Mary

Clandestine brainwashing of our minds obscured in innocent-looking images of happiness, perfection, fun.A consumerist society that has spun out of control is implanted into our conscious from the early stages of our childhood development. Through television we are conditioned to seek the great array of products the Leviathan provides us. Our young developing brains, still too virgin to comprehend what we watch, are bombarded with advertisement after advertisement that begins infecting us with an excessiveness bug whose virus remains inside us for the rest of our lives, compelling us to waste away our blood, sweat and tears on those products we perceive will make our lives the equivalent of the fantasy we see unfold on our television monitors. The Leviathan manipulates our brains and senses through the clandestine brainwashing of our minds obscured in innocent-looking images of happiness, perfection, fun, fantasy-laden advertisements, cartoons and movies. Using our sponge-like developing mind, mass media transgressions and imagery capture and alter our ability to think as humans have for hundreds of thousands of years. Our brains are being re-wired, no longer evolving through learning of culture, parenting and human behavior. Instead, our primordial brains are subjected to intense imagery based on marketing and profit motive, designed to make consumer drones of us from our earliest days. Bombarded with image after image of toy, food and fantasy, our child mind not close to perceiving the great manipulation taking place, we begin the process of becoming conditioned consumers expected to shop for an entire lifetime.Conditioned for Blood From birth we begin to breathe the smell of blood as a society addicted to violence manifests its craving through the many forms of media available to our children. Cartoons seemingly engage our young minds with constant battles of good versus evil, black versus white, inculcating us to the violent means by which to achieve victory over forces at odds with those virtues espoused by the shows’ creators. Cartoons are packed with violent undertones, filled with stories immersed with inner and outer battles that are only solved through violent means. These shows begin manipulating our developing brains to accept violence into our lives, suggesting solutions to problems based on fighting, engagement and destruction. The fantasy shown, whether in the form of human characters or animals, creatures or entities espousing man-like characteristics that solve their problems through incessant clashes is perceived by the fragile mind as a rational human response that makes violence an acceptable if not mainstream behavior capable of fixing what has been broken or solving that which remains a problem. It is fantasy designed for the youngest that begins to make warriors of millions who have not had an opportunity to be exposed to human reality. Violence is imputed onto the most innocent whose brains have yet to develop the capacity to understand the complexities of life or the behaviors of our circumstance. Through the television, children morph from bright candles of innocence into explosive flames accepting violence, death and destruction as part of every day life. Absorbing every image radiating out of the screen, seeing how fantasy solves its problems, learning behaviors from cartoon characters, the fragile human mind is programmed to accept conflict and conditioned to acquiesce to war.Why is every story and plot infused with battles only solved by violent clash? Our minds, not yet having the capacity to understanding the complex human condition, are inundated with a barrage of behaviors that, though ingrained evils in our animalistic selves, should not yet be embraced at such young ages. Yet somehow we are showering our youth with the tools of war, violence and conflict that they are embracing as realistic alternatives in human society. It thus comes to pass that the War Culture fails to seek accountability to the numerous evils done in our name. With television cartoons, videogames and films portraying endemic levels of violence, it is natural to accept that a society’s young will become immune and indifferent to the evils inherent in antagonistic conflict. It is the barrage of cartoons and movies such as those marketed by Disney that are conditioning our society to accept violence, death, destruction and by consequence the wars draped in the American flag. Why is it that every single Disney animated film must engage its characters in battle, war, conflict, death and violence? Why is every story and plot infused with battles only solved by violent clash? It is these forms of storylines that make it acceptable for our young to imitate and indeed believe that human society relies on Disney-like solutions to fantasy-filled problems. Disney characters seemingly always wage violent conflict with each other, pitting good versus evil, with the desired outcome always assured as long as violence is the means by which it is achieved. Why must violence be such an incessant ingredient to Disney’s success, to the great detriment of our children and society? Is the War Culture so immersed and addicted to violence that even the perceived creators of goodness and happiness must flood the big screen with a violence that has been a part of the human condition since the beginning of time?American society has in the last fifty years been transformed from bastion of innocent endeavors to citadel of violent and warmongering conditioning It is the vast expanse of shows and movies that litter the airwaves, most infested with violence, death and destruction that are conditioning us to accept the violence and wars done in our name. It seems the only solutions to the fantasy-ridden problems that comprise television