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"..in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie..."
-- (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p.134)
The BIG Lies
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To listen to the Alex Jones Show Live on the internet, click the image, Theres A War On For Your Mind
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http://infowars.com/articles/ps/terror_laws_bush_given_autho
rity_sexually_torture_us_kids.htm
Bush Given Authority To Sexually Torture American Children
The "horror of the shrieking boys" gets a rubber stamp from the boot-licking U.S. Congress & Senate as America officially becomes a dictatorship
Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | September 29 2006
Slamming the final nail in the coffin of everything America used to stand for, the boot-licking U.S. Senate last night gave President Bush the legal authority to abduct and sexually mutilate American citizens and American children in the name of the war on terror.
There is nothing in the "detainee" legislation that protects American citizens from being kidnapped by their own government and tortured.
Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman states in the L.A. Times, "The compromise legislation....authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights."
Similarly, law Professor Marty Lederman explains: "this [subsection (ii) of the definition of 'unlawful enemy combatant'] means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to 'hostilities' at all."
We have established that the bill allows the President to define American citizens as enemy combatants. Now let's take it one step further.
Before this article is dismissed as another extremist hyperbolic rant, please take a few minutes out of your day to check for yourself the claim that Bush now has not only the legal authority but the active blessings of his own advisors to torture American children.
The backdrop of the Bush administration's push to obliterate the Geneva Conventions was encapsulated b y John “torture†Yoo, professor of law at Berkeley, co-author of the PATRIOT Act, author of torture memos and White House advisor.
During a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel, John Yoo gave the green light for the scope of torture to legally include sexual torture of infants.
Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
CLICK HERE for the audio.
So if the President thinks he needs to order children's penises to be put in vices, there is no law that can stop him and after last night's vote, the Senate and Congress, exemplified by sicko 16-year-old boy groomer Mark Foley (R-FL) , has graciously provided Bush its full support for kids around the world to be molested in the name of stopping terror.
Yoo's comments were made before the passage of the torture legislation last night. Up until that point Bush had merely cited his role as dictator-in-chief as carte-blanche excuse for ordering torture - now his regime have the audacity to openly put it in writing - going one step further than even the Nazis did.
Again, for those who are still deluded into thinking the extent of the "pressure" is loud music and cold water being thrown over Johnny Jihad in Ragheadistan, consider for a moment the fact that your own Congress and President who, according to the Constitution, are mandated to serve you, have just legalized abducting your kids from your home and electric shocking their genitals.
Now that the criminals have declared themselves outside of the law does that mean we'll see Bush barbecuing babies on the White House lawn? Of course not, but the policy of torturing children in front of their parents has already been signed off on by the Pentagon and enacted under the Copper Green program and it happened at Abu Ghraib .
Women who were arrested with their children were forced to watch their boys being sodomized with chemical glow sticks as the cameras rolled. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says that the U.S. government is still withholding the tapes because of the horror of the "soundtrack of the shrieking boys" and their mothers begging to be killed in favor of seeing their children raped and tortured.
Your government has just lobbied for and Congress has passed legislation to discard the Geneva Conventions and mandate all this.
Pedophiles nationwide should rejoice - they can comfortably take a stroll down to the local swimming pool, grab whoever they like, drag them home, rape and torture them, and then in their defense cite the U.S. government as an example of how one should conduct themselves.
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The bill also retroactively gives Bush, the Neo-Cons or any of their henchmen immunity from war crimes charges dating back to September 11 . Ask yourself why they would be so careful to protect themselves from accusations of war crimes.
Could that possibly be because they are knowingly committing war crimes?
The legislating of torture itself should be a criminal act. All laws that contradict the U.S. Constitution are null and void. It was once a law that black people were slaves.
Only by engaging in civil disobedience and refusing to tolerate or acknowledge the laws of a criminal regime that has greased the skids for sexually torturing kids can we ever have a hope of returning America to its past glory.
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Can't Happen Here? Watch This
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police video of their own abuse
please save us!
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http://www.texemarrs.com/zionist_objective_global_domination
.htm
By Texe Marrs
Why did the Bush Administration invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam? We know it wasnt because of Saddams so-called "weapons of mass destruction." He had none. So why, then, have we stuffed over 500 billion dollars down this rat hole? Why has America sacrificed the blood of over 2,300 young soldiers to conquer and hold this nightmarish Islamic desert nation?
Well, check out the photograph here. Its from the official website of the Chabad Lubavitchers, the Orthodox Judaism group so powerful it pulls the strings of both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. It shows a bearded Colonel Jacob Goldstein, Chief of Chaplains for New York States Army National Guard, sitting on the regal solid gold throne in Iraq exactly in the spot where Saddam Hussein once sat.
