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How to Sell a War
This essay is excerpted from Cockburn and St. Clair's new book on the death of the mainstream media: End Times.
The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as "weapons of mass destruction" and "rogue state" were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.
To understand the Iraq war you don't need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.
Consider the picaresque journey of Tony Blair's plagiarized dossier on Iraq, from a grad student's website to a cut-and-paste job in the prime minister's bombastic speech to the House of Commons. Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery. Bush, who looted whole passages from Blair's speech for his own clumsy presentations, has skated freely through the tempest. Why?
Unlike Blair, the Bush team never wanted to present a legal case for war. They had no interest in making any of their allegations about Iraq hold up to a standard of proof. The real effort was aimed at amping up the mood for war by using the psychology of fear.
Facts were never important to the Bush team. They were disposable nuggets that could be discarded at will and replaced by whatever new rationale that played favorably with their polls and focus groups. The war was about weapons of mass destruction one week, al-Qaeda the next. When neither allegation could be substantiated on the ground, the fall back position became the mass graves (many from the Iran/Iraq war where the U.S.A. backed Iraq) proving that Saddam was an evil thug who deserved to be toppled. The motto of the Bush PR machine was: Move on. Don't explain. Say anything to conceal the perfidy behind the real motives for war. Never look back. Accuse the questioners of harboring unpatriotic sensibilities. Eventually, even the cagey Wolfowitz admitted that the official case for war was made mainly to make the invasion palatable, not to justify it.
The Bush claque of neocon hawks viewed the Iraq war as a product and, just like a new pair of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. The same techniques (and often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps were deployed to retail the Iraq war. To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spinmeisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit the script, it was shaded, retooled or junked.
Take Charlotte Beers whom Powell picked as undersecretary of state in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was a grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as "the queen of Madison Avenue." On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben's Rice and another for Head and Shoulder's dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses: Ogilvy and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.
At the state department Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell's words, "the branding of U.S. foreign policy." She extracted more than $500 million from Congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely focused on beaming U.S. propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.
"Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time," said Beers. "All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves, but for the outside world." Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of U.S. policy.
Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct communication between representatives of nations, a conversational give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie), but an exchange nonetheless. Public diplomacy, as defined by Beers, is something else entirely. It's a one-way street, a unilateral broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic and international, a kind of informational carpet-bombing.The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of "freedom" to oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of the U.S. war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise missiles were depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled the Beers equation to its bizarre essence: "This war is about peace."
Beers quietly resigned her post a few weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles battered Baghdad. From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks of shock and awe were all after play.
Over at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld drafted Victoria "Torie" Clarke as his director of public affairs. Clarke knew the ropes inside the Beltway. Before becoming Rumsfeld's mouthpiece, she had commanded one of the world's great parlors for powerbrokers: Hill and Knowlton's D.C. office.
Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig, Clarke convened regular meetings with a select group of Washington's top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop a marketing plan for the Pentagon's forthcoming terror wars. The group was filled with heavy-hitters and was strikingly bipartisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included PR executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Lowry, and Republican political consultant Rich Galen.
The brain trust also boasted top Democratic fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR's Cokie Roberts and son of the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana. At the very time Boggs was conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame the war on terror, he was also working feverishly for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis PR firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington. In the wake of hostile press coverage following the exposure of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed all the well-placed help it could buy. They seem to have gotten their money's worth. Boggs' felicitous influence-peddling may help to explain why the references to Saudi funding of al-Qaeda were dropped from the recent congressional report on the investigation into intelligence failures and 9/11.
According to the trade publication PR Week, the Rumsfeld Group sent "messaging advice" to the Pentagon. The group told Clarke and Rumsfeld that in order to get the American public to buy into the war on terrorism, they needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just nebulous groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, there needed to be a fixed target for the military campaigns, some distant place to drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs. They suggested the notion (already embedded in Rumsfeld's mind) of playing up the notion of so-called rogue states as the real masters of terrorism. Thus was born the Axis of Evil, which, of course, wasn't an "axis" at all, since two of the states, Iran and Iraq, hated each other, and neither had anything at all to do with the third, North Korea.
Tens of millions in federal money were poured into private public relations and media firms working to craft and broadcast the Bush dictat that Saddam had to be taken out before the Iraqi dictator blew up the world by dropping chemical and nuclear bombs from long-range drones. Many of these PR executives and image consultants were old friends of the high priests in the Bush inner sanctum. Indeed, they were veterans, like Cheney and Powell, of the previous war against Iraq, another engagement that was more spin than combat .
At the top of the list was John Rendon, head of the D.C. firm, the Rendon Group. Rendon is one of Washington's heaviest hitters, a Beltway fixer who never let political affiliation stand in the way of an assignment. Rendon served as a media consultant for Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter, as well as Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Whenever the Pentagon wanted to go to war, he offered his services at a price. During Desert Storm, Rendon pulled in $100,000 a month from the Kuwaiti royal family. He followed this up with a $23 million contract from the CIA to produce anti-Saddam propaganda in the region.
As part of this CIA project, Rendon created and named the Iraqi National Congress and tapped his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the shady financier, to head the organization.
Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon handed the Rendon Group another big assignment: public relations for the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon was also deeply involved in the planning and public relations for the pre-emptive war on Iraq, though both Rendon and the Pentagon refuse to disclose the details of the group's work there.
But it's not hard to detect the manipulative hand of Rendon behind many of the Iraq war's signature events, including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by U.S. troops and Chalabi associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags as the Third Infantry rolled by them. Rendon had pulled off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American flags to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration. "Where do you think they got those American flags?" clucked Rendon in 1991. "That was my assignment."
The Rendon Group may also have had played a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has now come back to haunt the Bush administration. In December of 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the inner circle of the Bush White House preferred the intelligence coming from Chalabi and his associates to that being proffered by analysts at the CIA.
So Rendon and his circle represented a new kind of off-the-shelf PSYOPs , the privatization of official propaganda. "I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician," said Rendon. "I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager."
What exactly, is perception management? The Pentagon defines it this way: "actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives and objective reasoning." In other words, lying about the intentions of the U.S. government. In a rare display of public frankness, the Pentagon actually let slip its plan (developed by Rendon) to establish a high-level den inside the Department Defense for perception management. They called it the Office of Strategic Influence and among its many missions was to plant false stories in the press.
Nothing stirs the corporate media into outbursts of pious outrage like an official government memo bragging about how the media are manipulated for political objectives. So the New York Times and Washington Post threw indignant fits about the Office of Strategic Influence; the Pentagon shut down the operation, and the press gloated with satisfaction on its victory. Yet, Rumsfeld told the Pentagon press corps that while he was killing the office, the same devious work would continue. "You can have the corpse," said Rumsfeld. "You can have the name. But I'm going to keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have."
At a diplomatic level, despite the hired guns and the planted stories, this image war was lost. It failed to convince even America's most fervent allies and dependent client states that Iraq posed much of a threat. It failed to win the blessing of the U.N. and even NATO, a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington. At the end of the day, the vaunted coalition of the willing consisted of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia, and a cohort of former Soviet bloc nations. Even so, the citizens of the nations that cast their lot with the U.S.A. overwhelmingly opposed the war.