and movies are through the undertaking of violence. In fantasy-land it has become the means to an end; in America it has made our society immune to the dangers of violence, whitewashing its evils from our conscious, making its ramifications upon our lives nothing more than another manifestation of cartoon cleanliness where blood is nonexistent, suffering ignored, destruction unsoiled and death romanticized. American society has in the last fifty years been transformed from bastion of innocent endeavors to citadel of violent and warmongering conditioning. War, death and destruction have in our minds been made sanitized endeavors where pain, misery and murder are but mere hiccups that resemble the fantasy we have seen throughout our lives. Violence is, therefore, accepted since it is not understood. It is allowed since it is manipulated, becoming the fantasy it never is and the reality our conditioned minds make it out to be.When we fail to understand reality it is transformed into the fiction we believe it to be We have been trained well to accept the evils done in our name. The videogames, movies and television shows that now flood our society glamorize violence, making it a fantasy that fails to awaken its deadly reality into our minds. In today’s War Culture, fictional murderers, psychopaths and cold-blooded killers become heroes, even as they unleash hailstorms of bullets on the enemy and claim victory in the name of violence. Death and destruction has become comical, further degrading our ability to sympathize with those bulldozed by our mighty military. The romantic notion of war, ingrained through our War Culture, makes robotic killers of young boys unleashing everything they have seen throughout their lives in the far away reaches of the world. The symptoms of this disease can be seen in the criminal occupation of Iraq and treatment of Iraqis by American soldiers. The War Culture represents a deviation from human evolution. The reality of violence is never shown; the death, misery and emotions of war never explored. Blood and gore are hidden from what they represent. Screams and pain have become mere inconveniences. Destruction of lives and property has been transformed into digital bytes ready to recycle themselves. War is made an abstract mirage portrayed by film, television and video games, not the reality humans have for too long endured that made wiser men of us all. Instead, we rely on fantasy to educate us to the horror and the perceived reality, thus making us willing subjects ignorant to the dangers human violence unearths. When we fail to understand reality it is transformed into the fiction we believe it to be.The War Culture is us Fiction has triumphed over the reality of the human condition as the War Culture’s assembly line of seekers of violence continues to grow. The master of conditioned violence, the Corporate Leviathan, extends its tentacles into every pair of eyes and every developing human brain, allowing the society it is designing to forever acquiesce to the violence, conquest, Empire and death it vehemently seeks to release upon the world. From birth we are trained, never seeing the true horrors of war nor the energy released by the misery of violent conflict. For untold millions who are on the receiving end of our failures, however, the violence is all too real, the death all too vivid and the destruction all too devastating. For them, Hollywood and the fantasy on television are sick and cruel jokes that do not begin to describe the terror and suffering enveloping them. In their eyes, the incessant violence of Hollywood has transmutated into the reality of their daily lives where blood is real, life is extinguished and hope destroyed. This the War Culture fails to understand because the fantasy it sees and the reality it ignores clash like the violent cartoons conditioning legions of American children. All the while, safe in our confined bubble that is America we live, growing ever accepting of our violent ways, unable to comprehend the reality of all we unleash and comfortably sitting on our couches watching airbrushed visions of war. As we bask in the splendor of the luck-filled extravagance we live, shielded away from the war crimes being committed in Iraq under the red, white and blue and unaware of the damage done to untold millions throughout the world our lavish society continues to prosper, ignorant to the true consequences and devastating power of Apache helicopters, cluster bombs, guided missiles, Abrams tanks, fighter jets, mortars, artillery and bullets that our War Culture releases upon our fellow human beings. It is this truth we fail to grasp, nowhere to be found in Disney films, Cartoon Network shows or Playstation video games. The War Culture is us, and guilty as charged we all stand.The War Culture — By Manuel Valenzuela From birth the Leviathan grips us with its sharp claws, reprogramming our minds to suit its sinister profit driven motives. Even at our most innocent and pure we are left to deal with the most malevolent pack of wolves dressed in sheep skin that use our youth and brain underdevelopment to further their capitalistic drive for greed-filled nirvana. We have been impregnated with a virus that makes of us consumer driven entities seeking refuge from the enslavement of our lives through the escape provided by the overabundance of goods and services we have from early childhood been trained to purchase. When embedded into our mind from such an early period in our lives, this nefarious condition becomes second nature, almost instinctual, and begins to pass for human behavior necessary for survival. It is all we have known, passed down from television, society and our own families who themselves have been made captives to the Leviathan’s incessant mind control