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THE STRANGE CALM OVER LYBIA

The Strange Calm Over Tripoli?

By Franklin Lamb

August 22, 2011 "CounterPunch" -- Tripoli - The large gold framed portrait of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi that adorned the wall behind the reception desk of my hotel since it opened many years ago has vanished. Also gone are the 72 green flags that flew on the white poles which have also been removed. It’s not polite to inquire of the skeleton staff about who removed these items because the act of removal could become very serious offenses depending on the final outcome here. But, my friend Ismail, manning the front desk, just grinned at me when I commented on the hotel's fine new mirror that hangs in the leader’s space.




Looking over the skyline of Tripoli at 7:30 a.m. 8/22/11 from the 26th floor of the Corinthia Hotel it seems that it’s just about over for the Qaddafi regime.




All night one heard in central Tripoli mainly celebratory gunfire from areas like the nearby newly renamed “Martyrs Square” (formerly ‘Green Square’) but so many questions are on most people minds this morning. Some ask, are the Qaddafi forces opening a trap for the rebel forces allowing them to come in quickly and easily and then when they are gathered in public celebrations and seek rest, counter attack?




The claim of the NTC representative this morning that the rebels control 95 per cent of Tripoli seems farfetched. This is a very spread out city and its clear rebel forces are not deployed everywhere.




A column of 22 camouflaged painted military vehicles full of government fighters slowly passed by our hotel at 8:10 this morning and turned right into the seaside compound which includes the Bab al Bahar Hotel (“gate to the sea”), and on its edge, the unoccupied JW Marriott, from which witnesses said the sniper who shot me in my right leg yesterday morning was perched. My doctor gave me the bullet as a souvenir and I will be fine although the damned thing hurts. An arriving hotel worker just reported seeing government forces assembling in Tripoli’s neighborhoods over the past several hours.




On the other side of my hotel I can see rebel pickups filled with fighters and new tricolor Libyan flags driving very slowly towards Green (Martyr’s) Square. I am thinking what would happen if they make a wrong turn.




Reports of Saif and Mohammad Qaddafi’s capture supports the idea that the government here wildly exaggerated its solid support and that the public largely believed them. Already among the few staff and some kids who come early to jump the hotel fence and use the swimming pool, and their trademark chants of “Allah, Mohammad, Muammar, Libya wa bass” have ended their chants and now support for ousting “the leader” is widespread. Most hotel staff at my hotel appear crestfallen.




The outpouring of support for Qaddafi’s departure by the same crowds who seemed to adore him at Green Square the past five months I have been monitoring them is surprising but perhaps reveals why all powerful despots are often more form than substance and can collapse quickly under certain conditions.




The questions being asked here this morning by student friends include what happened to the resistance to NATO and its supported rebels, where are the “65,000 professional soldiers waiting to repel “NATO’s rebels” from entering Tripoli, mentioned just last night by Government spokesman, Musa Ibrahim, was there ever a real Libyan army of thousands ready to defend Tripoli, what will the transition be like, will there be tribal conflicts for power, will Libya have to pay for all the infrastructure damage, will NATO countries, given the widespread hostility to NATO killing so many civilians be granted oil contracts, will the US get another military base (Wheelus was closed by Qaddafi on June 1970), will the new government recognize Israel as NATO is said to be demanding, will the National Transition Council fulfill its pledges for a just, quick transition with early elections, and on and on.




Yesterday morning, as I embarked on a bike tour of Tripoli, there were signs that something incongruous was happening. Security guards, normally about 20 outside the hotel were nowhere to be seen. Also, no staff came to work. Ismail and the IT guy slept at the hotel—and the British lady “Miss Lorraine” who is in charge of hotel Hospitality lives at the hotel and was understandably and visibly upset.




As I left the hotel close to 7:30 a.m. by bicycle yesterday morning I was surprised to see one woman standing alone on the street in front of the hotel. I was more surprised when she lit up with a broad smile as she chimed “Hello Mr. Lamb!”




