The politics of greed is what keeps this world wrapped in corruption. If you want to stick around for a while longer, I suggest you educate yourself and try to do something constructive to help save what little good, honesty, and trust we have left.

A motto for us old vets: Take one with you!

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Go to 13024
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=8287
Why George W. Bush is the World’s Leading Terrorist
Reggie – TV News Lies March 24, 2008

Terrorism is the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives. US Federal Bureau of Investigation

Read the sentence carefully. You didn’t hear it on any corporate media newscast since 9/11. It’s the official US FBI definition of terrorism. In its official definition, the FBI does not limit terrorism to stateless individuals or groups. In its official definition, the FBI does not suggest that terrorism cannot be perpetrated by the leader of a nation state. But even more amazing is that the official FBI definition of terrorism describes exactly what George Bush did in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11!


APPLYING THE DEFINITION

• George W. Bush, in his unprovoked attack against the sovereign nation of Iraq, openly violated the UN Charter, to which the US is a signatory. The Charter's core principles contained in Article 2(4) and Article 51 prohibit one nation from attacking another except in self-defense or with the authority of the U.N. In effect, George Bush launched an unlawful use of force against persons and property.

• The invasion launched by George W. Bush was heralded by the most frightening and powerful use of force and military violence in recent history. His Shock and Awe bombardment of Baghdad was designed to intimidate and coerce the government as well as the civilian population of that nation to change its existing leadership. That, in itself, was a political objective.

• The purpose of the invasion and ensuing occupation of Iraq was to replace the existing dictatorship with an American-backed form of democracy that would not permit the emergence of a government headed by the majority Shia religious leadership. These motives were unquestionably political and social.

So, what part of the FBI definition of “terrorism” do the voters of the United States not understand? And what acts of terrorism as defined by the FBI do the voters of the United States not recognize? Is there any doubt at all that the Bush administration committed acts of terrorism when it unlawfully used force and violence against the nation of Iraq to intimidate and coerce its government and the civilian population, in furtherance of the Bush/PNAC political and social objectives.

Therefore, by any definition, if George W. Bush is guilty of terrorism, he can accurately be identified as a TERRORIST. And if he is truly a terrorist, it is only fitting that George W. Bush be scrutinized in terms of his success in that capacity. What is his standing among the other murderous terrorist activity in the world today? Is it possible that George W. Bush actually has claim to being the very BEST at something during his reign in office?

It is our contention that George Bush is the most successful terrorist alive today, big time. Let’s look at the figures.

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL - WHO’S THE LEADING TERRORIST OF ALL?


THE CONTEST

EVERYONE ELSE: Despite the protestations of George W. Bush to the contrary, we are NOT safer now by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, according to the Terrorism Knowledge Base, the number of deaths from terrorist attacks throughout the entire world prior to the invasion of Iraq was 6,680. That included the nearly 3,00 deaths in the US on 9/11! Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the number of terrorist-related casualties worldwide has reached 36,174!

More than 27,000 of those deaths were in Iraq, where the identity of 'terrorists' is vague and undefined. However, for the sake of argument, we will attribute all of these deaths to so-called terrorists.

Repeat: The total number of deaths in the entire world caused by terrorists since George W. Bush declared a War on Terror, amounts to approximately 40,000.

GEORGE W. BUSH: In pursuit of his arrogant and PNAC-driven political and social objectives in Iraq, George W. Bush has the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians on his hands. To cover his guilt, early in the war, the US government ordered the Iraqi Ministry of Health to stop counting civilian deaths, and forbade them from releasing any totals previously gathered. The image of a surgical war, dominated by smart bombs and resulting in very few civilian casualties was televised to the American public throughout the hostilities.

As a result, the number of civilian casualties in Iraq is probably vastly under-estimated. According to Human Rights Watch, many of the civilian deaths were the direct result of weapons that should never have been used in populated areas. Among these were nearly 2 million submunitions which fail to explode immediately and killed people long after the initial conflict had ended. In addition, the strategy of decapitation bombing killed many civilians while it failed to kill a single Iraqi military leader in 50 attempts.

In January of 2008, a joint UN World Health Organization and the Iraqi government study concluded that between 104,000 and 223,000 Iraqis had died violently since the invasion. In 2006, the respected British journal The Lancet reported that 654,965 (at least 392,979 and as many as 942,636) Iraqi civilians had been killed in the occupation, in addition to deaths expected from Iraq's normal death rate. Whatever count you accept, George W. Bush is far ahead, big time..

If we go with the low ball figure of 104,000, the lowest estimate of Iraqi civilians killed as a direct result of the unlawful invasion and occupation of the country, George W. Bush still wins the title of the LEADING TERRORIST alive today, big time.

No matter how you look at it, George W. Bush wins, big time.

And that doesn’t include the estimated 3,485 civilian deaths in Afghanistan, - the country to which we sent only 11,000 troops to fight the Taliban. George W. Bush claimed victory in Iraq in his acceptance speech. What utter nonsense. The country is dangerous and explosive, and in the hands of the same warlords and Taliban chieftains who ruled before 9/11. Revisionist history by this administration is never challenged by the media. The list of Big Lies prevails.

And it doesn’t include the military deaths on all sides, or the kidnappings, or the contractor deaths or the wounded or the dying. It doesn’t count the deaths to come from the depleted uranium shells or the permanently maimed and psychologically affected.

George W. Bush, his handlers and his administration can be proud. The dubious title of LEADING TERRORIST now belongs to the most powerful man in the world who seeks another term of office to continue what he has begun.

The American corporate media refuse to address the totals. Doing so might result in an accusation of being unpatriotic or un-American. Doing so would challenge directives from the WH such as those that keep the nation from seeing the draped coffins of their 4,000 military dead or hearing about the deaths of other coalition forces. Terrorists also injure and mutilate their victims. The number of US seriously wounded troops is far into the tens of thousands. Still, we rarely, if ever, are told of the unbearable injuries that will scar the lives of so many young Americans for their lifetimes.

After all, doing so might influence the outcome of the upcoming election.

How utterly shameful that is for this ill-informed country and how tragic it is for the world.
=http://tvnewslies.org/tvnl/index.php/editorial/reggies-commentary/20-regs-thoughts/750-why-george-w-bush-isthe-worlds-leading-terrorist



Go to 13023
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2008/3513brit_eurasian_war.html
This article appears in the March 28, 2008 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
British Launch `Great
Eurasian War' Drive
by Jeffrey Steinberg

The British oligarchy, working through British intelligence and its longstanding assets and dupes, has launched a series of provocations, aimed at triggering what Lyndon LaRouche has described as a new "Great Eurasian War," pitting the trans-Atlantic powers against China, Russia, India, and other leading Eurasian states. The drive for war is coming from the highest levels of the British oligarchy, and is aimed at preventing, at all costs, the kind of collaboration among the United States, Russia, India, and China advocated by LaRouche, to deal with the onrushing collapse of the post-Bretton Woods global financial system.

