Underwear Bomber Redux - Was Mutallab An Israeli "Secret Weapon"?

After repeatedly denying that the Christmas Underwear Bomber™ had any help in his misguided attempt to blow up Detroit-bound Flight 253 on Christmas day 2009, or that there was any sign of an accomplice on over 200 hours of Amsterdam airport security tapes, the US government recently, and very quietly, chose to admit that it had been watching Mutallab all along and that it's now looking for his accomplice at Amsterdam airport.

In one of only a few mainstream news reports on the US government's reversal, the Detroit News stated:

The State Department didn't revoke the visa of foiled terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab because federal counter-terrorism officials had begged off revocation, a top State Department official revealed Wednesday.

Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab's visa wasn't taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would've foiled a larger investigation into al-Qaida threats against the United States.

"Revocation action would've disclosed what they were doing," Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, "rather than simply knocking out one soldier in that effort."

ABC News also reported:

Federal agents also tell ABCNews.com they are attempting to identify a man who passengers said helped Abdulmutallab change planes for Detroit when he landed in Amsterdam from Lagos, Nigeria.

Of course, that's not an admission that Mutallab had an accomplice, but it says a lot following six weeks of repeated denials on the existence of accomplices.



If US federal counterterrorism officials, aka the FBI, specifically requested that Mutallab be allowed to fly to Detroit from Amsterdam, it lends a lot more credence to the report by lawyer and eyewitness Kurt Haskell who has repeatedly claimed that Mutallab was escorted to the gate in Amsterdam by a "sharply dressed Indian-looking man". If we accept Haskell's statement (and at present there is no reason not to) then a reasonable explanation is that the accomplice was tasked with ensuring that Mutallab got on the plane and was a member of either the US intelligence services or the intelligence services of another US-friendly nation.

Haskell himself has presented just such an analysis on his web site.

But what are we to make of the claim by the US State Department that the goal of this little maneuver was to "get closer to apprehending the terror network he [Mutallab] is accused of working with"?

Surely if US intelligence was aware that Mutallab was a terrorist threat they would have at least taken the precaution of making very sure that the flight onto which he was to be escorted was not a target of the "terror network"? Surely a thorough rub down, or a strip-search would not have been out of the question for such a threat to US national security?

Take your pick; either US intelligence is so incompetent that they did not first check if this known terrorist was carrying a bomb onto the plane, or they staged the entire operation themselves in order to keep the Islamic terrorism bandwagon rolling.

One of the most interesting things about the Christmas day underwear bombing fiasco is that it played out on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. If Mutallab had no passport and was escorted to the gate by a "sharply-dressed man", then it is unlikely that he went through normal security checks at the airport. We have no doubt that an agent of the US government could quite easily bypass security at any airport, but we also believe it would be difficult to prevent this fact from leaking out to the press, particularly from officials and security personnel working at Amsterdam Schiphol airport.

To enable a person to bypass all airport security would require a very particular presence at the airport in question, something akin to a little self-contained "kingdom".

Recently, We exchanged a few emails with a Dutch reporter who has extensive experience of the internal workings of Amsterdam airport. He told us:

Israel [...] needs US-weapons - and spare-parts. Most of this stuff is since many years brought to Israel by cargo planes (Hercules, B-747) that used Schiphol (Amsterdam) as the needed half-way-stop. Officially they were civil planes, but they were treated as state - (military) planes. There is legally a big difference in status.

Because this weaponry was in many cases of a very sophisticated and for that reason classified kind, it needed protection on the way from the US to Israel. The Dutch authorities therefore agreed upon the fact that Israel was given a special secluded area (hangar and apron) that would be guarded by Israeli personnel.

These guardians were not of El Al (Israeli national airline). They were members of Shin Bet, the Mossad-branch that looks after civil safety. For the young people that manned it, it was a way of performing their conscription duties.

Members of Shin Bet did not only guard military airplanes. They also provide for safety of passenger-planes. I do not know whether it is the same at other airfields, but at Schiphol everyone could see them at work at the gates of El Al planes.

In fact the young girl who flew as a passenger with the Israeli cargo-plane that crashed in Amsterdam (Anat Solomon) had done a tour as a Shin Bet safety-officer at Schiphol and flew home for her wedding.

After the crash members of the Shin Bet-group at Schiphol were speedily brought to the crash-site, to see if they could gather some of the classified stuff that was on board the crashed plane. Officially this was in contradiction with Dutch laws about the treatment of crash-sites, but it was agreed to by a secret agreement between the Dutch and Israeli government - as a logical consequence of the fact that only Israelis would know what sort of classified weaponry was onboard.

Facts about the existence of an 'Israeli part of Schiphol' were officially given by the Parliamentary Enquiry Commission; they were given in interrogation reports (of El Al and Shin Bet personnel) by the police, they were given by Mr. Jeroen Pelttenberg, El Al's station-manager at Schiphol, and by some other people that were in some way or another confronted with the situation.

The El Al cargo crash into an appartment block in the Bijlmer suburb of Amsterdam in 1992 gives us an idea of the "sophisticated weaponry" and "spare parts" the Mossad was (still is) siphoning from the US arsenal through its transport hub at Amsterdam airport. Israelis arrived at the scene of the crash to retrieve incriminating evidence (the dead and injured residents of Bijlmer be damned). Over 1,000 local residents and emergency workers had developed respiratory, neurological and mobility ailments, as well as a rise in cancer and birth defects, by the time an investigation by Dutch journalists in 1998 brought the cargo's true manifest to light:

Almost six years after the event, on 30 September 1998, editors Harm van den Berg and Karel Knip of the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad published the results of an extensive investigation they had carried out into the crash. They had obtained the freight documentation for the flight, and made public for the first time its real cargo. The manifest confirmed the plane was carrying 400 kilograms of depleted uranium as ballast, but also showed that it carried among its cargo about 10 tons of assorted chemicals. The chemicals included ten 18.9-litre plastic drums of dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), and smaller amounts of isopropanol and hydrogen fluoride: three of the four chemical precursors for the production of Sarin nerve gas.