mechanisms that over the course of a lifetime transforms individual thinking minds into a collection of two hundred million serfs dependent on the same products we produce. Innocence lost and profit gained, the Leviathan, and the expert manipulators working to ruin childhoods, in essence transform society to suit their needs, using the great absorbing power of the young mind to create lifetime consumers that merrily join the fraternity of the War Culture. The vicious circle begins with the cradle and ends with the grave, human procreation becoming the conveyor belt spitting out new foot soldiers that in time will themselves become part of Empire seeking and building.Mustapha Ahmed Abed lost his leg in the attack by U.S. troops on city of Fallujah. Here he is cradled by a male relative, as his mother lies in a near by bed at the Naaman hospital in Baghdad. ValenzuelasVeritas.blogspot.comFictional delusion From sea to shining sea, superfluous undertaking through hereditary conditioning continues to mark an average citizen’s ascendancy into the American Dream. The land of plenty has become the land of gluttony, suffocating the rest of the world in the unquenchable desire to attain a plethora of materialistic possessions that characterize the vulnerability of the human psyche. As thirsty as a dehydrated tree, as voracious as a plague of locusts and as hungry as a starving pack of wolves, American society’s appetite for an ever-expanding array of products and goods at the expense of planet Earth and its inhabitants continues to unleash death, destruction and violence upon our teetering world. It is our unattainable thirst for vast amounts of worldly possessions that has become the flammable liquid breathing life into the American war machine. It is our lust for materialism and eager escape from unwanted realities that drive the engine of Empire, devastating so many millions and untold areas of land. In our consumer driven economy it is the corporate Leviathan that hereditarily conditions us to pursue its products as it forces down our throats, almost from birth, the desire to pursue a fulfillment of the expectations it markets onto our society. Whatever it desires to sell it strangulates us with, whatever trend it wants manifested it squirms into our lives. What values it wants created and what goals it wants maximized it bombards society with using its vast collection of media and marketing tools it has in its possession. We are the hand that feeds the Leviathan, mere energies in need of its products and services, mere pawns in its game of power and control. It, in turn, has become the hand that rocks the cradle, allowing us to fall asleep and escape the pill-popping reality that has become our lives today that we desperately want to exorcise from within us. Through the numerous products that flood our lives we can temporarily seek refuge from a reality that never seems to come close to the perfect fantasy we have been led to believe is attainable but that seems farther away each time we seek its fictional delusion.Bellaciao collective — Bella Ciao November 23, 2004 The War Culture By Manuel Valenzuela — ValenzuelasVeritas.blogspot.com Through the smoking mirror the guilty can be seen, and our faces frown at the realization that our excessively comfortable lives have been garnered through the misery, destruction, death and exploitation of the people of the world. The War Culture continues its dastardly ways, consuming, producing, ruining, destroying and unleashing Empire’s tools of violence, conquest and death upon billions. Empire is us and we are it; Bush is Empire’s tool and Empire gives us life. America’s military provides what we seek, want and crave. It validates our excessiveness, our desire for more. It attains the continuation of our comfort and the limitless bounty we purchase. The Empire’s financial armies enslave people’s of the south, making what we buy cheap and affordable. Their nations’ resources are pillaged and exploited, sent to our homes in the form of affordable products. The War Culture demands that the world’s limited supplies be sent to our shores so that our lifestyle and that of our descendents be continued, and assured. An Iraqi boy cheers and chants near the burning wreckage of a car bomb after it exploded in Baghdad , November 20, 2004. Looking into the mirror we see the War Culture, made ignorant to what we help create and destroy, made blind to our extravagant ways and made deaf to the many echoes resonating pain. Guilty we all stand, mesmerized in the grandeur of our existence and the ignorance our wealth creates. As long as our lives are made better we care not in knowing how we came to achieve the comfort that continues to shield us away from the reality of billions of human entities that live their lives in utter decay. Each new product we purchase distances our sisterhood with the peoples of the world; each new indulgence we grant ourselves condemns us further away from empathy and the understanding needed to comprehend all that has been done in our name. In order to achieve heaven in America Hell has been created elsewhere, yet still we live our unsustainable ways, condemning ourselves to the shock of the coming curtailment of our excessive lives that must sooner or later be halted. Absorbed in the land of the free and the home of the brave we have become, brainwashed by our comfort and our lifestyles, immersed in our materialistic society that reason dictates cannot be sustained much longer. The War Culture we have become, expanding our lifestyles, escaping our realities, becoming immune to the troubles our appetite causes and being made ignorant to the self-defeating mechanisms of our ways. It is for our way of life that Empire exists, Bush lives and Iraq implodes. Unquenchable