Domestically, it was a different story. A population traumatized by terror threats and shattered economy became easy prey for the saturation bombing of the Bush message that Iraq was a terrorist state linked to al-Qaeda that was only minutes away from launching attacks on America with weapons of mass destruction.
Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans, but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon.
Of course, the closest Saddam came to possessing a nuke was a rusting gas centrifuge buried for 13 years in the garden of Mahdi Obeidi, a retired Iraqi scientist. Iraq didn't have any functional chemical or biological weapons. In fact, it didn't even possess any SCUD missiles, despite erroneous reports fed by Pentagon PR flacks alleging that it had fired SCUDs into Kuwait.
This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception."
During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no one really wanted.
What the Pentagon sought was a new kind of living room war, where instead of photos of mangled soldiers and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans viewed and to a large extent the content of the stories. By embedding reporters inside selected divisions, Clarke believed the Pentagon could count on the reporters to build relationships with the troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It worked, naturally. One reporter for a national network trembled on camera that the U.S. Army functioned as "our protectors." The late David Bloom of NBC confessed on the air that he was willing to do "anything and everything they can ask of us."
When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. Of course, nearly every detail of her heroic adventure proved to be as fictive and maudlin as any made-for-TV-movie. But the ordeal of Private Lynch, which dominated the news for more than a week, served its purpose: to distract attention from a stalled campaign that was beginning to look at lot riskier than the American public had been hoodwinked into believing.
The Lynch story was fed to the eager press by a Pentagon operation called Combat Camera, the Army network of photographers, videographers and editors that sends 800 photos and 25 video clips a day to the media. The editors at Combat Camera carefully culled the footage to present the Pentagon's montage of the war, eliding such unsettling images as collateral damage, cluster bombs, dead children and U.S. soldiers, napalm strikes and disgruntled troops.
"A lot of our imagery will have a big impact on world opinion," predicted Lt. Jane Larogue, director of Combat Camera in Iraq. She was right. But as the hot war turned into an even hotter occupation, the Pentagon, despite airy rhetoric from occupation supremo Paul Bremer about installing democratic institutions such as a free press, moved to tighten its monopoly on the flow images out of Iraq. First, it tried to shut down Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel. Then the Pentagon intimated that it would like to see all foreign TV news crews banished from Baghdad.
Few newspapers fanned the hysteria about the threat posed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction as sedulously as did the Washington Post. In the months leading up to the war, the Post's pro-war op-eds outnumbered the anti-war columns by a 3-to-1 margin.
Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post's editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of war."
The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam. Anything to punish Iran was the message coming from the White House. Donald Rumsfeld himself was sent as President Ronald Reagan's personal envoy to Baghdad. Rumsfeld conveyed the bold message than an Iraq defeat would be viewed as a "strategic setback for the United States." This sleazy alliance was sealed with a handshake caught on videotape. When CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre replayed the footage for Rumsfeld in the spring of 2003, the secretary of defense snapped, "Where'd you get that? Iraqi television?"
The current crop of Iraq hawks also saw Saddam much differently then. Take the writer Laura Mylroie, sometime colleague of the New York Times' Judy Miller, who persists in peddling the ludicrous conspiracy that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
How times have changed! In 1987, Mylroie felt downright cuddly toward Saddam. She wrote an article for the New Republic titled "Back Iraq: Time for a U.S. Tilt in the Mideast," arguing that the U.S. should publicly embrace Saddam's secular regime as a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. The co-author of this mesmerizing weave of wonkery was none other than Daniel Pipes, perhaps the nation's most bellicose Islamophobe. "The American weapons that Iraq could make good use of include remotely scatterable and anti-personnel mines and counterartillery radar," wrote Mylroie and Pipes. "The United States might also consider upgrading intelligence it is supplying Baghdad."
In the rollout for the war, Mylroie seemed to be everywhere hawking the invasion of Iraq. She would often appear on two or three different networks in the same day. How did the reporter manage this feat? She had help in the form of Eleana Benador, the media placement guru who runs Benador Associates. Born in Peru, Benador parlayed her skills as a linguist into a lucrative career as media relations whiz for the Washington foreign policy elite. She also oversees the Middle East Forum, a fanatically pro-Zionist white paper mill. Her clients include some of the nation's most fervid hawks, including Michael Ledeen, Charles Krauthammer, Al Haig, Max Boot, Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, and Judy Miller. During the Iraq war, Benador's assignment was to embed this squadron of pro-war zealots into the national media, on talk shows, and op-ed pages.
Benador not only got them the gigs, she also crafted the theme and made sure they all stayed on message. "There are some things, you just have to state them in a different way, in a slightly different way," said Benador. "If not, people get scared." Scared of intentions of their own government.
It could have been different. All of the holes in the Bush administration's gossamer case for war were right there for the mainstream press to expose. Instead, the U.S. press, just like the oil companies, sought to commercialize the Iraq war and profit from the invasions. They didn't want to deal with uncomfortable facts or present voices of dissent.
Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network's executives blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its run Donahue's show attracted more viewers than any other program on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the memo said, offered "a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."
The memo warned that Donahue's show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, "a home for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot and hoisted the battle flag.
It's war that sells.
There's a helluva caveat, of course. Once you buy it, the merchants of war accept no returns.
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book is End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, co-written with Alexander Cockburn.
Scott Ritter: 'politically motivated hype' over Iran
'Iran is simply trying to do that which it is legally allowed to do'
Former UN Weapons Inspector says United States, Israel creating Iran crisis 'out of nothing'.
NEW YORK - Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter warned Tuesday against the “politically motivated hype” over Iran’s nuclear program.
"The Obama administration has come to a preordained conclusion that there’s nothing that can be done about Iran’s nuclear program, that Iran either has to get rid of it all, or there’s nothing to discuss about. That’s not much of a discussion," Ritter told Democracy Now!.
"Here we are condemning Iran for doing its job, declaring a facility, inviting inspectors in. And the conclusion it’s reached from this? That they’re producing nuclear weapons," said Ritter.
"This is politically motivated hype designed to create a situation this coming Thursday that will find the United States unable to reach any sort of agreement with Iran about its nuclear program," he added.
Ritter, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991-1998, is author of Target Iran.
"Even if Iran produces this new facility, which, by the way, is not in operation and won’t be in operation for over a year, no nuclear material has been diverted, there still is a full material balance, and the IAEA is in complete control of the situation. Iran is not in violation," explained Ritter.
"This is much ado about nothing. But again, we come back to the original premise: this is about political hype, the United States hyping up a capability in Iran which doesn’t exist, and that is the capability to produce nuclear weapons," Ritter added.
Ritter explained the vital Iranian need for nuclear energy.
The Iranians "strategically require an additional source of energy, such as nuclear energy" to supplement their domestic energy usage so that they free up their oil production and gas production for exportation, so they can earn money. "This is a big deal. This isn’t insignificant," explained Ritter.
However, Israel and the United States say they want to bomb Iranian nuclear facility, prompting Tehran to react.
"The first thing you do is you build redundancy, and that’s what this new Qom facility represents. It’s redundancy. It’s a backup to the Natanz primary facility. Again, it’s been declared, no nuclear material has been diverted. But it’s there as a backup. The second thing you do is you fire off missiles in a warning that you have an inherent right and capability of self-defense," said Ritter.