A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's office immediately denied that Flight 1862 had been carrying Sarin precursors. When this was contradicted hours later by an El Al spokesman, the Prime Minister's office acknowledged that the chemicals were onboard but stated that "the material was non-toxic and was to have been used to test filters that protect against chemical weapons". An explanation that Earth Island Journal found "puzzling", since "it only takes a few grams to conduct such tests. Once combined, the chemicals aboard Flight 1862 could have produced 270 kilos of sarin - sufficient to kill the entire population of a major world city."

On January 29, 1999, Dutch attorney general Vrakking testified at official hearings that the El Al security detachment at Schiphol was a branch of the Mossad. It also emerged that El Al planes are never inspected by Dutch customs or the Dutch Flight Safety Board at Amsterdam Schiphol.

Journalists say Dutch security officials have told them that the Netherlands has allowed Israel to make secret military air shipments through Schiphol since the 1950s. Former Dutch Defense minister Henk Vredeling, in an interview with Dutch TV NOS - and apparently caught unawares of the legal implications of admitting complicity in a war crime - proudly recounted secret weapons transports to Israel during the Yom Kippur war in 1973. These shipments apparently lie outside the Atlantic Alliance military treaties because the aircraft going to Israel are not refueled at NATO air bases but at the commercial airport of Schiphol.

The Mossad "state within a state" at the airport has taken full advantage of this loophole. "Schiphol has become a hub for secret weapons transfers because El Al has special status there. Dutch authorities have no jurisdiction over Israeli activities at the airport," said Henk van der Belt, a member of an investigation team set up by Bijlmer residents.

One of the investigators working on behalf of the Bijlmermeer survivors said that Schiphol had become, and continues to be, "a hub for Israeli secret weapons transfers". The question we need to answer is; was Mutallab also an Israeli secret weapon in the promotion of the war on terror?

Given the Mossad's free reign over its little "kingdom" within Amsterdam Schiphol, coupled with the fact that Israeli security firm ICTS is in charge of the regular security operation there, it's worth reflecting upon a couple of other incidents in recent years. Before the Underwear Bomber came the Shoe Bomber:

Six months prior to Reid's near shoe bombing of American Airlines flight 63 from Paris to Miami in December 2001, while memories of 9/11 were still fresh in everyone's mind, Reid attempted to board an El Al flight from Schiphol to Tel Aviv.

Reid was taken aside by El Al security and identified as a terrorist suspect. Reid paid for a one-way ticket with cash and would not reveal what he planned to do in Israel.

However, rather than turning Reid into Dutch security for further action, he was allowed to board the El Al flight by Israel's Shin Bet security so his movements during his five days in Israel could be monitored.

Six months later, Reid attempted to ignite his shoe on the flight from Paris to Miami. Israel had not informed British, American, or any other security agency of the concerns about Reid. Reid's aunt, Claudette Lewis who raised Reid in south London, was quoted as saying she believed her nephew had been "brainwashed."

Reid later said El Al failed to detect that he had explosives in his shoes on the flight to Tel Aviv, an amazing revelation considering the Israeli airline's tight security.

The links between El Al security and Mossad are extremely close with abundant cross-pollination of senior personnel back and forth.

The security company that allowed Reid to board American Airlines 63 at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris was ICTS (International Consultants on Targeted Security) International. ICTS's senior management are all ex-Israeli security officials, many of whom for El Al security.

It was ICTS that largely developed the passenger "profiling" procedures used at Schiphol and other airports around the world through its subsidiary, ICTS Holland Products BV.

Bear in mind that ICTS also shared security duties on 9/11 at Boston's Logan Airport and handled security for London's bus system. This Israeli security firm, effectively a front for the Mossad, has therefore had its personnel on the ground to oversee arguably the four most notorious "al-Qaeda terrorist attacks" against American and British targets.

According to former Mossad spy Victor Ostrovsky, the Mossad organisation is relatively small. But the ethos it embodies - rule over others by way of deception - runs deep through its front companies that link ramified networks comprising some of the 'best' (most noxiously evil) psychopaths globally.

In 2006 a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Mumbai was escorted back to Schiphol by Dutch fighter planes after the crew became suspicious of some passengers' behaviour. Granted that in the hysterical post-9/11 climate you only need to wear a beard and whisper Allah to warrant suspicions, but 12 people were nevertheless arrested before the Dutch government announced it was a false alarm. A trial run for future scenarios involving Northwest Airlines perhaps?

Last February a Turkish Airlines Boeing crashed upon landing at Schiphol. Another incident that smacks of spy vs spy games, four of the nine passengers killed were US "Boeing employees" returning from Turkey after pitching a "sophisticated airborne radar station" - to be installed in a Turkish airforce Boeing 737 - to the Turkish military brass on behalf of the Pentagon.

Zombie nation

Amsterdam Schiphol has had the DNA-tearing 'naked' scanners in operation since 2007. Although that's irrelevant in Mutallab's case because he was escorted around normal security procedure, the incident was used to promote these machines en-masse, a plan we are told was on the backburner until now because of 'fears for people's privacy.'

Completely overlooked is the brazen conflict of interest exemplified by former head of the Department of Homeland Security and dual US-Israeli citizen Michael Chertoff, who ran around giving dozens of media interviews touting the need for the US government to buy more full-body scanners. He stands to net a tidy profit through his security consultancy firm Chertoff Group, which along with other notable former Senators and TSA officials make up the "full-body scanner lobby" that represents the manufacturers cashing in on the sale of these insidious dehumanisation devices.

Along with the psychopaths in the US government, racist hard-liners in Israel believe the survival of the state of Israel lies solely in its military strength and that this strength arises from the need to answer the constant threat of war.

Of course, fighting a real and well-equipped enemy is very risky. After all, you might lose. The next best thing is to create the enemy yourself and play both sides against the middle, as they say. Unfortunately it is the masses of ordinary people that find themselves in the middle of the deranged games that psychopaths play.

Obama's State of the Union speech

A good friend passed on this excellent analysis

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Obama's State of the Union speech is occurring at the moment, and against my better judgment I actually turned it on. It's about 20 minutes into the incongruous jocularity of the President and the Chamber - and he just said that he will encourage legislation to reverse the ruling of the Supreme Court that Corporations are 'persons' and can donate to election funding. He says this is wrong - this will allow society's most powerful to influence elections, as well as foreign interests - he won't have it.