As in the 1920s and 1930s, the British oligarchy, today, is pressing for the imposition of fascism in Europe and the Americas, and for malthusian wars across Eurasia, aimed at wiping out the nation-state system, and a vast majority of the population of the planet, to establish a London-run world empire. British Royal Consort Prince Philip would unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: He has stated publicly that he would like to be "reincarnated as a particularly deadly virus," in order to drastically reduce the world's population. London is now aggressively moving into the implementation phase of that genocidal scheme, just as it moved in an earlier period to engineer two world wars in Eurasia during the 20th Century, to defeat the spread of American System republicanism across the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair promotes this one-world nightmare as a "post-Westphalian world," a reference to the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War, by establishing the principle of "the benefit of the other," and an acceptance of the idea of a system of sovereign nation-states. Blair, and others, wish to see the era of the nation-state come to a bloody end, starting with the total destruction of the United States from within. Indeed, Blair is peddling these ideas as part of his campaign to be the first president of the European fascist super-state, which would come into being early in 2009, if the European Union's Lisbon Treaty is passed by all the European parliaments.

It is from this standpoint, alone, that the assassinations and other destabilizations of the recent months, in Tibet, in Pakistan/Afghanistan, in the Caucasus, and in the Persian Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean, can be understood. As LaRouche recently warned: Do not look for local causes, or event-driven explanations for the near-simultaneous outbreak of chaos throughout Eurasia, Africa, and Ibero-America. We are witnessing a top-down, London-orchestrated global confrontation, aimed at spreading permanent chaos across much of the globe, as the British financier oligarchs seek to impose fascism in Europe, and also in the United States, through their corporatist schemes, and their Michael Bloomberg Presidential manueverings. London vows that under no circumstances will it permit another "Franklin Roosevelt reflex" in the United States, in response to the near-total collapse of the once-dominant American agro-industrial economy, and the onrushing evaporation of the global financial system. London would sooner kill, than see a revival of FDR anti-fascist policy from Washington.

And, while both the Lisbon Treaty and the Felix Rohatyn- and George Shultz-led Bloomberg scheme are meeting with significant, mounting resistance, the war plans targeting Asia are moving forward with breathtaking speed, despite significant resistance from among the leading Asian nations, themselves.

Venetian 'Index Cards'
There is a dangerous, widespread belief today, even among leading policy-making circles in the Americas and Europe, that the British Empire is a thing of the past. This dangerous delusion reflects a sorry lack of understanding of the Venetian method of financier oligarchical rule, and could, if not rectified, bring on a New Dark Age of horrible suffering.

Today's generation of British oligarchs and their vast intelligence establishment operate on the same "Venetian" principles as their predecessors, from the 18th- and 19th-Century epoch of undisputed British global imperial domination, during the heyday of the British East India Company. They always play divide-and-conquer, manipulating religious, ethnic, racial, and cultural fault-lines, to rule by promoting perpetual chaos.

Talk to any well-informed senior intelligence official from a nation targeted for British destabilization. They will all tell the same story, about British junior officers, sometimes presenting themselves as "cultural anthropologists," or even journalists, walking from one village to another, in the most remote, God-forsaken areas of their country, updating the card-files on the local tribal sheikhs, religious leaders, and warriors; updating genealogical charts; and following clan disputes from generation to generation. It is this method, and this repository of in-depth profiles of targeted populations, that is key to the Anglo-Dutch "Venetian method." Very often, the most senior British intelligence operatives deploy from major British universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge; from so-called news organizations, such as The Economist and Reuters and BBC; and from the House of Lords.

The Case of Tibet, Now Considered
It is from this vantage point, alone, that the case of the onrushing destabilization of the Chinese province of Tibet—ostensibly launched with anti-Chinese Tibetan independence riots in the capital city of Lhasa on March 10—can be assessed. The target of this destabilization, as well as the soon-to-be unleashed destabilization of China's Xinjiang Province, by Muslim Uighur separatists, is China. London intends to provoke a confrontation between China and the West, to be the opening phase of a larger Eurasian war, soon to target Russia and India as well.

Tibet has been a playground for British intelligence operations against China for more than a century, based on the initial British colonial-era interest in establishing a buffer state between its India colonies and China, and using that buffer state, on key occasions, to provoke actual war.

It was during the early 1930s, as Russia and China were being militarily challenged by Britain's ally Japan, that Britain trained and armed a separatist army, under the 13th Dalai Lama, to split Tibet out of China. At the same time, Britain trained and armed a Uighur Muslim uprising in southern Xinjiang Province in western China, which promoted then, and still does, to this day, an independent, mythical "East Turkestan."

In May 1933, the Soviet news agency TASS reported on the Uighur uprising and its links to the British-led actions in Tibet, in terms that could easily describe the British plans being activated today: The Xinjiang uprising, TASS wrote, "must be considered as definitely connected with the operations of Tibetan troops.... There is no doubt that interested imperialist countries are endeavoring to utilize the present moment to set up in Xinjiang, a Mohammedan state hostile to China, which would be dependent upon them and would serve as a buffer between the U.S.S.R. and China in the northwest, just as 'Manchukuo' [the Japanese puppet state] does in the northeast."

One of the architects of those 1930s Tibetan and Xinjiang operations for British intelligence was Hugh Richardson (1905-2000), a third-generation veteran of the British Foreign Office's India Office, who spent nine years in Tibet during the 1930s and 1940s, and became the British "handler" of the young 14th Dalai Lama, as well as the protector, after World War II, of the leading Nazi agents in Tibet, including Heinrich Harrer and Bruno Beger. A recipient of the Order of the British Empire, Richardson was the architect of the "independent" Tibet hoax, and recruited a next generation of British intelligence Tibet-handlers, including Michael Aris (the husband of Aung San Suu Kyi, the British intelligence-run Myanmar "opposition" leader). Upon his "retirement" in 1951, Richardson established the Tibet Society of the U.K., at the time the only non-governmental organization in the world that disputed Chinese sovereignty over Tibet; and later founded the Richardson Foundation, to recruit young Tibetans to British service.

Richardson, himself, had been recruited and trained by Basil Gould and Sir Charles Bell, two earlier Tibet handlers for the British secret services, who had worked on the original British invasion of Tibet in 1903, with Francis Younghusband, the military commander of that operation, which, in effect, sealed off Tibet from China. Richardson was the author of secret British intelligence profiles on Tibet, and a series of published works, profiling the culture and history of the Himalayan region.

U.S. Institutional Loss of Memory
During the 1920s and 1930s, the General Staff of the United States military maintained war plans, which included plans for a U.S. war against the Anglo-Japanese axis. The British targeting of China, described above, was well known among American intelligence specialists, and "War Plan Red-Orange," the specific American plan to fight against Great Britain and Japan, was regularly updated, and considered a very real proposition. Today, the mere historical existence of U.S. war plans to fight Britain is almost unknown, except among a rare breed of military historians of the period.

The unravelling British campaign to break up China, as an opening shot in a Eurasian war, pitting Europe and the United States against China, India, and Russia, poses a grave danger—particularly as the Bush Administration, leading Congressional Democrats like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and most European governments, fall in, lock-step, behind the British schemes, out of ignorance or worse.



Go to 13022
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0%2C7340%2CL-3523709%2C00.html
Obama advisor: US Jews hinder peace

More trouble for presidential hopeful: Inquiry by conservative US media outlets reveals that Obama advisor Merrill 'Tony' McPeak is a longtime anti-Israel critic who slammed American Jews for acting against US interests

Yitzhak Benhorin Published: 03.26.08, 01:24 / Israel News

WASHINGTON - General Merrill "Tony" McPeak, Senator Barack Obama's military advisor and co-chair of his presidential campaign is a longtime anti-Israeli critic who has slammed Israel harshly during his career, according to an inquiry by conservative American media outlets.

