Caught at the trough: a sign of things to come

Feds arrest former DHB chief

BY ROBERT E. KESSLER | robert.kessler@newsday.com

The former head of the Long Island company that provided most of the body armor for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan was arrested at dawn Thursday in his Manhattan apartment by FBI and IRS agents on charges of fraudulently looting the company and investors to pay for a lavish lifestyle.

That lifestyle included supporting a stable of trotting horses; a face-lift for his wife; a diamond, ruby and sapphire-encrusted belt buckle in the shape of an U.S. flag; and an $8 million bat mitzvah for his daughter, which featured music stars including 50 Cent and Kenny G, according to Benton Campbell, the U.S. attorney for the eastern district.

David Brooks, 53, the founder and former head of DHB Industries, which had been located in Westbury, was the highest-paid head of a public company on Long Island in 2004, making $2.7 million in salary and bonuses, plus tens of millions of dollars in stock options.

Related links

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How David Brooks lives in Old Westbury
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List of riches: some of what feds say Brooks took
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All about Brooks and that $8M bat mitzvah
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Point Blank Solutions is trying to recover
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Document: United States vs. David H. Brooks indictment

Federal prosecutors charged Brooks in a 71-page indictment with securities fraud, insider trading, obstruction of justice and tax evasion for allegedly obtaining almost all of his income by two illegal methods. One was by having the company secretly underwrite $6 million of his personal expenses; the other was by artificially inflating the value of DHB company stock, which he then sold in a type of pump-and-dump scheme, prosecutors say.

In the latter, Brooks allegedly made $186 million in 2004 by selling shares in the company shortly after he said he had no intention of selling the stock and shortly before the stock plunged because of reports about the quality of its body armor, the indictment said.

Brooks, who has a mansion in Old Westbury and a home in Florida as well as a Manhtattan apartment, also used tens of millions of dollars he acquired illegally to set up a number of supposed charitable trusts, according to remarks in court by Assistant U.S. Attorney John Martin, a prosecutor in Campbell's office.

Brooks took tax exemptions for the trusts' operations, but instead of contributing their money to needy causes, he used the funds to pay for many of the entertainers at his daughter Elizabeth's bat mitzvah, Martin said at the court hearing. Those entertainers also included Tom Petty, Aerosmith and the Eagles, Martin said. The November 2005 bat mitzvah had been widely reported as costing as much as $10 million.

In addition to the bat mitzvah, horses and face-lift for his wife, Terry, the indictment also alleges that Brooks illegally got the company to pay for luxury cars, vacations, jewelry, cosmetic surgery and country club bills for himself and his family. DHB moved its headquarters to Pompano Beach, Fla., in July 2006, after Brooks was forced out, and the company changed its name earlier this month to Point Blank Solutions. Although the company has set aside $60 million to settle a lawsuit alleging it manufactured defective vests, the vests in question were not among those supplied to U.S. troops.

Brooks pleaded not guilty at arraignment in U.S. District Court in Central Islip, and was held without bail by U.S. District Court Judge Joanna Seybert, pending a hearing Monday.

Seybert acted after prosecutor Martin said that in the past year Brooks had purchased a single diamond worth $10 million, unspecified millions in gold and had surreptitiously moved $22 million to banks in Switzerland and Senegal. The United States does not have an extradition treaty with Senegal, Martin said.

"David Brooks grew up in Brooklyn and that means he doesn't run away from a fight. It's a lot easier \[for the government\] to make allegations than to prove them," Paul Shechtman of Manhattan, Brooks' attorney, said after the hearing.

Shechtman, one of New York's leading defense lawyers, who was the Director of Criminal Justice for the State of New York under Governor George E. Pataki, said some sort of bail arrangement could be arranged permitting his client to be monitored by guards in home detention. Such an arrangement had been worked out recently in the case of a Muttontown couple accused of enslaving two Indonesian housekeepers, said Shechtman.

A spokesman for Point Blank, Glenn Wiener said yesterday, "As Mr. Brooks is no longer employed by the Company, we cannot provide additional commentary."

Also charged in the indictment with Brooks was Sandra Hatfield, 54, of Pompano Beach, the former chief executive officer of DHB.

Hatfield was accused of making $5 million by selling her company stock before it dropped. In 2004 she was the highest paid woman executive on Long Island, earning almost $1 million in salary and bonuses.

Brooks and Hatfield allegedly used a number of schemes to artificially inflate the stock of DHB.

To make the company look more profitable, for example, in one scheme, the two allegedly exaggerated the amount earned by the sales of armored vests to the U.S. military by $6 million in 2003 and $13 million 2004, according to Martin.

Hatfield's attorney Roland Riopelle, of Manhattan, said his client was not guilty and "we believe she will be speedily acquitted at a trial." She is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday.

Brooks and Hatfield theoretically face up to 140 years in prison if convicted on all charges, but would probably be sentenced to considerably less. They also face forfeiture of a total of $191 million, and additional multimillions of dollars in fines.

Original article posted here.

Putting the final nails in the fascist police state

"Thought Crime Bill" Could Ensnare Peaceful Activists Fears that government could define "Internet radicalization" and criticism as terrorism mount, violent comments left on messageboards by trolls could be exploited to entrap peaceful 9/11 truthers

Paul Joseph Watson

A new bill that recently passed the House and is headed for Senate approval has online activists worried that the vague definitions used for defining the Internet's contribution to radicalization of potential terrorists could lead to a government crackdown on talk radio, free speech and the 9/11 truth movement.

The bill is H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 and passed Congress after a bipartisan vote on October 23rd.

Ostensibly, the bill targets United States citizens because of its constant reference to basic Constitutional protections, but this has led some to fear that it is intended to shut down free speech on the Internet and stifle patriot and alternative talk radio networks.

The bill defines "violent radicalization" as "The process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change."

It further defines "homegrown terrorism" as "The use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."

The term "planned use" has caused concerns that "thinking about violence," ie thought crime, could be considered a terrorist act. But since to plan violence must involve some form of planning, whether that be drawing up bomb diagrams or making violent statements, the real threat seems to have been overlooked.

A disturbing trend in recent months has been the proliferation of violent postings on messageboards of websites affiliated with peaceful 9/11 truth organizations.

These messages are being posted by shameless trolls, COINTELPRO operatives and their stooges in a clear effort to discredit the 9/11 truth movement by making us all appear to be crazy nutcases who plan to commit terrorist acts.

Establishment media hacks like Glenn Beck have then seized upon the idea to spew propaganda about how the next Timothy McVeigh will come from the truth movement, despite the fact that the leadership of the truth movement have practiced what they preach all along, by engaging in completely peaceful protests and other forms of non-violent educational activism.

The bill's reference to how "The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens," is shocking.

Remember, the bill is not aimed at "Al-Qaeda" websites or arabic forums that post alleged Bin Laden video tapes, it is aimed at American citizens using American based websites, like the very one you're reading now.The opportunity for the state to seize upon violent posts left by trolls and use them to entrap peaceful 9/11 truthers under the guise that they "promoted violence" should be a major concern for us all.

Our message is simply this - don't even try it.

We have preached a doctrine of absolute non-violence from the very beginning and we will continue to do so. Anyone who calls for violence in a messageboard post is either a Fed, a Mom's basement dwelling troll who spends their entire day attempting to debunk the 9/11 truth movement, or a completely deluded moron who is unrepresentative of the vast majority of the 9/11 truth movement.

Those individuals who advocate violence should be sought out and investigated individually. Any plans to try and entrap prominent 9/11 truth movement figures using guilt by association should be abandoned immediately and we will ceaselessly emphasize this point until this current wave of propaganda subsides.

Original article posted here.

Stepping up war rhetoric, stepping up response

Attack Iran and you attack Russia

By Pepe Escobar

The barely reported highlight of Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran for the Caspian Sea summit last week was a key face-to-face meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

A high-level diplomatic source in Tehran tells Asia Times Online that essentially Putin and the Supreme Leader have agreed on a plan to nullify the George W Bush administration's relentless drive towards launching a preemptive attack, perhaps a tactical nuclear strike, against Iran. An American attack on Iran will be viewed by Moscow as an attack on Russia.

But then, as if this were not enough of a political bombshell, came the abrupt resignation of Ali Larijani as top Iranian nuclear negotiator. Early this week in Rome, Larijani told the IRNA news agency that "Iran's nuclear policies are stable and will not change with the replacement of the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council [SNSC]." Larijani will keep attending SNSC meetings, now as a representative of the Supreme Leader. He even took time to remind the West that in the Islamic Republic all key decisions regarding the civilian nuclear program are made by the Supreme Leader. Larijani actually went to Rome to meet with the European Union's Javier Solana alongside Iran's new negotiator, Saeed Jalili, a former member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), just like President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

In itself, the Putin-Khamenei meeting was extraordinary, because the Supreme Leader rarely receives foreign statesmen for closed talks, even one as crucial as Putin. The Russian president, according to the diplomatic source, told the Supreme Leader he may hold the ultimate solution regarding the endlessly controversial Iranian nuclear dossier. According to IRNA, the Supreme Leader, after stressing that the Iranian civilian nuclear program will continue unabated, said. "We will ponder your words and proposal."

Larijani himself had told the Iranian media that Putin had a "special plan" and the Supreme Leader observed that the plan was "ponderable". The problem is that Ahmadinejad publicly denied the Russians had volunteered a new plan.