Get the symbology here? It was ancient Babylon (modern-day Iraq) that in Jeremiahs day conquered Jerusalem and Israel and took the Jews captive. Always brimming with hate for their perceived enemies, for centuries the Jews vowed they would get their revenge.
Now, thanks to the military prowess of their proxy state, the U.S.A., the Jewish chieftains rule over Iraq with a bloody iron hand. Their Mossad agents secretly run Abu Ghraib and other torture centers. Their well-trained men direct terrorist acts inside Iraq, blaming the bloodshed on various Islamic factions, causing chaos to run rampant.
It is, in fact, Israels oil engineers who are supervising Iraqs oil pipelines, and the rich, black gold flows nonstop west across Iraq to Israeli depots. And now, their New York rabbi symbolically sits on the throne of power as the 21st Centurys King of Babylon!
Having conquered Babylon, Israels Zionist Masonic leadership, working hand-in-glove with Zionist neocon counterparts in the Bush Administration, have their sights set on Iran and Syria, to be quickly followed by the oil-rich Persian Gulf sheikdoms. Greater Israel is the immediate goal. Global Domination through control of the oil spigot to the West is the ultimate objective.
Someday, the rabbis are convinced, a kabbalist Jewish Messiah will sit on the throne of world power. He will accept the satanic kingdom that the Lord Jesus Christ, in the wilderness, once refused. Who can doubt, dear friends, that these are the last days, and Bible prophecy is being swiftly fulfilled.
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http://rense.com/general78/kene.htm"
The Kennebunkport Warning
And The Rogue B-52 -
Confirmation With A Vengeance
By Webster G. Tarpley
10- 8 -7
The events of August and September now allow us to evaluate the accuracy of the August 26 Kennebunkport Warning, which generated much attention and controversy from the moment it was issued.
The preliminary verdict of history is now in, and establishes the Kennebunkport Warning as one of the most remarkable successes of open source intelligence forecasting in recent decades. It may even have directly helped to disrupt Cheney's plan for a nuclear sneak attack on Iran.
The Kennebunkport Warning was written in the afternoon of August 24, 2007. Support signatures were obtained in Kennebunkport, Maine later on August 24, and primarily on August 25. The document was sent out to a list of recipients in the US and abroad just before midnight eastern time on Sunday, August 26. The first known internet posting was on the Jeff Rense web site ( www.rense.com), where the document appeared before midnight Pacific time on Sunday, August 26. The Kennebunkport Warning was thus in public view all day on Monday, August 27.
On Tuesday, August 28, Bush signaled an escalation of tensions with Iran in a raving speech before the American Legion convention in Kansas. Here he warned that the Middle East now lay in the shadow of a "nuclear holocaust" because of the Iranian nuclear program. He accused Iran of acting as a state sponsor of terrorism, intervening against the US forces in Iraq, and also made allegations about Iran as a backer of Hezbollah and Hamas. Diplomatic observers recognized that this tirade constituted an important intensification of US threats against Iran.
On Wednesday, August 29, Bush's threats moved a step towards fulfillment as US Air Force personnel loaded six cruise missiles onto the wing mounts of a B-52 intercontinental strategic bomber at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Each of the missiles carried a nuclear warhead of between 5 and 150 kilotons of explosive power. Reportedly because of mechanical problems, the loading process took some 8 hours.
On Thursday, August 30, the rogue B-52, with its cargo of six deadly nuclear-armed cruise missiles, made the 3.5 hour flight across the US to Barksdale, Louisiana. Barksdale is the number two US headquarters for nuclear warfighting, second only to Offutt AFB in Nebraska.
Barksdale is also the jumping-off base for direct B-52 bombing runs into the Middle East, a role which Barksdale played in the shock and awe campaign in Iraq in the spring of 2003. By the time the rogue B-52 reached Barksdale, cataclysmic events were not far off. This was exactly the kind of situation which the Kennebunkport Warning, which by that time had been circulating on the internet fro about three and a half days, had been concerned about.
At around this time, the rogue B-52and its cargo appear to have come to a halt. Between the late afternoon of August 30 and the public announcement of the rogue B-52 incident on the afternoon of September 5, we enter a gray area which requires much further investigation. According to Wayne Madsen, it was a "revolt and push-back" by Air Force personnel determined to block a wider the Middle East from being set off by a nuclear sneak attack, with support from elements of the intelligence community, which blocked the rogue B-52 from proceeding towards a possible appointment with Armageddon in Iran or elsewhere in that region.