McPeak, who served as the chief of staff o the US Air Force before retiring in 1994, made headlines over the past week after accusing former President Bill Clinton of McCarthyism. Yet as it turns out, over the years he has criticized Israel for failing to withdraw to the 1967 borders and charged American Jews were preventing American pressure that would lead to a Mideast peace agreement.

US Elections

Obama and the Jews / Sever Plocker

Jewish intellectuals blinded by Obama-mania, fail to see his flaws, Sever Plocker says
Full Story

The examination of McPeak's career, undertaken by conservative magazine American Spectator among others, revealed that the general adopted a harsh anti-Israeli line in interviews he submitted to and articles he published. According to the magazine, beyond his affinity for alcohol, which saw him detained for drunk driving a year ago, McPeak also appears to take great pleasure in slamming Israel and pro-Israel Jews.

'Large vote in favor of Israel'
In an interview with The Oregonion about five years ago, McPeak argued that the influence exerted by American Jews is responsible for the lack of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. According to the general the problem was New York and Miami.

"We have a large vote here in favor of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it," he said.

In the same interview, McPeak spoke of his personal experience with Israel.

"I've spent a lot of time in Israel, worked at one time very closely with the Israeli Air Force as a junior officer," he said, "but that's maybe the more cosmopolitan, liberal version of the Israeli population."

McPeak also charged that Jews and Christian Zionists manipulated American foreign policy in Iraq.

"Let's say that one of your abiding concerns is the security of Israel as opposed to a purely American self-interest, then it would make sense to build a dozen or so bases in Iraq," he said.

'Disturbing canard'

Following the latest revelations, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) called on Obama to remove McPeak as his military advisor and national campaign co-chairman.

"By choosing to have a military advisor and national campaign co-chairman like General McPeak, serious questions and doubts are once again being raised about Senator Obama's positions and judgment on Middle East issues," said RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks.

"Rather than putting the blame where it belongs - on the Palestinian leadership and their continued reliance on terror, General McPeak finds it more convenient to blame American Jewry and their perceived influence," said Brooks. "This is the same dangerous and disturbing canard being promoted by the likes of Jimmy Carter and authors Mearsheimer and Walt in their book, The Israel Lobby."


"Senator Obama continues to surround himself with advisors holding troubling and disturbing anti-Israel bias," Brooks said. "We call on Senator Obama to immediately remove General McPeak from his campaign leadership role and as a key advisor."



Go to 13021
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/outside-view-the-end-of-capitalism-as-we-know-it-799494.html
Outside View: The end of capitalism as we know it?
By Phillip Blond
Sunday, 23 March 2008


The Western world is in an economic crisis similar in scale to the oil shock of 1973. What we are seeing is nothing less than the unravelling of neo-liberalism – the dominant economic and ideological model of the last 30 years.


The disintegration of Anglo-Saxon-inspired markets has come about largely because of the confluence of two tendencies of the "free market": speculation and monopoly capitalism. Contrary to received opinion, free markets – unless subject to civil regulation, asset distribution and persistent intervention – always tend to monopoly.

Similarly, there is nothing inherently efficient about free markets – they do not of themselves promote sound investment or wise management. Rather, when markets are conceived wholly in terms of price and return, and when asset wealth and the leverage that this provides becomes as concentrated as it was in the 19th century (which is a scenario we are approaching), then markets encourage nothing other than gambling masking itself as sound investment.

For example, before 1973 the ratio of investment to speculative capital was 9:1; since 1973, these proportions have reversed. So huge have the numbers, leverage and derivative instruments become that their value now far exceeds the total economic value of the planet. For instance, in 2003 the value of all derivative trading was $85 trillion, while the size of the world economy was only $49 trillion.

These ratios have risen with the latest estimates that the value of all traded paper instruments exceeds the underlying value of the assets on which they are written by 3:1. The fact that these assets may themselves be devaluing by up to 50 per cent (US housing values have declined by 25 per cent in two years) means that the overall ratio of global paper value to its leveraged base may indeed double.

This average global figure itself masks even more extreme levels of leverage. The Carlyle Group de-faulted on $16.6bn (£8.4bn) of debt last week. The private equity firm had been speculating assiduously on its AAA-rated mortgage base – by some estimates, at the end of its life, Carlyle's loan-to-value ratio and hedge exposure was at 36:1. There are, of course, many other private equity firms in a similar position.

This incalculable level of speculation is abetted by the huge concentration of wealth that has occurred since 1973. Why? Because if markets tend to monopoly then smaller groups of people control larger amounts of assets. The latest figures demonstrate this admirably: the richest 10 per cent of the UK population increased their share of the nation's marketable wealth (excluding housing) from 57 per cent in 1976 to 71 per cent in 2003. Over the same period, the speculative capital that could be deployed or inves-ted by the bottom 50 per cent of the British population fell from 12 per cent to just 1 per cent. Indeed, the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population, on current government figures, now control more than a third of all the marketable wealth – and this ignores the vast sums held in offshore tax havens.

The New Economics Foundation has shown that global growth has not aided the poor. In the 1980s, for every $100 of world growth, the poorest 20 per cent received $2.20; by 2001, they received only 60 cents. Clearly neo-liberal growth disproportionately benefits the rich and further impoverishes the poor.

Real wage increases in the top 13 countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have been below the rate of inflation since about 1970 – a situation compounded in Britain as the measure of inflation massively underestimates the real cost of living.

Thus wage earners – rather than asset owners – have faced a 35-year downward pressure on their standard of living. Indeed, the golden age for the salaried worker, as a share of GDP, was between 1945 and 1973 – and not this vaunted age of liberalisation.

The trouble is that nobody in power recognises this crisis for what it is – an asset insolvency crisis brought about by massive debt leverage. Neo-liberals are still reacting as if the emergency was one of liquidity. They are wrong. Governments should bail out not banks and speculators but the customers who now have every reason to fear for the future.

Interesting? Click here to explore further



Go to 13020
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese437.html
The Bungled War
by Charley Reese

DIGG THIS

We have passed the five-year anniversary of George W. Bush's bungled war in Iraq. What has it gained the American people? I'm afraid the answer is nothing. Let's look at the accomplishments.

We delivered a new ally to Iran. We lost nearly 4,000 American lives and suffered another 29,000 wounded. We spent $400 billion, by Pentagon accounting. We increased the federal deficit to $9 trillion. We've made the Middle East more, not less, unstable. American prestige is in the trash can. Oil is more than $100 a barrel. The military is strained to the breaking point, so we are now recruiting high-school dropouts and people with criminal records. The American economy is on the tipping point of disaster. Bush's disapproval rating is at 65 percent.

