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THE EVIL EMPIRE
By Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts110620 09.html
November 6-8, 2009
The US government is now so totally under the thumbs of organized
interest groups that "our" government can no longer respond to the
concerns of the American people who elect the president and the
members of the House and Senate. Voters will vent their frustrations
over their impotence on the president, which implies a future of
one-term presidents. Soon our presidents will be as ineffective as
Roman emperors in the final days of that empire.
Obama is already set on the course to a one-term presidency. He
promised change, but has delivered none. His health care bill is held
hostage by the private insurance companies seeking greater profits.
The most likely outcome will be cuts in Medicare and Medicaid in
order to help fund wars that enrich the military/security complex
and the many companies created by privatizing services that the
military once provided for itself at far lower costs. It would be
interesting to know the percentage of the $700+ billion "defense"
spending that goes to private companies. In American "capitalism,"
an amazing amount of taxpayers' earnings go to private firms via the
government. Yet, Republicans scream about "socializing" health care.
Republicans and Democrats saw opportunities to create new sources
of campaign contributions by privatizing as many military functions
as possible. There are now a large number of private companies that
have never made a dollar in the market, feeding instead at the public
trough that drains taxpayers of dollars while loading Americans with
debt service obligations.
Obama inherited an excellent opportunity to bring US soldiers home
from the Bush regime's illegal wars of aggression. In its final days,
the Bush regime realized that it could "win" in Iraq by putting the
Sunni insurgents on the US military payroll. Once Bush had 80,000
insurgents collecting US military pay, violence, although still high,
dropped in half. All Obama had to do was to declare victory and bring
our boys home, thanking Bush for winning the war. It would have shut
up the Republicans.
But this sensible course would have impaired the profits and
share prices of those firms that comprise the military/security
complex. So instead of doing what Obama said he would do and what
the voters elected him to do, Obama restarted the war in Afghanistan
and launched a new one in Pakistan. Soon Obama was echoing Bush and
Cheney's threats to attack Iran.
In place of health care for Americans, there will be more profits
for private insurance companies.
In place of peace there will be more war.
Voters are already recognizing the writing on the wall and are falling
away from Obama and the Democrats. Independents who gave Obama his
comfortable victory have now swung against him, recently electing
Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia to succeed Democrats.
This is a protest vote, not a confidence vote in Republicans.
Obama's credibility is shot. And so is Congress's, assuming it ever
had any. The US House of Representatives has just voted to show
the entire world that the US House of Representatives is nothing
but the servile, venal, puppet of the Israel Lobby. The House of
Representatives of the American "superpower" did the bidding of its
master, AIPAC, and voted 344 to 36 to condemn the Goldstone Report.
In case you don't know, the Goldstone Report is the Report of the
United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. The "Gaza
Conflict" is the Israeli military attack on the Gaza ghetto, where 1.5
million dispossessed Palestinians, whose lands, villages, and homes
were stolen by Israel, are housed. The attack was on civilians and
civilian infrastructure. It was without any doubt a war crime under the
Nuremberg standard that the US established in order to execute Nazis.
Goldstone is not only a very distinguished Jewish jurist who has given
his life to bringing people to accountability for their crimes against
humanity, but also a Zionist. However, the Israelis have demonized
him as a "self-hating Jew" because he wrote the truth instead of
Israeli propaganda.
US Representative Dennis Kucinich, who is now without a doubt a marked
man on AIPAC's political extermination list, asked the House if the
members had any realization of the shame that the vote condemning
Goldstone would bring on the House and the US government. The entire
rest of the world accepts the Goldstone report.
The House answered with its lopsided vote that the rest of the world
doesn't count as it doesn't give campaign contributions to members
of Congress.
This shameful, servile act of "the world's greatest democracy"
occurred the very week that a court in Italy convicted 23 US CIA
officers for kidnapping a person in Italy. The CIA agents are now
considered "fugitives from justice" in Italy, and indeed they are.
The kidnapped person was renditioned to the American puppet state of
Egypt, where the victim was held for years and repeatedly tortured.
The case against him was so absurd that even an Egyptian judge ordered
his release.
One of the convicted CIA operatives, Sabrina deSousa, an attractive
young woman, says that the US broke the law by kidnapping a person and
sending him to another country to be tortured in order to manufacture
another "terrorist" in order to keep the terrorist hoax going at home.
Without the terrorist hoax, America's wars for special interest
reasons would become transparent even to Fox "News" junkies.
Ms. deSousa says that "everything I did was approved back in
Washington," yet the government, which continually berates us to
"support the troops," did nothing to protect her when she carried
out the Bush regime's illegal orders.
Clearly, this means that the crime that Bush, Cheney, the Pentagon, and
the CIA ordered is too heinous and beyond the pale to be justified,
even by memos from the despicable John Yoo and the Republican
Federalist Society.
Ms. deSousa is clearly worried about herself. But where is her concern
for the innocent person that she sent into an Egyptian hell to be
tortured until death or admission of being a terrorist? The remorse
deSousa expresses is only for herself. She did her evil government's
bidding and her evil government that she so faithfully served turned
its back on her. She has no remorse for the evil she committed against
an innocent person.