She is Marianne, who works with Lorraine somewhere in the bowels of this claimed “7 Star Hotel” I had spoken with her on the phone but we never met personally. When I asked her why she was standing in the empty street, she replied, “I need to find a ride to the port!” That seemed odd, given what is happening here, so I asked her why. “My two week vacation starts today and I need to get a boat to Malta”. I was shocked, “Sweetheart, please, for sure there is no boat to Malta now and it’s dangerous for you to go to the Port.” “But, my boyfriend is waiting for me in Malta” she wailed. "Ok, but if you find a ride call my room and I will pay half and come with you to the Port”. Marianne agreed. I never saw her again.




The UN delegation left yesterday after their five day “fact finding mission.” Not sure what facts they found because they mainly stayed in the hotel waiting and waiting, like most other foreigners here do, for a promised appointment with a government official or someone. Their leader, a stellar Palestinian lady from Nazarath in Occupied Palestine, convinced NATO to let some foreigners make use of empty UN plane seats so this hotel was essentially emptied of guests.




There has been no sign of Colonel Gaddafi. A strange calm has spread over Tripoli.

Franklin Lamb is in Tripoli. He can be reached c/o fplamb@gmail.com .
'CIA, MI6 'journos' in Tripoli Rixos hotel, outside NATO loses ground'






Journalists trapped in a Tripoli hotel say there are heavy explosions close-by, power is down, and there's gunfire outside. Journalist Thierry Meyssan, who's founder and chairman of online newspaper the Voltaire Network is in the Rixos hotel in Tripoli and says NATO forces are doing everything to back up rebels

COST OF WARS AND LOST LIVES

Number Of Iraqis Slaughtered In US War And Occupation Of Iraq "1,455,590"

Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged) In U.S. War And Occupation Of Iraq 4,792

Number Of International Occupation Force Troops Slaughtered In Afghanistan : 2,685



Cost of War in Iraq & Afghanistan
$1,238,756,961,286
For more details, click here.






Wikileaks Mirrors
Wikileaks is currently mirrored on 2194 sites
Click to view list

