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V--The preamble: I am an anarchist. I want a stateless society(Excerpts from Murray N. Rothbard's Essay "Society Without a State:In attempting to outline how a "society without a state--that is an anarchist society--might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach.First, is the argument that in providing for such defense or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the state back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not "really" anarchism. This sort of criticism can only involve us in an endles and arid dispute over semantics. Let me say from the beginning that I define the state as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as "taxation";and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state.On the other hand, I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.). Its easy for me now to have this position. We live in a violent country, led by the most violent government that has ever existed in human history. What is most distressing to me, however, is the easy acceptance of these facts by the American public. We get up everyday and know that our government is killing innocent people around the world, either covertly or overtly. Yet there is no real mass unrest from the public. The current administration has turned the constitution on its ear and challenged congress to stop them. From congress we get NOTHING!! Even though polls show the majority of Americans now recognize that the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq was a mistake, the congress and the administration ignore the public. We have allowed the government to consume our treasure and build the most powerful military in the history of the world. While we bluster at Iran and China about military activities our history tells us the USA dropped two atomic weapons on two cities in Japan, incinerating 200,000 or more innocent citizens, mostly elderly men and women and children. And the madness goes on. Now there is more then a plausible chance that this administration and congress plan to attack Iran; and may use NUCLEAR WEAPONS! Egged on by the Israel lobby leading democratic presidential candidates are fully on board for the attack. While the chances for a stateless society in my lifetime are remote I will do what I can to live outside the soft cage that the government is building for you and me. Many of the founding fathers warned us about this day but as you see------NONE OF US LISTENED.I was born into this on August 9, 1947. This year I will celebrate my 60th birthday! You know the cliche--where did the time go. So here I am living in America. I have travelled, I spent a year in Thule Greenland, a guest of the U.S. Air Force so to speak. Actually I enlisted so I could avoid Vietnam--Vietnam a noble adventure sponsored by the U.S. Government. 58,000 dead American soldiers, 3.8 million murdered Vietnamese civilians. Bush mentions the Axis of Evil: Iran, Korea, Iraq. Nothing in the history of mankind tops Vietnam for sheer butchery(bombing campaigns,napalm, assasinations,use of defoliate/agent orange("In Vietnam, between 1961 and 1971, the high command of the United States decided that, since a guerrilla struggle was apparently being protected by tree cover, a useful first step might be to "defoliate" those same trees. Famous corporatons such as Dow and Monsanto were given the task of attacking and withering the natural order of a country. The resulting chemical weaponry was euphemistically graded by color: Agent Pink, Agent Green,(yes, its true), Agent Purple, Agent Blue, Agent White, and-spoken often in whispers-Agent Orange. This shady gang, or gang of shades, all deferred to its ruthless chief, who proudly bore the color of hectic madness. The key constituent of Agent Orange is dioxin: a horrifying chemical that makes total war not just on vegetation but also on the roots and essences of life itself. The orange, in other words, was clockwork from the start. If you wonder what the dioxin effect can look like, recall the ravaged features of Viktor Yushchenko-ironically the leader of the Orange Revolution. The full inventory of this historic atrocity is still being complied: it's no exaggeration to say that about 12 million gallons of lethal toxin, in Orange form alone, were sprayed on Vietnam, on the Vietnamese, and on the American Forces who were fighting in the same jungles. A prime use of the chemical was in the delta of the Mekong River, where the Swift Boats were vulnerable to attack from the luxuriant undergrowth at the water's edge. Very well, said Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr. we shall kill off this ambush-enabling greenery by poisoning it from the skies. Zumwalt believes his own son Elmo III, who was also serving in the delta, died from the effects of Agent Orange, leaving behind him a son with grave learning disabilites. The resulting three-generation memoir of the Zumwalt family-My Father, My Son (1986), written by the first and second Elmos about themselves and about the grandchild-is one of the most stoic and affecting family portraits in American history" "Out of a population of perhaps 84 million Vietnamese, itself reduced by several million during the war, there are as many as one million cases of Agent Orange affliction still on the books. Of these, the hardest to look at are the monstrous births. But we agree to forgive ourselves for this, and to watch real monsters such as Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, who calmly gave the orders and the instructions, as they posture on chat shows and cash in with their "memoirs." "But, hey, forget it. Forget if if you can." "The Vietnam War came home, and so did many men who had been exposed to Agent Orange, either from handling it and loading it or from being underneath it. If you desire even a faint idea of the distance between justice and a Vietnamese peasant family,take a look at how long it took for the American victims of this evil substance to get a hearing. The chemical assault on Vietnam began in 1961, in the early days of the Kennedy administration, and it kept on in spite of many protests for another 10 years.The first effective legal proceeding brought in any American court was in 1984, in New York. This class action, settled out of court was so broadly defined, in point of American victims and their stricken children, that almost nobody got more than $5,000 out of it, and there was a sharp (or do I mean blunt?)cutoff point beyond which no claim could be asserted. Six million acres of Vietnam had been exposed to the deadly stuff, and, as is the way with protracted litigation, the statistics began to improve and harden. It was established that there was a "match" between those who had been exposed and those who were subject, or whose offspring were subject,to alarming disorders. Admiral Zumwalt, who had first used the phrase "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" in connection with Vietman, took a hand in forwarding the legal cause and might have added that his grandson shoud not be (or do I mean should be?)the last one to suffer for a mistake. More than mistake. A crime.Long after both senior male Zumwalts had died-or in 2003, to be precise-the Supreme Court ruled that the issue had not been completely put to rest by the 1984 settlement. The way now lies open for a full accounting of this nightmarish affair. A report, written by Professor Jeanne Stellman, of Columbia University, as part of a U.S. government study, has concluded that nearly two million more gallons of herbcide were disseminated than has yet been admitted, and that the dioxin content of each gallon was much higher than had been officially confessed. (It has been calculated from tests on some Vietnamese that their dioxin levels are 200 times higher than "normal." The implications are extraordinary, because it is now possible that thousands of Americans may join a million of their former, Vietnamese adversaries in having a standing to sue. Doesn't it ever end? When will Agent Orange become history?" These were the words of Kenneth Feinberg, who figured as teh court's "special master" in the 1984 suit, and who has more recently run the Victim Compensation Fund for the families of those who died in the the attacks of September 11, 2001. One should not leave him to answer his own question all by himself. Agent Orange will "become history" in a different way from the trauma of September 11. Of that event, it's fairly safe to say, there will no lapse of memory at lease until everybody who lived through it has died. Of this Vietnam syndrome, some of us have sworn, there will likewise be no forgetting, let alone forgiving, while we can still draw breath. But some of the victims of Agent Orange haven't even been born yet, and if that reflection doesn't shake you, then my words have been feeble and not even the photographs will do.Article by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair August 2006/check out the photographs!!!) ).Hooray for the good old USA.Yes, I am an EMEMY OF THE STATE. All governments are evil and the longer we support the U.S. Government or any other government for that matter the longer we condone violence committed in the name of the people.For those of you in your early 20's now is the time to demand the end of the welfare-warfare state because if you do not you and your children and their grandchidren will inherit a debt that you will not be able to repay. The rest of the world will pass you by--not because they hate you but because the leaders of America made a HUGE MISTAKE!!A HUGE MISTAKE! AND WHAT WOULD THAT BE? HUBRIS, are we better then anyone else, do we know what the rest of the world should know, does the rest of the world want to be like the U.S.? Spreading democracy? If spreading U.S. style democracy means what we now have----you have got to be FUCKING KIDDING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Perpetual war for perpetual peace? The war on Terror, the war on DRUGS(and what did Milton Friedman have to say about the WAR ON DRUGS in a famous 1989 open letter to Bill Bennett, drug czar under the 1st bush clown, Friedman wrote: "Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore...Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law-enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery,theft and assault." good ol milty recentley passed from this lovely planet),the war on POVERTY,the war on this and that--blah, blah,etc. The interesting thing to consider is that not one of my friends is demanding a war on anything or anybody. How about your friends-are they demanding war on anything or anybody? But what about your government. They seem hell bent on contolling the rest of the world. But why? I can tell you this much the US Government does not care about the American public. The US Government (the Congress) is a bunch of ELITES--MILLIONAIRS MOSTLY--who are interested in only two things POWER & MONEY. And one more thing--the control of the flow of OIL from the Middle East.So do you think I have to listen to this nonsense the rest of my life? Are you listening to the MORONS that lead the United States of America? These fools will drop the BIG ONE unless we find a way to stop them. AND I DON'T MEAN VOTING FOR DEMOCRATS. We have to devote the rest of our lives to living outside the BOX!! By this I mean find a way to live without paying taxes which support these bastards. Form co-ops, share everything, educate your children outside the public school system, develop your own energy systems, oppose all government!!!!!!!!I know it is not easy to face the future as it is starting to unfold. But you still have time to make some decisions. Lets start with just one: oppose the US goverment. The US government is EVIL. I know it sounds silly but its just fun to say. But hey its true. We all went to public school, or most of us did. And thats when we all got the old flag waving routine from our teachers or shall I say the propagandists. The US was good everyone else was bad. Now most of you who might be taking time to read this might wonder what the hell I am talking about but just take minute or so and stop and start thinking! Why are we in Iraq? Now ask some older person (me) why were in Vietnam? Now go back to the Korean War and ask someone why we were there. Ask why we had to go to Europe and get involved in WWII. And before that WWI. If you want to know just get on the net and ask a few pertinent questions and you will be surprised and amazed at the information you will have at your fingertips. Maybe this sounds like bullshit but its not. I am proposing that you take the time to research and hopefully come to the conclusion that the US government IS THE MOST DANGEROUS GOVERNMENT ON THE PLANET. Your security is in your hands.The US government cannot protect you from anything! And besides if they wanted to protect the country the crackpots in D.C. would close all the US bases spread around the world (estimated to be more then 700 in more then 130 countries that we know of)and bring the people home and hey actually do something about border security. You might think, after reading some of this, that I dislike the US government and you would be correct. And you might also think that I am a pretty angry guy right now and you would also be correct. For me its pretty hard to listen to the crackpots(bush, cheney, rice, rumsfeld and all there hired agents) in D.C. talk about the war in Iraq. I use the word crackpots to describe these people but C. Wright Mills, a "New Left Sociologist from the 60's, used the concept of crackpot realism to explain people like John F. Kennedy and all of his agents who were determined to save the world from communism. Some of what he said is relevant to what the present crackpots say and do. Here are some relevant lines taken from his book "The causes of World War III: In crackpot realism, a high flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands. In fact, the main content of "politics" is now a struggle among men equally expert in practical next steps--which, in summary, make up the thrust toward war__ and in great, round, hortatory principles.(p.86) The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists; it also confronts them with many new problems. Yet these, the problems of war, often seem easier to handle. They are out in the open: to produce more, to plan how to kill more of the enemy, to move materials thousands of miles...So instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplication of known catastrophe.(p.87) Now the next one is right on: They know of no solution to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines. Being baffled, and also being very tired of being baffled, they have come to believe that there is no way out__except war__which would remove all the bewildering paradoxes of their tedious and now misguided attempts to construct peace. In place of these paradoxes they prefer the bright, clear problems of war__ as they used to be. For they still believe that "winning" means something, although they never tell us what.(p88)Some men want war for sordid, others for idealistic, reasons; some for personal gain, others for impersonal principle. But most of those who consciously want war and accept it, and so help t create its "inevitability," want it in order to shift the locus of their problems.(p.88)But how does war really happen, how do the politicans accomplish their devious works--well its quite simple they fucking lie! I give you two pages of concise explanation from the book "Resurgence of the Warfare State by Robert Higgs. Here we go: "To Make War, Presidents Lie" When American presidents prepare for foreign war, they lie. Surveying our history, we see a clear pattern. Since the end of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, presidents have misled the public about their motives and their intentions in going to war. The enormous losses of life, property, and liberty that Americans have sustained in wars have occurred in large part because of the public's unwarranted trust in what their leaders told them before leading them into war. In 1898 President William McKinley, having been goaded by muscle-flexing advisers and jingoistic journlists to make war on Spain, sought divine guidance as to how he should deal with the Spanish possessions, especially the Philippines, that U.S. forces had seized in what ambassador John Hay famously described as a "splendid little war." Evidently, his prayer was answered, because the president later reported that he had heard "the voice of God," (No Shit) and "there was nothing left for us to do but take them all and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them." In truth, McKinley's motivations had little if anything to do with uuplifting the people whom William H. Taft, the first governor-general of the Philippines, called "our little brown brothers," but much to do with the political and commercial ambitions of influential expansionists such as Captain Alfred T. Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and their elk. In short, the official apology for the brutal and unnecessary Philippine-American War was a mendacious gloss. The Catholic Filipinos evidently did not yearn to be Christianized in the American style, at the point of a Krag rifle, and they resisted the U.S. imperialists as they had priviously resisted the Spanish imperialists. The Philippine-American War, which officially ended on July 4, 1902, but actually dragged on for many years in some islands, cost the lives of more than 4,000 U.S. troops, more than 200,000 Filipino fighters, and more than 220,000 Filipino civilians, many of whom perished in concentration camps eerily similar to the relocation camps into which U.S. forces herded Vietnamese peasants sixty years later."The twentieth century was the bloodiest in all history. More than 170 MILLION people were killed in World I and fifty million killed in World War II. In regard to the fifty million killed in World War II, it is significant that nearly 70% were innocent civilians, mainly as a result of the bombing of cities by Great Britain and America. This mumber of fifty million deaths does not include the estimated six to twelve million Russians killed by Stalin before World War II, and the several million people he killed after the war ended when Roosvelt delivered to him one-third of Europe as part of the settlement conferences. George Crocker's excellent book Roosevelt's Road to Russia describes the settlement conferences, such as Yalta, and shows how Roosevelt enhanced communism in Russia and China throughly deliberate concessions that strengthended it drastically, while Nazism was being extinguished in Germany." When World War I began in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson's sympathies clearly lay with the British. Nevertheless, he quickly proclaimed U.S. neutrality and urged his fellow Americans to be impartial in both thought and deed. Wilson himself, however, leaned more and more toward the Allied side as the proceeded. Still, he recognized that the great majority of Americans wanted no part of the fighting in Europe, and 1916 he sought reelection successfully on the appealing slogan "He kept Us Out of War." Soon after his second inauguration, however, he asked Congress for declaration of war, which was approved, although six senators and fifty members of the House of Representatives had the wit or wisdom of vote against it. Wilson promised this war would be "the war to end all wars," but wars aplenty have taken place since the guns fell silent in 1918, leaving their unprecedented carnage--nearly 9 million dead and more than 20 million wounded, many of them hideously disfigured or crippled for life, as well as perhaps 10 million civilians who died of starvation or disease as a result of the war's destruction of resources and its interruption of commerce. And what did the U.S. or the world gain? Only a twenty-year reprieve before the war's smoldering embers burst into flame again. After World WAr I, Americans felt betrayed, and they resolved never to make the same mistake again. Yet, just two decades later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began the maneuveres by which he hoped to plunge the nation once again into the European cauldron. Unsucessful in his naval provocations of the Germans in the Atlantic, he eventually pushed the Japanese to the wall by a series of hostile economic-warfare measures, issued clearly unacceptable ultimatums, and indeed induced them to mount a desperate military attack, most devastatingly on the U.S. forces he concentrated at Pearl Harbor. Campaigning for reelection in Boston on October 30, 1940, FDR had sworn: "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." Well, Pelelia ain't Peoria. Roosevelt was lying when he made his declaration, just as he had lied repeatedly before and would lie repeatedly for the remainder of his life.(Stanford University historian David M. Kennedy, careful not to speak too stridently, refers to FDR"s frequently cagey misrepresentations to the American public.")Yet many, many Americans trusted this inveterate liar, sad to say, with their lives, and during the war more than four hundred thousand of them paid the ultimate price. Among FDR's many political acolytes was a youngg congressman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who eventually and for the world unfortunately clawed his way to the presidency. As chief executive, he had to deal with vital questions of war and peace, and like his beloved mentor, he relied heavily on lying to the public. In October 1964, seeking to gain election by portraying himself as the peace candidate(in contrast to the alleged mad bomber Barry Goldwater), LBJ told a crowd at Akron University: "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." In 1965 however, shortly after the start of his elected term in office, Johnson exploited the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, itself based on a fictitious account of attacks on U.S. naval forces off Vietnam, and initiated a huge buildup of U.S. forces in Southeast Asia that would eventually commit more than five hundred thousand American "boys" to fight an "Asian boy's war. Some fifty-eight thousand U.S. military pesonnel would lose their lives in the service of LBJ's vanity and political ambitions, not to speak of the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Loations killed and wounded in the melee, Chalk up another catastrophe to a lying American president. Now President george w. bush is telling the American people that we stand in moral peril of imminent attack by Iraqis or their agents armed with weapons of mass destruction. Having presented no credible evidence or compelling argument for his characterizations of the alleged threat, he simply invites us to thrust him and therefore to support him as he undertakes what once would have been called naked aggression. Well, David Hume long ago argued that that no black swan exists. So Bush may be telling the truth. In the light of history, however, we would be making a long-odds bet to believe him. What did George say about Iraq(just a few of the lies):1.Iraq has 500 tons of chemical weapons(sarin gas,mustard gas,vx nerve gas). This was a lie. Zero chemical weapons found. 2. Iraq has 30,000 weapons capable of dumping chemical weapons on people. Not a single chemical weapon's munition was ever found in Iraq. 3. Iraq has a growing fleet of planes capable of dispersing chemical weapons almost anywhere in the world. Zero aerial vehicles found. 