appetites need to be fed, exorbitant energy needs fuel and the expanding consumerism of American citizens needs nourishment. The War Culture needs blood to blossom and Empire to continue.Bellaciao collective — Bella Ciao November 24, 2004 The War Culture — By Manuel Valenzuela — ValenzuelasVeritas.blogspot.com Devouring Earth at unprecedented rates, American society must satisfy its insatiable craving for lifestyles bathed in excessiveness and overabundance that dwarfs any culture that exists today, or that has come before. This superfluous undertaking has made the pursuit of Empire a necessary evil in which death, destruction and exploitation of both land and man are but predetermined conditions needed for the continued growth of economy, wallets and possessions. The end result is a culture of war, of expansion, Empire and control of the world’s natural, human and financial resources. Murder, genocide, suffering, enslavement, poverty, malnutrition, destruction of opportunity and ability, lack of education, happiness and healthcare have become mere manifestations of collateral damage in the American quest to satisfy the voracious appetite of its drooling citizens. The War Culture has emerged, and complicit we all are in Iraq, Palestine, Africa, Latin America, Asia and in the continued devastation and rape of Earth’s land, water, air and energy. Products proudly displayed in our homes, garages and gardens Through war our lives are made to prosper; through war our possessions are made cheaper; through war our excessiveness flourishes and greed mushrooms. Through war our materialistic selves shop merrily; through war we live like kings and queens while the rest of the world rots in indigence. It is war, conquest and Empire that sustains our standard of living and our slide into decadence. It is war and Empire that allows us to dwell in the expectation of unsustainable development and the continued increase to our ever-expanding array of possessions and property. It is war and violence that furthers our lifestyle living in castles, basking in worldly possessions and eating more than any other human society that has ever existed. Only through adventures like the failure in Iraq can we hope to continue living the American Dream, living as the feudal lords to the billions of serfs who slave their lives for our comfortable existence and unknowingly sacrifice their progeny and energies to our gorging greed. The ultimate exploiter is the War Culture, hiding behind the multitude of products proudly displayed in our homes, garages and gardens that degenerate the environment, suffocate the less fortunate and that helps release death, destruction and untold misery onto our brethren.The War Culture Demonstrably flying away from the fraternity of nations has not been achieved solely by the crimes and ineptitude of the worst president in living memory. Rather, this phenomenon has lingered in the American conscious for the last fifty years, evolving slowly but surely thanks to a rapidly evolving Pax Americana and its exponentially growing exploitation of the world’s remaining natural and human resources that continues to increase at unprecedented rates. This truth has over the span of decades alienated a large portion of the global population who has been privy to the damaging intervention in world affairs by a US government engaged in every corner of the world, usually at the expense of the native citizenry and in favor of the corporate Leviathan. (Leviathan — Something large, as a great whale, or monstrous beast) Exists to feed itself Exploited and enslaved, the people of the world have seen what those residing inside the belly of the beast refuse to accept and are ignorantly shielded away from. It is the creation of a War Culture that, even with the continued dwindling of the world’s resources and for calls for sustainable development, continues to decimate, devastate and exploit for its own purposes and goals. The War Culture exists to feed itself, to engulf itself in resplendent affluence and material comfort. It seeks to live in lavishness and privileged circumstance, usually at the expense of billions of poor human energies devoid of the luck of living inside the Pax Americana. Through careful manipulation based on hereditary conditioning, the Corporate Leviathan, together with the American government, has inserted the pursuit of luxury and excessiveness onto an unknowing public that has been educated and acclimatized towards acquiescing to the conquest of land and man through mechanisms of Empire. Included in this training is the acceptance of violence as a means to an end, creating in the citizenry, usually from birth, the tools necessary that allow both the government and the Leviathan to unleash extreme levels of violence, exploitation and destruction onto the world without so much as a small whisper of protest from the population. It is these tools that make violence a sanitized endeavor that is airbrushed to represent an abstract mirage that hides the horror and danger of armed conflict. Thus, the American people are inoculated to the realities of the violence their government unleashes in the name of the corporate world, making us immune to a truth that is all too real and oftentimes overwhelmingly destructive. This is the only way the War Culture can maintain its standard of living. It is the only way to build an Empire in a human civilization at the dawn of the 21st century. Only by conditioning its population, manipulating it to accept the violence necessary for the continued exploitation and conquest of the world’s natural and human resources can the Pax Americana survive, and thrive. Sleepwalking through life, blinded by excessiveness and plentitude, made ignorant by the many toys in our possession, we allow our government