This was exactly the case of loyal and patriotic military people refusing to obey an illegal order which the Kennebunkport Warning had pointed to less than four days earlier. As Madsen writes: "Selements of the Air Force, supported by US intelligence agency personnel, successfully revealed the ultimate destination of the nuclear weapons and the mission was aborted due to internal opposition within the Air Force and the US Intelligence Community." ("Air Force Refused to Fly Weapons to Middle East Theater," September 24, 2007, Wayne Madsen Report)
The Kennebunkport Warning thus represents an exceptionally successful effort to alert public opinion to a grave and imminent danger. Precisely the dangerous situation the Kennebunkport Warning talked about occurred in reality less than four days after the document had been posted on the internet. The Kennebunkport Warning must be acknowledged as accurate, timely, necessary, and indispensable for anyone seriously interested in stopping general war.
But there may be a further dimension. It cannot be excluded that the loyal and patriotic military and intelligence people who blocked the plan of the Cheney clique to use the nuclear cruise missiles in the Middle East, or even against a target or targets in the United States, had some how been encouraged to act by having seen the Kennebunkport Warning. The period of August 30 to September 5, when the crucial actions regarding the rogue B-52 would have had to occur, corresponds precisely to the maximum diffusion of the Kennebunkport Warning on the internet. On September 1, a Google search indicated that the Kennebunkport Warning was either posted in full or was mentioned on 72,000 web sites worldwide. By September 2, this figure had risen to 102,000 web sites. On September 3, the maximum diffusion of 110,000 web sites was attained. These figures do not include e-mailings and other forms of attention generated by the vast interest and lively controversy generated by the document· In any case, those who stopped the nukes from going to the Middle East are unsung heroes who deserve recognition.
On September 5, the US Air Force makes a public announcement of the rogue B-52, which is quickly the subject of dispatches by Agence France Presse, The Army Times, The Air Force Times, and other wire services and web sites. Considerable press interest in generated, but, so far as is known, not one member of Congress or presidential candidate of either major party has lifted a finger to start the obviously imperative in-depth investigation of the entire incident, including the half-dozen deaths. These deaths include:
Airman First Class Todd Blue, 20 years old, died Wyethville, Virginia, September 12
Two people from Barksdale Air Force Base, died Caddo Parish, Louisiana, September 15
Airman Adam Barrs, aged 20, killed in an auto crash in Minot, July 5
Air Force 1st Lt. Weston Kissel, 28, B-52 pilot assigned to the 23rd Bomb Wing at the Minot base, killed in a motorcycle crash in Tennessee
Air Force Capt. John Frueh, found dead in Skamania County, Washington state, September 2
On September 6, the Syrian News Agency SANA announced that the Israeli Air Force had mounted an incursion into the air space of northern Syria, and had jettisoned drop tanks and bombs along the Syrian-Turkish border. The Turkish Foreign Ministry protested the objects that had fallen on Turkish territory. The Israelis first denied, but later admitted, that this illegal incursion, an ipso facto act of aggressive war, had taken place. Middle East experts estimated that the Israelis had been probing the Syrian and Iranian air defenses, but that they had been driven off by the new and superior Russian air defense systems now fielded by these two countries. This meant that the US-UK-Israeli model of air blitzkrieg was now in crisis, just as the Israeli land blitzkrieg technique had been defeated by Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. To cover up this humiliating defeat, the Israelis later concocted a story that this had been a successful air attack on a nuclear facility operating in Syria with North Korean assistance; this silly tale was then retailed by neocon John Bolton and also by warmonger Democrat Hillary Clinton in a candidates' debate. But any bombing of a nuclear facility would have had to produce a cloud of radioactive nuclear debris, which would have been registered by Iran, Pakistan, India, Russia, China, Japan, or some other state in the region. Since no such reports have ever come to light, it must be assumed that the Israeli story was fabricated in an attempt to cover up the repulse of the Israeli jets.
According to Madsen, the rogue B-52's cruise missiles were very likely linked to the Israeli sneak attack: "WMR has learned that a US attack on Iran using nuclear and conventional weapons was scheduled to coincide with Israel's September 6 air attack on a reputed Syrian nuclear facility in Dayr-az-Zwar, near the village of Tal Abyad, in northern Syria, near the Turkish border. Israel's attack, code named OPERATION ORCHARD, was to provide a reason for the US to strike Iran."
On Friday, September 7, Joseph Cirincione is interviewed on the Bill Press morning show on Air America. Cirincione argues that transporting nuclear missiles by air is an exceedingly rare occurrence. It emerges that the US Air Force officially ceased air transport of nuclear weapons around 1968, partly as a result of crashes and lost bombs in the US, Spain, and elsewhere.
Shortly after this, the US Air Force announced a highly unusual stand-down of the entire USAF for Friday, September 14. The announced goal was to have all units at all levels review operating procedures and safeguards having to do with the handling of nuclear weapons.