Perhaps deSousa and her 22 colleagues grew up on video games. It was
great fun to plot to kidnap a real person and fly him on a CIA plane
to Egypt. Was it like a fisherman catching a fish or a deer hunter
killing a beautiful 8-point buck? Clearly, they got their jollies at
the expense of their renditioned victim.
The finding of the Italian court, and keep in mind that Italy is a
bought-and-paid-for US puppet state, indicates that even our bought
puppets are finding the US too much to stomach.
Moving from the tip of the iceberg down, we have Ambassador Craig
Murray, rector of the University of Dundee and until 2004 the
UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, which he describes as a Stalinist
totalitarian state courted and supported by the Americans.
As ambassador, Murray saw the MI5 intelligence reports from the CIA
that described the most horrible torture procedures. "People were
raped with broken bottles, children were tortured in front of their
parents until they [the parents] signed a confession, people were
boiled alive."
"Intelligence" from these torture sessions was passed on by the CIA
to MI5 and to Washington as proof of the vast al Qaeda conspiracy.
Amb. Murray reports that the people delivered by CIA flights to
Uzbekistan's torture prisons "were told to confess to membership in
Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they'd been in training camps in
Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden
in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes."
"I was absolutely stunned," says the British ambassador, who thought
that he served a moral country that, along with its American ally,
had moral integrity. The great Anglo-American bastion of democracy and
human rights, the homes of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the
great moral democracies that defeated Nazism and stood up to Stalin's
gulags, were prepared to commit any crime in order to maximize profits.
Amb. Murray learned too much and was fired when he vomited it all up.
He saw the documents that proved that the motivation for US and UK
military aggression in Afghanistan had to do with the natural gas
deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Americans wanted a
pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan.
To insure this, an invasion was necessary. The idiot American public
could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to
save them from "terrorism," and the utter fools would believe the lie.
"If you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as
against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that
undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline
route. It's what it's about. It's about money, its about energy,
it's not about democracy."
Guess who the consultant was who arranged with then Texas governor
George W. Bush the agreements that would give to Enron the rights to
Uzbekistan's and Turkmenistan's natural gas deposits and to Unocal to
develop the trans-Afghanistan pipeline. It was Karzai, the US-imposed
"president" of Afghanistan, who has no support in the country except
for American bayonets.
Amb. Murray was dismissed from the UK Foreign Service for his
revelations. No doubt on orders from Washington to our British puppet.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in
the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good
Intentions.He can be reached at: [email protected]
By Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts110620 09.html
November 6-8, 2009
The US government is now so totally under the thumbs of organized
interest groups that "our" government can no longer respond to the
concerns of the American people who elect the president and the
members of the House and Senate. Voters will vent their frustrations
over their impotence on the president, which implies a future of
one-term presidents. Soon our presidents will be as ineffective as
Roman emperors in the final days of that empire.
Obama is already set on the course to a one-term presidency. He
promised change, but has delivered none. His health care bill is held
hostage by the private insurance companies seeking greater profits.
The most likely outcome will be cuts in Medicare and Medicaid in
order to help fund wars that enrich the military/security complex
and the many companies created by privatizing services that the
military once provided for itself at far lower costs. It would be
interesting to know the percentage of the $700+ billion "defense"
spending that goes to private companies. In American "capitalism,"
an amazing amount of taxpayers' earnings go to private firms via the
government. Yet, Republicans scream about "socializing" health care.
Republicans and Democrats saw opportunities to create new sources
of campaign contributions by privatizing as many military functions
as possible. There are now a large number of private companies that
have never made a dollar in the market, feeding instead at the public
trough that drains taxpayers of dollars while loading Americans with
debt service obligations.
Obama inherited an excellent opportunity to bring US soldiers home
from the Bush regime's illegal wars of aggression. In its final days,
the Bush regime realized that it could "win" in Iraq by putting the
Sunni insurgents on the US military payroll. Once Bush had 80,000
insurgents collecting US military pay, violence, although still high,
dropped in half. All Obama had to do was to declare victory and bring
our boys home, thanking Bush for winning the war. It would have shut
up the Republicans.
But this sensible course would have impaired the profits and
share prices of those firms that comprise the military/security
complex. So instead of doing what Obama said he would do and what
the voters elected him to do, Obama restarted the war in Afghanistan
and launched a new one in Pakistan. Soon Obama was echoing Bush and
Cheney's threats to attack Iran.
In place of health care for Americans, there will be more profits
for private insurance companies.
In place of peace there will be more war.
Voters are already recognizing the writing on the wall and are falling
away from Obama and the Democrats. Independents who gave Obama his
comfortable victory have now swung against him, recently electing
Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia to succeed Democrats.
This is a protest vote, not a confidence vote in Republicans.
Obama's credibility is shot. And so is Congress's, assuming it ever
had any. The US House of Representatives has just voted to show
the entire world that the US House of Representatives is nothing
but the servile, venal, puppet of the Israel Lobby. The House of
Representatives of the American "superpower" did the bidding of its
master, AIPAC, and voted 344 to 36 to condemn the Goldstone Report.