and the corporate masters that control it free reign to usurp lands, peoples, lives and the collective future of the human race. A War Culture has been created, clandestinely spawned from within our own minds, making us pawns in its demolition of lives and foot soldiers in its continuing existence. Our breaths grant it life, our lifestyle makes it thrive. The War Culture we have become, birthed from our unsuspecting eyes, making us complicit in the forces of Empire building that sequester us to the grievous mistakes of Empires past. Spoils of Extravagance The embodiment of what America has become can lucidly be seen in a society that has been allowed to evolve beyond the borders of its own limitations. It can be seen in the voluminous exorbitance that defines the richest nation in the brief history of humankind. It can be seen in the annihilation of indigenous peoples that resulted in the exploitation of their lands and in the enslavement of an entire race that rocketed a new nation to splendorous wealth. Today, in order to meet its insatiable hunger for its luxurious standard of living, afforded to no other nation in existence, the exploitation of land and man must continue.Bellaciao collective — Bella Ciao November 24, 2004 The War Culture — By Manuel Valenzuela — ValenzuelasVeritas.blogspot.com Devouring Earth at unprecedented rates, American society must satisfy its insatiable craving for lifestyles bathed in excessiveness and overabundance that dwarfs any culture that exists today, or that has come before. This superfluous undertaking has made the pursuit of Empire a necessary evil in which death, destruction and exploitation of both land and man are but predetermined conditions needed for the continued growth of economy, wallets and possessions. The end result is a culture of war, of expansion, Empire and control of the world’s natural, human and financial resources. Murder, genocide, suffering, enslavement, poverty, malnutrition, destruction of opportunity and ability, lack of education, happiness and healthcare have become mere manifestations of collateral damage in the American quest to satisfy the voracious appetite of its drooling citizens. The War Culture has emerged, and complicit we all are in Iraq, Palestine, Africa, Latin America, Asia and in the continued devastation and rape of Earth’s land, water, air and energy. Products proudly displayed in our homes, garages and gardens Through war our lives are made to prosper; through war our possessions are made cheaper; through war our excessiveness flourishes and greed mushrooms. Through war our materialistic selves shop merrily; through war we live like kings and queens while the rest of the world rots in indigence. It is war, conquest and Empire that sustains our standard of living and our slide into decadence. It is war and Empire that allows us to dwell in the expectation of unsustainable development and the continued increase to our ever-expanding array of possessions and property. It is war and violence that furthers our lifestyle living in castles, basking in worldly possessions and eating more than any other human society that has ever existed. Only through adventures like the failure in Iraq can we hope to continue living the American Dream, living as the feudal lords to the billions of serfs who slave their lives for our comfortable existence and unknowingly sacrifice their progeny and energies to our gorging greed. The ultimate exploiter is the War Culture, hiding behind the multitude of products proudly displayed in our homes, garages and gardens that degenerate the environment, suffocate the less fortunate and that helps release death, destruction and untold misery onto our brethren.The War Culture exists to feed itself, to engulf itself in resplendent affluence and material comfort. It seeks to live in lavishness and privileged circumstance, usually at the expense of billions of poor human energies devoid of the luck of living inside the Pax Americana.War crimes upon war crimes There will likely be no Pentagon investigation of the latest mass killing in Ishaqi. Certainly there will never be an independent probe that could establish the truth of what really happened in that midnight hour. [Illegal — war crimes upon war crimes] If it involved ordinary troops and not Bush's shadowy death squads and hired guns, it was probably not, technically speaking, an atrocity, not a planned murder of civilians, but a simple skirmish with hostile forces in the dark - terrorists, insurgents, militiamen, gangsters [Illegal — what stems from illegal fruit breeds seed that always remains illegal — war crimes upon war crimes — continuing war against Iraq resistance] — or with innocent homeowners defending their property, or maybe an inextricable mix of the two. It was just another night in Iraq, another raid, another blood-letting, another outcry of anguish. Meanwhile, the makers of the true atrocity, the great atrocity — the unprovoked, unsanctioned, unnecessary act of aggression responsible for all the mass Iraqi deaths in Ishaqi and across the land, all the dead and maimed Americans, all the ruin, all the senseless pain and suffering — will be making the rounds of sumptuous Christmas parties in the coming days. They'll be feasting and toasting, dancing and laughing, swathed in the pomps of wealth and power, forever secure against the consequences of the evil they have done.Here's a headline you don't see every day: "War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals." Perhaps that's not the precise wording used by the Washington Post this week, but it is the essence of its story about the Bush Regime's new campaign to put Saddam's murderous security forces on America's payroll. Yes, the sahibs in Bush's Iraqi Raj are now doling out American tax