Iraq is by no means stable. The destruction of infrastructure and loss of life in Iraq have, many say, permanently wrecked the country. The so-called rebuilding of Iraq has, from the beginning, been a cluster-blunder marked by greed, corruption, no-bid contracts and incompetence. To a large extent, we have lost our economic independence. Most of the brands you see advertised on television are Japanese; most of the stuff we buy is made in China. We are the biggest debtor nation in the world. The product of our public education system sucks when compared with most of the industrial world. If it weren't for foreigners with Ph.D.'s in the sciences and engineering, many of our faculties would be lacking enough warm bodies to teach. You might think about that before you gripe about Muslims. The dollar has lost so much purchasing power, foreigners are beginning to demand payment in euros.

We've had some incompetents as president. I've always thought Jimmy Carter was the champion incompetent, but by golly he's been dethroned by George Bush. The Chinese, the Japanese and the Russians think we are stupid. They may be right at the present time, but America's ace in the hole has always been the ability to change. We do not face a single insoluble problem.

However, since all of our problems are self-created, we are going to have to change ourselves in order to solve them. I won't say, as Henry Hull said in an old movie about Jesse James, that the first thing we have to do is take all the lawyers out in the street and shoot them down like dogs. I will say we should close about three-quarters of the law schools in the U.S. We already have a surplus of lawyers, far more than any other three nations combined. Lawyers do not create wealth; they transfer it from their clients to themselves.

On the other hand, engineers and scientists, of which we have a shortage, do create wealth. I once argued that a new American missile should be sited on law-school campuses on the grounds that their destruction would at least provide a silver lining to a nuclear war. Lawyer-politicians in Washington, however, thought cornfields in the Middle West were more expendable than law schools. Therefore, one thing you can do is make a solemn pledge to never vote for a lawyer running for public office.

We also need to regain the civic courage that our ancestors had. That means the courage to face tough questions without regard for the special pleaders who claim they will be "offended" if you discuss it. It means the courage to demand of the schools that they educate and not entertain students. It means the courage to demand that students study and study hard, because learning is hard work. It means the courage, if necessary, to toss the television and the electronic games in the garbage can. And it's necessary if parents can't control the amount of time their children spend on these time-killers.

Lastly, we should all post on our refrigerators the immortal words of Pogo Possum when he said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

March 24, 2008
Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.



Go to 13019
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/hillaryjorge.php
Recently, the mainstream media has taken Barack Obama to task for comments made by his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Now, I attended church when I was very young, and one of the things I recall about that experience is that nobody ever dared challenge the authority of the guy in the funny robes. He said what he wanted to say and the rest of us sat and listened quietly, no matter how absurd it sounded. I presume that Reverend Wright's church operates with the same rules. Therefore, it is unreasonable to assume that Obama is in any way reposnible for what Reverend Wright has to say about anything. And, while I do not share Reverend Wright's beliefs, I do not disagree with much of what he says. There has been and is racism in this country in many forms, some overt, some covert. And it is hard to imagine any god blessing America after all the commandments our government shattered in the war on Iraq. But whether you agree with Reverend Wright or not, he has a First Amendment right to speak his peace.

In recent days, there have been attempts by the mainstream media to metaphorically tar and feather Barack Obama by his association with Reverend Wright. I was hopeful we had outgrown such things as guilt by association, but political campaigns always seem to bring out the worst in people.

But, if guilt by association is your cup of tea, then read on, because I have a couple doozies to share with you!

PHOTOGRAPH OF COCAINE SMUGGLER JORGE CABRERA WITH HILLARY CLINTON.


Click for full size picture.(56.4K)


Jorge Cabrera is a convicted drug dealer and friend of Fidel Castro.
Some News Coverage

MIAMI -- Jorge Cabrera, a drug smuggler who has emerged as
one of the most notorious supporters of President Clinton's
re-election campaign, was asked for a campaign contribution in
the unlikely locale of a hotel in Havana by a prominent Democratic
fund-raiser, congressional investigators have learned.


On his return to the United States several days after that
meeting, in November 1995, Cabrera wrote a check for $20,000 to
the Democratic National Committee from an account that included
the proceeds from smuggling cocaine from Colombia to the
United States, said the investigators, who spoke on condition of
anonymity.


In early January 1996, three weeks after having attended the
Christmas reception at the White House, Cabrera was arrested
and charged with importing 6,000 pounds of cocaine into the
United States on boats through the Florida Keys. Late last year, he
pleaded guilty to those charges and was sentenced to 19 years in
federal prison and fined $1.5 million.


Drug Smuggler Made Clinton Donation in Cuba, Investigators Say
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
New York Times
April 4, 1997

MIAMI -- Jorge Cabrera, a drug smuggler who has emerged as
one of the most notorious supporters of President Clinton's
re-election campaign, was asked for a campaign contribution in
the unlikely locale of a hotel in Havana by a prominent Democratic
fund-raiser, congressional investigators have learned.

The investigators said the fund-raiser, whom they identified as
Vivian Mannerud, a Cuban-American businesswoman from Miami,
told Cabrera at a meeting at the Copacabana Hotel in Havana that
in exchange for a contribution he would be invited to a
fund-raising dinner in honor of Vice President Al Gore in an
exclusive enclave near Miami.

Ms. Mannerud owns Airline Brokers Co., an airline charter
service that operates among Havana, the Bahamas and Mexico.

On his return to the United States several days after that
meeting, in November 1995, Cabrera wrote a check for $20,000 to
the Democratic National Committee from an account that included
the proceeds from smuggling cocaine from Colombia to the
United States, said the investigators, who spoke on condition of
anonymity.

Within two weeks of the contribution, Cabrera met Gore at the
dinner in Miami. Ten days later, Cabrera attended a Christmas
reception at the White House hosted by Hillary Rodham Clinton. At
the events, Gore and Mrs. Clinton posed for photographs with
Cabrera, who has two felony convictions dating from the 1980s
and is now in a prison here on a drug-smuggling conviction.


MORE STORIES ABOUT JORGE
Photo Op With First Lady

White House Refuses To Release Photos.

White House Finally Releases Photos.

Cabrera as informant


CHAPTER 2:
PHOTOGRAPH OF CRIME LORD NG LAP SENG WITH HILLARY CLINTON.


Click for full size picture.(199.4K)

Here we have a photo taken at an official DNC fundraiser with Bill and Hillary posed with Ng Lap Seng, Macau Crime Lord who controls Prostitution in that region. His Fortuna Hotel is actually a high class bordello where young girls (often underage) are available for a price. Ng, through his American contact Charlie Trie, donated close to a million dollars to the Democrats.


So, here is the point. If Barack Obama shares the guilt-by-association of a Pastor who says inflammatory things, then Hillary has to share the guilt-by-association with drug smugglers, pimps, and child molesters.

You cannot have one without the other.

Please forward this article to everyone who has been pounding on Obama's pastor these last few days.



Go to 13018
http://www.rense.com/general48/over46.htm
The Overthrow Of The
American Republic - Part 46
Senator "Cash & Carry"
By Sherman H. Skolnick
2-4-4

In retail, to turn merchandise quickly into hard currency, it was advertised as "cash and carry". As to public officials, however, like judges and lawmakers, the term designates sweet-talking, all-mouth characters who are themselves "for sale". That is, those who front for bloody spy cartels, bank criminals, and are all-around fakers.

He came back from Southeast Asia looking-like and speaking-like a handsome Kennedy. Later, as a U.S. Senator he headed a subcommittee supposedly investigating narcotics traffic and terrorism. This, at a time former Secret Political Police Chief Daddy Bush became President.