4. Iraq aids and protects terrorists including members of Al Qaeda. To date, not a shred of evidence connecting Hussein with Al Qaida or any other known terrorist organizations have been revealed (besides certain Palestinian groups who represent no direct threat to the US). 5. Iraq has purchased metal tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as well as dozens of leading scientists declared said tubes unsuitable for nuclear weapons production--months before the war. 6. Iraq is rebuilding nuclear facilities at former sites. Two months of inspections at these former Iraqi nuclear sites found zero evidence of prohibited nuclear activities there. 7. Iraq recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Niger. This was a HUGE whooper. The ..s implied were known at the time by the CLOWN to be forged and not credible. 8. Iraq has nuclear weapons for a fact. "The IAEA had found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq." 9. Hussein refused to allow UN inspectors into Iraq. UN inspectors went into Iraq to search for possible weapons violations from December 2002 into March 2003. 10. Iraq's WMDs were sent to Syria for hiding--No evidence. 11. The CIA was primarily responsible for any prewar intelligence errors or distortions regarding Iraq. The Pentagon was bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. In the end the CIA could not----Collin Powell lied in front of the UN security council. 12. An IAEA report indicated that Iraq could be as little as six months from making nuclear weapons--claim retracted when the IAEA pointed out that no such report existed. 13. Saddam was involved with bin laden and al Qaeda--a big whooper. 14. The US wants democracy in Iraq and the Middle East--"Democracy is the last thing the U.S. can afford in Iraq. Representative government in Iraq would mean the rapid expulsion of U.S. interests. Rather, the U.S. wants westernized, secular leadership regimes that will stay in pocket and work to neutralize the politically ambitious anti-western religious sects popping up everywhere. 15. Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress are a homegrown Iraqi political force, not a U.S. sponsored front. In fact Chalabi worked for Iran and fed false information to the clowns in D.C. 16. The U.S. is waging a war on terror. Really--if that were true why do the clowns give a pass to there Saudi friends and Israel. And the Pentagon has cozied up to the Mujahideen-e-khalq (MEK), an anti-Iranian terrorist group based in Iraq. 17. The U.S. has made progress against world terrorist elements, in particular by crippling al Qaeda. On the contrary al Qaeda is stronger then ever and is presently kicking our ass in Afqanistan. 18. The Clown's administration has made Americans safer from terror on U.S. soil. Terror on U.S. soil would disappear if we would stop meddling in the affairs of the rest of the world. Just shut down the bases around the world and bring all the soldier boys home. 19. The clowns's administration has nothing to hide concerning the events of september 11, 2001 or the intelligence evidence collected prior to that day. On the contrary--the Saudi connection and the Israel connection have never been revealed to the public. 20. U.S. air defense functioned according to protocols on September 11, 2001. The open secret here is that stateside U.S. air defenses had been rduced to paltry levels since the end of the cold war. 21. The clown had a plan for restoring essential services and rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure after the shooting war ended. Another big whooper. In fact many think chaos was the goal..to keep the middle east destablized. 22. The U.S. has made a good-faith effort at peacekeeping in Iraq during the postwar period. You be the judge. 23. Despite vocal international opposition, the U.S. was backed by most of the world, as evidenced by the 40-plus-member coalition of the willing. Big whooper. Another huge whooper. 24. The war was notable for the protection of civilians. It is now estimated that at least 100,000 to 655,000 innnocent people have been murdered by coalition forces. Since 1991 the U.S. is has been responsible for the deaths in Iraq of over 1,000,000 people. 25. The looting of archaeological and historic sites in Baghdad was unanticipated. Not true. 26. Saddam was planning to provide WMD to terrorist groups. "declassified portions of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) judged that possibility to be unlikely." 27. Saddam was capable of launching a chemical or biological attack in 45 minutes. "the 45 minute claim was at the center of a scandal in Britain that led to the apparent suicide on Friday of a British weapons scientist who had questioned the government's use of the allegation. The scientist, David Kelly, was being investigated by the British parliament as the suspected source of a BBC report that the 45-minute claim was added to Britain's public dossier on Iraq in September at the insistence of a aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair--and against the wishes of British Intelligence, which said the charge was from a single source and was considered unreliable." I could go and on but why waste your time. In his article "Dying for a lie" Laurence M. Vance states "They died in vain; they died for a lie. This does not mean that they were not brave, heroic, well-meaning, or patriotic. They may have fought with the best of intentions; they may have sacrificed themselves for others; they may have been sincere in their belief that they were fighting for a good cause; BUT THEY DIED FOR A LIE. THE FIRST LIE IS THAT WAR IS NECESSARY. After commanding forces that firebombed Tokyo, which killed as many civilians as the atomic bomb dropped a few months later, General Curtis LeMay remarked: "We knew we were going to KILL A LOT OF WOMEN AND KIDS when we burned that town. HAD TO BE DONE." But regardless of what happened beforehand, or what might have happened in the future, since when does slaughtering 100,000 people at one time ever have to be done? War should not be considered as an alternative; it is always the worst possible solution. As psychologist Alfred Adler has said: "War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man." War is not inevitable; it is never an absolute necessity. As Adler's successor Lydia Sicher once said: "Wars are inevitable...as long as we believe that wars are inevitable. The moment we don't believe it anymore it is not inevitable." THE SECOND LIE IS THAT IT IS THE PEOPLE IN A COUNTRY THAT WANT WAR. Surprisingly, it was Ronald Reagan who recognized that governments make wars, not people." It is up to the government to convince its citizens that the citizens of another country are "the enemy." After all, as one columnist remarked: "When people have friends and customers in other lands, they tend to take a dim view of their government dropping bombs on them." Governments abuse the concept of patriotism to convince the populace that "the enemy" should be bombed, maimed, and killed. Hermann Goering recognized that all a government has to do to get the people to support a war is to "denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." Real patriotism is not wanting to see the blood of your country's soldiers shed in some desert or jungle halfway around the world fighting the enemy of the week, month, or year. Patriotism, as Charles de Gaulle explained,"is when love of your people comes first; nationlism, when hate for people other than your own comes first." It is old men who make wars, and then send the young men to fight them; it is the members of Congress with no children in the military who agitate for war. THE THIRD IS THAT THERE ARE WINNERS AND LOSERS IN A WAR. No side ever really wins a war. As Jeannette Rankin, the only member of Congress to vote against U.S. entry into both world wars, said: "You can win a war than you can win an earthquake." Every side loses something in a war. English mystery writer, Agatha Christie, certainly showed more wisdom than most members of Congress when she said:"One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one." The consequences of a war are never as expected. One reason, as recognized by Thomas Jefferson, is that "war is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses."THE FOURTH LIE IS THAT WAR CAN BE GOOD FOR A NATION'S ECONOMY. This myth of war proseperity was exploded by Ludwig von Mises: "War prosperity is like the prosperity that earthquake or a plague brings. The earthquake means good business for construction workers, and cholera improves the business of physicans, pharmacists, and undertakers; but no one has for that reason yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as simulators of the productive forces in the general interest." More recently, Robert Higgs has called this "The Fallacy that Won't Die." But didn't unemployment fall during WWII? Of course it did. How could it not fall when the government conscripted 16 million men into the armed forces? But what about the GDP during World War II? Naturally, it increased, but only because of the increased output of military goods and services. Tell the grieving parents of their only son, who never gave them and grandchildren, about how much greater their standard of living will now be because of the war that took their son.THE FIFTH LIE IS THAT THE US MILITARY DEFENDS OUR FREEDOMS. "The military is too busy policing the world to defend our freedoms. We have U.S. troops in 158 countries of the world. How are the 69,395 US troops in Germany defending our freedoms? How are the 35,307 US troops in Japan defending our freedoms? How are the 12,258 US troops in the UK defending our freedoms? How are the_________US troops in___defending our freedoms? To appease his conservative base on the illegal immigration issue, Bush recently called for the stationing of some National Guard troops along the border with Mexico. The National Guard units that have been deployed to Iraq should not be assigned to guard the Mexican border. They should be sent home to their jobs and their families, and only used for genuine emergencies on US soil. Stationing US soldiers along the Mexican border would be defending our freedoms a thousand times more than putting them along any German or Italian border. Contrary to these lies, the truth about war, in the words of Major General Smedley Butler, is that "WAR IS A RACKET. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious." Ambrose Bierce once made a callous statement about war that nevertheless comes to pass whenever the US intervenes in another country: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." The aphorism that truth is the first casualty of war has often been spoken but rarely learned from. The is because, as Charles Lindbergh said: "In a time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda." This war in particular was started and maintained by more government LIES than perhaps any other war in our history. WHAT WERE OUR OBJECTIVES IN THIS WAR? Finding weapons of mass destruction? Finding chemical and biological weapons? Removing Saddam Hussein? Imposing democracy to Iraq? Bringing stability to the Middle East? Forcing Iraq to comply with UN resolutions? Protecting the nation of Israel? Dismantling Al Qaeda? Freeing Muslim women from oppression? Enforcing the no-fly zone imposed on Iraq after the first Persain Gulf War? How are we suduced by War? I will quote from the fabulous book by Butler Shafer entitled "Calculated Chaos" the chapter is Fueling the Engines of War( I am starting on page 124, 3rd paragraph): Because we have chosen to divide ourselves from other people and the rest of nature, we have created a state of war with one another. So accustomed have we become to our personal and institutionalized sources of conflict that we have simply accepted the inevitability of leaving behind us a trail of corpses and crippled victims. Whether we are considering box elder bugs, or the animals we routinely slaughter as we speed along the highways in our rush to go nowhere, or the aborted fetuses whose only offense were to be impediments to our self-indulgent life-styles, or the victims of more formalized systems of conflict, we seem increasingly indifferent to the consequences of our conflict-ridden lives. Because we have separated ourselves from these faceless "others," we find it easy to rationalize the suffering we so thoughtlessly inflict. After all, we convince ourselves, they did get in our way, did they not? Nowhere, though, do we indulge ourselves in such a vicious and unquestioning piling up of victims as in the system of POLITICAL WARFARE. Perhaps it is the enormity of the harm caused by war that anesthetizes our minds and permits us to overlook its obscene and monstrous nature. Even those who are rightfully horrified by the psychopathic BUTCHERY involved often fail to understand how war is both the ultimate expression of institutional superiority over the lives of human beings and, at the same time, the natural consequence classifying ourselves into mutually-exclusive groupings. War is an activity with implications for the institutional control of people that have rarely been understood by even its most ardent critics. Far too many opponents of war nevertheless believe that society could not function without political supervision and coordination. What they fail to understand is the necessity of the war system for soldifying political authority over a population. We have seen how people identify their ego boundaries with the political state, coalescing their individualities into a unified whole. Similarly, the world becomes divided into "we-they" relationships that generate conflict and fear of others. In order to resolve these perceived conflicts in there favor, people sanction the exercise of power by the political state. It is not sufficient for the maintenance fo their power that political institutions have only a theoretical capacity or formal authority to deal with conflicts. The State must be able to constantly exercise its control over conflict situations, and to demonstrate its capacity for violence, in order to reinforce both the herd-identity of its citizens and the force of is own authority. The State is as dependent upon conflict for its survival as the medical profession is upon illness. If conflicts do not arise in any other way, the State must concoct its own. War is, indeed, the health of the State, the means by which the State maintains its existence. Politics feeds on conflict like a parasite, drawing its life-sustaining blood from the wounds it has inflicted. This same conclusion was reached in what were reportedly the results of a secret, government-funded study--conducted over a period some three years by prominent scholars from various disciplines, as well as people from non-academic fields--of the likely consequences of a general condition of peace. Even though the group's report was published without authorization and without identifying any of the purported participants--thus raising questions of its authenticity--it nevertheless contains (like Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm) a perceptive understanding of the essential relationships between political institutions and the war system. Bearing the title Report From Iron Mountain, this professed study reflected a rather dim view by the group members of a condition of universal peace. Such a situation would, they feared, serve to dilute the power of political institutions.Acknowledging war to be the principal means for the organization of nations, the Iron Mountain group declared that the war system has been indispensable for governments securing a popular sanction for their rule. Wars and other threats to the national interest provided the sense of necessity making possible the state of mind that would gain the allegiances of men and women to a politically organized society. War, in other words, "is the basic social system," and the end of war means the end of national sovereignty." Because Allegiance requires a cause," and "a cause requires an enemy," the report goes on, the war-making societies require--and thus bring about--international conflicts."Since the health of the State is dependent upon its warmaking capacities, and a "healthy" military system "requires regular excercise," what would be the likely political consequences of a abandoment of war? The answer to that question was, of course, the primary charge to the Iron Mountain Group. If the State was no longer able to rely on military "threats" from foreign governments as fear-objects for maintaining control over its own population then, the group suggested, "alternate enemies" would have to be found. Demonstrating its capacity for practical as well as theoretical solutions, the group provided a list of such possible enemies that included threats from interplanetary creatures, environmental pollution(which, it was suggested, the State itself might have to secretly engage in order to make such a threat plausible), ethnic minorities within the the population, and the use of blood games. Should the State be unable to indentify any existing group as a substitute enemy, the report continues, "such a threat will have to be invented." Other methods of social control mentioned by the group included the use of "selective population control" and the "reintroduction of slavery," to be accomplished through a form of "universal military service." What more damning indictment of institutions could be offered than this? What fiendish monsters concocted in the dreariest recesses of a psychopatic imagination could begin to match the evil inherent in the systematic and calulated slaughter of millions of human beings? More importantly, what evasion of reality do we practice when we choose to acknowledge the propriety and even the glory of such institutionlized savagery? When the State can engage in its murderous exploits with no other purpose in mind than the aggrandizement of its own power, how can we continue to embrace such agencies as being essential to the maintenance of social order? Do we really believe, as we have been taught, that the absence of such agencies of mass-extermination would lead to disorder?Is it possible for us to look at the war system through clear, focused eyes, rather than the red, white, and blue lens filters that have been implanted in our minds, and see this vicious game for what it is? It should become evident to us that the governments of the US and the Soviet Union, for example, are organized not so much against one another, as against their own respective citizens, and that each government carefully guards against the disclosure of those State secrets that would reveal to their own people the nature of the game being played. It should also become apparent that, in spite of the heated rhetoric of the cold war, the American poitical and corporate systems require a healthy and vigorous communist bloc of nations, a fact that helps to explain the Reagan Administration's assistance to the Polish government during the "Solidarity" strikes. Political oratory about the "Red Menace" may have frightened many American into surrendereing more of their liberty to the State, but it has not dissuaded western bankers from lending billions of dollars to communist regimes, loans that might become worthless should these governments succumb to the emerging spirit of human liberation. Nor would the disappearance of this purported monolithic threat bode well for the beneficiares of the national defense racket: the defense contractors who have amassed great wealth in supplying the equipment for this game; the educational institutionss that have been well paid to train the players (even the federal government's student loan program bears the name "National Defense Education Act"); and the politicans, warlords, and bureaucracies, into whose hands are centralized even greater power and authority. It can hardly be denied that we have willingly been bamboozled into State-directed war frenzies conducted against whomever our political leaders have selected as our current enemies. During my lifetime, I have been told that Germany and Japan were my "enemies," and that Russia and China were my "friends." No sooner was that war concluded, though, and the roles rdeversed: it was Russia and China that were now my "enemies," while Germany and Japan were my "friends." During the Korean and Viet Nam wars, I was told that if these nations fell under the rule of the Chinese government, the rest of the free world would be threatened. But even now, as southeast Asian nations are brought under communist control, I learn that the American government is concluding agreements for arms sales to China, which is really my "friend" after all. A Richard Nixon who, as President, was ordering the sacrifice of Americans lives in order to arrest the fall of dominoes, now preaches the doctrine that a militarily strong China is in the best interests of the US. As this is done, we are asked to look elsewhere for our latest "enemies list," perhaps toward Iran, Libya, or some Central American nation. To those who are willing to subject millions of human beings to pain, misery, and death, for no other purpose than to maintain their own power, it really matters little who the war is against, or what the issues are. The vicious nature of what the politcal State is up to should be obvious. If the ABC grocery chain went on television with a series of commercials to convince us that they were our friends, while the XYZ grocery chain was our enemy, few of us would be inclined to believe them. And if they tried to persuade us to go to a neighborhood shopping center with our fellow ABC customers and shoot at the XYZ customers as they came in to shop, even fewer of us would likely do so. The self-serving nature of their proposal, as well as the absurdity of own participation in their scheme, would be so apparent as to evoke no interest on our part. Why, then, do we not question the State when it seeks to send us or ur children off to a foreign land to die for the glory of the State and its leaders? Those of us who carefully lock burglars out of our homes, allow predators with more voracious appetites into our very souls. Those of us who would not think of permitting our daughters to go out with known rapists, willingly turn our sons over to those who wish to place their lives in mortal danger in order to gratify their self-serving ambitions for power. If we were aware of the contrived nature of the State's bloody conflicts, we would lose our enthusiasm for participating in war games. When two people understand the logic of a game, it is usually pointless for the two of them to thereafter play that game with one another. One sees this in tic-tac-toe and computerized chess matches:when all the consequences of every move are known in advance by each player, it becomes impossible for either to win. The game remains meaningful to only two groups of people: those who do not understand the game, and those who do understand it and seek to take advantage of those who do not. Continuation of war games,then, is dependent upon widespread ignorance of the fundamental nature of politics. It is certainly not in the interests of the State to encourage--or even tolerate-any substanial questioning by its citizens. From the State's point of view, the