The Supreme justices sit there on camera like stunned corpses as a bipartisan standing ovation exploded in the chamber. He's addressed ear mark spending, lobbying limits and transparency, changing political discourse, the super-majority dictated by the Republican minority leadership (60% majority needed to do anything), and futher tax cuts for education and child credits. He states that voting no on everything is hindering progress (what an astonishingly brilliant observation!).

He then goes into Al Queda (trademarked courtesy CIA) and that as a candidate he promised he would end the war and that this is what he is doing - he will "have all the combat troops out of Iraq by August".

"All of our troops are coming home." (flash to a general's face who looks bewildered and Joe Lieberman mouthing something that looked a lot like 'yeah right'.) No mention of Afghanistan or the many other countries where we are killing because it is what we (or our drones) do.

Then - to supporting the troops when they come home, Michelle and Joe Biden are heading a new committee to support military families! (rousing applause - yes - yes to the military families, the Chamber responds! Camera zooms in on those in uniform.)

Sheesh - I take it the "5D city on a hill" is next week with all these promises that cannot be fulfilled?

No way all of this is going through - he is righting all the most obvious (to the sleeping populace) wrongs in one speech - down to reducing our nuclear stockpiles and "the farthest reaching arms control treaty in two decades"... ( what? )

"Securing all vulnerable nuclear material around the world in 4 yrs so they never fall into the hands of terrorists." Which brings us to isolating North Korea and Iran - A HAAAA - "they too will face consequences", he says!

I now know why I've avoided these speeches in the past. "America must always stand on the side of human dignity and freedom" ... (the nation glances nervously in the direction of the 'naked' airport scanners.)

"If you abide by the law, you should be protected by it" ... (who defines the law?)

He has "finally reversed legislation that prevents gays and lesbians from serving their country in the armed forces" ... (great, that's really important while the globe is on fire! To get more cannon fodder - gay cannon fodder is even better!)

Now he's attacking pundits "turning serious issues into soundbites" and how citizens are losing hope - "no wonder there is so much cynicism and disappointment" - "there are few Americans who believe we can change or that I can deliver it. I never said it would be easy or that i could do it alone." (The nation thinks, 'didn't you?' - could have sworn you said that somewhere between 'yes we can' and 'hope'... somewhere between my KFC dinner and McDonald's breakfast, I could have sworn you said you were the answer...)

"When you try to do big things it stirs controversy - we can respond to that by playing it safe and avoid hard truths and pointing fingers and keep our poll numbers high and get through the next election, instead of doing what is best for the next generation. I know if the people who were in this position had made that decision 100 years ago, we wouldn't be here tonight - we must do what is hard, even if success is uncertain..." (paraphrased due to excessive rhetorical leading that caused my mind to spasm momentarily - or more than momentarily).

Then a rousing crescendo of hyperbolic emotional rhetoric of what it means to be an American - "USA, USA, USA" (he actually said that) - "it lives IN you" (get it out!!)

"a new decade!" "We don't quit! I don't quit! Strengthen our union!"

You get the point - he is a spell binder. As the pressure behind my brow increases to the point of pounding, I turn off the mind control device that is television, understanding why the sheeple are now more comfy, more sleepy and more secure in their dream - no matter what crashes in on them in the next few years.

Even the Republicans were applauding, so it must be the truth, right? "Any more KFC left in that bucket, honey?"

(No actual msg laden poisonous food was ingested during this experience - however I do now feel that I need a shower.)

Disaster Capitalism Comes To Capitol Hill

Many civil liberties groups in the US are up in arms over Thursday's Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United V Federal Election Commission, that gives corporations free reign to spend as much money as they can afford (which is a lot) to influence American political election outcomes. This is the same gaggle of Supreme Court Justices (more or less) that gave us, literally, the glorious reign of George Dubya Bush. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann dedicated one of his 'special messages' to the ruling which he said made all US politicians 'prostitutes' to big corporations.

Eh....so what's new?

Here's the relevant part of the ruling:

The relevant factors in deciding whether to adhere to [precedents] beyond workability - the precedent's antiquity, the reliance interests at stake, and whether the decision was well reasoned - counsel in favor of abandoning Austin, which itself contravened the precedents of Buckley and Bellotti. As already explained, Austin was not well reasoned. It is also undermined by experience since its announcement. Political speech is so ingrained in this country's culture that speakers find ways around campaign finance laws. Rapid changes in technology - and the creative dynamic inherent in the concept of free expression - counsel against upholding a law that restricts political speech in certain media or by certain speakers.

In addition, no serious reliance issues are at stake. Thus, due consideration leads to the conclusion that Austin should be overruled. The Court returns to the principle established in Buckley and Bellotti that the Government may not suppress political speech based on the speaker's corporate identity. No sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations.

Forgive me if I can't find it within me to get worked up over a ruling that allows multinational corporations to legally do that which they have been doing for many years. Has everyone in the US suddenly forgotten the word 'lobby'? Or the fact that almost every member of Congress has, at some point, been bought and paid for by corporate lobby groups? Go to the Open Secrets web site and pick any congressman or woman or senator you like and see for yourself. Is there a difference between direct or indirect corporate influence of politicians and those same corporations spending money on, say, advertising to influence the same politicians? Up until now, corporations had to be satisfied with donating large sums of money to candidates that the candidates then used to run their campaigns, i.e. electioneering etc. Now the corporations can run the campaigns of candidates themselves. I can see it now, John Doe, presidential nominee, 'sponsored by Coca Cola'. You like Coca Cola, right? Well you're gonna LOVE our candidate!

And let's be clear that influencing US politicians today is an activity that is owned, lock, stock and pork barrel by the corporations, because corporations effectively dictate government policy in the US. Unions have long since been neutered and lobby groups that actually represent ordinary people simply don't have the financial clout to make any difference. It's all about money in the land of the free market capitalist corporation and banker.

So what, in real terms, has changed? Nothing. So what's the problem? Is it that corporations can now openly advertise for or against candidates for office at all levels, and in that way influence public opinion? Don't worry about it! Because it's not who gets elected (or appointed as the case may be), but rather the amount of money it takes to bribe them when they attain office.

My only gripe however is that the Supreme Court didn't go ahead and 'corporatize' the state of Israel and the Israel lobby in its ruling and declare them eligible to legally manipulate, bribe and blackmail US politicians to ensure a continuing Israel-friendly US foreign policy.