The Senator looked in but past the Bank of Criminals and Conspirators International, and saw nothing. Funny thing, the Senator and his pals in the U.S. Senate received loot from---you guessed it!---BCCI. Disguised, of course, as "campaign contributions".

The worldwide criminal bank with branches in the U.S. bought and owned twenty five per cent of Congress, 108 members of the House of Representatives and 28 U.S. Senators. Including, of course, the U.S. Senator himself, head of a supposed Senate watchdog committee.

Supervising BCCI was the Bank of England. As an open record, mysteriously only for thirty days at the London-based Central Bank, was the BCCI bribery list of U.S. officials. Wow! A very wide-awake reporter for a major news organization copied down the list before it was suppressed. [Begun in London, January, 2004, is the trial of Bank of England as defendant accused of covering up BCCI crimes. The trial is expected to take at least a year. BUT IT IS NOT ADEQUATELY MENTIONED IN THE MONOPOLY PRESS. It has taken all the time from 1991 up to 2004 to put together the case against Bank of England. Also, on our website, see the various stories we have how the Bank of England fraudulently manipulated the gold market.]

Shown to his editor, the list brought a profound gasp, "We can't go with this. Why, it would bring down the U.S. Government." [This was in 1991, just after the U.S. slaughtered Iraq in Daddy Bush-instigated Persian Gulf War One.]

So the list was turned over to us; we being known as independent-minded, free lance journalists and investigators running a court reform group disclosing certain instances of judicial bribery and political assassinations, and savvy about banker-judges and the role of banks in corruption of public officials.

The major news reporter told us the steps necessary to corroborate the bribery list. We went to work checking out the list for ourselves. For example, in 1991, we interviewed Senator Phil Gramm (R., Texas, since retired) on the bribery list. He was a key senior member of a Senate Committee as to bank matters. His wife, Wendy Gramm, for many years was the head of the highly corrupt federal agency regulating the commodities industry, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, CFTC. Later, she was on the Board of Directors of the infamous Enron Corporation, and has, so far, because of links to the Bush Crime Family, escaped being prosecuted for her role in reportedly covering up this vast money laundry.

As we confronted Senator Gramm with being on the verified BCCI bribery list, he did not deny it. Instead, raising his voice, he threatened us with physical harm if we dared set about to circulate the list. We got similar threats after confronting other members of the House and U.S. Senators.

The major journalist who gave us the list and all the details liked and trusted us. We got to know as well about his family, his unlisted number where he could be reached outside his office, and similar details. We promised him, as we do for all our sources, that we would never, never, never reveal his identity, even if faced with jail for contempt of court for refusing to answer [I have been jailed for such "contempt of court" some eight times in the last forty years.]

One time the reporter called us and I suspected his editor, the boss, was listening. The reporter sounded cold and strange. The reporter started denying that he ever previously spoke to us or gave us details of anything. He later wrote stories about BCCI, never mentioning the bribery list. Despite his precaution, he later lost his job.

We carefully followed up on every step he told us as to how to verify the list. In the process, we were astounded to discover that BCCI secretly in part financed Ted Turner, and his worldwide news empire which became CNN.

The bribery list was correct.

Two U.S. Senators knew too much themselves about the murder of President Kennedy; about treason committed by Ronald Reagan and the Elder Bush in the Iran-Contra Affair; about how the American CIA and various foreign intelligence agencies used BCCI to launder funds for political assassinations, committed within the U.S. and overseas.

One such Senator was John Tower (R., Texas). He headed up what became known as the Tower Commission which whitewashed the criminality of Reagan and Daddy Bush as to Iran-Contra. The other one was Senator John Heinz (R., Penn.) Heinz knew too much about fellow U.S. Senator Arlen Specter (R., Penn.) Specter had previously been on the staff of the infamous Warren Commission. Specter formulated the big lie that a single pristine bullet, marked Warren Commission Exhibit 399, somehow wounded John Connally in the limousine with JFK, and blew out Kennedy's brains. Cynics contend the bullet still circles the planet and no doubt, under Specter's big lie, also killed Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy, and a host of other assassination victims.

In the spring of 1991, just as we were verifying the bribery list, Senators Tower and Heinz were both assassinated, a few days apart. Both, in separate sabotaged plane crashes. By October, 1991, our exclusive story about the bribery list ran in a populist newspaper, "Spotlight" (later defunct after publishing continuously for 25 years). They had from us the bribery list and ran the complete story, but at the last minute, deleted the list from my story.

So, thereafter Senator "Cash & Carry"---Senator John Kerry (D., Mass.)---married the Heinz widow, heiress to the Ketchup fortune. And now the Senator is apparently going to run for U.S. President against his secret pal, George W. Bush. Both are members of the super-secret satanic worshipping cult, the Skull & Bastards Society.

Kerry is an expert on dope from Southeast Asia, from what is known as "The Golden Triangle". He is in a position to know that a Burmese General, in a videotaped confession and statement, stated tthat the dope cartel is headed by George Herbert Walker Bush, General Colin Powell, and Powell's sidekick, the infamous scoundrel Richard Armitage.

General Powell, by blackmailing others and corrupt means, escaped being prosecuted for his complicity in the My Lai scandal, where hundreds of Vietnamese women and children were murdered. Senator Kerry and Powell are in a position to know that Madame Ngu, widow of the assassinated head of the Saigon government, with Daddy Bush, Powell, and Armitage, jointly headed up "The Golden Triangle" dope cartel and financed thereby the murder of President Kennedy. [See the details in my website story "The Overthrow of the American Republic", Part 42, "The Public Execution of John F. Kennedy".]

Why do Senator "Cash & Carry" and his pal, George W. Bush, assume that some of us common Americans are asleep, and do not know what is really happening? When Daddy Bush ran against his CIA buddy Bill Clinton, in 1992, it was just shadow-boxing and a fraud upon the American common people. And now Dubya and Senator "Cash & Carry" are going to do a similar number on us?



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http://www.themodernreligion.com/terror/thirty-year-itch.html
The Thirty-Year Itch
By Robert Dreyfuss, Mother Jones, 29 March 2003
Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis, Washington's hawks conceived of a strategy for US control of the Persian Gulf's oil. Now, with the same strategists firmly in control of the White House, the Bush administration is playing out their script for global dominance.

If you were to spin the globe and look for real estate critical to building an American empire, your first stop would have to be the Persian Gulf. The desert sands of this region hold two of every three barrels of oil in the world -- Iraq's reserves alone are equal, by some estimates, to those of Russia, the United States, China, and Mexico combined. For the past 30 years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of an influential group of Washington foreign-policy strategists, who believe that in order to ensure its global dominance, the United States must seize control of the region and its oil. Born during the energy crisis of the 1970s and refined since then by a generation of policymakers, this approach is finding its boldest expression yet in the Bush administration -- which, with its plan to invade Iraq and install a regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer than any of its predecessors to transforming the Gulf into an American protectorate.