ideal citizen is the kamikaze pilot; the unthinking, obedient lemming capable of being programmed for its own self-destructive marches to wherever the State directs. The State cannot abide a thinker, an independent individual, a person who refuses to lose himself in the herd. In order to inculcate the attitudes upon which such mindless subservience to political authority rests, schools, churches, youth organizations, the enteraintment industry, and business groups have carefully taught us to march in straight lines, to come to attention on command, to respect authority, and to do as we are told. As a consequence, we have become the kind of people who value the security that comes from the certainty of our own institutionalized suffering, who prefer "the devil we know" to the uncertainty of being deprived of our emotional crutches. What we have turned ourselves into was noted so dramatically and pathetically in the movie Holocaust, when one of the concentratioon camp victims declared, while being ordered to march to th gas chambers, "why do we still obey them? We're finished anyway." The extent of our moral paralysis in the face of established authority was alarmingly identified in the now-classic study conducted by Stanley Milgram. Following a series of experiments in which subjects were directed to inflict pain upon others participating in the project, Milgram concluded that many people do as they told, regardless of the nature of the act, as long as they regard the source of their orders to be a "legitimate authority." It was neither anger, hatred, nor vindictiveness that caused people to be willing to inflict such pain, Milgram said. Rather, man tends "to abandon his humanity...as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures." To the political state, human beings have never amounted to anything more than resources available for exploitation on behalf of institutional purposes, a sad truth made no more evident than in plans to develop the neutron bomb. In case there any doubts as to the arrogance and human insensitivity of the State, or of the proposition that institutions have interests of their own which take priority over the interests of people, consider the implications of this ultimate weapon: a bomb that only kills people, while leaving buildings and equipment intact! A bomb capable of making distinctions between what is institutionally essential and what is dispensable. "Responsible" men and women will be able to be disintegrated for the glory of the state, comfortable in knowing that their homes will remain intact and thus not disturb the mortgage interests the secure their obligations to banks and loan companies, or provide a postmortem threat to their personal credit ratings. The agonizing screams of dying children will not be aggravated by their disquieting fears that the white house, or the washington monument, or their school building will suffer damage. At last, war shall have been made more "peaceful" for institutional interests. Wars are, it must be conceded, bad enough without insurance companies having to pay out billions of dollars for damaged property, or manufacturing firms having to suffer production line shutdowns. Neither should banks and insurance companies be left without tangible assets with which to guarantee repayment of corporate bonds, nor should gvernments be deprived of property on which to foreclose for unpaid taxes. Neither should we countenance the blasphemy inherent in toppling the Mormon Tabernacle or St. Peter's Basilica: religious "values" must be maintained. Wars do have a way of causing problems, and we must be prepared to exhibit that sense of "responsiblility" with which institutions have carefully imbued us. Far better that the government develop a nice, "clean" bomb, one that is not so "messy" and "destructive," one that kills people off by "peaceful" means! Someday, perhaps, the State may even be able to design a bomb that does not leave bodies around to litter public parks! The neutron bomb is not so much th product of some State-subsidized cadre of mad scientists as it is the logical extension of the basic premises by which we have chosen to live our lives. Once we accepted the idea that our lives ought to be subordinated to the purposes and control of institutions, once we subscribed to the proposition that "meaning" in life is only to be found in subservience to those "greater" purposes outside us, we also accepted for ourselves the status of fungible human 'resources," means to the ends of others. It was our individual decision to place our lives at the disposal of institutional interests, as coequals with such other resources as buildings and machines and mineral deposits and other forms of wealth. I wonder if we really fell in love iwth the Star Wars robots because of their human qualities, or because we saw something of ourselves in their roles of institutionally-created and programmed seromechanisms. When the political State introduces its neutron bomb, it is telling us the same thing it tells us in every war, if only we will listen, namely, that the institutional hierarchy has taken inventory of all its assets, and that the bottom has fallen out of the market for human beings. The political history of mankind has consisted of little more than recyling of the war system. We continue to mistake for "progress" our escalating technological sophistication for clawing, clubbing, and slashing one another. If Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan were to return today, they would no doubt be amazed by the design and power of modern weapondry. They would have no lack of familiarity, however, with the logic or the organizational structure of the war system itself. Though we do not love war, many of us are uncomfortable considering the factors that can lead to peace, for to do so would require us to confront all of our institutional commitments. And so we do nothing to change ourselves. We keep honoring dead soldiers as a way of reinvesting our own lives in the purposes of the State, never asking whether the Chinese are better off today than whey would have been under Japanese domination, or whether eastern European nations suffered less under the tyranny of Stalin than of Hitler. We are more comfortable with the illusion that our relatives and friends died in wars fought to advance important principles, than we are with the harsh truth that they were exploited and consumed for no other purpose than to feed the insatiable apetites of the machines of war. And so we remain in our State-induced sleep, dreaming of "national honor" and "glory" bought with the broken bodies of our children. We dream, as well, that peace will come to the world....somehow; that it will occur as a result of fundamental changes in thinking...by someone,...sometime. Theodore Roszak has commented upon the suicidal implications of our preoccupations with power and poitics, suggesting that we are behaving as though we did not choose to survive. "Power," he suggests, "is the enemy of life," because power would "make life what it would not be." We profess our ignorance of the lethal nature of political systems, as though our innocence exculpates us from the responsiblity for our unthinking involvement with the destruction of mankind. But if we are to be responsible people we must overcome our lack of awareness, not take refuge in it. The threats to human life posed by the war system are too great for any of us to continue indulging ourselves in our innocence of what we are doing. Some may argue that conflict is natural to us as territorial animals, and that we ought to accept our periodic mass-suicide ventures as simply one of the costs of being human. Again, such attitudes only help us to evade the responsibilities for our actions, and neutralize our efforts to change ourselves. We need to understand that aggression is the product of our conscious minds, of our ego boundary image-making. Our diabolical madness is the product not of natural selection, but of our preferences for the security of our collective images over the existence of life itself. But even if our tastes for blood have come to us through the processes of evolution, to embrace our biological phylogeny affords us no assurance of our continued survival. Most of the life forms that have ever lived on earth are now extinct--in spite of their fidelities to their natures--and mankind has been provided no greater guarantees of special immortality. If conflict and violence are indeed a part of our genetic chemistry--which I doubt--then we had best learn not to control or suppress our nature, but to rise above it. For along with whatever other attributes we have been provided, we humans also possess minds capable of transcending the present limitations of our conscious thought processess. Evolution, after all, is a continuing process in which we are active participants, not simply end products. If we are to avoid the fate of being the only species to deliberately engineer its own extinction, we must begin to think more in terms of making fundamental changes in our understanding than in incremental modifications of existing policies or strategies. It is not new programs or systems that we so desperately require, but a radical transformation within our consciousness. We need to become aware of what we have been doing to ourselves and to one another as a result of the fragementary and enervated habits of our minds. Though we have taught ourselves to feel menaced by enemies, the threat to our survival as a species comes from within: it is not us against them, but us against ourselves. I have no doubt that the war system will come to an end someday, and that the earth will experience total and unconditional peace. The only question is whether mankind will be around to enjoy it. If the human race is to survive, we must be prepared to abandon the political, religious, and ideological divisions that have nourished the war system. Those who persist in their efforts to reconcile peace with the interests of the State in organizing and controlling people should learn that there is no such thing as a peacful form of conflict. In the past, the political State has asked "who will defend our nation," or "who will defend freedom," or "who will defend democracy?" But if life on this earth is to continue, we must now ask "who will defend mankind?" Those who were prepared to march into war in order to save the interests of their respective nation-States must now be willing to walk away from war in order to save humanity itself. In the name of life, we must find the courage to move beyond all those sanctified divisions that are tearing the human race apart. We must be willing to transend political authority itself, to challenge the legitimacy of the machinery that has universalized human suffering, and to deny all institutiional claims of sovereign power and ocntol over people. Over the untold centuries of our existence, we humans have commited almost every conceivable form of violence upon not only our planet, but one another. We have tried conquering and dominating anything and anyone that served our apparent interests. While our ancestors were exploiting nature as well as their neighbors, we have felt more comfortable managing them. No matter how well-intended we have been in using other people or our environment for our purposes, all of such methods have been for controlling--and keeping us in a state of continuing warfare with--our universe. We live in what the Hopi call a state of "koyaanisqatsi," of "life out of balance." Because of the enormous technological and organizational power we have invested in the agencies that conduct these wars, we must now choose between destroying one another--if not our planet---or