Israel has launched a massive air exercise last year, in which it demonstrated the ability to fly hundreds of aircraft the distance necessary to strike targets in Iran.
The United States is also carrying out exercises with Israel.
"The bottom line is it’s the United States and Israel which are the more aggressive of the players here. Iran is not an aggressor. Iran has not attacked anybody. Iran is simply trying to do that which it is legally allowed to do: produce enriched uranium for the purposes of nuclear power," said Ritter.
"It’s Israel, which, by the way, is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, claims it will never be a signatory and has a massive nuclear weapons capability—it’s Israel and the United States which are creating a crisis out of nothing," he added.Indonesia, Home of World's Deadliest Quakes
Three of world's deadliest earthquakes occurred in Indonesia.
VIVAnews - An earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter Scale shook Samoa, United States, on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 local time.
The earthquake, which triggered Tsunami, killed at least 39 people.
However, the earthquake did not even make the list of strongest earthquakes in the world. Here is the list of the world’s most powerful earthquakes according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), published on news.com.au on Wednesday, September 30.
Three of them hit Indonesia.
1.9.5 SR-measured earthquake struck Chile on May 22, 1960. The lives of 1655 people were taken. A Tsunami, which was caused by the earthquake, also killed 68 people in Hawaii, 138 in Japan and 32 in the Philippines.
2.An earthquake, which measures 9.2 on the Richter scale, hit Alaska on March 28, 1964. Fifteen people were killed and 113 others died due to the following Tsunami.
3.On December 26, 2004, a 9.1 SR-measured earthquake took place in Aceh. The earthquake led to a devastating Tsunami which killed 230.000 people in several countries throughout the world. The deadliest earthquake ever in history.
4.Hawaii was hit by an earthquake that measures 9.0 on the Richter scale on November 4, 1952. Fortunately, nobody was killed.
5.A 8.8 SR-measured earthquake occurred in Ecuador on January 31, 1906. The earthquake elicited Tsunami that killed 1500 people in Ecuador and Columbia.
6.A 8.7 SR-measured earthquake shook Alaska on February 1965. No dead victims reported.
7.An earthquake that measures 8.6 on the Richter scale hit Indonesia on March 28, 2005. More than 1.300 people died.
8.A 8.6 SR-measured earthquake rocked Tibet on August 15, 1950. Seven hundred and eighty people were killed.
9.Alaska, March 9. 1957. An earthquake measuring 8.6 on the Richter scale occurred. Nobody was killed.
10.On September 12, 2007, Indonesia was hit by a 8.8 SR-measured earthquake. At least 25 people died.
VIVAnews - An earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter Scale shook Samoa, United States, on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 local time.
The earthquake, which triggered Tsunami, killed at least 39 people.
However, the earthquake did not even make the list of strongest earthquakes in the world. Here is the list of the world’s most powerful earthquakes according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), published on news.com.au on Wednesday, September 30.
Three of them hit Indonesia.
1.9.5 SR-measured earthquake struck Chile on May 22, 1960. The lives of 1655 people were taken. A Tsunami, which was caused by the earthquake, also killed 68 people in Hawaii, 138 in Japan and 32 in the Philippines.
2.An earthquake, which measures 9.2 on the Richter scale, hit Alaska on March 28, 1964. Fifteen people were killed and 113 others died due to the following Tsunami.
3.On December 26, 2004, a 9.1 SR-measured earthquake took place in Aceh. The earthquake led to a devastating Tsunami which killed 230.000 people in several countries throughout the world. The deadliest earthquake ever in history.
4.Hawaii was hit by an earthquake that measures 9.0 on the Richter scale on November 4, 1952. Fortunately, nobody was killed.
5.A 8.8 SR-measured earthquake occurred in Ecuador on January 31, 1906. The earthquake elicited Tsunami that killed 1500 people in Ecuador and Columbia.
6.A 8.7 SR-measured earthquake shook Alaska on February 1965. No dead victims reported.
7.An earthquake that measures 8.6 on the Richter scale hit Indonesia on March 28, 2005. More than 1.300 people died.
8.A 8.6 SR-measured earthquake rocked Tibet on August 15, 1950. Seven hundred and eighty people were killed.
9.Alaska, March 9. 1957. An earthquake measuring 8.6 on the Richter scale occurred. Nobody was killed.
10.On September 12, 2007, Indonesia was hit by a 8.8 SR-measured earthquake. At least 25 people died.
Malaysian student walks 5km to safety after Sumatra quake
KUALA LUMPUR: A Malaysian student in Padang, Sumatra had to walk five kilometres from her rented house to Gunung Tangilun, a green zone, to seek shelter after a powerful 7.6 magnitude earthquake rocked the area this evening.
Fashareena Nazir, a second-year medical student at Universitas Andalas said she was resting when she was abruptly woken by the quake at about 6pm.
"There were rumbles and a loud noise, like a bang," she told Bernama in a phone conversation today.
Fashareena, 23, from Ampang Jaya, said realising it was an earthquake, she quickly grabbed her belongings, passport and other documents and ran out of the house.
Her four other Malaysian housemates also rushed out of the single-storey bungalow to the compound for safety.
She said the house now had cracks and uneven floor all over.
For their safety, Fashareena and her housemates walked to Gunung Tangilun to seek shelter from another university mate.
She said she was traumatised by what she saw -- her neighbours’ houses were on fire, grounds caving in and some disappearing before her eyes.
Meanwhile, Fashareena's father, businessman Datuk Nazir Merasalam , 48, said he was thankful that his daughter was safe.
"I was worried when I first heard about the quake and quickly called my daughter and failed the few first times (to get her).
"But now, I am so grateful and glad to hear her voice and that she is doing fine," he told Bernama when contacted this evening. - Bernama
13 killed in major Indonesia quake: health ministry
JAKARTA, Sept 30 (AFP) - At least 13 people were killed and thousands trapped in rubble in a major earthquake that struck Indonesia's Sumatra island on Wednesday, the health ministry said.
"From our provisional data at 8:30 pm (1330 GMT), there are 13 dead victims from the West Sumatra earthquake," health ministry crisis centre head Rustam Pakaya told AFP by text message. (AFP)
G-20 / Oakland / Schenley Police Scanner (condensed & captioned)
Police scanner recording from the night of September 25, 2009, which focuses on the militarized police activity directed against students, bystanders, press & some We Are Change activists at Oakland / Schenley Park well after the G-20 Pittsburgh summit had ended. The full police-scanner recording is 1 hour & 34 minutes long. This is the Reader's-Digest-condensed version of the night's events.
Original police scanner recordings located at:
http://12160media.nin...
http://12160media.nin...
Japan prices continue record fall
Japan's core consumer prices dropped 2.4% in August year-on-year, the fourth successive month of record falls.
Official figures showed core prices, which exclude those of volatile fresh food, fell for a sixth month in a row.
The record fall for August was due to lower petrol and other energy costs as well as weak domestic demand.
Japan, the world's second largest economy, experienced a prolonged period of deflation in the 1990s, commonly referred to as "the lost decade".
Lower prices may appear to be a good thing, but deflation can hamper growth by depressing company profits and causing consumers to postpone purchases, leading to production and wage cuts. It can also increase debt burdens.