On Sunday, September 23, the Washington Post published a front page article above the fold which offered a sanitized version of the rogue B-52 story. Even in this sanitized form, an article of this sort would normally have been enough to trigger a congressional investigation, with hearings and witnesses subpoenaed to testify under oath. But the Democratic leadership
On Monday, September 24, Wayne Madsen Report posted a story which concluded that "the B-52 transporting six stealth AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles, each armed with a W-80-1 nuclear warhead, on August 30, was destined for the Middle East via Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. [S] It is now apparent that the command and control breakdown, reported as a BENT SPEAR incident to the Secretary of Defense and White House, was not the result of command and control chain-of-command 'failures,' but the result of a revolt and push back by various echelons within the Air Force and intelligence agencies against a planned US attack on Iran using nuclear weapons."
This report does not however mention the possibility that one or more of the cruise missiles was destined to be used against an American city, as prescribed by the Cheney Doctrine. A stealth cruise missile fired at night would be almost undetectable; all the public would see would be a nuclear fireball. Predictably, the target city would be swarming with patsies and dupes carrying large suitcases or trunks with "Al Qaeda" or "Osama Bin Laden" monograms. At that point, Cheney would have the "suitcase bomb" pretext he so ardently desires. Madsen also does not discuss the half-dozen people connected to the Minot or Barksdale Air Bases who had perished under mysterious circumstances between July and September 2007. But Madsen does stress one critical fact: according to reliable sources, one of the six nuclear-armed cruise missiles was reported missing in the course of the incident, and there was some indication that it was never found: "WMR has been informed by a knowledgeable source that one of the six nuclear-armed cruise missiles was, and still may be, unaccounted for. In that case, the nuclear reporting incident would have gone far beyond BENT SPEAR to a National Command Authority alert known as EMPTY QUIVER, with the special classification of PINNACLE."
On October 2, David Swanson, an early critic of the Kennebunkport Warning, issued a statement on Iran entitled "Leading Americans," with the signatures of a number of well-known personalities from politics, entertainment, and the arts. This belated statement is of course to be welcomed, but at the same time its weakness and narrowness, especially if compared to the Kennebunkport Warning, must also be pointed out. As soon as the Kennebunkport Warning had been published, Swanson challenged the notion that there was "massive evidence" of a false flag provocation by Cheney, to be used as a pretext to launch war with Iran. This new statement, coming five weeks after the Kennebunkport Warning, and thus too late to influence the rogue B-52 affair, now acknowledges the danger of an attack, and urges US military personnel to refuse to obey illegal orders. So far, so good. There is, however, no reference to the rogue B-52 incident, in which Air Force personnel have apparently done just what the statement urges. There is no reference to the question of a false flag attack. There are warnings against a "preemptive" attack on Iran, but Bush and Cheney, as well as their accomplice Mrs. Clinton, are already presenting the attack on Iran as retaliatory, aimed at stopping Iranian interference in Iran. Any US attack on Iran predicated on a false flag terror attack inside the US (as noted by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his Feb. 1 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) would be portrayed as purely defensive. The Swanson statement therefore has an escape clause in it big enough for Cheney to sail an aircraft carrier battle group through. Instead of such an uncertain trumpet, we must state unequivocally: NO ATTACK ON IRAN, SYRIA, PAKISTAN, SUDAN, LEBANON, VENEZUELA, NORTH KOREA or any other country, for any reason. False flag events must be attributed to Cheney, and not to the governments or forces accused and scapegoated by US-UK propaganda.
As for the scurrilous "Cosmos," "Colonel Jenny Sparks," "Arabesque," and Michael Wolsey, to say nothing of their comrade in arms, the Ford Foundation's favorite Chip Berlet, they have no interest in doing anything to stop the new 9/11 and the threatened war with Iran. Their sole focus is to harass and sabotage those who are undertaking action in that regard - and remarkably effective action it has turned out to be, despite the exertions of the wreckers.
We urge all persons of good will to support, endorse, and distribute the Kennebunkport Warning, which is fully as relevant today as when it was issued.
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http://prisonplanet.com/articles/june2006/130606Armageddon.h
tm
Bush's Armageddon Wish
Paul Craig Roberts JUNE 13 2006
John Bolton, a notorious neocon warmonger who could not be confirmed as America's ambassador to the UN by even the compliant and corrupt US Senate, got the job as a recess appointment. He is using the platform to push America into war with Iran.
Bolton told the Financial Times (June 9) that the Bush Regime has no intention of reaching an agreement with Iran. Time is running out for diplomacy, Bolton told the Financial Times. Iran has a short time remaining in which it can give up its right under the non-proliferation treaty to enrich uranium for nuclear energy or be attacked. Bolton said that US security guarantees for Iran "were not on the table."