dollars to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo - perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that's the word, seems to be that these bloodstained "insiders" will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained "insiders" responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad - and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta. Naturally, the Iraqi people - even the Bush-appointed leaders of the Potemkin "Governing Council" - aren't exactly overjoyed at seeing Saddam's goons return, flush with American money and firepower. And they're certainly not reassured by the fact that the Bushists have also re-opened Saddam's most notorious prison, the dread Abu Ghraib, and are now, Mukhabarat-like, filling it with Iraqis - men, women, and children as young as 11 - seized from their homes or plucked off the street to be held incommunicado, indefinitely, without due process, just like the old days. As the Times reports, weeping relatives who dare approach the gleaming American razor-wire in search of their "disappeared" loved ones are referred to a crude, hand-written sign pinned to a spike: 'No visits are allowed. 'No information will be given and you must leave.' Perhaps an Iraqi Akhmatova will do justice to these scenes one day.In The Process Of Genocide. The United States Of America is committing genocide in Iraq, and will continue to do so, until the will of the Iraqi people is destroyed. This is the same slow process that happened with the American Indian. Back then, the U.S. military was hanging Indian children from trees like Christmas ornaments. This was done to break the will of the American Indian. It was a message sent by the U.S. military, that if resistance did not stop, the U.S. Government would destroy everything that was Indian. It is exactly what happened at the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968 in Vietnam. The My Lai Massacre was a blatant calling card sent by the U.S. Government. It was a message to the people of Quang Ngai Province, that if they did not stop the resistance, the U.S. Government was going to continue to murder them as fast as American weaponry could. Iraq is in total turm-oil, because the final prize is oil. The American people need that oil, like a heroin addict needs a fix. When I went through the My Lai Massacre site in 1994, I could feel the evil that the U.S. committed at point-blank range. When I saw American soldiers destroy themselves in Vietnam from heroin addiction, I could feel the madness of our presence in Vietnam. We had destroyed everything, and now we were destroying ourselves. When I unzipped a body bag and saw the body of an American soldier who had shot himself in the head, I saw the final calling card of the Vietnam War. America had lost everything. And, it continues to loose the Vietnam War on a daily basis through suicides. The Iraq War is the other bookend to America's foreign policy of in- sanity. The mass migration of people leaving Iraq is the same terror that drove the American Indian to the reservation. This is all happening right now, as millions of Americans are Christmas shopping. Joy to the world. It is surrealism at its highest order, like seeing Indian children hanging from Christmas trees. It's all happening right now.... In the process of genocide. words: Mike Hastie November 24, 2006 Stop The War Now Stop The Oil AddictionTunnel Rat After you have been betrayed by your government for serving in a war for the cause of profit, you become a tunnel rat in your own country. The world is no longer safe. For years I hid in the closet of my mind. One day, I simply came out of the tunnel. I could no longer remain silent. I had to bear witness for the soldiers I saw die. My anger motivated me to give their lives meaning, and to expose the lies that ever sent them to War. The entire War was staged, and I was the disposable cannon fodder, who would either die in country, or self-destruct once I got back to the States. That almost happened. I can't tell you why I do what I do. I am driven by a force that will not let the dead die. My betrayal is a universal betrayal. Those guilty of these political incest crimes have to be brought to justice. They cannot be remembered for any great accomplishment, while Veterans continue to commit suicide. words: Mike Hastie Vietnam Veteran December 2, 2006Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon 1971. American soldier returning to the United States. Terminal Leaving Vietnam—I thought. Welcome Home—I thought. When the plane landed in the U.S.—I brought my secrets back. We were escorted to the back door of the terminal. Terminal—that's appropriate. words: Mike Hastie Vietnam Veteran December 2, 2006Soldiers In Pill Bottles I did not serve in Vietnam for the cause of freedom. I served Big Business in America for the cause of profit. Betrayal is the lethal dose that destroys countless Veterans. Lying Is The Most Powerful Weapon In War. I R emember A nother Q uagmire words: Mike Hastie U.S. Army Medic Vietnam 1970-71"None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval, and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with her scripting." Condoleezza Rice — Iraq — RovePublished on Thursday, July 28, 2005 by CommonDreams.org The Source Beyond Rove — Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal by Roger Morris "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." It was September 2002, and then-National Security Advisor, now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was fastening on CNN perhaps the most memorable and frightening single link in the Bush regime’s chain of lies propagandizing the war on Iraq. Behind her carefully planted one-liner with its grim imagery was the whole larger hoax about Saddam Hussein