The deflation comes despite recent signs of an improvement in the Japanese economy, which returned to positive growth in the second quarter of 2009, exiting a severe year-long recession.
Not to worry?
The central bank has expressed confidence that low interest rates and the stimulus packages it has already implemented will prevent deflation taking hold again.
Analysts are not so sure.
Several have said that although the impact of last summer's spike in the oil price will lessen towards the end of the year, they expect further falls in prices.
"Reflecting stagnant retail sales, falls in prices are spreading more broadly than we had expected," said Susumu Kato, chief economist at Calyon Securities.
"There's a chance that deflation might continue longer than expected."
Few economists expect falls in prices to accelerate sharply but weak domestic demand is likely to keep up the deflationary pressure.
The Bank of Japan has already forecast deflation to last until the year to March 2011 and is expected to extend its deflation forecast by another year in its next set of forecasts due out in late October.
Separately, the Japanese Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii said that it is important not to overreact to current foreign exchange moves, which he said are within a natural "margin of error".
The yen surged to an eight-month high against the greenback on Monday.
HONDURAS TODAY ~~ WE ARE ALL PALESTINIANS!
Yesterday, my Associate and dear friend Carlos Latuff stated that this Blog is ‘mostly about the Middle East’. That is very true, for the simple fact that I live here. The Palestinian cause, in particular, is very close to my heart as they are my people. As Carlos himself stated, “WE ARE ALL PALESTINIANS”. His series of cartoons dealing with that can be seen HERE.
BUT…. this Blog deals with International Issues as well, especially those issues where Justice and Democracy are threatened. The Human Race is one…. we are all brothers and none of us will be free until we are all free. Nothing says that better than the following video featuring Peter, Paul and the late Mary Travers. The words are by Tom Glazer and the music is by J.S.Bach.
Here are the lyrics…
Because all men are brothers wherever men may be
One union shall unite us forever proud and free
No tyrant shall defeat us, no nation strike us down
All men who toil shall greet us the whole wide world around.
One union shall unite us forever proud and free
No tyrant shall defeat us, no nation strike us down
All men who toil shall greet us the whole wide world around.
My brothers are all others forever hand in hand
Where chimes the bell of freedom there is my native land
My brother’s fears are my fears yellow white or brown
My brother’s tears are my tears the whole wide world around.
Let every voice be thunder, let every heart beat strong
Until all tyrants perish our work shall not be done
Let not our memories fail us the lost year shall be found
Let slavery’s chains be broken the whole wide world around.
Here are some photos showing the brutality against the Resistance in Honduras…..
Is the following what awaits the people of Honduras? The world must SAY NO NOW!
DEMOCRACY MUST BE RESTORED NOW!!
Under Pinochet’s regime, over a quarter of a million people were detained in prisons like the Chacabuco desert camp. These are the only images to have emerged from his camps and reveal the true horror of his regime. “They must stay here until they realise they are on the wrong path,” states the guard at Chacabuco Concentration camp. Nearby prisoners suspected of being Communists are forced to march and sing military songs. One of the victims filmed at the camp was Patricia Letelier. Now, she lives in exile in Scotland and recalls what happened to her at Chacabuco. “I heard shouting and screaming and knew what was waiting for me. Shortly afterwards my own torture began.”
Powerful images show men kneeling with their hands in the air, being kicked and beaten with the butts of soldiers’ guns. Others show men being marched into the stadium stripped naked with blankets over their heads.
Study prompts provinces to rethink flu plan
Report suggests people who get vaccinated are more likely to catch H1N1
A “perplexing” Canadian study linking H1N1 to seasonal flu shots is throwing national influenza plans into disarray and testing public faith in the government agencies responsible for protecting the nation's health.
Distributed for peer review last week, the study confounded infectious-disease experts in suggesting that people vaccinated against seasonal flu are twice as likely to catch swine flu.
The paper is under peer review, and lead researchers Danuta Skowronski of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and Gaston De Serres of Laval University must stay mum until it's published.
Met with intense early skepticism both in Canada and abroad, the paper has since convinced several provincial health agencies to announce hasty suspensions of seasonal flu vaccinations, long-held fixtures of public-health planning.
“It has confused things very badly,” said Dr. Ethan Rubinstein, head of adult infectious diseases at the University of Manitoba. “And it has certainly cost us credibility from the public because of conflicting recommendations. Until last week, there had always been much encouragement to get the seasonal flu vaccine.”
On Sunday Quebec joined Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Nova Scotia in suspending seasonal flu shots for anyone under 65 years of age. Quebec's Health Ministry announced it would postpone vaccinations until January, clearing the autumn months for health professionals to focus on vaccinating against H1N1, which is expected to the more severe influenza strain this season.
“By the time the H1N1 wave is over, there will be ample time to vaccinate for seasonal flu,” Dr. Rubinstein said.
B.C. is expected to announce a similar suspension during a press conference Monday morning.
Other provinces, including Manitoba, are still pondering a response to the research.
New Brunswick is a lone hold-out, announcing last week it would forge ahead with seasonal flu shots for all residents in October, as originally planned.
So far, the study's impact is confined to Canada. Researchers in the U.S., Britain and Australia have not reported the same phenomenon. Marie-Paule Kieny, the World Health Organization's director of vaccine research, said last week the Canadian findings were an international anomaly and could constitute a “study bias.”
An international panel is currently scrutinizing the research data. “The review process has been expedited, so we're hoping for a response within days,” said Roy Wadia, spokesman for the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.
Dr. Rubinstein, who has read the study, said it appears sound.
“There are a large number of authors, all of them excellent and credible researchers,” he said. “And the sample size is very large – 12 or 13 million people taken from the central reporting systems in three provinces. The research is solid.”
The vaccine suspensions do not apply for people over 65. Seniors are considered more susceptible to severe seasonal flu symptoms. At the same time, they carry antibodies from a 1957 pandemic that seem to neutralize the current version of H1N1.
Even if the statistical link is proven, the medical link between seasonal flu shots and H1N1 remains mysterious. One hypothesis suggests seasonal flu vaccine preoccupies the cells that would otherwise produce antibodies against H1N1.
But, according to Dr. Rubinstein, the research shows that people who received the seasonal shot during the 2007-08 flu season remained vulnerable to swine flu well into 2009 – an interval that should provide most immune systems ample restoration time.
“We don't understand the mechanism,” Dr. Rubinstein said. “At the present time it is quite perplexing.”
Quake, Tsunami Kill at Least 34 in Pacific
Towering tsunami waves spawned by a powerful earthquake swept ashore on Samoa and American Samoa early Tuesday, flattening villages, killing at least 34 people and leaving dozens of workers missing at devastated National Park Service facilities.
Cars and people were swept out to sea by the fast-churning waters as survivors fled to high ground, where they remained huddled hours later. Hampered by power and communications outages, officials struggled to assess the casualties and damage.
A Samoan reporter says tsunami victims "are everywhere" in a hospital near a hard-hit area.
Associated Press reporter Keni Lesa said three or four villages on the popular tourist coast near the southern town of Lalomanu on Samoa's main island of Upolu had been "wiped out" by waves that roared ashore early Wednesday.
Lesa said he had visited the town's main hospital where "there are bodies everywhere," including at least one child.
Hampered by power and communications outages, officials struggled to assess the casualties and damage. The quake, with a magnitude between 8.0 and 8.3, struck around dawn about midway between Samoa and American Samoa.