Iranian hawks close to Ahmadinejad are spinning that Putin's proposal involves Iran temporarily suspending uranium enrichment in exchange for no more United Nations sanctions. That's essentially what International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohammad ElBaradei has been working on all along. The key issue is what - in practical terms - will Iran get in return. Obviously it's not the EU's Solana who will have the answer. But as far as Russia is concerned, strategically nothing will appease it except a political/diplomatic solution for the Iranian nuclear dossier.

US Vice President Dick Cheney - who even Senator Hillary Clinton now refers to as Darth Vader - must be foaming at the mouth; but the fact is that after the Caspian summit, Iran and Russia are officially entangled in a strategic partnership. World War III, for them, is definitely not on the cards.

Let's read from the same script
The apparent internal controversy on how exactly Putin and the Supreme Leader are on the same wavelength belies a serious rift in the higher spheres of the Islamic Republic. The replacement of Larijani, a realist hawk, by Jalili, an unknown quantity with an even more hawkish background, might spell an Ahmadinejad victory. It's not that simple.

The powerful Ali Akbar Velayati, the diplomatic adviser to the Supreme Leader, said he didn't like the replacement one bit. Even worse: regarding the appalling record of the Ahmadinejad presidency when it comes to the economy, all-out criticism is now the norm. Another former nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, told the Etemad-e Melli newspaper, "The effects of the [UN] sanctions are visible. Our situation gets worse day by day."

Ahmadinejad for the past two months has been placing his former IRGC brothers-in-arms in key posts, like the presidency of the central bank and the Oil, Industry and Interior ministries. Internal repression is rife. On Sunday, hundreds of students protested at the Amir-Kabir University in Tehran, calling for "Death to the dictator".

The wily, ultimate pragmatist Hashemi Rafsanjani, now leader of the Council of Experts and in practice a much more powerful figure than Ahmadinejad, took no time to publicly reflect that "we can't bend people's thoughts with dictatorial regimes".

This week, the Supreme Leader himself intervened, saying, "I approve of this government, but this does not mean that I approve of everything they do." Under the currently explosive circumstances, this also amounts to a political bombshell.

As if anyone needed to be reminded, the buck - or rial - stops with the Supreme Leader, whose last wish on earth is to furnish a pretext for the Bush administration to launch World War III. If Ahmadinejad now deviates from a carefully crafted strategic script, the Supreme Leader may simply get rid of him.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com

Original article posted here

Time in Iraq winding down as Iraqis (even cronies) tired of genocide

Endgame for Iraqi Oil?

The Sovereignty Showdown in Iraq

By Jack Miles

The oil game in Iraq may be almost up. On September 29th, like a landlord serving notice, the government of Iraq announced that the next annual renewal of the United Nations Security Council mandate for a multinational force in Iraq -- the only legal basis for a continuation of the American occupation -- will be the last. That was, it seems, the first shoe to fall. The second may be an announcement terminating the little-noticed, but crucial companion Security Council mandate governing the disposition of Iraq's oil revenues.

By December 31, 2008, according to Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, the government of Iraq intends to have replaced the existing mandate for a multinational security force with a conventional bilateral security agreement with the United States, an agreement of the sort that Washington has with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and several other countries in the Middle East. The Security Council has always paired the annual renewal of its mandate for the multinational force with the renewal of a second mandate for the management of Iraqi oil revenues. This happens through the "Development Fund for Iraq," a kind of escrow account set up by the occupying powers after the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime and recognized in 2003 by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483. The oil game will be up if and when Iraq announces that this mandate, too, will be terminated at a date certain in favor of resource-development agreements that -- like the envisioned security agreement -- match those of other states in the region.

The game will be up because, as Antonia Juhasz pointed out last March in a New York Times op-ed, "Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?":

"Iraq's neighbors Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia…. have outlawed foreign control over oil development. They all hire international oil companies as contractors to provide specific services as needed, for a limited duration, and without giving the foreign company any direct interest in the oil produced."

By contrast, the oil legislation now pending in the Iraqi parliament awards foreign oil companies coveted, long-term, 20-35 year contracts of just the sort that neighboring oil-producers have rejected for decades. It also places the Iraqi oil industry under the control of an appointed body that would include representatives of international oil companies as full voting members.

The news that the duly elected government of Iraq is exercising its limited sovereignty to set a date for termination of the American occupation radically undercuts all discussion in Congress or by American presidential candidates of how soon the U.S. occupation of Iraq may "safely" end. Yet if, by the same route, Iraq were to resume full and independent control over the world's third-largest proven oil reserves -- 200 to 300 million barrels of light crude worth as much as $30 trillion at today's prices -- a politically incorrect question might break rudely out of the Internet universe and into the mainstream media world, into, that is, the open: Has the Iraq war been an oil war from the outset?

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan evidently thought so or so he indicated in a single sentence in his recent memoir: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." When asked, Gen. John Abizaid, former CENTCOM commander who oversaw three and a half years of the American occupation of Iraq, agreed. "Of course it's about oil, we can't really deny that," he said during a roundtable discussion at Stanford University. These confessions validated the suspicions of foreign observers too numerous to count. Veteran security analyst Thomas Powers observed in the New York Review of Books recently:

What it was only feared the Russians might do [by invading Afghanistan in the 1980s] the Americans have actually done -- they have planted themselves squarely astride the world's largest pool of oil, in a position potentially to control its movement and to coerce all the governments who depend on that oil. Americans naturally do not suspect their own motives but others do. The reaction of the Russians, the Germans, and the French in the months leading up to the war suggests that none of them wished to give Americans the power which [former National Security Adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski had feared was the goal of the Soviets.

Apologists for the war point out lamely that the United States imports only a small fraction of its oil from Iraq, but what matters, rather obviously, is not Iraq's current exports but its reserves.

Before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, media mogul Rupert Murdoch said, "The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil." In the twenty-first century's version of the "Great Game" of nineteenth century imperialism, the Bush administration made a colossal gamble that Iraq could become a kind of West Germany or South Korea on the Persian Gulf -- a federal republic with a robust, oil-exporting economy, a rising standard of living, and a set of U.S. bases that would guarantee lasting American domination of the most resource-strategic region on the planet. The political half of that gamble has already been lost, but the Bush administration has proven adamantly unwilling to accept the loss of the economic half, the oil half, without a desperate fight. Perhaps the five super-bases that the U.S. has been constructing in Iraq for as many as 20,000 troops each, plus the ill-built super-embassy (the largest on the planet) it has been constructing inside the Green Zone, will suffice to maintain American control over the oil reserves, even in defiance of international law and the officially stated wishes of the Iraqi people -- but perhaps not.

Blackwater and the Sovereignty Showdown

In any case, a kind of slow-motion showdown may lie not so far ahead; and, during the past weeks, we may have been given a clue as to how it could unfold. Recall that after the gunning down of at least 17 Iraqis in a Baghdad square, Prime Minister al-Maliki demanded that the State Department dismiss and punish the trigger-happy private security firm, Blackwater USA, which was responsible for the safety of American diplomatic personnel in Iraq. He further demanded that the immunity former occupation head L. Paul Bremer III had granted, in 2004, to all such private security firms be revoked. Startled, the Bush administration briefly grounded its diplomatic operations, then defiantly resumed them -- with security still provided by Blackwater. Within days, though, Bush found himself face-to-face in New York with al-Maliki for discussions whose topic National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley revealingly named as "Iraqi sovereignty." Who would blink first?

We're still waiting to see, but in the wake of an Iraqi investigation ended with a demand for $8 million compensation for each of the 17 murdered Baghdadis, Blackwater is reportedly "on its way out" of security responsibility in Iraq, probably by the six-month deadline that al-Maliki has demanded. Despite its disgrace, the well-connected private security company continues to win lucrative State Department security contracts. Blackwater expert Jeremy Scahill told Bill Moyers that losing the Iraq gig would only slightly affect Blackwater's bottom line, but could grievously inconvenience U.S. diplomatic operations in Iraq. In forcing such a crisis on the State Department, the al-Maliki government, whose powerlessness has been an assumption unchallenged from left or right (in or out of Iraq), suddenly looks a good deal stronger.

But oil matters more to Washington than Blackwater does. In September, when the effort to enact U.S.-favored oil legislation -- a much-announced "benchmark" of both the White House and Congress -- collapsed in Iraq's legislature, the coup de grace seemed to be delivered by a wildcat agreement between the Kurdistan Regional Government and Hunt Oil of Dallas, Texas, headed by Ray L. Hunt, a longtime Bush ally and a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. This agreement, undertaken against the stated wishes of the central government, provides for the separate development of Kurdistan's oil resources and puts the Kurds in blatant, preemptive violation of the pending legislation. It makes, in fact, such a mockery of that legislation that the prospect of its passage before the Development Fund mandate expires is now vanishingly small.

Endgame for Iraqi Oil?

If the mandate expires and the law is not passed, then what? Then others in Iraq may well seek to follow the Kurdish example and cut comparable deals with whomever they wish. The central government, even if it has lost effective control of the Kurdish north and the Sunni west, could well ratify resource-separatism by contracting for the development of the oil resources in the territory generally remaining under its control. Thus, a new, Iran-allied, oil-rich, nine-province Shiite Iraq could match Kurdistan's deal with one of its own, perhaps even with ready-and-willing China. Will any combination of American military and diplomatic pressure suffice to stop such an untoward outcome?