Getting worked up over the Supreme Court ruling is akin to fretting over the door of the barn being unlocked while ignoring the fact that the barn itself is on fire. But the hubris doesn't stop there. Not only are many deluded US-centric individuals and activist groups concerned about native corporations being let off their very long leash, but there is now also the looming specter of, horror of horrors, foreign corporations and governments muscling in on the farce that is the US political process!

Newsweek commented:

The biggest questions with this ruling is the scope of the term "corporation," says Edward Foley, law professor at the Ohio State University College of Law and director of the election-law program. Does the high court want this decision to apply to foreign corporations as well as domestic ones, he ponders? The truth is, the court didn't make a decision one way or the other.

Foley best explains the potential issues by talking about the electronic, video, and communication giant, Sony. The corporation is headquartered in Japan, but a large number of its shareholders reside in the United States. In fact, people can even buy and trade Sony's stock on the New York Stock Exchange. The issue is whether this corporation, with strong ties to a foreign country and the United States, should be permitted to independently contribute money to presidential and congressional campaigns.

The Center For Public Integrity carried the headline:

Will the Citizens United Ruling Let Hugo Chavez and King Abdullah Buy U.S. Elections?

And wondered:

it's one thing for U.S. firms to have their say. What about foreign companies that operate U.S. subsidiaries? Many of these, like American businesses, are owned by ordinary shareholders - but a host of others are owned, in whole or in part, by the foreign governments themselves.

One prominent examples is CITGO Petroleum Company - once the American-born Cities Services Company, but purchased in 1990 by the Venezuelan government-owned Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. The Citizens United ruling could conceivably allow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has sharply criticized both of the past two U.S. presidents, to spend government funds to defeat an American political candidate, just by having CITGO buy TV ads bashing his target.

Given that the US has for many years been a global empire, it seems only fair that some of its subjects should have a say in, or exert an influence over the deliberations of the empire builders. Isn't Hugo Chavez due a little payback after the CIA tried to oust him in 2002? If it were able to, what kind of influence might Venezuela exert on the US politics and the lives of 300 million Americans? Free health care and third level education for all perhaps? Or subsidized gas in the winter time at least? Would that be a bad thing for the more than 10% of US citizens living below the poverty line?

And what about the Saudis? Well, they're unlikely to stray far from the Neo-Liberal script, but they might nudge US politicians towards a more equitable treatment of Middle Eastern Arab states. They might even encourage the President not to invade any more Arab nations and to lay off slaughtering their people. Again, is that a bad idea? It is a bad idea that other nations would be in a position to check the power of the US military-industrial complex and forestall the worst of its excesses? Personally I think it's a great idea, but its unlikely to happen, mainly because the Supreme Court ruling does not explicitly allow it and can therefore prohibit it at any stage, which it would very likely do, if US corporations paid the Supreme Court Justices enough money.

So there's nothing to see here folks, other than the next logical step along the path that the USA began many years ago when everyone ignored Eisenhower's warning about the threat from a military industrial complex. If that explanation doesn't satisfy you, then just think of the US political scene as being a bit like Haiti is today, and as in all such wastelands of despair, the corporate vultures waste no time in finding a way to profit.

Bin Laden Alive And Well In Spain - In Another Man's Body

Not content with faking Osama Bin Laden video tapes and audio recordings, the CIA and their 'private sector' friends at Intelcenter and SITE, have resorted to pilfering the physical features of living people in an effort to give life to the likely long-dead boogey man.

First of all we were told that the FBI had used "cutting edge technology" to produce a photo-fit of what Osama may look like now, as he struts around his cave in Toora Loora Loora, sans beard and turban:



It turns out however that it was more like cut and paste technology, when some uppity Spanish politician cried foul:

Gaspar Llamazares, 52, a member of Spain's communist party and the former leader of the United Left coalition in parliament, said his forehead, hair and jaw-line had been "cut and pasted" from an old campaign photograph.



The UK Telegraph reported:

But yesterday Ken Hoffman, a spokesman the FBI, admitted that a technician "was not satisfied" with the hair features offered by the FBI's software programme and instead used part of a photo of Mr Llamazares, found on the internet. "The technican had no idea whose image he had found and no dark motive for using it," he said.

Mr Llamazares said the mistake showed the "low level" of US intelligence services. It could cause problems for any individual mistakenly seen to resemble the wanted terrorist, he said. "Bin Laden's safety is not threatened by this but mine certainly is."

I'm actually very happy to see that the FBI, CIA etc. are stooping to such low brow propaganda, coming hot on the heels of the ridiculous Christmas knicker bomber farce we can have renewed hope that many more people will begin to identify the war on terror for the global scam that it is.

And speaking of scams and scam artists, I just read this:

Obama hears Haitian calls for mercy... sends Dubya as "special relief envoy"

The White House announced late on Thursday that National Security Staff chief of staff Denis McDonough would travel to Haiti along with a public affairs official from the Pentagon to help coordinate communication efforts on the ground.

Obama enlisted the help of former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat who is already a U.N. special envoy for Haiti, and former President George W. Bush, the Republican who preceded Obama in the White House.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs dismissed a question as to why Obama would turn to Bush after criticizing him for the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, saying bipartisan unity was needed.

So I take back my previous comment about having renewed hope. Reality has gone insane and to be honest, I've had enough. It's the proverbial final straw. I'm powering up my intergalactic ship, and I'm outta here.

I'll leave you all with these parting words, may they resonate forever throughout the multi-verse.

'Heck of a job Bushy'

Arun Gandhi And The Jewish Conspiracy

Arun Gandhi is the fifth grandson of the famous Mahatma Gandhi, a public figure and an established and true man of peace. So what was he doing spreading nefarious ‘conspiracy theories’ about the Jews back in January 2008?

In 1987, along with his entire family, Arun Gandhi moved to the United States to work on a project at the University of Mississippi. The project examined and contrasted the sorts of prejudices that existed in India, the U.S., and South Africa. Afterward the moved to Memphis, Tennessee and founded the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Non-Violence hosted by the Christian Brothers University, a Catholic academic institution. This institute was dedicated to applying the principles of nonviolence at both local and global scales. In 2007, the institute moved to Rochester, New York, and is currently located on the University of Rochester River Campus.