learning to live with one another. At no other time in human history have the consequences or our thinking been so immediate and pervasive. If manking is to survive, you and I will have to take the responsibility for ending our participation in violence. The character of any society can never rise higher than the character of the individuals within it. If our world is disorderly and violent, it is because you and I have learned to be conflict-ridden and aggressive.Institutions are blessed with no mysterious powers that would enable a society to transcend the division, discord, and confusion of its members. Only by transforming ourselves dan our world become peaceful and orderly. The task is ours, yours and mine. We have no one else to whom we can turn for salvation. No international organization of nation-States can be expected to curb the appetites of its own members. We must save mankind, for we are mankind. Our leaders, our gods, our ideologies, our laws, our thinkers, our experts, our institutions have all failed us--or, to be more precise, because of our dependencies upon these agencies we have failed ourselves. But if we are to end war, we must be prepared to do more than talk and moralize about the subject. We will not accomplish our purpose with humanely-inspired resolutions, nor by creating insitutional scarecrows to ward off conflict. We cannot oppose war on a piecemeal basis, opposing "unjust wars while sanctioning "just" ones, opposing nuclear weapons but favoring conventional methods of killing. We cannot oppose war while worshiping the engines that produce the agony. We must understand the nature of conflict and the conditions that make for peace. This means that we must be able to discover and deal with the conflicts we feel within ourselves, for those who cannot find peace for themselves will never help to secure it for the rest of mankind. But in the process of our inquiry, we must not be afraid to ask the questions we are not supposed to ask. We can no longer make a pretense of opposing war and, at the same time, fail to see that war is inherent to all political institutions. We must learn to be aware of how others embroil us in their disputes. We must learn to be more skeptical of those who teach children to march.Ron Paul Debates the War With Doug Casey, against Dinesh D'Souza and Larry Abraham DIGG THISBuy a copy of Ron Paul's new book for $20.See the Ron Paul Filehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_C992KPzKsv..mspobj type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="never" allowNetworking="internal" height="350" width="425" data="http

My Interests

I support the notion that George W. Bush should be impeached! It will not happen because the US congress is just as guilty as Bush in conducting an illegal invasion and occupation of two sovereign nations. The US government is a ROGUE STATE! If congress will not impeach Bush what can be done? Elizabeth de la Vega, an ex-federal prosecutor has written a book: United States v George W. Bush et al. This book provides a hypothetical account of the indictment of George Bush, Richard B.Cheney, Condolezza Rice, Donald M. Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell. Conspiracy to Defraud the United States/18 U.S.C. Section 371. This is the indictment portion of the book: Indictment/The Grand Jury Charges: Introductory Allegations/At times relevant to this Indictment: 1. The primary law of the US Federal Government was set forth in the U.S. Constitution ("Constitution"),which provides that the first branch of government is the legislative ("Congress").Pursuant to Article I, Section 8, Congress has certain powers and obligations regarding oversight of foreign affairs, including the powers to: (1)declare war;(2)raise and support the armed forces; and (3)tax and spend for the common good. 2. Article II of the Constitution establishes the Executive Branch. The Executive Power of the US is vested in the President, who is also the Commander in Chief of the Armed Services. 3.Defendant GEORGE W. BUSH ("BUSH")has been employed as President of the United States since January 20, 2001. On that day, BUSH took a constitutionally mandated oath to faithfully execute the Office of President and to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. BUSH is also constitutionlly obilgated to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. 4. As Chief Executive,BUSH excercised authority, direction, and control over the entire Executive Branch, which includes the White House, the office of the Vice President, the Department of State, Defense, and others, and the National Security Council. 5.Defendent RICHARD B. CHENEY ("Cheney")has been employed as Vice President of the United States since January 20, 2001. 6. Defendent CONDOLEEZA RICE ("RICE") was employed as the National Security Adviser from January 2001 to January 2005, when she became Secretary of State, a position she holds as of the date of this indictment. As National Security Adviser, Rice, exercised direction, control, and authority over the National Security Council, which coordinates various national security and foreign policy agencies, including the Departments of Defense and State. 7. Defendent DONALD M.RUMSFELD ("RUMSFELD")has been employed as Secretary of Defense since January 2001.(no longer secretary of defense).8.Defendent COLIN M. POWELL,("POWELL")was employed as Secretary of State from January 2001 through January of 2005. 9. Before assuming their offices, CHENEY, RICE, RIMSFELD and POWELL, took an oath to preserve,protect, and defend the Constitution.10. As employees of the Executive Branch, BUSH,CHENEY, RICE, RUMSFELD, and POWELL, were governed by Executive Orders 12674 and 12731. These orders provide that Executive Branch employees hold their positions as a public trust and that the American people have a right to expect that they will fulfill that trust in accordance with certain ethical standards and principles. These include abiding by the Constitution and laws of the United States, as well as not using their offices to further private goals and interests. 11. Pursuant to the Constitution, their oaths of office, their status as Executive Branch employees, and their presence in the United States, BUSH,CHENEY,RICE,RUMSFELD, AND POWELL, and their subordinates and employees, are required to obey Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States. 12. As used in Section 371, the term "to defend the United States" means "to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful government functions by deceit, craft,trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest." The term also means to "impair, obstruct, or defeat the lawful function of any department of government" by the use of "false or fraudulent pretenses or representations." 13. A "false" or "fraudulent" representation is one that is" (a) made with knowledge that it is untrue; (b) a half-truth; (c) made without a reasonable basis or with reckless indifference as to whether it is, in fact, true or false; or (d) literally true, but intentionally presented in a manner reasonably calculated to deceive a person of ordinary prudence and intelligence. The knowing concealment or omission of information that a reasonable person would consider important in deciding an issue also constitutes fraud. 14. Congress is a "department of the United States" within the meaning of Section 371. In addition, hearings regarding funding for military action and authorization to use military force are "lawful functions" of Congress. 15. Accordingly, the presentation of information to congress and the general public through deceit, craft, trickery, dishonest means, and fraudulent reprsentatons, including lies, half-truths, meaterial omissions, and statements made with reckless indifferene to their truth or falsity, while knowing and intending that such fraudulent representations would influence Congress" decisions regarding authorization to use military force and funding for military action, constitutes interfering with,obstructing, impairing , and defeating a lawful government function of a department of the United States within the meaning of Section 371.The Conspiracy to Defraud the United States.16. Beginning on or about a date unknown, but no later than August of 2002, and continuing to the present, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendents, GEORGE W. BUSH, RICHARD B. CHENEY, CONDOLEEZA RICE,DONALD M.RUMSFELD, AND COLIN POWELL, and others known and unknown, did knowingly and intentionally conspire to defraud the United States by using deceit, craft,trickery,dishonest means, false and fraudulent representations, including ones made without a reasonable basis and with recklesss indifference to their truth or falsity, and omitting to state material facts necessary to make their representations truthful,fair,and accurate, while knowning and intending that their false and fraudulent representations would influence the public and the deliberations of Congress with regard to authorization of a preventive war against Iraq, thereby defeating, obstructing, impairing, and interfering with Congress'lawful functions of overseeing foreign affairs and making appropriations. 17.The Early Months of the Bush-Cheney Administration: Prior to January of 2001, Bush,Cheney, and Rumsfeld each demonstrated a predisposition to employ U.S. military force to invade the Middle East, including, specifically, to forcibly remove Saddam Hussein. 18. Since 1992,Cheney has endorsed a "bold foreign policy" that includes using military force to "punish" or "threaten to punish" possible aggressors in order to protect the United States's access to Persian Gulf oil and to halt proliferation of weapons of mass destruction ("WMD"), a term that is customarily used to describe chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. 19. On or about January 26,1998 RUMSFELD and seven other future BUSH-CHENEY administration appointees signed a letter sent by a conservative policy institute named "Project for a New American Century" ("PNAC") to then President William Clinton, which called for U.S. military action to forcibly remove Saddam Hussein from power. 20.In Janury 1999, BUSH named RICE, and future Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley ("Hadley"), as his presidential campaign foreign-policy advisers, along with future Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz ("Wolfowitz") and four others who had publicy advocated forcibly removing Saddam Hussein. 21.On or before September 2000, 12 future BUSH-CHENEY administration appointees, including Wolfowitz, former Assistant to Vice President CHENEY,I.Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Rumsfeld's long term aide Stephen Cambone, participated in drafting "Rebuilding America's Defenses," a PNAC policy statement which asserted that the "need for a substantial American force presence in th Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." PNAC acknowledged that its goals would take a long time to achieve "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event-like a new Pearl Harbor." 22. Once BUSH became the Republican candidate in the 2000 presidentil election campaign, he and CHENEY informed the general public that they would be reluctant to use military force and did not believe that the United States should engage in "nation building." 22. Once Bush became the Republican candidate in the 2000 presidential election campaign, he and CHENEY informed the general public that they would be reluctant to use military force and did not believe that the United States should engage in "nation building." 