Clearly, some in Washington still think so. Shortly before the collapse of the Iraqi oil legislation effort, Bush's Commerce Department began quietly advertising for an Arabic-speaking legal advisor to help it in "providing technical assistance to Iraq to create a legal and tax environment conducive to domestic and foreign investment in Iraq's key economic sectors, starting with the mineral resources sector." (Read: starting with oil.) As it happens, the job description overlaps heavily with that of the Development Fund for Iraq's existing International Advisory and Monitoring Board, whose responsibility, according to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483, has been to see to it "that all export sales of petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas from Iraq…. shall be made consistent with prevailing international marketing best practices." Is the Commerce Department already planning for the demise of this board? Like the super-embassy and the super-bases, this bit of Commerce Department staffing-up bespeaks the urge to continue an invasive American presence in Iraq, including Iraq's energy sector, long after December 31, 2008.

But if the occupation is shut down legally after that date and if Iraqi control over Iraqi oil reverts -- legally, at least -- to something close to pre-war status, that Commerce Department expert may find him or herself playing a less-than-major role in Baghdad. Instead, expect a new role for Iraq's hitherto excluded pool of domestic expertise. The Iraq National Oil Company began operations back in 1961; its legacy includes a skilled work force of trained oil workers. Notable, in fact, among those opposed to the failed oil legislation is the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions. Its members object to provisions in the legislation that permit the hiring of foreign oil workers rather than Iraqis and -- in classic Bush Administration fashion -- exclude the union from any participation in contract negotiations. The Federation's protests have attracted a letter of support signed by six Nobel Peace Prize laureates.

Even with Iraqi expertise duly factored in, oil remains a complicated business, and foreign expertise and capital will remain indispensable in Iraq. Still, for the Shiite-dominated central government, the most trusted foreign supplier of supplementary expertise, manpower, and even capital would seem to be Iran. For now, the United States is paying many of the salaries in Baghdad; but Iran's president, predicting an American withdrawal, has lately declared his readiness to "fill the [regional power] gap, with the help of neighbors and regional friends like Saudi Arabia, and with the help of the Iraqi nation." This invitation to regional collaboration will surely strike the less populous, militarily more vulnerable Saudis as disingenuous in the extreme, but Iran may be hard to stop. As former ambassador Peter Galbraith has explained: "Since 2005, Iraq's Shiite-led government has concluded numerous economic, political, and military agreements with Iran. The most important would link the two countries' strategic oil reserves by building a pipeline from southern Iraq to Iran, while another commits Iran to providing extensive military assistance to the Iraq government." On Oct. 17, the al-Maliki regime flexed its supposedly non-existent muscle yet again by awarding $1.1 billion in contracts to Iran and China to build enormous power plants in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City and between the two Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

The prospect that, in the endgame for Iraqi oil, the victor might be Shiite Iran (and indirectly Communist China) may help explain recent American calls for the replacement of the devoutly Shiite Prime Minister al-Maliki. Yet, even if American pressure leads to al-Maliki's ouster, the Iraqi parliament cannot be ousted with him. The prime minister's announcement that the next renewal of the multi-force mandate would be the last came, in fact, in response to a binding resolution in parliament that the next renewal, unlike previous ones, may not be at the request of the prime minister alone, but only with the advice and consent of parliament. It has voted once already, in a non-binding resolution, to require the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal.

Fragile as it is, the government of Iraq enjoys international legal recognition, and the underestimated al-Maliki is evidently not without resources when it comes to asserting Iraqi sovereignty over American autonomy within Iraq's borders. In "Blackwatergate," he found a remarkable pressure point, declaring that no new law would be passed in Iraq until the Blackwater matter was resolved to his satisfaction. Nor was al-Maliki necessarily whistling in the dark when he warned his American critics, "We can find friends elsewhere."

The expiration date that Iraq has now set for the operation of a multinational force on its territory coincides almost exactly with the end of the Bush administration. As that date nears, the endgame question may become: How far can the administration go in repudiating its own erstwhile agenda and returning Iraq to its pre-war status -- that is, to U.S.-backed Sunni domination of Iraqi domestic politics. That would, of course, result in armed Iraqi hostility to the administration's enemy of enemies in the region, Iran, and a resigned return to collaboration with the Saudi-dominated Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the management of the world oil market, all under a largely offshore U.S. military umbrella. Will the fallback dream now be the one the President's father entertained after Gulf War I -- the creation in Baghdad of a kinder, gentler Saddam Hussein with whom, to use the classic phrase, the U.S. can "do business"?

Time will tell, but not too much time. The eerie silence of the Bush administration about oil grows all the more deafening as the price of crude climbs toward $100 a barrel. Blood for oil may never have been a good deal, but so much blood for no oil at all may seem a far worse one.

Jack Miles is senior fellow for religious affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and professor of English and religious studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning God: A Biography, among other works.

Original article posted here.

Still dancing around the edges of 911

Constitutional scholar: 9/11 'highly convenient' in allowing Bush to expand power

David Edwards and Nick Juliano

A constitutional scholar says President Bush and his administration were working to expand their spy powers months before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which provided a "highly convenient" opportunity to dramatically strengthen law enforcement and surveillance authority.

"This administration was seeking a massive expansion of presidential power and national security powers before 9/11. 9/11 was highly convenient in that case," George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told Keith Olbermann on Countdown Monday night. "I'm not saying that they welcomed it, but when it happened, it was a great opportunity to seize powers that they have long wanted at the FBI."

Turley was responding to allegations aired last week by a former Qwest CEO that the National Security Agency approached telecoms as early as February 2001 about establishing secret mechanisms to spy on Americans. The former CEO, Joe Nacchio, said in court papers related to an insider trading conviction that the government withdrew lucrative contracts from his company after he raised legal objections to the proposed spy program.

Earlier in the program, Olbermann invoked recent reports that the Pentagon used the FBI to issue secret national security letters allowing access to reams of data on Americans with even slim connections to the military.

"Does that essentially mean that I or you dial a wrong number and it happens to belong to somebody that's under investigation, the pentagon can go and get your information or my information as well?" Olbermann asked.

"They can. And you can thank the U.S. congress for that," Turley said, noting that the Patriot Act made it very easy for the FBI to issue the letters. "And what is astonishing is that the abuses of the NSLs are well documented. As soon as the FBI got this power that they were promising to use in the most judicious and cautious way, they abused it with abandon."

Toward the end of the segment, Turley noted the disconnect between the drive for expanded power, and the FBI and National Security Agency's inability to properly analyze intelligence before Sept. 11.

"The great irony, of course, with the NSA and the FBI is that their blunders help contribute to 9/11," he said, "but they radically expanded those powers as a result of that tragedy."

"Nothing succeeds like failure," Olbermann quipped.

The following video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast on October 15, 2007.

A partial transcript appears below: Olbermann: These details about the pentagon spying program and national security letters, if as I was quoting from its manual, these NSLs can be used to gather information on anybody, even somebody vaguely connected with a suspect. Does that essentially mean that I or you dial a wrong number and it happens to belong to somebody that's under investigation, the pentagon can go and get your information or my information as well? Turley: They can. And you can thank the U.S. congress for that. In the Patriot Act and four other pieces of legislation that were enacted, the NSLs can be used with extraordinary ease. And what is astonishing is that the abuses of the NSLs are well documented. As soon as the FBI got this power that they were promising to use in the most judicious and cautious way, they abused it with abandon. Congress has done very, very little. But what congress did do is they created this relevancy test. And most anything can be relevant. And your example is by no means far-fetched. Yes, If you show up on the phone records by accident of somebody that they suspect, you can have your records searched and you will not know it because the companies are told that they can't tell you. [..] Olbermann: These allegations from the former CEO of Qwest -- and he's not necessarily a neutral witness. We have to take this with a grain of salt because he's trying to get an insider trading conviction overthrown. But what do you make of his allegation? Is this the first time we've heard anything like that that the NSA was trying to get phone records of citizens of this country, no warrant involved, seven months before 9/11? Turley: You're right, we do have to consider the context. But what he is saying actually is confirmed by other sources. You know, this administration was seeking a massive expansion of Presidential power and national security powers before 9/11. 9/11 was highly convenient in that sense. I'm not saying that they welcomed it, but when it happened, it was a great opportunity to seize powers that they have long wanted at the FBI. The great irony, of course, with the NSA and the FBI is that their blunders help contribute to 9/11, but they radically expanded those powers as a result of that tragedy. Olbermann: Nothing succeeds like failure.

Original article posted here.

The price of fascism

Terror watch list swells to more than 755,000

SCREENING FOR TERRORISM The number of terror watch-list records [1] more than quadrupled over roughly a three-year period: June 2004 158,374 May 2005 287,982 June 2006 515,906 May 2007 754,960 [1]: One record reflects one name but not necessarily one person. Source: Julie Snider, USA TODAY; Government Accountability Office

By Mimi Hall, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The government's terrorist watch list has swelled to more than 755,000 names, according to a new government report that has raised worries about the list's effectiveness.

The size of the list, typically used to check people entering the country through land border crossings, airports and sea ports, has been growing by 200,000 names a year since 2004. Some lawmakers, security experts and civil rights advocates warn that it will become useless if it includes too many people.

"It undermines the authority of the list," says Lisa Graves of the Center for National Security Studies. "There's just no rational, reasonable estimate that there's anywhere close to that many suspected terrorists."

The exact number of people on the list, compiled after 9/11 to help government agents keep terrorists out of the country, is unclear, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Some people may be on the list more than once because they are listed under multiple spellings.

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who plans a hearing on the report today, says "serious hurdles remain if (the list) is to be as effective as we need it to be. Some of the concerns stem from its rapid growth, which could call into question the quality of the list itself."