Arun has given many speeches about non-violence in many countries. During his tour of Israel and Palestine in 2004, he urged the Palestinians to resist Israeli occupation peacefully to assure their freedom. He proposed to the Palestinian Parliament a peaceful march of 50,000 Palestinian refugees across the Jordan River to return to their homeland in Palestine, and said MPs should lead the way. Arun stated:

What would happen? Maybe the Israeli army would shoot and kill several. They may kill 100. They may kill 200 men, women and children. And that would shock the world. The world will get up and say, 'What is going on?'

Given the brutal conditions under which the Palestinians are being forced to live, attacked and murdered on a daily basis, Arun's proposal for the solution of the Palestinian question makes good sense. Rather than be picked off, one by one by the Israeli military and have their deaths ignored by the mainstream media, why not undertake such a march, and potential sacrifice, and increase the chances that the world would be forced to sit up and take notice? An act of this type is very probably what the ordinary Palestinian people, both in Palestine and elsewhere, would decide upon if ordinary Palestinians had any say in their future. But Palestinians today have no real voice, no true representation, their political leadership having been infiltrated and co-opted long ago by the forces of the state of Israel. Israel calls all the shots and carefully stage-manages both sides in its one-sided "war" against the Palestinian people.

In 2006 The Board of Governors of the BBC published an Independent Panel Report into the impartiality of BBC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The scope of the inquiry was "assess the impartiality of BBC news and current affairs coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with particular regard to accuracy, fairness, context, balance and bias, actual or perceived".

The inquiry found that the BBC's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was "incomplete and misleading" and “failed to adequately report the hardships of Palestinians living under occupation.”

In 2006 the research group If Americans Knew released a study into the reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the Associated Press (AP) for the period Jan-Dec 2004. The study found “a significant correlation between the likelihood of a death receiving coverage and the nationality of the person killed.” In 2004, there were 141 reports in AP headlines or first paragraphs of Israeli deaths. During this time, there had actually been 108 Israelis killed (the discrepancy is due to the fact that a number of Israeli deaths were reported multiple times).

During the same period, 543 Palestinian deaths were reported in headlines or first paragraphs. During this time, 821 Palestinians had actually been killed. In other words, 131% of Israeli deaths and 66% of Palestinian deaths were reported in AP headlines or first paragraphs. That is, AP reported prominently on Israeli deaths at a rate 2.0 times greater than Palestinian deaths. In reality, 7.6 times more Palestinians were killed than Israelis in 2004.

Previous studies into the reporting of Palestinian versus Israeli deaths have shown newspaper coverage to be even more distorted than the pattern that was found for AP. For example a six-month study of the San Francisco Chronicle showed a 30:1 differential of Israeli children’s deaths to Palestinian children’s deaths; a six-month study of The Oregonian by AUPHR showed the paper’s headlines had reported Israeli children’s deaths to Palestinians children’s deaths at a rate 44:1.

We live in a world where truth and justice have been turned on their heads. While the daily murder of Palestinians by the forces of Israel goes unreported and therefore unrecognised by the rest of the world, any high-profile criticism of these crimes is immediately met with outrage and condemnation by (mainly Western) political leaders and the infamous Israel lobby in the US, and of course by the mainstream Western press.

In an episode with strong echoes of the Walt and Mearsheimer debacle, Arun Gandhi made the headlines in January 2008 because of comments he made about the state of Israel, the Palestinian people's plight and the danger that the insane policies of what can loosely be termed "Zionism" pose to the entire world.

Gandhi wrote that Jewish identity "has been locked into the holocaust experience — a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of how a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends.

"The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. ... The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on, the regret turns into anger."

Describing Israel as "a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs," Gandhi asked whether it would "not be better to befriend those who hate you?" He added:

"Apparently, in the modern world so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept. You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity."

Gandhi later apologized for his “poorly worded post," saying he shouldn't have implied that Israeli government policies reflected the views of all Jewish people.

Of course, Gandhi was wrong to blame ‘the Jews’, not merely because it is entirely inaccurate to suggest that all Jews support the policies of the state of Israel, but because it also left him and his otherwise reasonable and important message open to immediate dismissal as anti-Semitic, which is exactly what happened.

To his credit, Gandhi immediately recognised his error and asserted that he understood that not all Jewish people support Israel. The simple fact is that ‘the Jews’ are not to blame for the most extreme injustices being perpetrated throughout the world today, the spittle-flecked rants of some alternative news pundits notwithstanding. How can they be? Are we to believe that all 15 million Jews throughout the world regularly get together in secret and drive forward the political and economic policies of the major world governments?

Of course, certain Jewish politicians in Israel, the US the UK and elsewhere do wield inordinate power, this is a verifiable fact. If, as some would have it, the actions of these few make ‘all Jews’ responsible, then it follows that every American that supports the Obama government or the Republican or Democratic parties for that matter (i.e. significantly more than half of all Americans) is personally guilty of the murder of over 1 million Iraqis! So if it is ‘the Jews!’ then it is also ‘the Americans!’ (and ‘the British’!)

Clearly this is nonsense. To those who subscribe to such beliefs, it is worth remembering that Israeli policy makers and their policies thrive on the preponderance of such extremism. Why? Because such opinions are clearly illogical and it is extremely easy to use them as evidence to convince the world that anti-Semitism, or hatred of Jews, is ‘on the rise’, which in turn facilitates continued Israeli aggression against Palestinians and Arabs of the Middle East and the compounding of Israeli influence over Western governments (aka the Israel lobby).

Yet Ghandi was in error only on this point. His statement that "a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs," and "would it not be better to befriend those who hate you?" is eminently rational.

Equally defensible is his comment:

"apparently, in the modern world so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept. You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity."

But we are still left with the problem of who to blame, because make no mistake, someone or some group is responsible for the horrors that have beset humanity for so long. The culprits do not belong to any organised religion, nor do they adhere to any political or social views, these are but distractions used to cement this controlling group's domination of the masses of ordinary people.

There is a word for the people of which I speak, a word which does not rely on ideologically derived definitions or convoluted rhetorical formulae, a word which cuts to the root of this human problem in a scientific and psychologically precise manner, circumventing the infinite feedback loop of speculation which has enabled a lasting solution to evade us for so long.

The word is psychopath.