The U.S. Geological Service, which estimated the magnitude at 8.0, said the quake struck 20 miles below the ocean floor, 120 miles from American Samoa and 125 miles from Samoa, with a 5.6-magnitude aftershock 20 minutes later.
A five-foot tsunami wave swept into Pago Pago, capital of American Samoa, shortly after the earthquake, sending sea water surging inland about 100 yards before receding, leaving some cars and debris stuck in mud. Electricity outages were reported, and telephone lines were jammed. The U.S. territory is about the size of Washington, D.C. and has a population of 65,000,
Reports differed, but tsunami waves are believed to have been as big as 20 feet high in places and reached as far as half a mile inland, reports CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker.
Radio host John Rayner was down the coast from Pago Pago. "It was just absolute frantic. People were saying 'go high' or go pray somewhere," he told Whitaker. "Get away from ocean as quickly as you can."
Mike Reynolds, superintendent of the National Park of American Samoa, was quoted as saying four tsunami waves 15 to 20 feet high roared ashore soon afterward, reaching up to a mile inland. Holly Bundock, spokeswoman for the National Park Service's Pacific West Region in Oakland, Calif., spoke with him from his vantage point under a coconut tree uphill from Pago Pago Harbor; he reported that the park's visitor center and offices appeared to have been destroyed.
Bundock said Reynolds and another park service staffer had been able to locate only 20 percent of the park's 13 to 15 employees and 30 to 50 volunteers. The National Park of American Samoa is the only national park south of the equator, a scenic expanse of reefs, picturesque beaches, tropical forests and wildlife that include flying foxes and sea turtles.
Residents in both Samoa and American Samoa reported being shaken awake by the quake, which lasted two to three minutes, then fleeing uphill out of fear of a tsunami. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a general alert from American Samoa to New Zealand, warning of the prospect of a "destructive" wave.
The ramifications of the tsunami could be felt thousands of miles away, with federal officials saying strong currents and dangerous waves were forecast from California to Washington state. No major flooding was expected, however.
Mase Akapo, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in American Samoa, said at least 14 people were killed in four different villages on the main island of Tutuila, while an unspecified number of people died neighboring Samoa, with reports of people and cars swept out to sea. Thousands of people were still huddled on high ground hours after the initial quake, which was followed by at three aftershocks of at least 5.6 magnitude.
An unspecified number of fatalities and injuries reported in the Samoan village of Talamoa. New Zealander Graeme Ansell said the beach village of Sau Sau Beach Fale was leveled.
"It was very quick. The whole village has been wiped out," Ansell told New Zealand's National Radio from a hill near Samoa's capital, Apia. "There's not a building standing. We've all clambered up hills, and one of our party has a broken leg. There will be people in a great lot of need 'round here."
Schools and businesses were closed, with the Samoan capital virtually deserted.
"Our house has been taken by the tsunami and we have lost everything," Teresa Sulili Dusi told National Radio, adding that "everything dropped on the floor and we thought the house was going to go down as well. Thank God, it didn't."
Local media said they had reports of some landslides in the Solosolo region of the main Samoan island of Upolu and damage to plantations in the countryside outside Apia.
American Samoa Gov. Togiola Tulafono was at his Honolulu office assessing the situation but was having difficulty getting information, said Filipp Ilaoa, deputy director of the office.
"There is some water damage to residences," Ilaoa said. "To what extent and how much, and how many villages are effected, that is a mystery at this time."
Rescue workers found a scene of destruction and debris with cars overturned or stuck in mud. The staff of the port ran to higher ground, and police soon came by, telling residents to get inland. Several students were seen ransacking a gas station/convenience store.
Rear Adm. Manson Brown, Coast Guard commander for the Pacific region, said the Coast Guard is in the early stages of assessing what resources to send to American Samoa. Coast Guard spokesman Lt. John Titchen said a C-130 was being dispatched Wednesday to deliver aid, asssess damage and take the governor back home. A New Zealand air force P3 Orion maritime search airplane also was being sent.
One of the runways at Pago Pago International Airport was being cleared of widespread debris for emergency use, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said in Los Angeles.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it was deploying teams to American Samoa to provide support and on the ground assessment.
"Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of American Samoa and all those in the region who have been affected by these natural disasters," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.
The ramifications of the tsunami could be felt thousands of miles away, with federal officials saying strong currents and dangerous waves were forecast from California to Washington state. No major flooding was expected, however.
The earthquake and tsunami were big, but not on the same large scale of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami that killed more than 150,000 across Asia the day after Christmas in 2004, said tsunami expert Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey in Seattle.
The 2004 earthquake was at least 10 times stronger than the 8.0 to 8.3 measurements being reported for Tuesday's quake, Atwater said. It's also a different style of earthquake than the one that hit in 2004.
The tsunami hit American Samoa about 25 minutes after the quake, which is similar to the travel time in 2004, Atwater said. The big difference is there were more people in Indonesia at risk than in Samoa.
Cars and people were swept out to sea by the fast-churning waters as survivors fled to high ground, where they remained huddled hours later. Hampered by power and communications outages, officials struggled to assess the casualties and damage.
A Samoan reporter says tsunami victims "are everywhere" in a hospital near a hard-hit area.
Associated Press reporter Keni Lesa said three or four villages on the popular tourist coast near the southern town of Lalomanu on Samoa's main island of Upolu had been "wiped out" by waves that roared ashore early Wednesday.
Lesa said he had visited the town's main hospital where "there are bodies everywhere," including at least one child.
Hampered by power and communications outages, officials struggled to assess the casualties and damage. The quake, with a magnitude between 8.0 and 8.3, struck around dawn about midway between Samoa and American Samoa.
The U.S. Geological Service, which estimated the magnitude at 8.0, said the quake struck 20 miles below the ocean floor, 120 miles from American Samoa and 125 miles from Samoa, with a 5.6-magnitude aftershock 20 minutes later.
A five-foot tsunami wave swept into Pago Pago, capital of American Samoa, shortly after the earthquake, sending sea water surging inland about 100 yards before receding, leaving some cars and debris stuck in mud. Electricity outages were reported, and telephone lines were jammed. The U.S. territory is about the size of Washington, D.C. and has a population of 65,000,
Reports differed, but tsunami waves are believed to have been as big as 20 feet high in places and reached as far as half a mile inland, reports CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker.
Radio host John Rayner was down the coast from Pago Pago. "It was just absolute frantic. People were saying 'go high' or go pray somewhere," he told Whitaker. "Get away from ocean as quickly as you can."
Mike Reynolds, superintendent of the National Park of American Samoa, was quoted as saying four tsunami waves 15 to 20 feet high roared ashore soon afterward, reaching up to a mile inland. Holly Bundock, spokeswoman for the National Park Service's Pacific West Region in Oakland, Calif., spoke with him from his vantage point under a coconut tree uphill from Pago Pago Harbor; he reported that the park's visitor center and offices appeared to have been destroyed.
Bundock said Reynolds and another park service staffer had been able to locate only 20 percent of the park's 13 to 15 employees and 30 to 50 volunteers. The National Park of American Samoa is the only national park south of the equator, a scenic expanse of reefs, picturesque beaches, tropical forests and wildlife that include flying foxes and sea turtles.