There is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. Every physicist knows that the enrichment requirement for weapons is many times greater than for nuclear energy and that Iran can barely achieve the latter. Despite the facts, Bolton told the Financial Times: "They've [Iran] got both feet on the accelerator, which is why we have a sense of urgency. Each day that goes by gives Iran more time to continue to perfect its efforts for mass production."
Bolton is lying through his teeth. Bush Regime lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and propagandistic references to mushroom clouds convinced the befuddled American public to accept an illegal invasion of Iraq. The same collection of neocon war criminals is again deceiving the American public about Iran.
In his remarks to the Financial Times, Bolton shows himself to be extremely disturbed by the prospect that the diplomatic efforts of Europe, Russia, and China could undermine the Bush Regime's plan to attack Iran. Bolton is doing everything possible to make certain that there is no diplomatic solution.
To help undermine any prospect for peace in the Middle East, Israeli gunboats shelled a public beach and killed or wounded 50 Palestinians. This was done in order to provoke Hamas into abandoning the long-established cease-fire that Hamas had imposed in the interest of negotiating a Palestinian settlement.
The Israeli government succeeded, and now there will a resurgence of "Hamas terrorism" that Bolton and his neocon compatriots can use to build a frightening spectacle of Muslim terrorism.
The Bush/Olmert axis-of-evil have made it clear that "we don't want no stinking peace."
Writing in Antiwar.com (June 10), University of California Professor Jorge Hirsch explains the tripwire that the Bush Regime has laid for Iran in order to have an excuse to launch an attack on that country.
Just as the Bush Regime planned to attack Iraq and then orchestrated a case based on lies, the Bush Regime has already planned to attack Iran. Only this time nuclear weapons will be used.
Nuking Iran is an essential part of the attack plan. The US lacks the necessary conventional military force to invade and occupy Iran, but the use of nuclear weapons against Iran has a wider purpose. The neocons are determined not to have any more embarrassments, such as the Iraqi insurgency. By nuking Iran they intend to send a wider message that the US will use every means at its disposal to ensure its hegemony. The neocons believe that the use of nukes will convince Arabs and the wider world that there is no recourse to accepting America's will.
The neoconservatives could not care less about public opinion. Neocons are contemptuous of the American people. Leo Strauss taught neocons that it was their duty to deceive the clueless American people in order to implement their agenda of global domination. The neocons believe that they have a perfect right, even the obligation, to manipulate the public through propaganda and black ops in order to create acceptance and support for their wars of aggression.
The neocons are the epitome of evil, and they have succumbed to hubris. Like Hitler when he attacked the Soviet Union, neocons believe that their manipulative skills and use of military power will carry the day for their agenda. Hitler's hubris doomed Germany to destruction. What price will America pay for neocon hubris?
When the neocon nazis nuke Iran it will revive memories in Japan and break the US-Japanese alliance. Japan owns enough US Treasury bonds to be able to destroy both the US dollar and the market for Washington's endless red ink. Russia, China, India, and even our European lackeys will have it forcefully brought home to them that the US is an out-of-control rogue nation. They will unify against us. Most likely our bought and paid for puppets in the MIddle East will fall, and Islamic leaders will gain Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Al Qaeda will gain tens of millions of recruits.
Francis Fukuyama's phrase, "the end of history" takes on new meaning.
Bush 'is planning nuclear strikes on Iran's secret sites'
LINK TO ARTICLE
By Philip Sherwell in Washington
(Filed: 04/09/2006)
The Bush administration is planning to use nuclear weapons against Iran, to prevent it acquiring its own atomic warheads, claims an investigative writer with high-level Pentagon and intelligence contacts.
President George W Bush is said to be so alarmed by the threat of Iran's hard-line leader, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, that privately he refers to him as "the new Hitler", says Seymour Hersh, who broke the story of the Abu Ghraib Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.
Some US military chiefs have unsuccessfully urged the White House to drop the nuclear option from its war plans, Hersh writes in The New Yorker magazine. The conviction that Mr Ahmedinejad would attack Israel or US forces in the Middle East, if Iran obtains atomic weapons, is what drives American planning for the destruction of Teheran's nuclear programme.
Hersh claims that one of the plans, presented to the White House by the Pentagon, entails the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One alleged target is Iran's main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, 200 miles south of Teheran.
Although Iran claims that its nuclear programme is peaceful, US and European intelligence agencies are certain that Teheran is trying to develop atomic weapons. In contrast to the run-up to the Iraq invasion, there are no disagreements within Western intelligence about Iran's plans.