In the geopolitical vision driving current U.S. policy toward Iraq, the key to national security is global hegemony -- dominance over any and all potential rivals. To that end, the United States must not only be able to project its military forces anywhere, at any time. It must also control key resources, chief among them oil -- and especially Gulf oil. To the hawks who now set the tone at the White House and the Pentagon, the region is crucial not simply for its share of the U.S. oil supply (other sources have become more important over the years), but because it would allow the United States to maintain a lock on the world's energy lifeline and potentially deny access to its global competitors. The administration "believes you have to control resources in order to have access to them," says Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. "They are taken with the idea that the end of the Cold War left the United States able to impose its will globally -- and that those who have the ability to shape events with power have the duty to do so. It's ideology."

Iraq, in this view, is a strategic prize of unparalleled importance. Unlike the oil beneath Alaska's frozen tundra, locked away in the steppes of central Asia, or buried under stormy seas, Iraq's crude is readily accessible and, at less than $1.50 a barrel, some of the cheapest in the world to produce. Already, over the past several months, Western companies have been meeting with Iraqi exiles to try to stake a claim to that bonanza.

But while the companies hope to cash in on an American-controlled Iraq, the push to remove Saddam Hussein hasn't been driven by oil executives, many of whom are worried about the consequences of war. Nor are Vice President Cheney and President Bush, both former oilmen, looking at the Gulf simply for the profits that can be earned there. The administration is thinking bigger, much bigger, than that.

"Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than oil as fuel," says Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Resource Wars. "Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan, and China. It's having our hand on the spigot."

Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United States has steadily been accumulating military muscle in the Gulf by building bases, selling weaponry, and forging military partnerships. Now, it is poised to consolidate its might in a place that will be a fulcrum of the world's balance of power for decades to come. At a stroke, by taking control of Iraq, the Bush administration can solidify a long-running strategic design. "It's the Kissinger plan," says James Akins, a former U.S. diplomat. "I thought it had been killed, but it's back."

Akins learned a hard lesson about the politics of oil when he served as a U.S. envoy in Kuwait and Iraq, and ultimately as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the oil crisis of 1973 and '74. At his home in Washington, D.C., shelves filled with Middle Eastern pottery and other memorabilia cover the walls, souvenirs of his years in the Foreign Service. Nearly three decades later, he still gets worked up while recalling his first encounter with the idea that the United States should be prepared to occupy Arab oil-producing countries.

In 1975, while Akins was ambassador in Saudi Arabia, an article headlined "Seizing Arab Oil" appeared in Harper's. The author, who used the pseudonym Miles Ignotus, was identified as "a Washington-based professor and defense consultant with intimate links to high-level U.S. policymakers." The article outlined, as Akins puts it, "how we could solve all our economic and political problems by taking over the Arab oil fields [and] bringing in Texans and Oklahomans to operate them." Simultaneously, a rash of similar stories appeared in other magazines and newspapers. "I knew that it had to have been the result of a deep background briefing," Akins says. "You don't have eight people coming up with the same screwy idea at the same time, independently.

"Then I made a fatal mistake," Akins continues. "I said on television that anyone who would propose that is either a madman, a criminal, or an agent of the Soviet Union." Soon afterward, he says, he learned that the background briefing had been conducted by his boss, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Akins was fired later that year.

Kissinger has never acknowledged having planted the seeds for the article. But in an interview with Business Week that same year, he delivered a thinly veiled threat to the Saudis, musing about bringing oil prices down through "massive political warfare against countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran to make them risk their political stability and maybe their security if they did not cooperate."

In the 1970s, America's military presence in the Gulf was virtually nil, so the idea of seizing control of its oil was a pipe dream. Still, starting with the Miles Ignotus article, and a parallel one by conservative strategist and Johns Hopkins University professor Robert W. Tucker in Commentary, the idea began to gain favor among a feisty group of hardline, pro-Israeli thinkers, especially the hawkish circle aligned with Democratic senators Henry Jackson of Washington and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York.

Eventually, this amalgam of strategists came to be known as "neoconservatives," and they played important roles in President Reagan's Defense Department and at think tanks and academic policy centers in the 1980s. Led by Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, they now occupy several dozen key posts in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department. At the top, they are closest to Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who have been closely aligned since both men served in the White House under President Ford in the mid-1970s. They also clustered around Cheney when he served as secretary of defense during the Gulf War in 1991.

Throughout those years, and especially after the Gulf War, U.S. forces have steadily encroached on the Gulf and the surrounding region, from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia. In preparing for an invasion and occupation of Iraq, the administration has been building on the steps taken by military and policy planners over the past quarter century.

Step one: The Rapid Deployment Force
In 1973 and '74, and again in 1979, political upheavals in the Middle East led to huge spikes in oil prices, which rose fifteenfold over the decade and focused new attention on the Persian Gulf. In January 1980, President Carter effectively declared the Gulf a zone of U.S. influence, especially against encroachment from the Soviet Union. "Let our position be absolutely clear," he said, announcing what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine. "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." To back up this doctrine, Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force, an "over-the-horizon" military unit capable of rushing several thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf in a crisis.

Step two: The Central Command
In the 1980s, under President Reagan, the United States began pressing countries in the Gulf for access to bases and support facilities. The Rapid Deployment Force was transformed into the Central Command, a new U.S. military command authority with responsibility for the Gulf and the surrounding region from eastern Africa to Afghanistan. Reagan tried to organize a "strategic consensus" of anti-Soviet allies, including Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The United States sold billions of dollars' worth of arms to the Saudis in the early '80s, from AWACS surveillance aircraft to F-15 fighters. And in 1987, at the height of the war between Iraq and Iran, the U.S. Navy created the Joint Task Force-Middle East to protect oil tankers plying the waters of the Gulf, thus expanding a U.S. naval presence of just three or four warships into a flotilla of 40-plus aircraft carriers, battleships, and cruisers.

Step three: The Gulf War
Until 1991, the United States was unable to persuade the Arab Gulf states to allow a permanent American presence on their soil. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, while maintaining its close relationship with the United States, began to diversify its commercial and military ties; by the time U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman arrived there in the late Ô80s, the United States had fallen to fourth place among arms suppliers to the kingdom. "The United States was being supplanted even in commercial terms by the British, the French, even the Chinese," Freeman notes.

All that changed with the Gulf War. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states no longer opposed a direct U.S. military presence, and American troops, construction squads, arms salesmen, and military assistance teams rushed in. "The Gulf War put Saudi Arabia back on the map and revived a relationship that had been severely attrited," says Freeman.

In the decade after the war, the United States sold more than $43 billion worth of weapons, equipment, and military construction projects to Saudi Arabia, and $16 billion more to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, according to data compiled by the Federation of American Scientists. Before Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military enjoyed the right to stockpile, or "pre-position," military supplies only in the comparatively remote Gulf state of Oman on the Indian Ocean. After the war, nearly every country in the region began conducting joint military exercises, hosting U.S. naval units and Air Force squadrons, and granting the United States pre-positioning rights. "Our military presence in the Middle East has increased dramatically," then-Defense Secretary William Cohen boasted in 1995.

Another boost to the U.S. presence was the unilateral imposition, in 1991, of no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, enforced mostly by U.S. aircraft from bases in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. "There was a massive buildup, especially around Incirlik in Turkey, to police the northern no-fly zone, and around [the Saudi capital of] Riyadh, to police the southern no-fly zone," says Colin Robinson of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank. A billion-dollar, high-tech command center was built by Saudi Arabia near Riyadh, and over the past two years the United States has secretly been completing another one in Qatar. The Saudi facilities "were built with capacities far beyond the ability of Saudi Arabia to use them," Robinson says. "And that's exactly what Qatar is doing now."