23.On and after January 20, 2001, BUSH and CHENEY caused to be appointed as senior foreign policy advisors and consultants, at least thirty-four persons who had publicly endorsed the PNAC principles of United States global preeminence and use force to "punish" or "threaten to punish" emerging threats from weapons of mass destruction ("WMD") or impediments to United States access to oil in the Middle East. Of those appointees, eighteen had also publicly advocated forcibly removing Saddam Hussein. 24. In late December 2000, BUSH and CHENEY advised outgoing President William J. Clinton and others that, among potential foreign policy issues, BUSH's primary concern was Iraq. 25. On February 11, 2001, BUSH ordered the first airstikes since 1998 to be conducted outside the United Nations ("UN") agreed upon No-Fly zones, to get Saddam Hussein"s "attention."26. The Attacks of September 11, 2001. On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four commercial airplanes. They crashed two planes into the World Trade Towers in New York City and another into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. The fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania. In total, nearly 3,000 people died as a result of the September 11, 2001, attacks ("9/11"). 27. Shortly afterward, United States intelligence agencies dtermined that 9/11 was the work of the terrorist organization al Qaeda, spearheaded by Osama Bin Laden. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, two from Yemen, and two from Lebanon. This information, along with the conclusion that no evidence linked the attacks to Saddam Hussein or al Qaeda, was immediately communicated to BUSH, CHENEY, RUMSFELD, POWELL, and others. 28. BUSH-CHENEY administration members began discussing an invasion of Iraq immediately after 9/11. BUSH, RUMSFELD and others also assigned various subordinates, including former counterterrorism czar Richard Clark, CIA Director George Tenet, General Richard Meyes to look for intelligence that could justify attacking Saddam Hussein's regime. 29. On September 17, 2001, BUSH secretly ordered the formulation of preliminary plans for an invasion of Iraq, while admitting to his aides that no evidence existed to justify an attack. 30. On or about September 18, 2001, in response to BUSH's request, Clarke sent RICE a memo that stated: (a) the case for linking Hussein to 9/11 was weak;(b)only anecdotal evidence linked Hussein to al Qaeda;(c)Osama Bin Laden resented the secularism of Saddam Hussein; and(d)there was no confirmed reporting of Saddam cooperating with Bin Laden on unconventional weapons. 31. On September 20, 2001, BUSH informed British Prime Minister Tony Blair that after Afghanistan, the United States and Britain should return to the issue of invading Iraq. 32. U.S. Intellegence Community Assessments of Risk from Iraq in Effect on November 2001. On occasion, Executive Branch officials request assessments of current intelligence on risks posed by WMD in a given country. Although such assessments are coordinated by the Central Intelligence Agency ("CIA"), the final product incorporates the analyses, including dissenting opinions, of the intelligence branches of the Departments of State, Energy, Defense, the National Security Agency, and others, which are collectively called the Intelligence Community ("IC").33. As of November 2001, the most recent assessment on Iraq was a December 2000 classified Intelligence Community Assessment ("ICA") called "Iraq: Steadily Pursuing WMD Capabilities." This ICA was a comprehensiveupdate on pssible Iraqi efforts to rebuild WMD and weapons delivery systems after teh 1998 departure of International Atomic Energy Agency ("IAEA") representatives and UN weapons inspectors, who are collectively referred to as the United Nations Special Commission ("UNSCOM"). 34. Regarding Iraq's possible nuclear program, the December 2000 NIE unanimously concluded that: (a) The IAEA and UNSCOM had destroyed or neutralized Iraq's nuclear infrastructure, but Iraq still had a foundation for future nuclear reconstitution; (b) Iraq was continuing low-level theoretical research and training, and attempting to obtain dual-use items that could be used to reconstitute its nuclear program; (c) if Iraq acquired a significant quanity of fissile material through foreign assistance, it could have a crude nuclear weapon within a year; if Iraq received foreign assistance, it would take five to seven years to produce enough weapons-grade fissile material for a nuclear weapon;and (d) Iraq did not appear to have reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. 35. Escalation of Military Acitivity and Planning for Invasion of Iraq. On November 21, 2001, BUSH secretly ordered preparation of a formal war plan for invading Iraq. Thereafter, for sixteen months, the BUSH-CHENEY administration expended substantial U.S. government funds in military activity and planning for invasion of Iraq, all without notice to, or approvalby, the U.S. Congress. 36. BUSH did not receive an extensive briefing about possible WMD in Iraq before ordering a war plan, nor did he discuss the legitimacy of grounds for war with anyone. BUSH received no such briefing until December 21, 2002. 37.On or about November 27, 2001 RUMSFELD asked General "Tommy" Franks, head oc Central Command, which supervises Middle East operations, to immediately prepare an Iraq war plan in response to BUSH's order. 38. Thereafter, Franks discussed numerous revised Iraq war plans with RUMSFELD. Between December 2001 and August 2002, BUSH, CHENEY, RICE, RUMSFELD, POWELL, and others held at lease five lengthy meetings about Franks' plans. In August, BUSH ordered Franks to prepare to invade Iraq using the "Hybrid Plan," a combination of the "Running Start" and "Generated Start" plans developed previously. 39. During 2002, the United States and Great Britain increased air strikes in order to degrade Iraqi air defenses and began deploying troops to areas around Iraq. 40. On or about July 30, 2002, without approval by, or notice to, Congress, BUSH caused the diversion of $700 million from Afghanistan war funds into Iraq invasion preparations. 41. On September 5, 2002, without approval by, or notice to, Congress, BUSH caused approximately 100 United States and British aircraft to launch ballistic missiles at Iraq's major western air-defense facility. 42. By September 12, 2002, without approval by, or notice to, Congress, BUSH, had caused the movement of 40,000 military personnel and over 350,000 tons of equipment to areas around Iraq. Franks also ordered Central Command to be moved to Al Udeid Air Base near Doha, Qutar. 43. Behind-the-Scenes Strategizing with British Officials: On or before March 2002, BUSH, RICE, Wolfowitz, and others secretly began discussing ways to persude the public and foreign allies to accept Bush's goal of invading Iraq, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair ("Blair") and his advisers. 44. On March 12, 2002, in Washington, DC, RICE met with Blair's Foreign Policy Adviser Sir David Manning and informed him of BUSH's problems with persuading "international opinion that military action against Iraq was necessary and justified." 45. On March 17, 2002, in Washington,DC, British Ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer advised Wolfowitz that the two countries should "wrongfoot" Saddam Hussien by seeking a UN resolution that would require the readmission of weapons inspectors with the expectation tdhat Saddam would create a justification for war by obstructing the inspections. 46.On April 6, 2002, in Crawford, Texas, BUSH and Blair discussed strategies to sway public opinion regarding military action in Iraq. Blair agreed to support a United States invasion if the two countries obtained a UN resolution first. 47. In mid-July,2002, in Washington, DC, White House Officials discussed Iraq with visiting British officials. Upon their return to London, these officials reported the talks to Blair in a meeting at 10 dowining St. on July 23, 2002.Among other things, Blair's advisers suggested that he urge BUSH to devise a more realistic political strategy for attacking Iraq, because a desire for "regime change" would not justify military action under international law. 48. In mid-July, 2002, in Washington,DC, CIA Director Tenet and others talked about the Bush administration's intentions regarding Iraq with Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of British Intelligence. 49. On July 23, 2002, during the Downing St. meeting described above, Dearlove informed Blair that in the United States "Military action was now seen as inevetable. BUSH wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." 50. On July 23, 2002, British Foreign Secretary Jack Snow also noted that BUSH had "made up his mind to take military action." Straw said he would urge POWELL to persaude BUSH to seek a UN resolution requiring Saddam Hussein to readmit weapons inspectors, in effect, suggesting the "wrongfooting" strategy that Meyer described to Wolfowitz. 51. BEHIND-THE-SCENES EFFORTS TO FIX INTELLIGENCE AROUND THE POLICY. Within weeks after learning from Clarke, Tenet, and others that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had no involvement with either 9/11 or al Qaeda RUMSFELD caused Deputy Undersecretary for Defense Douglas Feith ("Feith") to secretly create the Counter Terrorism Group ("CTEG")a small unit of political appointees whose mission was to find links between Iraq and al Qaeda by reviewing raw intelligence that previously had been discarded as unreliable. CTEG reported weekly to RUMSFELD's longterm associate Stephen Cambone, and occasionally presented information directly to Wolfowitz, thereby circumventing standard IC procedures. 52.At some time in 2002, Feith also designated political appointees to work under his supervision in the newly-created Office of Special Plans, whose purpose was to develop and package information for use in marketing the President's plan for an invasion of Iraq. In the fall of 2002, this group presented information directly to RUMSFELD, to RICE's office, and to CHENEY's office, thereby circumventing standard IC procedures. 53. In the spring of 2002, CHENEY and former aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, began visiting CIA headquarters to question CIA agents' assessments about Iraq. RUMSFELD and Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley also repeatedly pressed CIA Director Tenet and his subordinates t present a stronger case against Iraq. 54. Bush's Creation of the White House Iraq Group. By the summer of 2002, domestic and international support for BUSH's plan to invade Iraq was lukewarm. At the same time, Bush's chief political strategist and Senior Advisor Karl Rove and Kenneth Mehlman, head of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, were beginning to coordinate the President's involvement in the November 7, 2002 congressional election. Their overall goal was to gain Republican majorities in both houses of Congress so that the President would have the greatest possible support for his policies. Rove had specifically recommended that Republicans "focus on war" as a way to win elections. Consequently, in the summer of 2002, BUSH's efforts to win support for an invasion O Iraq and his efforts to assist Republican congressional candidates became inextricably intertwined. 55. In the summer of 2002, BUSH caused the creation of the White House Iraq Group, which was cochaired by BUSH's long-term political operatives Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, who remained BUSH's close associate even though she had resigned her position as Counselor to the President. This team, also called WHIG, was largely a political and public-relations entity that included RICE, Hadley, President's Chief of Staff Andrew Card, President's legislative liaison Nicholas Calio, CHENEY's key aide and veteran Republican political strategist Mary Matalin, CHENEY's senior adviser Libby, and James Wilkinson, another Republican campaign consultant. 