This newspaper disclosed recently that senior Pentagon strategists are updating plans to strike Iran's nuclear sites with long-distance B2 bombers and submarine-launched missiles. And last week, the Sunday Telegraph reported a secret meeting at the Ministry of Defence where military chiefs and officials from Downing Street and the Foreign Office discussed the consequences of an American-led attack on Iran, and Britain's role in any such action.
The military option is opposed by London and other European capitals. But there are growing fears in No 10 and the Foreign Office that the British-led push for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear stand-off, will be swept aside by hawks in Washington. Hersh says that within the Bush administration, there are concerns that even a pummelling by conventional strikes, may not sufficiently damage Iran's buried nuclear plants.
Iran has been developing a series of bunkers and facilities to provide hidden command centres for its leaders and to protect its nuclear infrastructure. The lack of reliable intelligence about these subterranean facilities, is fuelling pressure for tactical nuclear weapons to be included in the strike plans as the only guaranteed means to destroy all the sites simultaneously.
The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings among the joint chiefs of staff, and some officers have talked about resigning, Hersh has been told. The military chiefs sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran, without success, a former senior intelligence officer said.
The Pentagon consultant on the war on terror confirmed that some in the administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among defence department political appointees.
The election of Mr Ahmedinejad last year, has hardened attitudes within the Bush Administration. The Iranian president has said that Israel should be "wiped off the map". He has drafted in former fellow Revolutionary Guards commanders to run the nuclear programme, in further signs that he is preparing to back his threats with action.
Mr Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official told Hersh. "That's the name they're using. They say, 'Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?' "
Despite America's public commitment to diplomacy, there is a growing belief in Washington that the only solution to the crisis is regime change. A senior Pentagon consultant said that Mr Bush believes that he must do "what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do," and "that saving Iran is going to be his legacy".
Publicly, the US insists it remains committed to diplomacy to solve the crisis. But with Russia apparently intent on vetoing any threat of punitive action at the UN, the Bush administration is also planning for unilateral military action. Hersh repeated his claims that the US has intensified clandestine activities inside Iran, using special forces to identify targets and establish contact with anti-Teheran ethnic-minority groups.
The senior defence officials said that Mr Bush is "determined to deny Iran the opportunity to begin a pilot programme, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium".
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The Armageddon Plan
LINK TO ARTICLE
By James Mann
The Atlantic Monthly
March 2004
During the Reagan era Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were key players in a clandestine program designed to set aside the legal lines of succession and immediately install a new "President" in the event that a nuclear attack killed the country's leaders. The program helps explain the behavior of the Bush Administration on and after 9/11.
At least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was working diligently on Capitol Hill, as a congressman rising through the ranks of the Republican leadership. Rumsfeld, who had served as Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense, was a hard-driving business executive in the Chicago area?where, as the head of G. D. Searle & Co., he dedicated time and energy to the success of such commercial products as Nutra-Sweet, Equal, and Metamucil. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Even their wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington phone number to use in case of emergency.
After leaving their day jobs Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made their way to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington. From there, in the middle of the night, each man?joined by a team of forty to sixty federal officials and one member of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet?slipped away to some remote location in the United States, such as a disused military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of lead-lined trucks carrying sophisticated communications equipment and other gear would head to each of the locations.
Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. Under it U.S. officials furtively carried out detailed planning exercises for keeping the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The program called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession in some circumstances, in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new "President" and his staff. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve "continuity of government," and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would play a greatly diminished role.
The inspiration for this program came from within the Administration itself, not from Cheney or Rumsfeld; except for a brief stint Rumsfeld served as Middle East envoy, neither of them ever held office in the Reagan Administration. Nevertheless, they were leading figures in the program.
A few details about the effort have come to light over the years, but nothing about the way it worked or the central roles played by Cheney and Rumsfeld. The program is of particular interest today because it helps to explain the thinking and behavior of the second Bush Administration in the hours, days, and months after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Vice President Cheney urged President Bush to stay out of Washington for the rest of that day; Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his deputy Paul Wolfowitz to get out of town; Cheney himself began to move from Washington to a series of "undisclosed locations"; and other federal officials were later sent to work outside the capital, to ensure the continuity of government in case of further attacks. All these actions had their roots in the Reagan Administration's clandestine planning exercises.
The U.S. government considered the possibility of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union more seriously during the early Reagan years than at any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Reagan had spoken in his 1980 campaign about the need for civil-defense programs to help the United States survive a nuclear exchange, and once in office he not only moved to boost civil defense but also approved a new defense-policy document that included plans for waging a protracted nuclear war against the Soviet Union. The exercises in which Cheney and Rumsfeld participated were a hidden component of these more public efforts to prepare for nuclear war.