Step four: Afghanistan
The war in Afghanistan -- and the open-ended war on terrorism, which has led to U.S strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere -- further boosted America's strength in the region. The administration has won large increases in the defense budget -- which now stands at about $400 billion, up from just over $300 billion in 2000 -- and a huge chunk of that budget, perhaps as much as $60 billion, is slated to support U.S. forces in and around the Persian Gulf. Military facilities on the perimeter of the Gulf, from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, have been expanded, and a web of bases and training missions has extended the U.S. presence deep into central Asia. From Afghanistan to the landlocked former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, U.S. forces have established themselves in an area that had long been in Russia's sphere of influence. Oil-rich in its own right, and strategically vital, central Asia is now the eastern link in a nearly continuous chain of U.S. bases, facilities, and allies stretching from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea far into the Asian hinterland.

Step five: Iraq
Removing Saddam Hussein could be the final piece of the puzzle, cementing an American imperial presence. It is "highly possible" that the United States will maintain military bases in Iraq, Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative strategist, recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time," he said. "When we have economic problems, it's been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies."

Kagan, along with William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, is a founder of the think tank Project for the New American Century, an assembly of foreign-policy hawks whose supporters include the Pentagon's Perle, New Republic publisher Martin Peretz, and former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey. Among the group's affiliates in the Bush administration are Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz; I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff; Elliott Abrams, the Middle East director at the National Security Council; and Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison to the Iraqi opposition groups. Kagan's group, tied to a web of similar neoconservative, pro-Israeli organizations, represents the constellation of thinkers whose ideological affinity was forged in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

To Akins, who has just returned from Saudi Arabia, it's a team that looks all too familiar, seeking to implement the plan first outlined back in 1975. "It'll be easier once we have Iraq," he says. "Kuwait, we already have. Qatar and Bahrain, too. So it's only Saudi Arabia we're talking about, and the United Arab Emirates falls into place."

LAST SUMMER, Perle provided a brief glimpse into his circle's thinking when he invited rand Corporation strategist Laurent Murawiec to make a presentation to his Defense Policy Board, a committee of former senior officials and generals that advises the Pentagon on big-picture policy ideas. Murawiec's closed-door briefing provoked a storm of criticism when it was leaked to the media; he described Saudi Arabia as the "kernel of evil," suggested that the Saudi royal family should be replaced or overthrown, and raised the idea of a U.S. occupation of Saudi oil fields. He ultimately lost his job when rand decided he was too controversial.

Murawiec is part of a Washington school of thought that views virtually all of the nations in the Gulf as unstable "failed states" and maintains that only the United States has the power to forcibly reorganize and rebuild them. In this view, the arms systems and bases that were put in place to defend the region also provide a ready-made infrastructure for taking over countries and their oil fields in the event of a crisis.

The Defense Department likely has contingency plans to occupy Saudi Arabia, says Robert E. Ebel, director of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank whose advisers include Kissinger; former Defense Secretary and CIA director James Schlesinger; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser. "If something happens in Saudi Arabia," Ebel says, "if the ruling family is ousted, if they decide to shut off the oil supply, we have to go in."

Two years ago, Ebel, a former mid-level CIA official, oversaw a CSIS task force that included several members of Congress as well as representatives from industry including ExxonMobil, Arco, BP, Shell, Texaco, and the American Petroleum Institute. Its report, "The Geopolitics of Energy Into the 21st Century," concluded that the world will find itself dependent for many years on unstable oil-producing nations, around which conflicts and wars are bound to swirl. "Oil is high-profile stuff," Ebel says. "Oil fuels military power, national treasuries, and international politics. It is no longer a commodity to be bought and sold within the confines of traditional energy supply and demand balances. Rather, it has been transformed into a determinant of well-being, of national security, and of international power."

As vital as the Persian Gulf is now, its strategic importance is likely to grow exponentially in the next 20 years. Nearly one out of every three barrels of oil reserves in the world lie under just two countries: Saudi Arabia (with 259 billion barrels of proven reserves) and Iraq (112 billion). Those figures may understate Iraq's largely unexplored reserves, which according to U.S. government estimates may hold as many as 432 billion barrels.

With supplies in many other regions, especially the United States and the North Sea, nearly exhausted, oil from Saudi Arabia and Iraq is becoming ever more critical -- a fact duly noted in the administration's National Energy Policy, released in 2001 by a White House task force. By 2020, the Gulf will supply between 54 percent and 67 percent of the world's crude, the document said, making the region "vital to U.S. interests." According to G. Daniel Butler, an oil-markets analyst at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Saudi Arabia's production capacity will rise from its current 9.4 million barrels a day to 22.1 million over the next 17 years. Iraq, which in 2002 produced a mere 2 million barrels a day, "could easily be a double-digit producer by 2020," says Butler.

U.S. strategists aren't worried primarily about America's own oil supplies; for decades, the United States has worked to diversify its sources of oil, with Venezuela, Nigeria, Mexico, and other countries growing in importance. But for Western Europe and Japan, as well as the developing industrial powers of eastern Asia, the Gulf is all-important. Whoever controls it will maintain crucial global leverage for decades to come.

Today, notes the EIA's Butler, two-thirds of Gulf oil goes to Western industrial nations. By 2015, according to a study by the CIA's National Intelligence Council, three-quarters of the Gulf's oil will go to Asia, chiefly to China. China's growing dependence on the Gulf could cause it to develop closer military and political ties with countries such as Iran and Iraq, according to the report produced by Ebel's CSIS task force. "They have different political interests in the Gulf than we do," Ebel says. "Is it to our advantage to have another competitor for oil in the Persian Gulf?"

David Long, who served as a U.S. diplomat in Saudi Arabia and as chief of the Near East division in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research during the Reagan administration, likens the Bush administration's approach to the philosophy of Admiral Mahan, the 19th-century military strategist who advocated the use of naval power to create a global American empire. "They want to be the world's enforcer," he says. "It's a worldview, a geopolitical position. They say, 'We need hegemony in the region.'"

UNTIL THE 1970s, the face of American power in the Gulf was the U.S. oil industry, led by Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, and Gulf, all of whom competed fiercely with Britain's BP and Anglo-Dutch Shell. But in the early '70s, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states nationalized their oil industries, setting up state-run companies to run wells, pipelines, and production facilities. Not only did that enhance the power of opec, enabling that organization to force a series of sharp price increases, but it alarmed U.S. policymakers.

Today, a growing number of Washington strategists are advocating a direct U.S. challenge to state-owned petroleum industries in oil-producing countries, especially the Persian Gulf. Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and CSIS are conducting discussions about privatizing Iraq's oil industry. Some of them have put forward detailed plans outlining how Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and other nations could be forced to open up their oil and gas industries to foreign investment. The Bush administration itself has been careful not to say much about what might happen to Iraq's oil. But State Department officials have had preliminary talks about the oil industry with Iraqi exiles, and there have been reports that the U.S. military wants to use at least part of the country's oil revenue to pay for the cost of military occupation.