SHADOW WARRIORS MOVE IN ON UP

Shadow Warriors: Movin’ On Up By Conn Hallinan August 18, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --  For decades the U.S. military has waged clandestine war on virtually every continent on the globe, but, for the first time, high-ranking Special Operations Forces (SOF) officers are moving out of the shadows and into the command mainstream. Their emergence suggests the U.S. is embarking on a military sea change that will replace massive deployments, like Iraq and Afghanistan, with stealthy night raids, secret assassinations, and death-dealing drones. Its implications for civilian control of foreign policy promises to be profound. Early this month, Vice Adm. Robert Harward—a former commander of the SEALs—the Navy’s elite SOF that recently killed al-Qaeda leader Osma bin Laden—was appointed deputy commander of Central Command, the military region that embraces the Middle East and Central Asia.  Another SEAL commander, Vice Adm. Joseph Kernan, took over the number two spot in Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean. The Obama Administration has been particularly enamored of SOFs, and, according to reporters Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post, is in the process of doubling the number of countries where such units are active from 60 to 120. U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Col. Tim Nye told Nick Turse of Salon that SOF forces would soon be deployed in 60 percent of the world’s nations: “We do a lot of traveling.” Indeed they do. U.S. Special Operations Command (SOC) admits to having forces in virtually every country in the Middle East, Central Asia, as well as many in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. But true to its penchant for secrecy, SOC is reluctant to disclose every country to which its forces are deployed. “We’re obviously going to have some places where it’s not advantageous for us to list where were at,” Nye told Turse. SOF forces have almost doubled in the past two decades, from some 37,000 to close to 60,000, and major increases are planned in the future. Their budget has jumped from $2.3 billion to $9.8 billion over the last 10 years These Special Forces include the Navy’s SEALs, the Marines Special Operations teams, the Army’s Delta Force, the Air Force’s Blue Light and Air Commandos, plus Rangers and Green Berets. There is also the CIA, which runs the clandestine drone war in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It is increasingly difficult to distinguish civilian from military operatives. Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA, is now Defense Secretary, while Afghanistan commander Gen. David Petraeus—an expert on counterinsurgency and counter terror operations—is taking over the CIA. Both have worked closely with SOF units, particularly Petraeus, who vastly increased the number of “night raids” in Iraq and Afghanistan. The raids are aimed at decapitating insurgent leadership, but have caused widespread outrage in both countries. The raids are based on intelligence that many times comes from local warlords trying to eliminate their enemies or competition. And, since the raids are carried out under a cloak of secrecy, it is almost impossible to investigate them when things go wrong. A recent CIA analysis of civilian casualties from the organization’s drone war in Pakistan contends that attacks since May 2010 have killed more than 600 insurgents and not a single civilian. But a report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at City University in Londonfound “credible evidence” that at least 45 non-combatants were killed during this period. Pakistani figures are far higher. Those higher numbers, according to Dennis C. Blair, retired admiral and director of national intelligence from 2009 to 2010, “are widely believed [in Pakistan] and, Blair points out, “our reliance on high-tech strikes that pose no risk to our soldiers is bitterly resented.” Rather than re-examining the policy of night raids and the use of armed drones, however, those tactics are being expanded to places like Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. The question is, who’s next? Latin America is one candidate. A recent WikiLeak release demonstrates that there was close coordination between right wing, separatist groups in eastern Bolivia—where much of that country’s natural gas reserves are located—and the U.S. Embassy. The cables indicate that the U.S. Embassy met with dissident generals, who agreed to stand aside in case of a right-wing coup against the left-leaning government of Evo Morales. The coup was thwarted, but Bolivia expelled American Ambassador Philip Goldberg over U.S. meddling in its domestic politics. The U.S. has a long and sordid history of supporting Latin American coups—at times engineering them— and many in the region are tense over the recent re-establishment of the U.S. Fourth Fleet. The latter, a Cold War artifact, will patrol 30 countries in the region. Given the Obama administration’s support for the post-2009 coup government in Honduras, its ongoing hostility to the Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and now the WikiLeak revelations about Bolivia, the idea of appointing a “shadow warrior” the number two leader in South Command is likely to concern governments in the region. SOFs have become almost a parallel military. In 2002, Special Operations were given the right to create their own task forces, separate from military formations like Central and Southern Command. In 2011 they got the okay to control their budgets, training and equipment, independent of the departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. If one reaches for an historical analogy, the Praetorian Guard of Rome’s emperors comes to mind. There is a cult-like quality about SOFs that the media and Hollywood has done much to nurture: Special Forces are tough, independent, competent and virtually indestructible. The gushy New Yorker magazine story about SEAL Team Six, “Getting Bin Laden,” is a case in point. According to New York Timescolumnist Maureen Dowd, the story will be made into a movie-for-TV and released just before the 2012 elections. There is a telling moment in that story that captures the combination of bravado and arrogance that permeates SOF units. An unidentified “senior Defense Department official” told author Nicholas Schmidle that the bin Laden mission was just “one of almost two thousand missions that have been conducted over the last couple of years, night after night.” And then adds that these raids were routine, no big thing, “like mowing the lawn.” But war is never like “mowing the lawn,” as 38 American and Afghan SOFs found out the night of Aug. 6 when their U.S. CH-47 “Chinook” helicopter flew into a carefully laid ambush just south of the Afghan capital of Kabul. “It was a trap that was set by a Taliban commander,” a “senior Afghan government official” told Agence France Presse. According to the official, the Taliban commander, Qari Tahir, put out a phony story that a Taliban meeting was taking place. When Army Rangers went in to attack the “meeting,” they found the Taliban dug in and waiting. Within minutes the Rangers were pinned down and forced to send for help. The Taliban had spent several years practicing for just such an event in the Korengal Valley that borders Pakistan. According to a 2009 Washington Poststory—“Taliban Surprising U.S. Forces With Improved Tactics”—the Valley is a training ground to learn how to gauge the response time for U.S. artillery, air strikes and helicopter assaults. “They know exactly how long it takes before…they have to break contact and pull back,” a Pentagon officer told the Post. “The Taliban knew which route the helicopter would take,” said the Afghan official, because “that is the only route, so they took position on either side of the valley on mountains and as the helicopter approached, they attacked it with rockets.” According to Wired, the insurgents apparently used an “improvised rocket-assisted rocket,” essentially a rocket-propelled grenade with a bigger warhead. As soon as the chopper was down, the Taliban broke off the attack and vanished. According to the U.S., many of those Taliban were later killed in a bombing raid, but believing what the military says these days about Afghanistan is a profound leap of faith. SOFs are not invulnerable, nor are they a solution to the dangerous world we live in. And the qualities that make them effective— stealth and secrecy—are in fundamental conflict with a civilian controlled armed forces, one of the cornerstones of our democracy. As Adm. Eric Olson, former head of Special Operations, recently said at the Aspen Institute’s Security Forum, having Special Forces in 120 countries “depends on our ability to not talk about it,” and what the military most wanted was “to get back into the shadows.” Which is precisely the problem. Conn M. Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus, “A Think Tank Without Walls, and an independent journalist. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. He oversaw the journalism program at the University of California at Santa Cruz for 23 years, and won the UCSC Alumni Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award, as well as UCSC’s Innovations in Teaching Award, and Excellence in Teaching Award. He was also a college provost at UCSC, and retired in 2004. He is a winner of a Project Censored “Real News Award,” and lives in Berkeley, California. Conn can be read at www.dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com