The premise of the secret exercises was that in case of a nuclear attack on Washington, the United States needed to act swiftly to avoid "decapitation"?that is, a break in civilian leadership. A core element of the Reagan Administration's strategy for fighting a nuclear war would be to decapitate the Soviet leadership by striking at top political and military officials and their communications lines; the Administration wanted to make sure that the Soviets couldn't do to America what U.S. nuclear strategists were planning to do to the Soviet Union.
Under the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations the U.S. government had built large underground installations at Mount Weather, in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, and near Camp David, along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, each of which could serve as a military command post for the President in time of war. Yet a crucial problem remained: what might happen if the President couldn't make it to one of those bunkers in time.
The Constitution makes the Vice President the successor if the President dies or is incapacitated, but it establishes no order of succession beyond that. Federal law, most recently the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, establishes further details. If the Vice President dies or cannot serve, then the speaker of the House of Representatives becomes President. After him in the line of succession come the president pro tempore of the Senate (typically the longest-serving member of the majority party) and then the members of the Cabinet, in the order in which their posts were created?starting with the Secretary of State and moving to the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, and so on. The Reagan Administration, however, worried that this procedure might not meet the split-second needs of an all-out war with the Soviet Union. What if a nuclear attack killed both the President and the Vice President, and maybe the speaker of the House, too? Who would run the country if it was too hard to track down the next living person in line under the Succession Act? What civilian leader could immediately give U.S. military commanders the orders to respond to an attack, and how would that leader communicate with the military? In a continuing nuclear exchange, who would have the authority to reach an agreement with the Soviet leadership to bring the war to an end?
The outline of the plan was simple. Once the United States was (or believed itself about to be) under nuclear attack, three teams would be sent from Washington to three different locations around the United States. Each team would be prepared to assume leadership of the country, and would include a Cabinet member who was prepared to become President. If the Soviet Union were somehow to locate one of the teams and hit it with a nuclear weapon, the second team or, if necessary, the third could take over.
This was not some abstract textbook plan; it was practiced in concrete and elaborate detail. Each team was named for a color?"red" or "blue," for example?and each had an experienced executive who could operate as a new White House chief of staff. The obvious candidates were people who had served at high levels in the executive branch, preferably with the national-security apparatus. Cheney and Rumsfeld had each served as White House chief of staff in the Ford Administration. Other team leaders over the years included James Woolsey, later the director of the CIA, and Kenneth Duberstein, who served for a time as Reagan's actual White House chief of staff.
As for the Cabinet members on each team, some had little experience in national security; at various times, for example, participants in the secret exercises included John Block, Reagan's first Secretary of Agriculture, and Malcolm Baldrige, the Secretary of Commerce. What counted was not experience in foreign policy but, rather, that the Cabinet member was available. It seems fair to conclude that some of these "Presidents" would have been mere figureheads for a more experienced chief of staff, such as Cheney or Rumsfeld. Still, the Cabinet members were the ones who would issue orders, or in whose name the orders would be issued.
One of the questions studied in these exercises was what concrete steps a team might take to establish its credibility. What might be done to demonstrate to the American public, to U.S. allies, and to the Soviet leadership that "President" John Block or "President" Malcolm Baldrige was now running the country, and that he should be treated as the legitimate leader of the United States? One option was to have the new "President" order an American submarine up from the depths to the surface of the ocean?since the power to surface a submarine would be a clear sign that he was now in full control of U.S. military forces. This standard?control of the military?is one of the tests the U.S. government uses in deciding whether to deal with a foreign leader after a coup d't.
"One of the awkward questions we faced," one participant in the planning of the program explains, "was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them." For one thing, it was felt that reconvening Congress, and replacing members who had been killed, would take too long. Moreover, if Congress did reconvene, it might elect a new speaker of the House, whose claim to the presidency might have greater legitimacy than that of a Secretary of Agriculture or Commerce who had been set up as President under Reagan's secret program. The election of a new House speaker would not only take time but also create the potential for confusion. The Reagan Administration's primary goal was to set up a chain of command that could respond to the urgent minute-by-minute demands of a nuclear war, when there might be no time to swear in a new President under the regular process of succession, and when a new President would not have the time to appoint a new staff. The Administration, however, chose to establish this process without going to Congress for the legislation that would have given it constitutional legitimacy.