"One of the major problems with the Persian Gulf is that the means of production are in the hands of the state," Rob Sobhani, an oil-industry consultant, told an American Enterprise Institute conference last fall in Washington. Already, he noted, several U.S. oil companies are studying the possibility of privatization in the Gulf. Dismantling government-owned oil companies, Sobhani argued, could also force political changes in the region. "The beginning of liberal democracy can be achieved if you take the means of production out of the hands of the state," he said, acknowledging that Arabs would resist that idea. "It's going to take a lot of selling, a lot of marketing," he concluded.

Just which companies would get to claim Iraq's oil has been a subject of much debate. After a war, the contracts that Iraq's state-owned oil company has signed with European, Russian, and Chinese oil firms might well be abrogated, leaving the field to U.S. oil companies. "What they have in mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies," says Akins. "The American oil companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of this war."

The would-be rulers of a post-Saddam Iraq have been thinking along the same lines. "American oil companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," says Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a group of aristocrats and wealthy Iraqis who fled the country when its repressive monarchy was overthrown in 1958. During a visit to Washington last fall, Chalabi held meetings with at least three major U.S. oil companies, trying to enlist their support. Similar meetings between Iraqi exiles and U.S. companies have also been taking place in Europe.

"Iraqi exiles have approached us, saying, 'You can have our oil if we can get back in there,'" says R. Gerald Bailey, who headed Exxon's Middle East operations until 1997. "All the major American companies have met with them in Paris, London, Brussels, all over. They're all jockeying for position. You can't ignore it, but you've got to do it on the QT. And you can't wait till it gets too far along."

But the companies are also anxious about the consequences of war, according to many experts, oil-company executives, and former State Department officials. "The oil companies are caught in the middle," says Bailey. Executives fear that war could create havoc in the region, turning Arab states against the United States and Western oil companies. On the other hand, should a U.S. invasion of Iraq be successful, they want to be there when the oil is divvied up. Says David Long, the former U.S. diplomat, "It's greed versus fear."

Ibrahim Oweiss, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown University who coined the term "petrodollar" and has also been a consultant to Occidental and BP, has been closely watching the cautious maneuvering by the companies. "I know that the oil companies are scared about the outcome of this," he says. "They are not at all sure this is in the best interests of the oil industry."

Anne Joyce, an editor at the Washington-based Middle East Policy Council who has spoken privately to top Exxon officials, says it's clear that most oil-industry executives "are afraid" of what a war in the Persian Gulf could mean in the long term -- especially if tensions in the region spiral out of control. "They see it as much too risky, and they are risk averse," she says. "They think it has 'fiasco' written all over it."

A Mother Jones contributing writer, Robert Dreyfuss was named one of the "best unsung investigative journalists working in print" last year by the Columbia Journalism Review.



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White House: Computer hard drives tossed
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 21, 7:34 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005.

The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed.

"When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired ... the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction," the White House said in a sworn declaration filed with U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola.

It has been the goal of a White House Office of Administration "refresh program" to replace one-third of its workstations every year in the Executive Office of the President, according to the declaration.

Some, but not necessarily all, of the data on old hard drives is moved to new computer hard drives, the declaration added.

In proposing an e-mail recovery plan Tuesday, Facciola expressed concern that a large volume of electronic messages may be missing from White House computer servers, as two private groups that are suing the White House allege.

Facciola proposed the drastic approach of going to individual workstations of White House computer users after the White House disclosed in January that it recycled its computer backup tapes before October 2003. Recycling — taping over existing data — raises the possibility that any missing e-mails may not be recoverable.

At a House committee hearing last month, a computer expert who previously worked at the White House called the e-mail system "primitive" and said it was set up in a way that created a high risk that data would be lost from White House servers where it was being archived.

Under pressure to provide details about its computer system, the White House told the congressional committee that it never completed work that began in 2003 on a planned records management and e-mail archiving system. The White House canceled the project in late 2006 and says it is still working on a new version.

In the absence of a permanent archiving system, the White House has been archiving e-mails on White House servers since early in the administration.

The White House says it does not know if any e-mails are missing, but is looking into the matter.

It would be costly and time-consuming for the White House to institute an e-mail retrieval program that entails pulling data off each individual workstation, the court papers filed Friday state.



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http://www.realjewnews.com/?p=178
McCAIN BOUGHT BY JEWS
VIA THE ROTHSCHILDS!
JOHN McCAIN KNOWS WHICH SIDE HIS BREAD is buttered on. And that’s the Jewish-side of campaign contributions.

On March 20 2008, the Jews “Lord” Jacob Rothschild and his son, the “Honorable” Nathaniel Rothschild, invited McCain to attend a fund-raiser in the posh London Spencer House on March 20 2008 Here.

Many are concerned about McCain’s Rothschild-connection for 2 reasons:

$1 The Issue Of Foreign Contributors To A USA Election:

* The Federal Election Campaign Act states:

— “FECA prohibits any foreign national from contributing, donating or spending funds in connection with any election in the United States either directly or indirectly.” — Here

$2 The Issue Of The Rothschild Involvement In The Awarding Of The US Air Force Tanker Contract To European Airbus (EADS) Over America’s Boeing:

* The Rothschilds through their Business-Intelligence Group, “Diligence,” have a large financial stake in the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS) headquartered in Paris. EADS bumped Boeing out of the running for the US Air Force Contract Here.

* Thus McCain is a traitor to American interests for currying up to the Jewish Rothschilds who took away thousands of American jobs in their usurping of the US Air Force Contract with Boeing Here.

McCAIN’S JEWISH HANDLER
SENATOR JOSEPH LIEBERMAN

SENATOR JOSEPH LIEBERMAN IS an Orthodox Jew. Lieberman has obtained for McCain Big Jewish Money.

Lieberman recently told HaAretz News why Jews should vote for McCain:

“McCain will not do anything that will compromise Israel’s security.”

“McCain was fighting for the surge in Iraq when it was unpopular.”


“McCain will be strong when it comes to dealing with Iran. The Iranians will not respond to talks. The Iranians will only respond to strength [translate ‘war.’]”

See: “Why Jews Should Vote For McCain According To Lieberman” Here

McCAIN RETRACTS
“AMERICA IS A CHRISTIAN NATION” SPEECH
TO PLEASE THE JEWS

IN AN INTERVIEW WITH Beliefnet in September of 2007 Here McCain said:

— “Since this nation was founded on Christian principles, I would prefer someone as President who has a solid grounding in the Christian faith. The Constitution established America as a Christian nation.” —

Immediately the Jews sprung into Anti-Christian action:

— “Former maverick John McCain’s statements were repugnant. It’s been sad watching McCain transform from a political maverick to a religious-right mouthpiece.” —
Ira Forman of the National Jewish Democratic Committee Here.

No sooner did the Jews threaten to take their money from McCain, did the coward retract:

— “I only meant to say that the US was founded on Judeo-Christian values which is basically the rights of human dignity and human rights. I believe that anyone of any faith can be President.” — Here

Indeed, John McCain is an unprincipled man who will say anything, (always contradicting himself), simply to get votes. In a 2007 Massachusetts forum to court the Gay Vote, McCain said:

— “I think that gay marriages should be allowed if there’s a ceremony kind of thing. I believe that if people want to have private ceremonies that’s fine.” — Here



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