possessing or about to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a deception as blatant and inflammatory as claims of the Iraqi dictator’s ties to Al Qaeda. Rice’s demagogic scare tactic was also very much part of the tangled history of alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger: The fabrication leading to ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s now famous exposé of the fraud. The administration’s immediate retaliatory “outing” of Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. And now the revelation that the President’s supreme political strategist Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Lewis Libby were involved in that potentially criminal leak—altogether the most serious political crisis Bush has faced. Pivotal role In fact, though her pivotal role has been missed entirely—or deliberately ignored—in both the media feeding frenzy and the rising political clamor, now-Secretary of State Rice was also deeply embroiled in the Niger uranium-Plame scandal, arguably as much as or more so than either Rove or Libby. For those who know the invariably central role of the NSC Advisor in sensitive political subjects in foreign policy and in White House leaks to the media as well as tending of policy, especially in George W. Bush’s rigidly disciplined, relentlessly political regime, Rice by both commission and omission was integral in perpetrating the original fraud of Niger, and then inevitably in the vengeful betrayal of Plame’s identity. None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval, and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with her scripting. "God's never failed me yet" One summer weekend in 1998 at the family estate at Kennebunkport, Me., former president George H. W. Bush introduced his ambitious son George W. to a 43-year-old political science professor, Condoleezza Rice. One of the rare African-American women in the field of Soviet studies, she was rarer still for her archly conservative views. She had interrupted a teaching career at Stanford to work from 1989 until 1991 on the elder Bush's National Security Council staff as a specialist on Russian and East European affairs, and remained a vocal Bush loyalist. George W. Bush was planning on running for the White House and was woefully uninformed about world politics. At Kennebunkport, the politician and academic hit it off right away, and Rice was entrusted with a vital task: "to instruct and protect G.W. at his most vulnerable," as a friend put it. How the woman who became his National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State has fulfilled that trust has had fateful consequences for the United States, other nations, and not least for George W. Bush. Frame from a videotape, which was delivered to Associated P Since the end of the Second World War, the National Security Adviser's staff domain has varied between a dozen and nearly 100, but its function has remained strikingly the same: To be the presidency's eyes, ears, and brain, devoted like no other institution in Washington to protecting and serving the Chief Executive, the National Security Adviser's constituency of one. Rice, who worked for Brent Scowcroft, a cautious NSC adviser under the elder president Bush, defined her role early in 2001 as "stitching the connections together tightly." The gravity of the NSC Adviser's role demands an extraordinary combination of intellect and substantive knowledge, with shrewd understanding of both the world and Washington — a capacity that previous office-holders have had to varying degrees, from Henry Kissinger's 'mastery of power' on down. Although usually relatively hidden from public view in her sensitive role as the president's advisor without peer, the Nigerien uranium scandal and case for war mounted by Rice illustrates vividly that she was a full party to the now notorious intelligence claims about Iraqi weaponry and ties to terrorists. Prey to the same impulse of the uninformed men around her, she repeated to the 9/11 commission, in one of her rare under oath testimonies before Congress, the regime's cant about terrorism in general — insisting "they attacked us for who we are, for no other reason" ignoring a half century of history of American foreign policy and musing with stunning hubris that victory in Iraq will "inspire hope and encourage reform throughout the greater Middle East." However history records Bush's policy and Rice's counsel of war, to all appearances Rice has succeeded at the one task required for advancement in the current Bush regime — maintaining by her fierce loyalty the patronage of the President. And in line with an administration that joins eagles claw to religious cloak, Rice looks to the same sense of divine guidance that fortifies her patron. "When I'm concerned about something, I figure out a plan of action, and then I give it to God. I just ask to be carried through it," she said in a 2002 interview with Essence magazine. "God's never failed me yet." It is an opinion, of course, that history will not share. * The evidence of Rice’s complicity is increasingly damning as it gathers over a six-year twisting chronology of the Nigerien uranium-Wilson-Plame affair, particularly when set beside what we also know very well about the inside operations of the NSC and Rice’s unique closeness to Bush, her tight grip on her staff, and the power and reach that went with it all. What follows isn’t simple. These machinations in government never are, especially in foreign policy. But follow the bouncing ball of Rice’s deceptions, folly, fraud and culpability. Slowly, relentlessly, despite the evidence, the hoax of the Iraq-Niger uranium emerges as a central thread in the fabricated justification for war, and thus in the President’s, Rice’s, and the regime’s