About 53,000 people on the list were questioned since 2004, according to the GAO, which says the Homeland Security Department doesn't keep records on how many were denied entry or allowed into the country after questioning. Most were apparently released and allowed to enter, the GAO says.

Leonard Boyle, director of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, which maintains the list, says in testimony to be given today that 269 foreigners were denied entry in fiscal 2006.

The GAO report also says:

•The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) could not specify how many people on its no-fly list, which is a small subset of the watch list, might have slipped through screening and been allowed on domestic flights.

•TSA data show "a number of individuals" on the no-fly list passed undetected through screening and boarded international flights bound for the United States. Several planes have been diverted once officials realized that people named on the watch lists were on board.

•Homeland Security has not done enough to use the list more broadly in the private sector, where workers applying for jobs in sensitive places such as chemical factories could do harm.

Boyle also urges that the list be used by for screening at businesses where workers could "carry out attacks on our critical infrastructure that could harm large numbers of persons or cause immense economic damage."

But the sheer size of the watch list raised the most alarms.

"They are quickly galloping towards the million mark — a mark of real distinction because the list is already cumbersome and is approaching absolutely useless," said Tim Sparapani of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, says "creating and maintaining a comprehensive terrorist watch list is an enormous endeavor fraught with technical and tactical challenges."

The report, she says, "underscores the need to make the watch lists more accurate, to improve screening procedures at airports and the ports of entry, and to provide individuals with the ability to seek redress if they believe they have been wrongfully targeted."

Original article posted here.

What our Moron should be saying

Simply put, everything he touches, he breaks

Bush Risks Falling Off Turkish-Kurd Tightrope

by Jim Lobe

Spurred by the deployment of at least 100,000 troops along Turkey's border with Iraq, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush is pressing its closest clients in Iraqi Kurdistan to crack down hard against the Kurdish Turkish Workers' Party (PKK), which Washington considers a terrorist organization.

Given the administration's refusal so far to back up that pressure with the military muscle, however, it remains unclear whether its efforts will translate into action by local Kurdish authorities, or prevent a cross-border offensive that could throw into chaos the one Iraqi region that has enjoyed stability since the 2003 U.S. invasion.

Indications so far are that U.S. pressure is having only a limited impact. The PKK's offer to observe a conditional cease-fire was dismissed both by Ankara and officials in Washington, who noted that such declarations had proved meaningless in the past.

And a declaration by the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that it will close down all PKK offices throughout Iraq was also considered toothless, since Iraqi troops at least nominally under Maliki's control are not permitted to operate in Kurdistan where the peshmerga, the Kurdish militia forces, are charged with maintaining security.

"I understand there's this commitment to shut down offices," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. "Okay, but what you need to see are actual outputs from inputs that the Iraqi government might make."

"The outputs are that you need to stop terrorist attacks; there needs to be prevention of terrorist attacks, and you need to get to the root cause here, and that is to stop this terrorist organization from operating on Iraqi soil," he added.

Most analysts in Washington believe that neither Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan nor his military commanders are eager to send their forces into Iraq to deal with the estimated 3,000 PKK guerrillas who are thought to be based there and that diplomacy, which has intensified dramatically over the last several days, has at least several more days to play itself out.

Indeed, senior Turkish officials themselves have stressed that they prefer diplomatic, and, if that doesn't work, economic pressure to persuade Iraqi and regional authorities to move against the PKK. Kurdistan is landlocked, and its economy is heavily dependent on open borders with Turkey, as well as Iran and Syria, both of which, with large and restive Kurdish populations of their own, have expressed solidarity with Ankara in recent days.

But any major new attack by Iraq-based PKK guerrillas, who killed 12 Turkish soldiers and claimed to have taken prisoner eight more over the weekend, will likely force Erdogan to order his military to cross the border – initially with air strikes and commandos, according to analysts here – as authorized by the Turkish parliament late last week.

"If there is another event, Erdogan and the military, despite their reluctance to be drawn reflexively across that border, will probably have to do something, and the options aren't particularly good," according to a former U.S. ambassador to Ankara, Mark Parris.

"I have no doubt that [U.S. ambassador to Iraq] Ryan Crocker, [U.S. Iraq commander Gen. David] Petraeus, and people here are pounding on the Iraqi leadership to get this under control," Parris added in a teleconference on the crisis sponsored by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

At the same time, however, the administration finds its influence over the key parties at a particularly low ebb.

Anti-U.S. sentiment in an increasingly democratic Turkey is at an all-time high, not least because of Washington's refusal to date to seriously address Ankara's concerns about the PKK, a refusal that has fed the perception that the U.S. has a secret agenda to break up Iraq and create an independent Kurdistan that will naturally act as an inspiration for Kurds in Turkey to seek independence.

"We have just not answered the mail on this," according to Ian Lesser, an expert at the German Marshall Fund and author of a new book on U.S.-Turkey relations, significantly entitled Beyond Suspicion.

"We're seeing the result of letting this issue lie for so long," according to Stephen Cook, a Turkey expert at CFR, who noted that the special U.S. envoy appointed by Bush last year to deal with Turkey's concerns resigned recently, reportedly out of frustration at the administration's neglect. "The Turks have very little trust in our ability to do anything on this issue."

At the same time, Ankara enjoys considerable leverage over the U.S. both as a key NATO partner that contributes 1,000 troops to the alliance's forces in Afghanistan and as the host of Incirlik air base, a major logistical hub for U.S. forces in Iraq.

Hints by Turkish officials that Ankara would restrict access to the base after a key congressional committee approved a non-binding resolution on the "genocide" of up to 1.5 million Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire spurred an all-out lobbying effort by the administration and the Pentagon, in particular, to persuade lawmakers to drop the matter.

Washington similarly finds its leverage over the Iraqi Kurds limited, not least because it has all but ruled out deploying already-stretched U.S. troops from central and southern Iraq to the north's mountain redoubts where the PKK guerrillas are based, and because the PKK is believed to have strong popular support in Kurdistan.

"U.S. action against the PKK could be as destabilizing as a Turkish incursion," according to Parris, who also noted that U.S. strategy for building an Iraqi army capable of assuming much of the security burden that has been shouldered by U.S. troops has come to depend mainly on the supply of peshmerga recruits by the Kurdistan authorities, notably the province's governor, Mustafa Barzani.

"We are hamstrung by our relationship with Barzani," said Cook.

Barzani, in turn, may be seeking to exact a high price for cracking down on the PKK; namely, the holding of a referendum in oil-rich Kirkuk on its absorption by Kurdistan, a step that the Turks have long warned against and one that could provoke a broader military intervention.

On this issue, U.S. diplomacy until now has been somewhat more activist than on the PKK. It has successfully delayed the holding of such a referendum, which was mandated to take place this year by the 2005 constitution until at least next year. Washington is concerned that the referendum could spark major ethnic violence in the region, as well as intervention by Turkey.

Original article posted here.

No depth too low for the fascist propagandists and FOX news and their complete disdain for Americans: Al CIAda is causing California wildfires

Fox News: Al Qaeda is causing the CA wildires.

This morning on Fox News, hosts of the show Fox and Friends blamed the wildfires in California on a new culprit: al Qaeda. They pointed to a 2003 FBI memo, which raised the possibility that al Qaeda may try to set wildfires around the western United States. They also noted that men in a “hovering helicopter” saw “a guy starting one of these fires.” Watch it:

Later in the segment, host Steve Doocy acknowledged that in memo, al Qaeda didn’t even mention California. “They mention Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming,” he added.

Transcript:

DOOCY: You’re looking live at pictures from San Diego — Santiago, CA, where the wildfires continue. We were talking earlier in today’s telecast with Adam Housley and apparently police officers in a hovering helicopter saw a guy starting one of these fires. And Allison Allison Camerota, an FBI memo from late in June of this year is popping up this morning and it is ominous.

CAMEROTA: This actually has happened for many years in the past as well. An FBI sent out to local law-enforcement said that an al Qaeda detainee had given them some information that the next wave of terrorism could be in the form of setting wild fires. Adam Housley said lots of people on his block were asking him about it. Obviously this is something the FBI has looked into. They will continue to investigate it.

CARLSON: If they have this person in custody it probably won’t take long to be able to develop a link if there is one.

KILMEADE: A June 25 memo from the FBI’s Denver offices reported three days ago, excuse me, five days ago, by the Arizona Republic, that is a newspaper, they have been carrying the story and they continue to expand upon it.

DOOCY: Brian, the plot they say, according to this detainee, and they don’t know if the detainee is telling the truth. The plot was to set three or four wildfires. But they don’t mention California. They mention Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming. We do know for a fact that a number of the fires in southern California are of a suspicious nature and they are investigating arson.

Original article posted here.

Naomi Wolf on "The End of America"

CIA continues to protect itself from treasonous murder

The CIA is withholding key documents in the JFK assassination case.

Lisa Pease

As Jefferson Morley reports in the Huffington Post:

"Lawyers for the Central Intelligence Agency faced pointed questions in a federal court hearing Monday morning about the agency's efforts to block disclosure of long-secret records about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

Morley filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the CIA for failing to disclose records about a CIA officer named George Joannides. Joannides was responsible for running the DRE, an anti-Castro CIA front group that had extensive interactions with Lee Harvey Oswald in the months leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy.

The CIA has consistently refused to release Joannides' records, even though they are mandated to by the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Act.

What's at stake here matters greatly to all historians. If the government can simply choose which records to release, and which to withhold, they can pervert and deliberately misshape history to serve their purposes.