Residents in both Samoa and American Samoa reported being shaken awake by the quake, which lasted two to three minutes, then fleeing uphill out of fear of a tsunami. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a general alert from American Samoa to New Zealand, warning of the prospect of a "destructive" wave.
The ramifications of the tsunami could be felt thousands of miles away, with federal officials saying strong currents and dangerous waves were forecast from California to Washington state. No major flooding was expected, however.
Mase Akapo, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in American Samoa, said at least 14 people were killed in four different villages on the main island of Tutuila, while an unspecified number of people died neighboring Samoa, with reports of people and cars swept out to sea. Thousands of people were still huddled on high ground hours after the initial quake, which was followed by at three aftershocks of at least 5.6 magnitude.
An unspecified number of fatalities and injuries reported in the Samoan village of Talamoa. New Zealander Graeme Ansell said the beach village of Sau Sau Beach Fale was leveled.
"It was very quick. The whole village has been wiped out," Ansell told New Zealand's National Radio from a hill near Samoa's capital, Apia. "There's not a building standing. We've all clambered up hills, and one of our party has a broken leg. There will be people in a great lot of need 'round here."
Schools and businesses were closed, with the Samoan capital virtually deserted.
"Our house has been taken by the tsunami and we have lost everything," Teresa Sulili Dusi told National Radio, adding that "everything dropped on the floor and we thought the house was going to go down as well. Thank God, it didn't."
Local media said they had reports of some landslides in the Solosolo region of the main Samoan island of Upolu and damage to plantations in the countryside outside Apia.
American Samoa Gov. Togiola Tulafono was at his Honolulu office assessing the situation but was having difficulty getting information, said Filipp Ilaoa, deputy director of the office.
"There is some water damage to residences," Ilaoa said. "To what extent and how much, and how many villages are effected, that is a mystery at this time."
Rescue workers found a scene of destruction and debris with cars overturned or stuck in mud. The staff of the port ran to higher ground, and police soon came by, telling residents to get inland. Several students were seen ransacking a gas station/convenience store.
Rear Adm. Manson Brown, Coast Guard commander for the Pacific region, said the Coast Guard is in the early stages of assessing what resources to send to American Samoa. Coast Guard spokesman Lt. John Titchen said a C-130 was being dispatched Wednesday to deliver aid, asssess damage and take the governor back home. A New Zealand air force P3 Orion maritime search airplane also was being sent.
One of the runways at Pago Pago International Airport was being cleared of widespread debris for emergency use, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said in Los Angeles.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it was deploying teams to American Samoa to provide support and on the ground assessment.
"Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of American Samoa and all those in the region who have been affected by these natural disasters," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.
The ramifications of the tsunami could be felt thousands of miles away, with federal officials saying strong currents and dangerous waves were forecast from California to Washington state. No major flooding was expected, however.
The earthquake and tsunami were big, but not on the same large scale of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami that killed more than 150,000 across Asia the day after Christmas in 2004, said tsunami expert Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey in Seattle.
The 2004 earthquake was at least 10 times stronger than the 8.0 to 8.3 measurements being reported for Tuesday's quake, Atwater said. It's also a different style of earthquake than the one that hit in 2004.
The tsunami hit American Samoa about 25 minutes after the quake, which is similar to the travel time in 2004, Atwater said. The big difference is there were more people in Indonesia at risk than in Samoa.
History Channel Caught In Another 9/11 Lie
Life After People documentary admits steel structured buildings can withstand temperatures of over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit without being compromised
The History Channel’s new documentary Life After People completely contradicts its 9/11 debunking show by pointing out that steel structure buildings can withstand temperatures of well over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit without being compromised, proving that burning jet fuel temperatures of no more than 1100 degrees Fahrenheit could not have weakened the steel in the twin towers, never mind melted it.
In August 2007, the History Channel aired a documentary called 9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction, which at the time we labeled the worst 9/11 hit piece to date, “A completely savage, dishonest and deceptive abomination, replete with dirty tricks, malicious lies and a level of journalistic fraud that goes way beyond simple bias.”
The debunkers featured on the show, people like James Meigs whose scientific expertise stretches as far as being the editor of Video Review and Entertainment Weekly, were labeled as experts while real experts like Physicist Professor Steven Jones were stripped of any such description.
One such “expert” was structural engineer Matthys Levy, whose opinion can hardly be viewed as balanced in light of the fact that he was one of the chief engineers for a study commissioned by WTC leaseholder Silverstein Properties Inc. to support a $7 billion insurance claim for the destruction of the World Trade Center complex.
During the show, Levy bizarrely claimed that the fires in WTC Building 7 started before the collapse of either twin tower, in complete contradiction to the FEMA report and an impossibility considering WTC 7 was not hit by a plane.
Levy also attempted to debunk questions surrounding the collapse of the twin towers by claiming, “The fires burned at a temperature of about 1100 degrees in some cases, that’s sufficient to cause the steel to lose half its strength, now if it only has half its strength left it doesn’t have the ability to support the floors above it anymore.”
However, another History Channel documentary completely contradicted this hypothesis by admitting that steel buildings are not compromised in any way until temperatures reach well over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.
During the more recent Life After People program, a segment about what would happen to the famous steel-structured U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles, a building similar in size to the twin towers, if it became a raging inferno (something that the twin towers were not), the narrator states, “The U.S. Bank Tower burns from the inside out. The structural steel frame withstands the searing heat – it can endure temperatures of over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit without degradation.”
The fires would turn the tower into a “charred skeleton,” but would not result in its collapse, which is exactly what should have happened to the twin towers and Building 7, which in comparison all suffered relatively limited fires which were extinguished quickly.
Apparently, the ability of structural steel to withstand temperatures over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit without degradation is a scientific principle that wasn’t applicable for one day in history according to the History Channel and Matthys Levy.
Of course this is not to mention the pools of molten steel that were found after the collapse of the twin towers. Even debunkers admit that jet fuel temperatures cannot melt steel, which leaves the presence of molten metal one of the thousands of unanswered questions surrounding 9/11.
Watch the two clips below. The first example from the 9/11 debunking program is 6 minutes into the clip, the second example from Life After People is 1 minute and 15 seconds into the clip.
Prison Planet.tv Members Will Be The FIRST To See Fall Of The Republic On October 21st - Don't Miss Out! Get Your Subscription Today!FAKE TERROR - THE ROAD TO WAR AND DICTATORSHIP
It's the oldest trick in the book, dating back to Roman times; creating the enemies you need.