Estimated at up to 6% of any given population, they are human beings in appearance only. Lacking the ability to empathise with the feelings of another person, they therefore lack that which defines a person as truly human. Recent research by British scientists has shown that the brains of psychopaths are fundamentally different to the brains of ordinary humans. Such deviants not only possess a natural advantage over normal human beings in the ease and speed with which they rise to positions of power, once there, they are free of the constraints of conscience and driven only by their need to dominate, control and ultimately destroy others. It is not hard to imagine that a group of such deviants, having recognised kindred spirits in each other and joined forces, and subsequently attained to positions of near absolute power, would wreak havoc on the rest of humanity. Indeed, in his seminal work on the subject, Without Conscience, Canadian psychologist Dr Robert Hare estimates that psychopaths are responsible for up to 50% of crime committed in society.

But the crimes of the common or garden psychopath pale into insignificance when we consider the crimes of our psychopaths in power, aka our political leaders. George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair and his White Hall civil servants, all of these men (and more) committed the supreme international war crime (as defined in the Nuremberg trials) when they lied to the public and ordered the invasion of a sovereign country in 2003 without due cause. The Iraq invasion (there was no ‘war’) resulted in the violent deaths of 1.3 million Iraqi citizens, and a further 1.2 million non-violent deaths, and some 6 million displaced and left homeless. On the direct orders of the office of the Vice President, the CIA ran a death squad operation out of the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior which involved dozens of covert car bombings and massacres of Iraqi Shia and Sunni Muslims in an effort to create the ‘reality’ of a civil war in Iraq and thereby justify the continued US military and economic colonisation of the country. Today, those responsible for these massive crimes are not in jail but instead remain in positions of power and are lauded as ‘elder statesmen’.

Having identified the problem, the question then is what we can do about it.
A capacity to cheat, to compete and to lie has proven to be a stupendously successful adaptation for psychopaths, so the scope for saintliness to spontaneously spread throughout the world looks implausible in practice. Brotherly and sisterly love today is vanishingly rare, and the misery and suffering of those who are able to truly feel, who have a conscience, is all too common. The manipulations of psychopathic leaders, such as the promotion of torture as somehow justified, are designed to make psychopaths of us all. Nevertheless, a predisposition to conscience and ethics can prevail if and when it is able to make the enhancing of freedom and altruism in the abstract sense, for the sake of others, including our descendants, its primary goal.

So our first efforts must be focused on rejecting the black and white ‘us versus them’ thinking that has gained much ground over the past few decades. We must stop idiotically decrying the imminent dangers of the great ‘Jewish conspiracy’ or the Muslim hoard sweeping the world. It is not ‘the Jews’ ‘the Muslims, ‘the Christians’, ‘the Iranians’ or any other religious or ethnic group that we should be concerned about, but rather the existence of psychopaths in positions of power who use religious and cultural beliefs to divide and conquer the normal human population. In short, our "self-interest" ought to be vested in collectively ensuring that all others are happy and well-disposed too; and in ensuring that children we bring into the world have the option of being constitutionally happy and benevolent toward one another.

This means that if psychopathy threatens the well-being of the future of normal humanity - which it is doing - then it can be only be dealt with by widespread refusal to allow the self to be dominated by it on an individual, personal basis. Preserving freedom for the self in the practical sense, ultimately preserves freedom for others. Protection of our own rights as the rights of others, underwrites the free will position and potential for happiness and a peaceful future of all.


Notes

1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1766215,00.html
2 http://www.ifamericansknew.org/download/ap-report.pdf
3 http://www.auphr.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3226&Itemid=86
4 Psychophasia: The Unwritten Doctrine by R.R. Foster
5 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6736973.ece
6 http://www.hare.org/
7 http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/
8 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1230

Would The Real War Criminals Please Stand Up

Diamonds are a spooks best friend

Charles Taylor, Liberian President for 6 years until 2003, is currently on trial for international war crimes at a U.N.-backed special court in the Hague. Those that facilitated his crimes will not be there.

Taylor seized the presidency in 1998 after an appalling eight-year campaign of terror. Taylor is accused of orchestrating rape, murder, mutilation and recruitment of child soldiers during the 1991-2002 civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone.

Some of the harrowing testimony has been provided by Alex Tamba Teh. Teh claims that he saw a rebel commander from Liberia called "Rocky" shoot 101 people:

"After he killed the civilians... he gave the instruction that they should be decapitated. Rocky gave the order to the small boy units"

Tamba Teh recounted how child soldiers rounded on one child and chopped off his hand, then his arm, then both his feet, before tossing him into a toilet pit. In all somewhere between 75,000 and 200,000 Sierra Leoneans were killed (estimates vary) with many more suffering mutilations and around 2 million left homeless.

[Today Sierra Leon's shy teenagers] show you their scars and explain that RUF rebel commanders cut them and rubbed cocaine into the wound to make them mad enough to fight or to chop people's limbs off. Sometimes the victims were their neighbours, or their brothers and sisters.

"They gave us drugs the whole time," says Saidu, 16, who was abducted and recruited into the RUF when he was five. First, he worked as a bearer and messenger for the soldiers' "wives", most of whom were themselves abducted adolescent girls. When he was seven he was given a gun, a couple of months' training in Liberia, and sent to fight.

"It was fun, like a big boy's game," he says. "They made us so crazy, we enjoyed the smoking, the drinking, the shooting, all that." He didn't enjoy having to cut a man's arm off, though, one morning on the road in from the airport. They were all lined up at gunpoint, the men, shaking, their arms obediently held out. Saidu couldn't look when it was his turn to swing his machete. He doesn't think the man survived. "I can't forget his scream," he says.

The civil war in Sierra Leon was fought over control of the lucrative diamond mining trade with the neighboring nations of Guinea and Liberia deeply involved. In 1991 a small band of men calling themselves the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) under the leadership of a former-corporal, Foday Sankoh, began to attack villages in eastern Sierra Leone on the Liberian border. The RUF's signature terror tactic was physical mutilation. An estimated 20,000 civilians suffered amputation, with machetes and axes being used to sever arms, legs, lips, and ears. Over the course of the next 12 years a series of coups and counter-coups followed with the British, who ruled Sierra Leon as a colony until 1961, choosing to do little but observe the bloodshed, until the UN chose to enforce a relative peace in 2003 which still holds.

