bush works heroically on turning Americans into automatons of subservience to his goals. John Kerry, refusing to concede the airwaves to Bush, is using the medium to respond to Bush attack ads and launch attacks of his own, giving every indication that he will continue the tradition of Saturday presidential radio if elected. 

Radio is the most hypnotic of the media as, in the words of Jean Dauven, "It is through the spoken word that the hypnotist exercises his power." The audio nature of broadcast fosters an illusion of privacy that allows the hypnotist to flatter the listener that he/she is being addressed exclusively, enhancing the listener's suggestibility. 

Hate-Talk Radio Hypnosis 

Estabrooks witnessed the birth of political radio hypnosis and the advent of the craft's earliest stars, FDR, Churchill, and Hitler. He predated Rush Limbaugh's lobotomized rabble by decades, but was in on the beginnings of hate-talk radio when Father Charles Coughlin and the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith poisoned the airwaves in the 1930s. 

Estabrooks would have been fascinated with the emergence of Ronald Reagan, radio hypnotism's modern master. With his banal gipperisms, deeply imbedded fear of communism and Soviet nuclear threat obsessive-compulsive anxiety disorder, all delivered in the polished tones of a professional broadcaster, Reagan robbed a generation of Americans of their capacity to think critically, a condition perpetuated by his disciples as witnessed in the transcontinental state funeral of early June, 2004, a seven-day binge of national hypnosis. Brain dead from Alzheimer's for 10 years, Reagan was resurrected from the public media files to extend his hypnotic hold on Americans, all part of the Republican power keeping machinery which includes putting Reagan's picture on money and carving his likeness either on Mt. Rushmore, or "our own mountain," as one of his adherents puts it. 

Men of Action Don't Apologize 

The president, by the very nature of his position at the pinnacle of power, is hypnotic. Probably no president, with the possible exceptions of Nixon and Reagan, has marshaled so powerful an arsenal of hypnosis, or exercised it so energetically and effectively as George W. Bush. 

Successful hypnosis of the electorate satisfies a demagogue's dream - uncritical acceptance of the man and his policies by a majority. Bush has been good enough at it to acquire an aura of invincibility that predictably has led to an excess of hubris in his conduct. 

As Reagan and the elder Bush did not apologize for Iran-Contra, do not expect George W. Bush to ever forswear his actions in Iraq. It is not in his nature to admit mistakes or reflect on his misdeeds, nor apparently is it in the nature of his closest aides and subordinates to do so either. Gustave Le Bon described the type in The Crowd. 

"The leaders we speak of are more frequently men of action than thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight, nor could they be, as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity. They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness...their convictions are so strong that all reasoning is lost on them. Contempt and persecution do not affect them, or only serve to excite them more." 

George Estabrooks spoke of such men possessing ".....an uncanny drive, a restless energy, as they push forward toward their own self-centered ideal, and they will be utterly ruthless in attaining their ends. The rights of others, even the lives of others, are simply of no consequence if they stand between the dictator and his determined goal.... 

The dictator really believes that he is God's chosen instrument - or society's chosen instrument if he does not believe in God - to lead his group, or possibly the entire world, into the promised land."