And nobody has ever really explained what this second Ryder truck was doing in a secret camp half way from Elohim City to Oklahoma City two weeks before the bombing.
| In 70 BC, an ambitious minor politician and extremely wealthy man, Marcus Licinius Crassus, wanted to rule Rome. Just to give you an idea of what sort of man Crassus really was, he is credited with invention of the fire brigade. But in Crassus' version, his fire-fighting slaves would race to the scene of a burning building whereupon Crassus would offer to buy it on the spot for a tiny fraction of it's worth. If the owner sold, Crassus' slaves would put out the fire. If the owner refused to sell, Crassus allowed the building to burn to the ground. By means of this device, Crassus eventually came to be the largest single private land holder in Rome, and used some of his wealth to help back Julius Caesar against Cicero. |  |
| In 70 BC Rome was still a Republic, which placed very strict limits on what Rulers could do, and more importantly NOT do. But Crassus had no intentions of enduring such limits to his personal power, and contrived a plan. Crassus seized upon the slave revolt led by Spartacus in order to strike terror into the hearts of Rome, whose garrison Spartacus had already defeated in battle. But Spartacus had no intention of marching on Rome itself, a move he knew to be suicidal. Spartacus and his band wanted nothing to do with the Roman empire and had planned from the start merely to loot enough money from their former owners in the Italian countryside to hire a mercenary fleet in which to sail to freedom. |
| Sailing away was the last thing Crassus wanted Spartacus to do. He needed a convenient enemy with which to terrorize Rome itself for his personal political gain. So Crassus bribed the mercenary fleet to sail without Spartacus, then positioned two Roman legions in such a way that Spartacus had no choice but to march on Rome. Terrified of the impending arrival of the much-feared army of gladiators, Rome declared Crassus Praetor. Crassus then crushed Spartacus' army and even though Pompey took the credit, Crassus was elected Consul of Rome the following year. |
| With this maneuver, the Romans surrendered their Republican form of government. Soon would follow the first Triumvirate, consisting of Crassus, Pompeii, and Julius Caesar, followed by the reign of the god-like Emperors of Rome. The Romans were hoaxed into surrendering their Republic, and accepting the rule of Emperors. |
 | Julius Caesar's political opponent, Cicero, for all his literary accomplishments, played the same games in his campaign against Julius Caesar, claiming that Rome was falling victim to an internal "vast right wing" conspiracy in which any expressed desire for legislative limits on government was treated as suspicious behavior. Cicero, in order to demonstrate to the Romans just how unsafe Rome has become hired thugs to cause as much disturbance as possible, and campaigned on a promise to end the internal strife if elected and granted extraordinary powers. |
| What Cicero only dreamed of, Adolph Hitler succeeded in doing. Elected Chancellor of Germany, Hitler, like Crassus, had no intention of living with the strict limits to his power imposed by German law. Unlike Cicero, Hitler's thugs were easy to recognize; they all wore the same brown shirts. But their actions were no different than those of their Roman predecessors. They staged beatings, set fires, caused as much trouble as they could, while Hitler made speeches promising that he could end the crime wave of subversives and terrorism if he was granted extraordinary powers. Then the Reichstag burned down; a staged terrorist attack. The Germans were hoaxed into surrendering their Republic, and accepting the total rule of Der Fuehrer. Hitler had German troops dressed in Polish uniforms attack the radio station at Gleiwitz, then lied to the Germans, telling them Poland had invaded, and marched Germany off into World War Two |  |
| The state-sponsored schools will never tell you this, but governments routinely rely on hoaxes to sell their agendas to an otherwise reluctant public. The Romans accepted the Emperors and the Germans accepted Hitler not because they wanted to, but because the carefully crafted illusions of threat appeared to leave no other choice. Our government too uses hoaxes to create the illusion that We The People have no choice but the direction the government wishes us to go in. |
| In 1898, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal were arguing for American intervention in Cuba. Hearst is reported to have dispatched a photographer to Cuba to photograph the coming war with Spain. When the photographer asked just what war that might be, Hearst is reported to have replied, "You take the photographs, and I will provide the war". Hearst was true to his word, as his newspaper published stories of great atrocities being committed against the Cuban people, most of which turned out to be complete fabrications. On the night of February 15, 1898, the USS Maine, lying in Havana harbor in a show of US resolve to protect her interests, exploded violently. Captain Sigsbee, the commander of the Maine, urged that no assumptions of enemy attack be made until there was a full investigation of the cause of the explosion. For this, Captain Sigsbee was excoriated in the press for "refusing to see the obvious". The Atlantic Monthly declared flat out that to suppose the explosion to be anything other than a deliberate act by Spain was "completely at defiance of the laws of probability". Under the slogan "Remember the Maine", Americans went to war with Spain, eventually winning the Philippines (and annexing Hawaii along the way). In 1975, an investigation led by Admiral Hyman Rickover examined the data recovered from a 1911 examination of the wreck and concluded that there had been no evidence of an external explosion. The most likely cause of the sinking was a coal dust explosion in a coal bunker imprudently located next to the ship's magazines. Captain Sigsbee's caution had been well founded. |
 | President Franklin Delano Roosevelt needed a war. He needed the fever of a major war to mask the symptoms of a still deathly ill economy struggling back from the Great Depression (and mutating towards Socialism at the same time). Roosevelt wanted a war with Germany to stop Hitler, but despite several provocations in the Atlantic, the American people, still struggling with that troublesome economy, were opposed to any wars. Roosevelt violated neutrality with lend lease, and even ordered the sinking of several German ships in the Atlantic, but Hitler refused to be provoked. Roosevelt needed an enemy, and if America would not willingly attack that enemy, then one would have to be maneuvered into attacking America, much as Marcus Licinius Crassus has maneuvered Spartacus into attacking Rome. |
| The way open to war was created when Japan signed the tripartite agreement with Italy and Germany, with all parties pledging mutual defense to each other. Whereas Hitler would never declare war on the United States no matter the provocation, the means to force Japan to do so were readily at hand. The first step was to place oil and steel embargoes on Japan, using Japan's wars on the Asian mainland as a reason. This forced Japan to consider seizing the oil and mineral rich regions in Indonesia. With the European powers militarily exhausted by the war in Europe, the United States was the only power in the Pacific able to stop Japan from invading the Dutch East Indies, and by moving the Pacific fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Roosevelt made a pre-emptive strike on that fleet the mandatory first step in any Japanese plan to extend it's empire into the "southern resource area". Roosevelt boxed in Japan just as completely as Crassus had boxed in Spartacus. Japan needed oil. They had to invade Indonesia to get it, and to do that they first had to remove the threat of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. There never really was any other course open to them. |
| To enrage the American people as much as possible, Roosevelt needed the first overt attack by Japan to be as bloody as possible, appearing as a sneak attack much as the Japanese had done to the Russians. From that moment up until the attack on Pearl Harbor itself, Roosevelt and his associates made sure that the commanders in Hawaii, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, were kept in the dark as much as possible about the location of the Japanese fleet and it's intentions, then later scapegoated for the attack. (Congress recently exonerated both Short and Kimmel, posthumously restoring them to their former ranks). |  |
| But as the Army board had concluded at the time, and subsequent de-classified documents confirmed, Washington DC knew the attack was coming, knew exactly where the Japanese fleet was, and knew where it was headed. On November 29th, Secretary of State Hull showed United Press reporter Joe Leib a message with the time and place of the attack, and the New York Times in it's special 12/8/41 Pearl Harbor edition, on page 13, reported that the time and place of the attack had been known in advance! The much repeated claim that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence on it's way to Hawaii was a lie. Among other intercepts still held in the Archives of the NSA is the UNCODED message sent by the Japanese tanker Shirya stating, "proceeding to a position 30.00 N, 154.20 E. Expect to arrive at that point on 3 December." (near HI) |