Foday Sankoah created the RFU with substantial support from Liberian leader Taylor who remained one of the primary antagonists throughout the conflict. In that respect, the current proceedings against him are indeed justified, but the evidence that will be undoubtedly missing from his trial concerns the claims of former Washington Post West African Bureau chief Douglas Farah. In 2004 Farah published Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror detailing the ties between "al-Qaeda" and diamond networks in West Africa. Farah is also a senior fellow at the National Strategy Information Center, a "right-wing think tank for military strategy with a history of working with hard-line, anti-Soviet groups promoting an aggressive U. S. foreign policy", according to Group Watch.

In 2004 the news web site AllAfrica.com conducted an interview with Farah on the 9-11 Commission findings, the interaction between "al-Qaeda" and West Africa's diamond trade, and his view of the role U.S. intelligence has played. Excerpts from the Allafrica article and interview follow with my emphasis:

West Africa: Debate Over al Qaeda's Connection to West Africa's Diamond Trade Takes New Turns

August 5, 2004
AllAfrica.com

Washington Post correspondent Douglas Farah, in a recently published 225-page book entitled "Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror," provides a detailed description of al Qaeda's activity in West Africa.

According to Farah, American intelligence agencies "overlooked" the connection between diamond trading and al Qaeda and the central role played in harboring and profiting from the illicit dealing by Liberian President Charles Taylor, who was forced into exile in Nigeria last year under a deal brokered by the U.S. government.

Farah's findings have been hotly disputed by the CIA and FBI, and their viewpoint was reflected in the recently release report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9-11 Commission. "We have seen no persuasive evidence that al Qaeda funded itself by trading in African conflict diamonds," the report states (page 171).

But a confidential investigation by the Sierra Leone Special Court further bolsters the view that that the alliance between Taylor and al Qaeda was substantial, according to an article in Wednesday's Boston Globe by Washington correspondent Bryan Bender.

"Al Qaeda allegedly paid Taylor for protection and then joined him in the African diamond trade, raising millions of dollars for terrorist activities, according to UN war crimes documents," Bender wrote.

Citing the Special Court's investigation and U.S. intelligence official, Bender said a planned raid a few weeks after September 11, 2001 by U.S. Special Forces aimed at capturing Ghailani and an associate in Liberia was called off for unexplained reasons. One explanation raised by Bender's sources was Taylor's reported longstanding relations with the CIA.

In 2002 the Washington Post reported that European intelligence agencies had found evidence that Taylor hosted "senior terrorist operatives" who oversaw a $20 million diamond-buying spree that effectively cornered the market on the region's precious stones, receiving a $1 million payment for his help. Senior European intelligence sources were however "baffled" by the lack of U.S. interest from the CIA in these findings.

AllAfrica: What is your reaction to the single sentence in the 9-11 Commission report that dismisses African diamonds as a source of al Qaeda funding?

Farah: If you look at the footnotes of that particular citation, it's all FBI and CIA reports with the exception of an interview they quote with Allan White from the Special Court in Sierra Leone. I find it disturbing because they had access to the Belgium police report, which I have on my website, which they were given. The Special Court also wrote a special brief to them and the intelligence indicating al Qaeda's presence. The book, the Global Witness Report - none of those are cited as having been used at all in making their determination.

I think the 9-11 Commission was under a great deal of pressure to make hurried judgments. In my limited communication with them, they told me that they could not get to the bottom of the dispute. If you read my book, I have a lot of discussion of why the CIA tried to discredit the story, and the great lengths that they went to do so, despite the fact that they did not succeed, and the fact that more evidence continues to emerge [that] the story is actually correct. But there is a great hostility towards the story from the intelligence community, and all the commission did was take the intelligence community reports and use them as their basis for making their assertions.

AllAfrica: The 9-11 Commission also stated "to date, we have not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9-11 attacks?" How do you respond to that?

Farah: The proof of the telephone contacts to Afghanistan on September 10th and the prior communications from the Belgium police who traced the phone call from the satellite phone used by Aziz Nassour and Samih Osailly [two al Qaeda operatives whose activities in west Africa are detailed in Farah's book] is not hearsay evidence. They made numerous calls and it's documented. I have the phone bills for them, and more importantly, the police got them out of the official records. I do not think it's something you can easily dismiss. Neither are the bank records from Artesia Bank that show $20m flowing and being unaccounted for, and all the other indications that other people came up with. [...]

AllAfrica: Alex Yearsley of Global Witness asserts that, "Taylor received CIA payments until January 2001." You write about dealings between the CIA and Ibrahim Bah, the Senegalese mastermind who coordinated the diamond trade with al Qaeda. Why would the CIA form this kind of partnership?

Farah: It's a disturbing question. I do not have direct knowledge myself of the CIA dealings with Taylor. Taylor has told others and me that he has worked for the CIA over time.

AllAfrica: You write that the diamond trade in Africa transcends ideological and religious differences. Could you please talk more about the business dealings between Israeli and Lebanese merchants in West Africa?

Farah: [...] I think it's one of the truly extraordinary demonstrations of the depth to which people will sink in their greed for diamonds. It's the epitomy of the worst kind of greed and corruption of moral principles. They come with the desire to make money at any cost. What both the Arabs and Israelis told me was, 'Business is business. Here we do business. Back there is war and back there is not our problem.' If you look at Lebanese with ties to radical Islamists trying to buy weapons with Israelis to ship [elsewhere], it's a web that is very complicated, very difficult to understand, and very hard to believe unless you see it and talk to people yourself.

As Farah states, all of it is certainly very disturbing, and his comment that "it's a web that is very complicated, very difficult to understand" is indeed true but the web is made infinitely more complex and becomes impossible to understand when, as appears to be the case with Farah, the conclusions that the data points to conflict with the lies fed to us by our governments and the mainstream media. Lies like the one that says that the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies are fighting a "war against terror" when the reality is that they are waging a war of terror on the entire planet.

Lies like the one that says "al-Qaeda" is an Islamic terror group when in fact it is just a name given by Western governments to a fictitious group that is used to take the blame for terrorist attacks carried out by Western intelligence agencies (Mossad, CIA, MI5).

Lies like the claim that the US, Israeli and British governments and their agencies are doing everything they can to stamp out "Islamic terrorism" when in truth they have for many years been actively creating a false reality of "Islamic terrorism" which they use as a cover for their own illegal and murderous activities around the world.