inseparable credibility. The discrediting of Wilson, in which the outing his CIA wife is irresistible, becomes as imperative for Rice as for Rove and Libby, Bush and Cheney. And when that moment comes, she has the unique authority, and is in a position, to do the deed. Motive, means, opportunity—in the classic terms of prosecution, Rice had them all.U.S. War Crimes On Haditha and Al-Qa’im an Iraqi doctor sent me this — “Listen...we witnessed crimes in the west area of the country of what the bastards did in Haditha and Al-Qa’im.Photos taken by the US military of loved ones in Fallujah when the US attacked the city November, 2004 This image was taken on November 19th, 2004, to identify the dead. The IRC estimates that at least 60% of the people killed in the assault of Fallujah are women, children and elderly. Photo: http://dahr.org/ It was a crime, a really big crime we have witnessed and filmed in those places and recently also in Fallujah. We need big help in the western area of the country. Our doctors need urgent help there. Please, this is an URGENT humanitarian request from the hospitals in the west of the country. We have big proof on how the American troops destroyed one of our hospitals, how they burned the whole store of medication of the west area of Iraq and how they killed a patient in the ward...how they prevented us from helping the people in al-Qa’im. This is an URGENT Humanitarian request. The hospitals in the west of Iraq ask for urgent help...we are in a big humanitarian medical disaster...” June 2005 http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/archives/dispatches/000256. phpInside besieged Falluja Residents of the rebel-held city of Falluja in Iraq are packing their bags and leaving town after one of the heaviest US bombardments for weeks. BBC News Online spoke by phone to a reporter in the city, contacted by the BBC's Arabic Service, who gave the following account of life there.------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------The mood in the city is grim. It is the start of Ramadan, but there is nowhere to celebrate and no food to celebrate with. Right now faith is a stronger bond than family Falluja's most popular kebab restaurant used to be the place to go at the end of the day to break the Ramadan fast — but that was bombed by the Americans this week. Many families have used a lull in the bombing to leave the city. Fighters are engaged in skirmishes with US forces in the eastern and southern areas. US positions are about half a kilometre from Falluja. No single militia force controls the whole city. Different clans in the city have their own militias but they all seem to be working together to fend off US forces. The people of Falluja are very clannish — but they have also always been very religious and right now faith is a stronger bond than family. Police and militias Two elements have been running the affairs of the city — the police force and local militias. Reclaiming rebel areas Relations between the two are good — I have seen policemen on the streets chatting to the fighters. In fact, relations between local fighters and police have always been good — a deal struck some months ago means the police are welcome in the city provided they do not take orders from the Americans. There are more police on the streets than usual — possibly to protect the property of residents who are leaving the city. But the risk of looting is small — the local militias have a reputation for being very tough with the criminals. No foreign fighters I am not aware of any foreign fighters in Falluja. If there are any foreigners here, they have blended in very well with the locals. Foreigners used to frequent the city in the past, but many of them were forced to leave under a deal the city's leaders struck with the government. Ninety-nine percent of the fighters here are Fallujans. Local clan leaders are broadly opposed to any kind of foreign presence in the city because they fear they may be spies. Supplies exhausted Hospitals have all but run out of supplies and most people know this. Hospital workers clean the floor after receiving fresh casualties But still the injured are being taken there — just so that they can be near the doctors and receive some comfort. The Iraqi health ministry has not sent any extra supplies. Food supplies are also running out. All shops are shut. Some people who fled the city a few days ago have begun returning because they ran out of food. They are coming back even as more and more people are trying to leave. 'Not a sectarian issue' The ordinary people of Falluja still want a peaceful solution — but they knew war was inevitable when Prime Minister Iyad Allawi issued his ultimatum earlier this week. That's when they started stocking up on food. The people believe they are being targeted because they inflicted heavy casualties on US forces during the siege earlier this year. They say the Americans are attacking them because of wounded pride They say the Americans are attacking them because of wounded pride. They say they are motivated by revenge. Most people in Falluja believe the Baghdad government is divided into two camps. They believe the president, Ghazi Yawer, is a Sunni and heads the faction that wants to negotiate a solution to the crisis. On the other side, they say, is Prime Minister Allawi, a Shia, who believes military force is the only way ahead. But many people in Falluja, though largely Sunni, dismiss this. They say Mr Allawi may be a Shia, but this is not why he is at war with Falluja. They think he simply gives the order to batter Falluja because this is what the Americans want. Translation from Arabic by Jumbe Omari Jumbe of bbcarabic.coma target="_blank" href="http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LnNsaWRlLmNvbS 9zL0h