Ronald Reagan established the continuity-of-government program with a secret executive order. According to Robert McFarlane, who served for a time as Reagan's National Security Adviser, the President himself made the final decision about who would head each of the three teams. Within Reagan's National Security Council the "action officer" for the secret program was Oliver North, later the central figure in the Iran-contra scandal. Vice President George H.W. Bush was given the authority to supervise some of these efforts, which were run by a new government agency with a bland name: the National Program Office. It had its own building in the Washington area, run by a two-star general, and a secret budget adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Much of this money was spent on advanced communications equipment that would enable the teams to have secure conversations with U.S. military commanders. In fact, the few details that have previously come to light about the secret program, primarily from a 1991 CNN investigative report, stemmed from allegations of waste and abuses in awarding contracts to private companies, and claims that this equipment malfunctioned.
The exercises were usually scheduled during a congressional recess, so that Cheney would miss as little work on Capitol Hill as possible. Although Cheney, Rumsfeld, and one other team leader took part in each exercise, the Cabinet members changed depending on who was available at a particular time. (Once, Attorney General Ed Meese participated in an exercise that departed from Andrews in the pre-dawn hours of June 18, 1986?the day after Chief Justice Warren Burger resigned. One official remembers looking at Meese and thinking, "First a Supreme Court resignation, and now America's in a nuclear war. You're having a bad day.")
In addition to the designated White House chief of staff and his President, each team included representatives from the Departments of State and Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, and also from various domestic-policy agencies. The idea was to practice running the entire federal government with a skeletal crew during a nuclear war. At one point there was talk of bringing in the governors of Virginia and Maryland and the mayor of the District of Columbia, but the idea was discarded because they didn't have the necessary security clearance.
The exercises were designed to be stressful. Participants gathered in haste, moved and worked in the early-morning hours, lived in Army-base conditions, and dined on early, particularly unappetizing versions of the military's dry, mass-produced MREs (meals ready to eat). An entire exercise lasted close to two weeks, but each team took part for only three or four days. One team would leave Washington, run through its drills, and then?as if it were on the verge of being "nuked"?hand off to the next team.
The plans were carried out with elaborate deception, designed to prevent Soviet reconnaissance satellites from detecting where in the United States the teams were going. Thus the teams were sent out in the middle of the night, and changed locations from one exercise to the next. Decoy convoys were sometimes dispatched along with the genuine convoys carrying the communications gear. The underlying logic was that the Soviets could not possibly target all the makeshift locations around the United States where the Reagan teams might operate.
The capstone to all these efforts to stay mobile was a special airplane, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, a modified Boeing 747 based at Andrews and specially outfitted with a conference room and advanced communications gear. In it a President could remain in the air and run the country during a nuclear showdown. In one exercise a team of officials stayed aloft in this plane for three days straight, cruising up and down the coasts and back and forth across the country, refueling in the air.
When George H.W. Bush was elected President, in 1988, members of the secret Reagan program rejoiced; having been closely involved with the effort from the start, Bush wouldn't need to be initiated into its intricacies and probably wouldn't re-evaluate it. In fact, despite dramatically improved relations with Moscow, Bush did continue the exercises, with some minor modifications. Cheney was appointed Secretary of Defense and dropped out as a team leader.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse, the rationale for the exercises changed. A Soviet nuclear attack was obviously no longer plausible?but what if terrorists carrying nuclear weapons attacked the United States and killed the President and the Vice President? Finally, during the early Clinton years, it was decided that this scenario was farfetched and outdated, a mere legacy of the Cold War. It seemed that no enemy in the world was still capable of decapitating America's leadership, and the program was abandoned.
Where things stood until September 11, 2001, when Cheney and Rumsfeld suddenly began to act out parts of a script they had rehearsed years before. Operating from the underground shelter beneath the White House, called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, Cheney told Bush to delay a planned flight back from Florida to Washington. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instructed a reluctant Wolfowitz to get out of town to the safety of one of the underground bunkers, which had been built to survive nuclear attack. Cheney also ordered House Speaker Dennis Hastert, other congressional leaders, and several Cabinet members (including Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Interior Secretary Gale Norton) evacuated to one of these secure facilities away from the capital. Explaining these actions a few days later, Cheney vaguely told NBC's Tim Russert, "We did a lot of planning during the Cold War with respect to the possibility of a nuclear incident." He did not mention the Reagan Administration program or the secret drills in which he and Rumsfeld had regularly practiced running the country.
Their participation in the extra-constitutional continuity-of-government exercises, remarkable in its own right, also demonstrates a broad, underlying truth about these two men. For three decades, from the Ford Administration onward, even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never far away. They stayed in touch with defense, military, and intelligence officials, who regularly called upon them. They were, in a sense, a part of the permanent hidden national-security apparatus of the United States?inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come and go, but America keeps on fighting.
The Real Master Minds
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"Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government." -- Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 Bilderburgers meeting. Unbeknownst to Kissinger, his speech was taped by a Swiss delegate to the meeting.
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