In this particular case, the CIA appears hellbent on ondoing the will of the people. The JFK Act came into being due to an enormous outcry from the public when they learned, at the end of Oliver Stone's film JFK, that many records relating to the assassination were still classified.

Congress passed what became known as "The JFK Act," which mandated the creation of a board to declassify records and, if necessary, seek out new and pertinent records and make them public.

The Board, officially named the Assassination Records and Review Board, put Joannides on the JFK assassination story map when it declassified five personnel reports of his in 1998. In addition, researchers learned that it was Joannides who had helped shut down an early investigation of the CIA's possible involvement in the assassination.

Joannides was responsible for kicking out two staffers of the House Select Committee on Assassinations who had been set up with full access at CIA to CIA records pertaining to that time period. When the records they dug up got more interesting in terms of suggesting possible CIA involvement in a plot to kill Kennedy, Joannides had the two staffers removed from their temporary office at CIA headquarters.

Morley discusses why Joannides records are of interest:

"Oswald approached the DRE's delegation in New Orleans and offered to train guerrillas to fight the Castro government. He was rebuffed. When DRE members saw Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets a few days later an altercation ensued that ended with the arrest of all the participants.

"A week after that, the DRE's spokesman in New Orleans debated the Cuba issue with Oswald on a radio program. After these encounters, the DRE issued a press release calling for a congressional investigation of the pro-Castro activities of the then-obscure Oswald.

"The CIA was passing money to the DRE leaders at the time, according to an agency memo dated April 1963, found in the JFK Library in Boston. The document shows that the Agency gave the Miami-based group $250,000 a year -- the equivalent of about $1.5 million annually in 2007 dollars.

"The secret CIA files on Joannides may shed new light on what, if anything, Joannides and other CIA officers in anti-Castro operations knew about Oswald's activities and contacts before Kennedy was killed."

Morley has spent several years now trying to obtain these records, and his frustration is palpable. But his frustration should be ours, as it's our history that is being hidden from us.

If the CIA was involved in the Kennedy assassination, wouldn't that change entirely our understanding of events from that time forth, and wouldn't that call into question much of the reporting on the case, and the credibility of the media from that time forward?

And aren't laws meant to be upheld? As Morley writes:

"In my admittedly subjective view, the JFK Records Act is being slowly repealed by CIA fiat. In defiance of the law and common sense, the Agency continues to spend taxpayers' money for the suppression of history around JFK's assassination. In the post-9/11 era, you would think U.S. intelligence budget could be better spent."

Several former members of the ARRB, including its chairman, filed affidavits in support of Morley's request. Even anti-conspiracy authors Gerald Posner and Vincent Bugliosi have sided with the law, calling for the documents to be released.

If our government can simply choose which laws to support and which to break, is it really our government anymore?

For more information on Morley's suit, click here..

Lisa Pease is a historian who has studied the JFK assassination for many years. [Her article first appeared in Progressive Historians.]

Original article posted here.

Livelier voices regarding 9/11

Seven CIA Veterans Challenge 9/11 Commission Report

Seven CIA Veterans Challenge 9/11 Commission Report : (Google Operation North Woods)

Posted October 23rd, 2007 by pitbullpimple

Thanks: Boston 9/11 Truth

Raymond McGovern, former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council and 27-year CIA veteran, "I think at simplest terms, there's a cover-up. The 9/11 Report is a joke."

William Christison, former National Intelligence Officer (NIO) and former Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political, and 29-year CIA veteran, "We very seriously need an entirely new very high level and truly independent investigation of the events of 9/11. I think you almost have to look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a joke and not a serious piece of analysis at all."

Melvin Goodman, PhD, former Division Chief of the CIA's Office of Soviet Affairs and Senior Analyst from 1966 - 1990, "The final report is ultimately a coverup. I don't know how else to describe it."

Robert Baer, 21-year CIA veteran and specialist in the Middle East, who was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal upon his retirement in 1997, "Until we get a complete, honest, transparent investigation …, we will never know what happened on 9/11."

Robert David Steele has 25 years of combined service in the CIA and the U.S. Marine Corps. Second ranking civilian in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988 - 1992. Member of the Adjunct Faculty of Marine Corps University. "I am forced to conclude that 9/11 was at a minimum allowed to happen as a pretext for war. … I have to tell anyone who cares to read this: I believe it. I believe it enough to want a full investigation that passes the smell test of the 9/11 families as well as objective outside observers."

Lynne Larkin, former CIA Operations Officer who served in several CIA foreign stations before being assigned to the CIA's Counter-Intelligence Center. There, she co-chaired a multi-agency task force, which coordinated intelligence efforts among the many intelligence and law enforcement agencies. One of twenty-five signers of a letter to Congress expressing their concerns about "serious shortcomings," "omissions," and "major flaws" in the 9/11 Commission Report and offering their services for a new investigation.

David MacMichael, PhD, former Senior Estimates Officer at the CIA with special responsibility for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the CIA's National Intelligence Council. Prior to joining the CIA, he served for four years as a civilian counter-insurgency advisor to the U.S. government, and prior to that was a U.S. Marine Corps officer for ten years. One of twenty-five signers of a letter to Congress expressing their concerns about "serious shortcomings," "omissions," and "major flaws" in the 9/11 Commission Report and offering their services for a new investigation.

Seven CIA Veterans Challenge 9/11 Commission Report
Official Account of 9/11 a “Joke” and a “Cover-up”

September 23, 2007 – Seven CIA veterans have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and have called for a new investigation. “I think at simplest terms, there’s a cover-up. The 9/11 Report is a joke,” said Raymond McGovern, 27-year veteran of the CIA, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates during the seventies. “There are a whole bunch of unanswered questions. And the reason they’re unanswered is because this administration will not answer the questions,” he said. McGovern, who is also the founder of VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity), is one of many signers of a petition to reinvestigate 9/11.[1]

During his 27-year CIA career, McGovern personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials. Upon retirement in 1990, McGovern was awarded the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medallion and received a letter of appreciation from then President George H. W. Bush. However, McGovern returned the award in 2006 in protest of the current George W. Bush Administration’s advocacy and use of torture.

In his blurb for 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out,” edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, McGovern wrote “It has long been clear that the Bush-Cheney administration cynically exploited the attacks of 9/11 to promote its imperial designs. But the present volume confronts us with evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by this administration precisely so they could be thus exploited. If this is true, it is not merely the case, as the Downing Street memos show, that the stated reason for attacking Iraq was a lie. It is also the case that the whole “war on terror” was based on a prior deception. This book hence confronts the American people---indeed the people of the world as a whole---with an issue second to none in importance and urgency. I give this book, which in no way can be dismissed as the ravings of ‘paranoid conspiracy theorists,’ my highest possible recommendation.”

William Christison, a 29-year CIA veteran, former National Intelligence Officer (NIO) and former Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis also describes the 9/11 Commission Report as a “joke” and offers even more outspoken criticism. In a 2006 audio interview he said, "We very seriously need an entirely new very high level and truly independent investigation of the events of 9/11. I think you almost have to look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a joke and not a serious piece of analysis at all.”

Earlier this year, in an endorsement of David Ray Griffin’s book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, Christison wrote “[There’s] a strong body of evidence showing the official U.S. Government story of what happened on September 11, 2001 to be almost certainly a monstrous series of lies.” And in an online essay in late 2006, he wrote, “I now think there is persuasive evidence that the events of September did not unfold as the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission would have us believe. … An airliner almost certainly did not hit The Pentagon. … The North and South Towers of the World Trade Center almost certainly did not collapse and fall to earth because hijacked aircraft hit them.”

Prior to his retirement from the CIA in 1979, Christison served as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, overseeing 200 analysts who collected intelligence and provided analysis on all regions and every country in the world. Prior to that, he served as one of only a handful of NIO’s in the intelligence community. NIO’s are responsible for the intelligence community efforts in a particular area and are the principal advisors to the Director of Central Intelligence. Christison was NIO for Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Africa.

Melvin Goodman, PhD, is another former senior CIA official who calls the 9/11 Commission Report a “coverup” and who signed the petition to reinvestigate 9/11 Goodman was the Division Chief of the CIA’s Office of Soviet Affairs and served as Senior Analyst from 1966 - 1990. He also served as Professor of International Security at the National War College from 1986 - 2004.

In testimony before a 2005 Congressional briefing on the 9/11 Commission Report Goodman said, “I want to talk about the [9/11] Commission itself, about the flawed process of the Commission and finally about the conflict of interest within the Commission that is extremely important to understand the failure of the Commission. … The final report is ultimately a coverup. I don't know how else to describe it." Goodman is currently Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and Adjunct Professor of Government at Johns Hopkins University.

Robert Baer is another well known CIA veteran who has questioned the official account of 9/11. A 21-year CIA veteran and specialist in the Middle East, Baer was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal upon his retirement in 1997. After retirement, he wrote two best-selling non-fiction books about the CIA, See no Evil Sleeping with the Devil the former of which was the basis for the Academy Award-winning movie Syriana, starring George Clooney. Baer was also the writer and on-camera commentator for the Emmy Award-nominated documentary Cult of the Suicide Bomber.

Baer has repeatedly questioned whether al-Qaida could have accomplished 9/11 alone. The 9/11 Commission Report categorically found al-Qaida to be entirely responsible for 9/11, stating, "Similarly, we have seen no evidence that any foreign government -- or government official -- supplied any funding." However, this 9/11 Commission finding directly contradicts the earlier finding of the Joint House-Senate Select Intelligence Committee's 2002 Report (p.415) of "sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers.”