 | President Lyndon Johnson wanted a war in Vietnam. He wanted it to help his friends who owned defense companies to do a little business. He needed it to get the Pentagon and CIA to quit trying to invade Cuba. And most of all, he needed a provocation to convince the American people that there was really "no other choice". On August 5, 1964, newspapers across America reported "renewed attacks" against American destroyers operating in Vietnamese waters, specifically the Gulf of Tonkin. The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an "unprovoked attack" on the USS Maddox while it was on "routine patrol". The truth is that USS Maddox was involved in aggressive intelligence gathering in coordination with actual attacks by South Vietnam and the Laotian Air Force against targets in North Vietnam. The truth is also that there was no attack by torpedo boats against the USS Maddox. Captain John J. Herrick, the task force commander in the Gulf, cabled Washington DC that the report was the result of an "over-eager" sonar man who had picked up the sounds of his own ship's screws and panicked. But even with this knowledge that the report was false, Lyndon Johnson went on national TV that night to announce the commencement of air strikes against North Vietnam, "retaliation" for an attack that had never occurred. |
 | President George H. W. Bush wanted a war in Iraq. Like Crassus, George Bush is motivated by money. Specifically oil money. But with the OPEC alliance failing to keep limits on oil production in the Mideast, the market was being glutted with oil pumped from underneath Iraq, which sat over roughly 1/3 of the oil reserves of the entire region. |
| George wanted a war to stop that flow of oil, to keep prices (and profits) from falling any further than they already had. But like Roosevelt, he needed the "other side" to make the first move. Iraq had long been trying to acquire greater access to the Persian Gulf, and felt limited confined a narrow strip of land along Kuwait's northern border, which placed Iraqi interests in close proximity with hostile Iran. George Bush, who had been covertly arming Iraq during its war with Iran, sent word via April Glaspie that the United States would not intervene if Saddam Hussein grabbed a larger part of Kuwait. Saddam fell for the bait and invaded. Of course, Americans were not about to send their sons and daughters to risk their lives for petroleum products. So George Bush arranged a hoax, using a public relations firm which has grown rich on taxpayer money by being most industrious and creative liars! The PR firm concocted a monumental fraud in which the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States, went on TV pretending to be a nurse, and related a horror story in which Iraqi troops looted the incubators from a Kuwaiti hospital, leaving the premature babies on the cold floor to die. The media, part of the swindle from the start, never bothered asking why the "nurse" didn't just pick the babies up and wrap them in blankets or something. Enraged by the incubator story, Americans supported operation Desert Storm, which never removed Saddam Hussein from power but which did take Kuwait's oil off of the market for almost 2 years and limited Iraq's oil exports to this very day. That our sons and daughters came home with serious and lingering medical illnesses was apparently not too great a price to pay for increased oil profits. |
| Following the victory in Iraq, yet another war appeared to be in the offering in the mineral rich regions of Bosnia. Yet again, a hoax was used to create support for military action. The photo (right) of Fikret Alic staring through a barbed wire fence, was used to "prove" the existence of modern day "Concentration Camps". As the headline of "Belsen 92" indicates, all possible associations with the Nazi horrors were made to sell the necessity of sending yet more American troops into someone else's nation. |  |
| But when German Journalists went to Trnopolje, the site of the supposed Concentration Camp. to film a documentary, they discovered that the photo was a fake! The camp at Trnopolje was not a concentration camp but a refugee center. Nor was it surrounded by barbed wire. Careful examination of the original photo revealed that the photographer had shot the photo through a broken section of fence surrounding a tool shed. It was the photographer who was on the inside, shooting out at the refugees. Once again, Americans had been hoaxed into support of actions they might otherwise not have agreed with. |
| While several American Presidents have willingly started wars for personal purposes, perhaps no President has ever carried it to the extreme that Bill Clinton has. Coincident with the expected public statement of Monica Lewinsky following her testimony, Bill Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack on Sudan and Afghanistan, claiming to have had irrefutable proof that bogeyman extraordinaire (and former Afghani ally) Osama Bin Ladin was creating terrorist chemical weapons there. |  |
 | Examination of the photos of the debris revealed none of the expected structures one would find in a laboratory that handled lethal weapons-grade materials. Assurances from the CIA that they had a positive soil test for biological weapons fell on their face when it was revealed that there had been no open soil anywhere near the pre-bombed facility. Sudan requested that international observers come test the remains of the factory for any signs of the nerve gas Clinton had insisted was there. None was found. The Sudanese plant was a harmless aspirin factory, and the owner has sued for damages. |
Later examination of the site hit in Afghanistan revealed it to be a mosque.
| Meanwhile, back in Kosovo, stories about genocide and atrocities were flooding the media (in time to distract from the Sudanese embarrassments), just as lurid and sensational and as it turns out often just as fictional as most of William Randolph Hearst's stories of atrocities against the Cubans. Again, the government and the media were hoaxing Americans. The above photo was shown on all the American networks, claiming to be one of Slobodan Milosovic's Migs, shot down while attacking civilians. Closer examination (click on the photo) shows it to be stenciled in English! Like Germany under Chancellor Hitler, there have been events in our nation which strike fear into the hearts of the citizens, such as the New York World Trade Tower bombing, the OK City Federal Building, and the Olympic Park bomb (nicely timed to divert the media from witnesses to the TWA 800 shoot down). The media has been very quick to blame such events on "radicals", "subversives", "vast right wing conspiracies", and other "enemies in our midst", no different than the lies used by Cicero and Hitler. But on closer examination, such "domestic terrorist" events do not appear to be what they are made out to be. The FBI had an informant inside the World Trade Tower bombers, Emad Salam, who offered to sabotage the bomb. The FBI told him "no". The so-called "hot bed" of white separatism at Elohim City, occasional home to Tim McVeigh in the weeks prior to the OK City bombing, was founded and run by an FBI informant! |
So, here we are today. Like the Romans of Crassus' and Cicero's time, or the Germans under a newly elected Hitler, we are being warned that a dangerous enemy threatens us, implacable, invisible, omnipresent, and invulnerable as long as our government is hamstrung by that silly old Bill of Rights. Already there have appeared articles debating whether or not "extraordinary measures" (i.e. torture) are not fully justified under certain circumstances such as those we are purported to face.
As was the case in Rome and Germany, the government continues to plead with the public for an expansion of its power and authority, to "deal with the crisis".
However, as Casio watch timers are paraded before the cameras, to the stentorian tones of the talking heads' constant dire warnings, it is legitimate to question just how real the crises is, and how much is the result of political machinations by our own leaders.
Are the terrorists really a threat, or just patsies with fake bombs and Casio watches, paid for by Cicero and given brown shirts to wear by Hitler?
Is terrorism inside the United States really from outside, or is it a stage managed production, designed to cause Americans to believe they have no choice but to surrender the Republic and accept the totalitarian rule of a new emperor, or a new Fuhrer?
Indeed, given that acts of terror undermine the very public support needed by the so-called "terrorists" to bring about change, it may be argued that there are in fact no genuine acts of terror; that they are all manufactured events to be blamed on the groups wishing to challenge the status quo.
Once lost, the Romans never got their Republic back. Once lost, the Germans never got their Republic back. In both cases, the nation had to totally collapse before freedom was restored to the people.
Remember that when Crassus tells you that Spartacus approaches.
Remember that when thugs in the streets act in a manner clearly designed to provoke the public fear.
Remember that when the Reichstag burns down.
Remember that when the President lies to you about weapons of mass destruction.
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