THE HUGE DEMONSTRATIONS IN SERIA

Those Huge Demonstrations In Syria

By Moon Of Alabama

August 18, 2011 "Moon Of Alabama" - -We know for a while that the protests in Syria are far smaller than reported:

That same night on July 15, I received news feeds from the AFP announcing a million protestors all over Syria, of which 500,000 in Hama alone.

In Hama however, they could not have been more than 10,000.

This ‘information’ was even more absurd due to the fact that the city of Hama counts only 370,000 inhabitants.

... 

So what sources does AgenceFrancePresse (AFP) cite?

The same which crops up systematically throughout the media and has now become a monopoly in its own right, regarding the Syrian protests: the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). Behind this superficial veneer of respectability and professionalism, hides a political organisation based in London, its president none other than Rami Abdel Raman, a man who has consistently sided against the Baath regime, who is loosely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Therefore, for many months now, the Western media have diffused an edited reality, corrected by a single source which nobody has deemed it necessary, it seems, to question.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, often cited, is one that feeds the "western" image of the protests. Another source are videos uploaded to Youtube.

Today we learn of a big demonstration in Homs arranged for the sole purpose of video making:

On a recent Sunday, 200 protesters marched in front of the Safir Hotel, the city’s most famous, carrying signs calling for the fall of the government and showing solidarity with Hama, a city to the north that was stormed on July 31.

The demonstrators walked slowly, led in the chants by a man whose face was concealed with a scarf. “Hama, we are with you until death,” they cried, with a few of the protesters in back filming the crowd with their cellphones.

...

“We’re not worried about the security,” said one of the protesters. “We will be done anyway in half an hour.” Since it was a small protest, he said, they would disperse by the time the buses carrying members of the security forces arrived. The protesters had lookouts near security stations, and they sent signals when the buses left. The main purpose of this protest was symbolic, he explained: they wanted to upload new videos on YouTube.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and AlJazeerah will very likely point to that video and claim it shows a big demonstration of 20,000+ with 20+ killed by the marauding forces of the Syrian army.

But video from huge demonstrations do not make them true. Homs seems to be rather quiet now and the few Syrian cities where armed troublemakers are still roaming around will likely be cleared in a short while.

Some people hope for the Turks to get involved in Syria. Forget about it. Syria, Iraq and Iran have, like Turkey, partly Kurdish population. If they want to pressure Turkey to stay away from an intervention in Syria they only need to unleash some of the Kurdish rebels into east Turkey. Indeed they may have already done so. Erdogan understands that and will stay out of Syria.

fake terror ROAD TO DICTATORSHIP

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.

THE ROMAN PATH

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 its 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.

ENTER HITLER

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.

FROM CUBA TO HAWAII

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 ROOSEVELT NEEDED AN ENEMY

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 its 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 its 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 its 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 its 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)

OOH, LET US HAVE VIETNAM!

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.

IRAQ GOT OIL!

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 Glaspiethat 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.

WE MAY AS WELL DO A DETOUR TO BOSNIA

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 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.

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!

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.

DOWN THE SAME YELLOW BRICK ROAD

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.

AUTHOR: Michael Rivero