In 2006, during an interview by Thom Hartmann, Baer, after commenting on the financial profits being made from 9/11, was asked: “What about political profit? There are those who suggest that ... someone in that chain of command ... had pretty good knowledge that 9/11 was going to happen -- and really didn't do much to stop it -- or even obstructed efforts to stop it because they thought it would lend legitimacy to Bush's ... failing presidency.” Baer replied: “Absolutely.” Hartmann then asked, “So you are personally of the opinion ... that there was an aspect of 'inside job' to 9/11 within the U.S. government?" To which Baer replied, "There is that possibility, the evidence points at it." When Hartmann continued, "And why is it not being investigated?” Baer replied, "Why isn't the WMD story being investigated? Why hasn't anybody been held accountable for 9/11? We held people accountable after Pearl Harbor. Why has there been no change in command? Why have there been no political repercussions? Why has there been no -- any sort of exposure on this? It really makes you wonder."

In his blurb for the revised and updated edition of David Ray Griffin’s Debunking 9/11 Debunking Baer wrote "Until we get a complete, honest, transparent investigation …, we will never know what happened on 9/11.”

"I am forced to conclude that 9/11 was at a minimum allowed to happen as a pretext for war,” wrote well-known intelligence analyst Robert David Steele in 2006 in a review of the book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror by Webster Tarpley Steele is the author of numerous books on the intelligence services and is currently the CEO of OSS.net, a proponent of Open Source Intelligence. Steele has 25 years of combined service in the CIA and the U.S. Marine Corps. He also served as the second ranking civilian (GS-14) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988 - 1992 and was a member of the Adjunct Faculty of Marine Corps University. Steele continued, “I have to tell anyone who cares to read this: I believe it. I believe it enough to want a full investigation that passes the smell test of the 9/11 families as well as objective outside observers.”

In a subsequent interview on the Alex Jones Show Steele said, "The U.S. government did not properly investigate this [9/11] and there are more rocks to be turned over," and added, "I'm absolutely certain that WTC 7 was brought down by controlled demolition and that, as far as I'm concerned, means that this case has not been properly investigated. There's no way that building could have come down without controlled demolition."

In late 2004, a group of 25 intelligence service and law enforcement veterans sent a joint letter to Congress expressing their concerns about “serious shortcomings,” “omissions,” and “major flaws” in the 9/11 Commission Report and offering their services for a new investigation. Their letter was apparently entirely ignored. Among the signers were four CIA veterans; Raymond McGovern and Melvin Goodman (both mentioned above) and Lynne Larkin and David MacMichael.

Lynne Larkin was a CIA Operations Officer who served in several CIA foreign stations before being assigned to the CIA's Counter-Intelligence Center. There, she co-chaired a multi-agency task force, which, among other functions, provided direction to other federal agencies for coordinating intelligence efforts among the many intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

David MacMichael, PhD, is a former Senior Estimates Officer at the CIA with special responsibility for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the CIA's National Intelligence Council. Prior to joining the CIA, he served as a U.S. Marine Corps officer for ten years and for four years as a counter-insurgency advisor to the government.

Their letter read:

"[W]e the undersigned wish to bring to the attention of the Congress and the people of the United States what we believe are serious shortcomings in the report and its recommendations. …

Omission is one of the major flaws in the Commission’s report. We are aware of significant issues and cases that were duly reported to the commission by those of us with direct knowledge, but somehow escaped attention. …

The omission of such serious and applicable issues and information by itself renders the report flawed, and casts doubt on the validity of many of its recommendations. ...

The Commission, with its incomplete report of "facts and circumstances", intentional avoidance of assigning accountability, and disregard for the knowledge, expertise and experience of those who actually do the job, has now set about pressuring our Congress and our nation to hastily implement all its recommendations. …

We the undersigned, who have worked within various government agencies (FBI, CIA, FAA, DIA, Customs) responsible for national security and public safety, call upon you in Congress to include the voices of those with first-hand knowledge and expertise in the important issues at hand. We stand ready to do our part.”

And they and thousands of dedicated, loyal, and experienced military officers, intelligence service and law enforcement veterans, and government officials still stand ready to provide assistance for a thorough, impartial, and honest investigation into the terrible acts of 9/11.

Statements questioning the official account of 9/11 and calls for a new investigation by hundreds of credible individuals can be found at http://patriotsquestion911.com/

Dancing in the margins-Intellectuals write & review books challenging US foreign policy while ignoring the elephant in the room: US involvement in 911

Intellectual fallacies of the 'war on terror'

By Chalmers Johnson

(This essay reviewsThe Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror by Stephen Holmes.)

There are many books entitled A Guide for the Perplexed, including Moses Maimonides' 12th century treatise on Jewish law and E F Schumacher's 1977 book on how to think about science. Book titles cannot be copyrighted. A Guide for the Perplexed might therefore be a better title for Stephen Holmes' new book than the one he chose, The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror. In his perhaps overly clever conception, the matador is the terrorist leadership of al-Qaeda, taunting a maddened United States into an ultimately fatal reaction. But do not let the title stop you from reading the book. Holmes has written a powerful and philosophically erudite survey of what we t hink we understand about the 9/11 attacks - and how and why the United States has magnified many times over the initial damage caused by the terrorists.

Stephen Holmes is a law professor at New York University. In The Matador's Cape, he sets out to forge an understanding - in an intellectual and historical sense, not as a matter of journalism or of partisan politics - of the Iraq war, which he calls "one of the worst (and least comprehensible) blunders in the history of American foreign policy" (p 230). His modus operandi is to survey in depth approximately a dozen influential books on post-Cold War international politics to see what light they shed on America's missteps. I will touch briefly on the books he chooses for dissection, highlighting his essential thoughts on each of them.

Holmes' choice of books is interesting. Many of the authors he focuses on are American conservatives or neoconservatives, which is reasonable since they are the ones who caused the debacle. He avoids progressive or left-wing writers, and none of his choices are from Metropolitan Books' American Empire Project. (Disclosure: This review was written before I read Holmes' review of my own book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, in the October 29 issue of The Nation.)

He concludes: "Despite a slew of carefully researched and insightful books on the subject, the reason why the United States responded to the al-Qaeda attack by invading Iraq remains to some extent an enigma" (p 3). Nonetheless, his critiques of the books he has chosen are so well done and fair that they constitute one of the best introductions to the subject. They also have the advantage in several cases of making it unnecessary to read the original.

Holmes interrogates his subjects cleverly. His main questions and the key books he dissects for each of them are:

# Did Islamic religious extremism cause 9/11? Here he supplies his own independent analysis and conclusion (to which I turn below).

# Why did American military preeminence breed delusions of omnipotence, as exemplified in Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (Knopf, 2003)? While not persuaded by Kagan's portrayal of the United States as "Mars" and Europe as "Venus", Holmes takes Kagan's book as illustrative of neoconservative thought on the use of force in international politics: "Far from guaranteeing an unbiased and clear-eyed view of the terrorist threat, as Kagan contends, American military superiority has irredeemably skewed the country's view of the enemy on the horizon, drawing the United States, with appalling consequences, into a gratuitous, cruel, and unwinnable conflict in the Middle East." (p 72)

# How was the war lost, as analyzed in Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (Pantheon, 2006)? Holmes regards this book by Gordon, the military correspondent of the New York Times, and Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, as the best treatment of the military aspects of the disaster, down to and including US envoy L Paul Bremer's disbanding of the Iraqi military. I would argue that Fiasco (Penguin 2006) by the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks is more comprehensive, clearer-eyed, and more critical.

# How did a tiny group of individuals, with eccentric theories and reflexes, recklessly compound the country's post-9/11 security nightmare? Here Holmes considers James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (Viking, 2004). One of Mann's more original insights is that the neocons in the Bush administration were so bewitched by Cold War thinking that they were simply incapable of grasping the new realities of the post-Cold War world. "In Iraq, alas, the lack of a major military rival excited some aging hardliners into toppling a regime that they did not have the slightest clue how to replace ... We have only begun to witness the long-term consequences of their ghastly misuse of unaccountable power". (p 106).

# What roles did Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld play in the Bush administration, as captured in Michael Mann's Incoherent Empire (Verso, 2003)? According to Holmes, Mann's work "repays close study, even by readers who will not find its perspective altogether congenial or convincing". He argues that perhaps Mann's most important contribution, even if somewhat mechanically put, is to stress the element of bureaucratic politics in Cheney's and Rumsfeld's manipulation of the neophyte Bush: "The outcome of inter- and intra-agency battles in Washington, DC, allotted disproportionate influence to the fatally blurred understanding of the terrorist threat shared by a few highly placed and shrewd bureaucratic infighters. Rumsfeld and Cheney controlled the military; and when they were given the opportunity to rank the country's priorities in the war on terror, they assigned paramount importance to those specific threats that could be countered effectively only by the government agency over which they happened to preside" (p 107).

# Why did the US decide to search for a new enemy after the Cold War, as argued by an old cold warrior, Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1996)? It is not clear why Holmes included Huntington's 11-year-old treatise on "Allah made them do it" in his collection of books on post-Cold War international politics except as an act of obeisance to establishmentarian - and especially Council-on-Foreign-Relations - thinking. Holmes regards Huntington's work as a "false template" and calls it misleading. Well before 9/11, many critics of Huntington's concept of "civilization" had pointed out that there is insufficient homogeneity in Christianity, Islam, or the other great religions for any of them to replace the position vacated by the Soviet Union. As Holmes remarks, Huntington "finds homogeneity because he is looking for homogeneity" (p 136).