Charles Taylor is currently being tried in the Hague for war crimes in Sierra Leon that were financed in part by the diamond trade. It is something of an irony that not 40 miles to the south of the Hague sits the Belgian city of Antwerp where 90 percent of the world's diamonds are cut and polished by the city's large Hasidic Jewish community. Surely the court in the Hague could find a few answers to the real source of the Sierra Leon tragedy there?

But I digress, in fact I have been digressing since the second paragraph. What I really wanted to say as regards Charles Taylor's ongoing trial for war crimes is that I have a question that I need someone to answer, and it is a very pressing question indeed:

Charles Taylor is being tried by an international war crimes tribunal because he is responsible for sending an army into another nation in the pursuit of personal gain and in doing so causing the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. If the moral standards by which Taylor is being measured are just and fair, why then are George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and a host of other Neocons and Israel-firsters (both in the US and in Israel) not waiting in line behind him?

The Bush government, at the behest of their Israeli friends and with the complicity of their British lackeys, also sent an army into another country in the pursuit of personal gain and in doing so caused the deaths of not tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

The following is but a tiny fraction of the massive evidence for US government war crimes in Iraq:

'I saw the heads of my two little girls come off'

April 2 2003
Smh.com.au

An Iraqi mother in a van fired on by US soldiers says she saw her two young daughters decapitated in the incident that also killed her son and eight other members of her family.

The children's father, who was also in the van, said US soldiers fired on them as they fled towards a checkpoint because they thought a leaflet dropped by US helicopters told them to "be safe", and they believed that meant getting out of their village to Karbala.

Bakhat Hassan - who lost his daughters, aged two and five, his three-year-old son, his parents, two older brothers, their wives and two nieces aged 12 and 15, in the incident - said US soldiers at an earlier checkpoint had waved them through.

As they approached another checkpoint 40km south of Karbala, they waved again at the American soldiers.

"We were thinking these Americans want us to be safe," Hassan said through an Army translator at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital set up at a vast Army support camp near Najaf.

The soldiers didn't wave back. They fired.

"I saw the heads of my two little girls come off," Hassan's heavily pregnant wife, Lamea, 36, said numbly.

She repeated herself in a flat, even voice: "My girls - I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead."

US officials originally gave the death toll from the incident as seven, but reporters at the scene placed it at 10. And Bakhat Hassan terrible toll was 11 members of his family.

'US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one'

Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologise

Rory McCarthy in Ramadi
Friday May 21, 2004
The Guardian

The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.

It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.

"The bombing started at 3 am," she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. "We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.

She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.

"I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn't kill me."

U.S. soldier poured kerosene on raped, slain Iraqi

One of the U.S. soldiers accused of raping and killing a 14 year-old Iraqi girl and slaying her family told investigators that after the killings he poured kerosene on the girl's bullet-ridden body.

In an interview with the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigative Division in June, Spec. James P. Barker, 23, said that he held the girl down while she was raped by another soldier, Sgt. Paul Cortez, during an incident in March in Mahmoudiya, according to testimony from CID Special Agent Benjamin Bierce.

Barker said that he then attempted to rape the girl himself, before she was shot to death by former Pfc. Steven D. Green, Bierce said.

For the last five years the US government and military have waged a war on the Iraqi people that dwarfs the Sierra Leon conflict in terms of its mindless brutality. The people of Sierra Leon, while traumatised for years to come, are at least enjoying relative peace - the people of Iraq continue to suffer bombings, mutilations and the predations of US soldiers on an almost daily basis. Can we therefore expect the American, Israeli and British war criminals to appear in the dock in the Hague any time soon? If not, why not?

There is something VERY wrong with this world.

Kenyans Know A Stolen Election When They See It - What About Americans?

It's no fun living in a world ruled by Psychopaths. They lie, cheat and steal elections. So what's a decent ordinary human being to do about it? The choices are limited to precisely two. Ignore it and believe them when they say their lies are truth, or take a stand, in one way or other. Today President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya began a second term having "won" elections a few days ago amid widespread allegation of voting fraud. In response, many Kenyan people took to the streets. For sure the violence and death that continue to mar these protests are terrible, yet the blame for the deaths lies largely with the heavy-handed response of Kibaki's security forces and the support he receives from the American and Israeli governments. Yet what price do we place on justice and the people's right to not be treated like ignorant cattle by their "elite" rulers?

In America George Bush stole both the 2000 and 2004 elections. This is an established fact and can and has been proven, yet there was hardly a murmur from the American people. It is one of the enduring ironies of our times that the citizens of the "greatest democracy on earth" appear to have been robbed of the fundamental tenet of all democratic nations - the right to publicly protest the criminality of their political leaders.

What is wrong with the American people? What is mechanism that has reduced their political and social conscience to that of a retarded child? Is it the sophistication of the propaganda to which they are subjected compared to other nations like Kenya where the state relies on brute force to silence opposition? Certainly Americans are bombarded daily by mind-jellifying programming from a host of sources. From their TV sets to their PCs to the billboards on the way to work to the products in the shopping mall, all scream in both subtle and flagrant ways the "greatness" of all things American. But can this possibly be enough to wipe away the glaring crimes of the Bush government? Crimes that include the genocide of over 1 million innocent Iraqi citizens in the last 4 years and the imposition of draconian legislation that has effectively turned the US into a police state. Where IS the voice of the American people?

Perhaps the answer is that the spirit of democracy in modern America has been utterly broken in its people and exists only in the duplicitous words of the Bush government. Perhaps the American people DO see, but they see too clearly, or rather they see, or feel, in a vague unconscious way that as they sat idly by denying the obvious, their psychopathic leaders have been slowly building the prison walls around them. And only now, as they sit in the prison of their own complacency do they taste the unsavory reality and the futility of believing that, at this late stage, anyone can do anything about it.

Yet one option remains open to the American people, and it is certainly as unsavory as the reality that confronts them - to use the example set for them by citizens of dozens of nations around the world over the past 100 years, and rebel. To not quail before a threat to their physical safety and take to the streets, to cling not to life and limb but to the noble ideals that are set down in the American constitution, universal ideals of truth, justice, love and empathy for our fellow human beings. To unite in spirit with the repressed around the world and to identify and rout our common enemy - that instra-species predator called the psychopath.