In case you don't know, the Goldstone Report is the Report of the
United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. The "Gaza
Conflict" is the Israeli military attack on the Gaza ghetto, where 1.5
million dispossessed Palestinians, whose lands, villages, and homes
were stolen by Israel, are housed. The attack was on civilians and
civilian infrastructure. It was without any doubt a war crime under the
Nuremberg standard that the US established in order to execute Nazis.
Goldstone is not only a very distinguished Jewish jurist who has given
his life to bringing people to accountability for their crimes against
humanity, but also a Zionist. However, the Israelis have demonized
him as a "self-hating Jew" because he wrote the truth instead of
Israeli propaganda.
US Representative Dennis Kucinich, who is now without a doubt a marked
man on AIPAC's political extermination list, asked the House if the
members had any realization of the shame that the vote condemning
Goldstone would bring on the House and the US government. The entire
rest of the world accepts the Goldstone report.
The House answered with its lopsided vote that the rest of the world
doesn't count as it doesn't give campaign contributions to members
of Congress.
This shameful, servile act of "the world's greatest democracy"
occurred the very week that a court in Italy convicted 23 US CIA
officers for kidnapping a person in Italy. The CIA agents are now
considered "fugitives from justice" in Italy, and indeed they are.
The kidnapped person was renditioned to the American puppet state of
Egypt, where the victim was held for years and repeatedly tortured.
The case against him was so absurd that even an Egyptian judge ordered
his release.
One of the convicted CIA operatives, Sabrina deSousa, an attractive
young woman, says that the US broke the law by kidnapping a person and
sending him to another country to be tortured in order to manufacture
another "terrorist" in order to keep the terrorist hoax going at home.
Without the terrorist hoax, America's wars for special interest
reasons would become transparent even to Fox "News" junkies.
Ms. deSousa says that "everything I did was approved back in
Washington," yet the government, which continually berates us to
"support the troops," did nothing to protect her when she carried
out the Bush regime's illegal orders.
Clearly, this means that the crime that Bush, Cheney, the Pentagon, and
the CIA ordered is too heinous and beyond the pale to be justified,
even by memos from the despicable John Yoo and the Republican
Federalist Society.
Ms. deSousa is clearly worried about herself. But where is her concern
for the innocent person that she sent into an Egyptian hell to be
tortured until death or admission of being a terrorist? The remorse
deSousa expresses is only for herself. She did her evil government's
bidding and her evil government that she so faithfully served turned
its back on her. She has no remorse for the evil she committed against
an innocent person.
Perhaps deSousa and her 22 colleagues grew up on video games. It was
great fun to plot to kidnap a real person and fly him on a CIA plane
to Egypt. Was it like a fisherman catching a fish or a deer hunter
killing a beautiful 8-point buck? Clearly, they got their jollies at
the expense of their renditioned victim.
The finding of the Italian court, and keep in mind that Italy is a
bought-and-paid-for US puppet state, indicates that even our bought
puppets are finding the US too much to stomach.
Moving from the tip of the iceberg down, we have Ambassador Craig
Murray, rector of the University of Dundee and until 2004 the
UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, which he describes as a Stalinist
totalitarian state courted and supported by the Americans.
As ambassador, Murray saw the MI5 intelligence reports from the CIA
that described the most horrible torture procedures. "People were
raped with broken bottles, children were tortured in front of their
parents until they [the parents] signed a confession, people were
boiled alive."
"Intelligence" from these torture sessions was passed on by the CIA
to MI5 and to Washington as proof of the vast al Qaeda conspiracy.
Amb. Murray reports that the people delivered by CIA flights to
Uzbekistan's torture prisons "were told to confess to membership in
Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they'd been in training camps in
Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden
in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes."
"I was absolutely stunned," says the British ambassador, who thought
that he served a moral country that, along with its American ally,
had moral integrity. The great Anglo-American bastion of democracy and
human rights, the homes of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the
great moral democracies that defeated Nazism and stood up to Stalin's
gulags, were prepared to commit any crime in order to maximize profits.
Amb. Murray learned too much and was fired when he vomited it all up.
He saw the documents that proved that the motivation for US and UK
military aggression in Afghanistan had to do with the natural gas
deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Americans wanted a
pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan.
To insure this, an invasion was necessary. The idiot American public
could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to
save them from "terrorism," and the utter fools would believe the lie.
"If you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as
against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that
undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline
route. It's what it's about. It's about money, its about energy,
it's not about democracy."
Guess who the consultant was who arranged with then Texas governor
George W. Bush the agreements that would give to Enron the rights to
Uzbekistan's and Turkmenistan's natural gas deposits and to Unocal to
develop the trans-Afghanistan pipeline. It was Karzai, the US-imposed
"president" of Afghanistan, who has no support in the country except
for American bayonets.
Amb. Murray was dismissed from the UK Foreign Service for his
revelations. No doubt on orders from Washington to our British puppet.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in
the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good
Intentions.He can be reached at: [email protected]