# What role did left-wing ideology play in legitimizing the war on terror, as seen by Samantha Power in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic, 2002). As Holmes acknowledges, "The humanitarian interventionists rose to a superficial prominence in the 1990s largely because of a vacuum in US foreign-policy thinking after the end of the Cold War ... Their influence was small, however, and after 9/11, that influence vanished altogether." He nonetheless takes up the anti-genocide activists because he suspects that, by making a rhetorically powerful case for casting aside existing decision-making rules and protocols, they may have emboldened the Bush administration to follow suit and fight the "evil" of terrorism outside the constitution and the law. The idea that Power was an influence on Cheney and Rumsfeld may seem a stretch - they were, after all, doing what they had always wanted to do - but Holmes' argument that "a savvy pro-war party may successfully employ humanitarian talk both to gull the wider public and to silence potential critics on the liberal side" (p 157) is worth considering.

# How did pro-war liberals help stifle national debate on the wisdom of the Iraq war, as illustrated by Paul Berman in Power and the Idealists (Soft Skull Press, 2005)? Wildly overstating his influence, Holmes writes, Berman, a regular columnist for The New Republic, "first tried to convince us that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, far from being a tribal war over scarce land and water, is part of the wider spiritual war between liberalism and apocalyptic irrationalism, not worth distinguishing too sharply from the conflict between America and al-Qaeda. He then attempted to show that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden represented two 'branches' of an essentially homogeneous extremism." (p 181) Berman, Holmes points out, conflated anti-terrorism with anti-fascism in order to provide a foundation for the neologism "Islamo-fascism." His chief reason for including Berman is that Holmes wants to address the views of religious fundamentalists in their support of the war on terrorism.

# How did democratization at the point of an assault rifle become America's mission in the world, as seen by the apostate neoconservative Francis Fukuyama in America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale University Press, 2006)? Holmes is interested in Fukuyama, the neoconservatives' perennial sophomore, because he offers an insider's insights into the chimerical neocon "democratization" project for the Middle East.

Fukuyama argues that democracy is the most effective antidote to the kind of Islamic radicalism that hit the United States on September 11, 2001. He contends that the root of Islamic rebellion is to be found in the savage and effective repression of protestors - many of whom have been driven into exile - in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Terrorism is not the enemy, merely a tactic Islamic radicals have found exceptionally effective. Holmes writes of Fukuyama's argument, "[T]o recognize that America's fundamental problem is Islamic radicalism, and that terrorism is only a symptom, is to invite a political solution. Promoting democracy is just such a political solution." (p 209)

The problem, of course, is that not even the neocons are united on promoting democracy; and, even if they were, they do not know how to go about it. Fukuyama himself pleads for "a dramatic demilitarization of American foreign policy and a re-emphasis on other types of policy instruments." The Pentagon, in addition to its other deficiencies, is poorly positioned and incorrectly staffed to foster democratic transitions.

# Why is the contemporary American antiwar movement so anemic, as seen through the lens of history by Geoffrey Stone in Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (W W Norton, 2004)? Holmes has nothing but praise for Stone's history of expanded executive discretion in wartime. A key question raised by Stone is why the American public has not been more concerned with what happened in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison and in the wholesale destruction of the Sunni city of Fallujah. As Holmes sees it, the Bush administration, at least in this one area, was adept at subverting public protest. Among the more important lessons George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and others learned from the Vietnam conflict, he writes, was that if you want to suppress domestic questioning of foreign military adventures, then eliminate the draft, create an all-volunteer force, reduce domestic taxes, and maintain a false prosperity based on foreign borrowing.

# How did the embracing of American unilateralism elevate the Office of the Secretary of Defense over the Department of State, as put into perspective by John Ikenberry in After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton University Press, 2001)? This book is Holmes' oddest choice - a dated history from an establishmentarian point of view of the international institutions created by the United States after World War II, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and NATO, all of which Ikenberry, a prominent academic specialist in international relations, applauds. Holmes agrees that, during the Cold War, the United States ruled largely through indirection, using seemingly impartial international institutions, and eliciting the cooperation of other nations. He laments the failure to follow this proven formula in the post-9/11 era, which led to the eclipse of the State Department by the Defense Department, an institution hopelessly ill-suited for diplomatic and nation-building missions.

# Why do we battle lawlessness with lawlessness (for example, by torturing prisoners) and concentrate extra-constitutional authority in the hands of the president, as expounded by John Yoo in The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11 (University of Chicago Press, 2005)? In this final section, Holmes puts on his hat as the law professor he is and takes on George W Bush's and Alberto Gonzales' in-house legal counsel, the University of California, Berkeley law professor John Yoo, who authored the "torture memos" for them, denied the legality of the Geneva Conventions, and elaborated a grandiose view of the president's war-making power. Holmes wonders, "Why would an aspiring legal scholar labor for years to develop and defend a historical thesis that is manifestly untrue? What is the point and what is the payoff? That is the principal mystery of Yoo's singular book. Characteristic of The Powers of War and Peace is the anemic relations between the evidence adduced and the inferences drawn." (p. 291)

Holmes then points out that Yoo is a prominent member of the Federalist Society, an association of conservative Republican lawyers who claim to be committed to recovering the original understanding of the constitution and which includes several Republican appointees to the current Supreme Court. His conclusion on Yoo and his fellow neocons is devastating: "[I]f the misbegotten Iraq war proves anything, it is the foolhardiness of allowing an autistic clique that reads its own newspapers and watches its own cable news channel to decide, without outsider input, where to expend American blood and treasure - that is, to decide which looming threats to stress and which to downplay or ignore." (p. 301)

Is Islam the culprit or merely a distraction?
In addition to these broad themes, Holmes investigates hidden agendas and their distorting effects on rational policy-making. Some of these are: Cheney's desire to expand executive power and weaken congressional oversight; Rumsfeld's schemes to field-test his theory that in modern warfare speed is more important than mass; the plans by some of Cheney's and Rumsfeld's advisers to improve the security situation of Israel; the administration's desire to create a new set of permanent US military bases in the Middle East to protect the US oil supply in case of a collapse of the Saudi monarchy; and the desire to invade Iraq and thereby avoid putting all the blame for 9/11 on al-Qaeda - because to do so would have involved admitting administration negligence and incompetence during the first nine months of 2001 and, even worse, that Clinton was right in warning Bush and his top officials that the main security threat to the United States was a potential al-Qaeda attack or attacks.

This is not the place to attempt a comprehensive review of Holmes' detailed critiques. For that, one should buy and read his book. Let me instead dwell on three themes that I think illustrate his insight and originality.

Holmes rejects any direct connection between Islamic religious extremism and the 9/11 attacks, although he recognizes that Islamic vilification of the United States and other Western powers is often expressed in apocalyptically religious language. "Emphasizing religious extremism as the motivation for the [9/11] plot, whatever it reveals," he argues, "… terminates inquiry prematurely, encouraging us to view the attack ahistorically as an expression of 'radical Salafism', a fundamentalist movement within Islam that allegedly drives its adherents to homicidal violence against infidels." (p 2) This approach, he points out, is distinctly tautological: "Appeals to social norms or a culture of martyrdom are not very helpful ... They are tantamount to saying that suicidal terrorism is caused by a proclivity to suicidal terrorism." (p 20)

Instead, he suggests, "The mobilizing ideology behind 9/11 was not Islam, or even Islamic fundamentalism, but rather a specific narrative of blame" (p 63). He insists on putting the focus on the actual perpetrators, the 19 men who executed the attacks in New York and Washington - 15 Saudi Arabians, two citizens of the United Arab Emirates, one Egyptian, and one Lebanese. None of them was particularly religious. Three were living together in Hamburg, Germany, where they did appear to have become more interested in Islam than they had been in their home countries. Mohamed Atta, the leader of the group, age 33 on 9/11, had Egyptian and German degrees in architecture and city planning and became highly politicized in favor of the Palestinian cause against Zionism only after he went abroad.

Holmes notes, "According to the classic study of resentment [Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)], 'every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; more specifically, an agent, a "guilty" agent who is susceptible of pain - in short, some living being or other on whom he can vent his feelings directly or in effigy, under some pretext or other.' If suffering is seen as natural or uncaused it will be coded as misfortune instead of injustice, and it will produce resignation rather than rebellion. The most efficient way to incite, therefore, is to indict." (p 64)

The role of bin Laden was, and remains, to provide such a hyperbolic indictment - one that men like Atta would never have heard back in authoritarian Egypt but that came through loud and clear in their German exile. Bin Laden demonized the United States, accusing it of genocide against Muslims and repeatedly contending that the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia ever since the first Gulf War in 1991 was a far graver offense than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, even though that had led to the death of 1 million Afghans and had sent 5 million more into exile.

The fact that the 9/11 plot involved the attackers' own self-destruction suggests possible irrationality on their part, but Holmes argues that this was actually part of the specific narrative of blame. Americans feel contempt for Muslims and ascribe little or no value to Muslim lives. Therefore, to be captured after a terrorist attack involved a high likelihood that the Americans would torture the perpetrator. Suicide took care of that worry (and provided several other advantages discussed below).

The US as 'sole remaining superpower'
Another subject about which Holmes is strikingly original is the subtle way in which the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the United States' self-promotion as the sole remaining superpower clouded our vision and virtually guaranteed the catastrophe that ensued in Iraq. "Because Americans ... have sunk so much of their national treasure into a military establishment fit to deter and perhaps fight an enemy that has now disappeared," he argues, "they have an almost irresistible inclination to exaggerate the centrality of rogue states, excellent targets for military destruction, [above] the overall terrorist threat. They overestimate war (which never unfolds as expected) and underestimate diplomacy and persuasion as instruments of American power." (pp 71-72)

Holmes draws several interesting implications from this American overinvestment in Cold-War-type military power. One is that the very nature of the 9/11 attacks undermined crucial axioms of American national security doctrine. In a much more significant way than in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, a non-state actor on the international stage successfully attacked the United States, contrary to a well-established belief in Pentagon circles that only states have the capability of menacing us militarily. Equally alarming, by employing a strategy requiring their own deaths, the terrorists ensured that deterrence no longer held sway. Overwhelming military might cannot deter non-state actors who accept that they will die in their attacks on others. The day after 9/11, American leaders in Washington, DC, suddenly felt unprotected and defenseless against a new threat they only imperfectly understood. They responded in various ways.

One was to recast what had happened in terms of Cold-War thinking. "To repress feelings of defenselessness associated with an unfamiliar threat, the decision makers' gaze slid uncontrollably away from al-Qaeda and fixated on a recognizable threat that was unquestionably susceptible to being broken into bits." (p 312) Holmes calls this fusion of bin Laden and Saddam Hussein a "mental alchemy, the ‘reconceiving' of an impalpable enemy as a palpable enemy". He endorses James Mann's thesis that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others did not change the underlying principles guiding American foreign policy in response to the 9/11 attacks; that, in fact, they did the exact opposite: "[T]he Bush administration has managed foreign affairs so ineptly because it has been reflexively implementing out-of-date formulas in a radically changed security environment." (p 106)

Unintended consequences also played a role, Holmes argues: "If conservative congressmen had not blocked [Pennsylvania Governor] Tom Ridge's nomination as Defense Secretary [in 2000] for the ludicrously immaterial reason that he was wobbly on abortion, then the Cheney-Rumsfeld group, including Wolfowitz and [Douglas] Feith, would have been in no position to hijack the administration's reaction to 9/11." (pp 93-94) Rumsfeld enthusiastically endorsed Bush's description of his "new" policies as a "war" because the Office of the Secretary of Defense then became the lead agency in designing and carrying out America's response.

There was little or no countervailing influence. "By sheer chance," Holmes writes, "Rice and Powell - no doubt orderly managers - have pedestrian minds and perhaps deferential personalities. Neither provided a gripping and persuasive vision of the United States' role in the world that might have counteracted the megalomania of the neoconservatives, and neither was capable of outfoxing the hard-liners in an interagency power struggle." (p 94)

The costs of equating al-Qaeda with Iraq and of concentrating on a military response were high. "It meant that some of the troops sent to Iraq in the first wave believed, disgracefully, that they were avenging the 3,000 dead from September 11 ... Cruel and arbitrary behavior by some US forces helped stoke the violent insurgency that followed." (p 307)

American confusion about the nature of the enemy - rogue state vs non-state terrorist organization - produced two different counterstrategies, both of which almost certainly made the situation worse. First, by focusing on a rogue state (Iraq), rather than on a non-state actor (al-Qaeda), the Pentagon drew attention to what it came to call the "hand-off scenario" in which a nuclear-armed rogue state might hand over weapons of mass destruction to terrorists who would use them against the US. To counter this threat, the Pentagon developed a strategy of preventive war against rogue states with the objective of bringing about regime change in them. The only way to prevent nuclear proliferation to terrorist groups - so the argument went - was to forcibly democratize Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes, some of which had long been allied with the United States.

The other strategy was a return to what seemed like a form of deterrence: a "scare the Muslims" campaign. This involved a resort to massive "shock and awe" bombing raids on Baghdad with the intent of demonstrating the futility of defying the United States.

By reacting to the threat of modern terrorism with an attack on a substitute target - without even bothering to calculate the enormous potential costs involved - the Pentagon greatly overestimated what military force could achieve. Both the regime-change and overawe-the-Muslims approaches carried with them potentially devastating unintended consequences - particularly if any of the premises, such as about who possessed WMD, were wrong. Overly abstract ideas were substituted for empirical knowledge of, and logical responses to, an enemy's capabilities. Thus, insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, two devastated, poor countries, have managed to fight one of the most powerful American expeditionary forces in history to a virtual standstill. In short, "America's bellicose response to the 9/11 provocation was not only dishonorable and unethical, given the cruel suffering it has inflicted on thousands of innocents, but also imprudent in the extreme because it was bound to produce as much hatred as fear, as much burning desire for reprisal as quaking paralysis and docility. Some of the sickening effects are unfolding before our eyes. That even more malevolent consequences remain in store is a grim possibility not to be wished away." (p 10)

Complicity of the left in American imperialism
Holmes is also interesting on why the American left has been so ineffectual in countering the efforts of Washington's pro-war party. Deeply guilt-ridden over the Clinton administration's failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda and frustrated by the constraints of international law and United Nations procedures, some influential progressives in America had already advocated a preemptive and unilateralist turn in American foreign policy that the Bush administration hijacked. Human rights activists had heavily promoted intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo to halt ethnic cleansing - and doing so without any international sanction whatsoever. Some of them became as enthusiastic about using the American armed forces to achieve limited foreign policy goals as many neocons. Even US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright made herself notorious with her 1993 wisecrack to then Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

Although Holmes tries not to overstate his case, he suspects that the humanitarian interventionism of the 1990s - at one point he speaks of "human rights as imperial ideology" (p 190) - may have played at least a small role in the public's acceptance of Bush's intervention in Iraq. If so, it is hard to imagine a better example of the disasters that good intentions can sometimes produce. The result in Iraq, in turn, has more or less silenced calls from the left for further campaigns of military intervention for humanitarian purposes. The US is conspicuously not participating in the UN intervention in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The rule of law
As a legal scholar, Holmes is committed to the rule of law. "[L]aw is best understood," he writes, "not as a set of rigid rules but rather as a set of institutional mechanisms and procedures designed to correct the mistakes that even exceptionally talented executive officials are bound to make and to facilitate midstream readjustments and course corrections. If we understand law, constitutionalism, and due process in this way, then it becomes obvious why the war on terrorism is bound to fail when conducted, as it has been so far, against the rule of law and outside the constitutional system of checks and balances." (p 5)

This short-circuiting of normal constitutional procedures he sees as probably the most consequential post-9/11 blunder of the Bush administration. The president's repeated claims that he needs high levels of secrecy and the ability to arbitrarily cancel established law in order to move decisively against terrorists draw his utter contempt. "By dismantling checks and balances, along the lines idealized and celebrated by [John] Yoo, the administration has certainly gained flexibility in the 'war on terror'. It has gained the flexibility, in particular, to shoot first and aim afterward." (p 301) Although such an assumption of dictatorial powers has happened before during periods of national emergency in the United States, Holmes is convinced that the humanitarian interventionism of the 1990s helped anesthetize many Americans to the implications of what the government was doing after 9/11.

Even now, with the Iraq War all but lost and public opinion having turned decisively against the president, there is still a flabbiness in mainstream criticism that reveals a major weakness in the conduct of American foreign policy. For example, while many hawks and doves today recognize that Rumsfeld mobilized too few forces to achieve his military objectives in Iraq, they tend to concentrate on his rejection of former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki's advice that he needed a larger army of occupation. They almost totally ignore the true national policy implications of Rumsfeld's failed leadership. Holmes writes, "If Saddam Hussein had actually possessed the tons of chemical and biological weapons that, in the president's talking points, constituted the casus belli for the invasion, Rumsfeld's slimmed-down force would have abetted the greatest proliferation disaster in world history." (p 82) He quotes Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor: "Securing the WMD required sealing the country's borders and quickly seizing control of the many suspected sites before they were raided by profiteers, terrorists, and regime officials determined to carry on the fight. The force that Rumsfeld eventually assembled, by contrast, was too small to do any of this." (pp 84-85) As a matter of fact, looters did ransack the Iraqi nuclear research center at al Tuwaitha. No one pointed out these flaws in the strategy until well after the invasion had revealed that, luckily, Saddam had no WMD.

With this book, Stephen Holmes largely succeeds in elevating criticism of contemporary American imperialism in the Middle East to a new level. In my opinion, however, he underplays the roles of American imperialism and militarism in exploiting the 9/11 crisis to serve vested interests in the military-industrial complex, the petroleum industry, and the military establishment. Holmes leaves the false impression that the political system of the United States is capable of a successful course correction. But, as Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of checks and balances ... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."

There is, I believe, only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge, still growing military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic - becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force. To take up these subjects, however, moves the discussion into largely unexplored territory. For now, Holmes has done a wonderful job of clearing the underbrush and preparing the way for the public to address this more or less taboo subject.

weazl's advice to Mr. Chambers: you won't begin the process of dismantling the empire until you make clear to people the extent to which we have one, and the extent to which it is out of control, homicidal and self immolating. And that can be done only with bringing the truth about 911 out of the dark corners of public consciousness, but front and center. Until that happens, you and your ilk are engaging in intellectual masterbation: discussing the symptoms of the problem while refusing to address the disease, like the doctor dealing with the AIDS patient's shingles and infections and unwilling to check for the virus because the reality would be too painful. What are the chances for that patient's recovery? About as likely as dismantling the American empire without a frank discussion about US black ops and false flags on its own people to justify an attempted genocidal war without end.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of the bestselling Blowback Trilogy - Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2007).

Original article posted here.