56.On or about September 6, 2002, Rove and Card publicly announced that:(a) the BUSH-CHENEY administration was beginning to "roll out" its case for an invasion of Iraq;(b) its public-relations campaign was specifically directed at forcing Congress to pass a resolution authorizing the President to use military force in Iraq;(c) BUSH wanted the resolution passed in about five weeks, before the 2002 election; and (d) in the end, it would be difficult for any legislator to vote against it. 57.The Defendants' Massive Fraud to "Market" an invasion of Iraq. On or about September 4, 2002, BUSH staged a photo opportunity with a bipartisan group of congressional leaders, after which he falsely and fraudulently announced that Iraq posed a serious threat to the safety of the United States and the world, while concealing from Congress and the American people the material facts that:(a)he had no reasonable basis whatsoever for his assertion;(b) he had never discussed the legitimacy of the grounds for an attack against Iraq with anyone;(c) he had never extensively reviewed existing intellgence regarding any possible threat from Iraq;(d) he had not requested an updated intelligence assessment on Iraq;(e)the United States intelligence assessment then in effect stated that Iraq had neither nuclear weapons nor a nuclear weapons program; and(f) the IC had consistently reported that Iraq had no involvement in 9/11 and no relationship with al Qaeda. 58.On September 4, 2002, BUSH also falsely and fraudulently claimed he was beginning an "open dialogue" with the American public, with Congress, and with United States allies to decide how to respond to Iraq, while concealing the material facts that he:(a)had requested a formal plan to invade Iraq nearly a year before;(b)had been conducting significant military and nonmilitary planning and attacks against Iraq for a year;(c)had directed significant military deployment to areas around Iraq;(d) was planning a massive air assault against Iraq's air defenses facility for the next day;and (e)intended to work with the UN only to create a justification to use military force against Iraq. 59.Thereafter, the defendants and WHIG executed a calculated and wide-ranging strategy to deceive Congress and the American people by making hundreds of false and fraudulent representations that were only half-true, or literally true but misleading; by concealing material facts; and by making statements without a reasonable basis and with reckless indifference to their truth, regarding, among other things: (a)their true intent to invade Iraq:(b)the extent of military buildup and force used against Iraq without notice to or approval by Congress; (c)their true purpose in seeking a Congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iraq; (d) their true intent to use their involvement in seeking a UN resolution requiring Iraq to cooperate with weapons inspectors as a sham; and (e) their claimed justifications for invading Iraq, including but not limited to: The alleged connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11, 2001; The alleged connection between Iraq and al Qaeda; The alleged connection between Saddam Hussein and any terrorists whose primariy animus was directed towards the United States;Saddam Hussein's alleged intent to attack the United States in any way; Saddam Hussein's possession of nuclear of nuclear weapons and the status of any alleged ongoing nuclear weapons propgrams; The lack of any reasonable basis for asserting with certainy that Saddam Hussein was actively manufacturing chemical and biological weapons; and The alleged urgencey of any threat posed to the United States by Saddam Hussein. 60. Congressional Joint Resolution to Authorize Use of Force Against Iraq. As a result of the defendants' false and fraudulent "marketing" of the President's plan to invade Iraq, on October 11, 2002, the U.S. Congress, acting pursuant to its Article I constitutional authority to oversee and authorize use of military force, passed a Congressional Joint Resolution to Authorize Use of Force Against Iraq ("the Resolution") which stated: The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to- (a) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (b) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq. 61. The Resolution required the President to, either before or within 48 hours after exercising the authority to use force, make available to the Senate and the House of Representatives this determination that: (a) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone either (1) will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq or (2) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and (b) acting pursuant to this resolution in consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorists attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. 62. The Resolution also required the President to, at least every 60 days, present Congress a report on "matters relevant to this joint resolution." 63. In furtherance of the above-described conspiracy, the defendants and their coconspirators committed and caused to be committed the following overt acts: OVERT ACTS A. On December 9, 2001, CHENEY announced on NBC's Meet the Press that "it was pretty well confirmed" that lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met the head of the Iraqi intelligence in Prague in April 2001, which statement was, as CHENEY well knew, made without reasonable basis and with reckless disregard for the truth, because it was based on a single witness's uncorroborated allegation that had not been fully investigated by U.S. intelligence agencies. B. On July 15, 2002, POWELL, stated on Ted Koppel's Nightline: "What we have consistenly said is that the President has no plan on his desk to invade Iraq at the moment, nor has one been presented to him, nor have his advisors come together to put a plan to him," which statement was deliberately false and misleading in that it deceitfully implied the President was not planning an invasion of Iraq when, as POWELL, well knew, the President was close to finalizing detailed military plans for such an invasion that he had ordered months previously. C. On August 26, 2002, CHENEY made numerous false and fraudulent statements including: "Simply stated there in no doublt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. the in no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," when, as CHENEY well knew, this statement was made without reasonable basis and with reckless indifference to the truth in that the IC's then prevailing assessment was that Iraq had neither nuclear weapons nor a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. D. On September 7, 2002 appearing publicly with Blair, BUSH claimed a recent IAEA report stated that Iraq was "six months away from developing a (nuclear) weapon" and "I don't know what more evidence we need," which statements were made without basis and with reckless indifference to the truth in that: (1) the IAEA had not even been present in Iraq since 1998; and (2) the report the IAEA did write in 1998 had concluded there was no indication that Iraq had the physical capacity to produce weapons-usable nuclear material or that it had attempted to obtain such materila. E. On September 8, 2002, on Late Night with Wolf Blitzer, RICE, asserted that Saddam Hussein was acquiring aluminum tubes that wre "only suited" for nuclear centifuge use, which statemtent was deliberately false and fraudulent, and made with reckless indifference to the truth in that it omitted to state the following material facts: (1) the U.S. intelligence community was deeply divided about the likely use of the tubes; (2) there were at least fifteen intelligence reports written since April 2001 that cast doubt on the tubes' possible nuclear-related use; and (3) the U.S. Department of Energy nuclear weapons experts had conclude, after analyzing the tube's specifications and the circumstances of the Iraqis' attempts to procure them, that the aluminum tubes were not well suited for nuclear centrifuge use and were more likely for artillery rocket production. F. On September 8, 2002, RUMSFELD stated on Face the Nation: "Imagine a September 11th, with weapons of mass destruction. It's not three thousand, it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children," which statement was deliberately fraudulent and misleading in that it implied without reasonable basis and in direct contradiction to then prevailing intelligence that Saddam Hussein had no operational relationship with al Qaeda and was unlikely to provide weapons to terrorists. G.On September 19, 2002 RUMSFELD told the Senate Armed Services committee that "no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein," which statement was, as Rumsfeld well knew, made without reasonable basis and with reckless indifference to the truth in that: (1) Hussein had not acted agressively toward the United States since his alleged attempt to assinate Prsident George H.W. Bush in 1993; (2) Iraq's military forces and equipment were severly debilitated because of UN sanctions imposed after the 1991 Gulf War; (3) the IC's opinion was that Iraq's sponsorship of terrorists was limited to ones whose hostility was directed toward Israel; and (4) Iran, not Iraq, was the most active state sponsor of terrorism. H. On October 1, 2002, the defendants caused the IC's updated classified National Intellegence Estimate to be delivered to Congress just hours before the beginning of debate on the Authorization to Use Military Force. At the same time, the defendants caused an unclassified 'White Paper" to be published which was false and misleading in many respects in that it failed to include qualifying language and dissents that substantially weakended their argument that Iraq posed a serious threat to the United States. I. On October 7, 2002, in Cincinnati, Ohio, BUSH made numerous deliberately misleading statements to the nation, including stating that in comparison to Iran and North Korea, Iraq posed a uniquely serious threat, which statement BUSH well knew was false and fraudulent in that it omitted to state the material fact that a State Department representative had been informed just three days previously that North Korea had actually already produced nuclear weapons. The defendants continued to conceal this information until Congress passed the Authorization to Use Military Force against Iraq. J. Between Septmeber 1, 2002, and November 2, 2002, BUSH traveled the country making in excess of thirty congressional-campaign speeches in which he falsely and fraudulently asserted that Iraq was a "serious threat" which required immediate action, when as he well knew, this assertion was made without reasonable basis and with reckless indifference to the truth. K. In his January 28, 2003 State of the Union address, BUSH announced that the "British have recently learned that Iraq was seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa" which statement was fraudulent and misleading and made with reckless disregard for the truth, in that it falsely implied that the information was true, when the CIA had advised the administration more than once that the allegation was unsupported by available intelligence. L. In a February 5, 2003, speech to the UN, POWELL falsely implied, without reasonable basis and with reckless disregard fro the truth, that, among things: (1) those who maintained that Iraq was purchasing alumninum tubes for rockets were allied with Saddam Hussein, even though POWELL well knew that both Department of Energy nuclear weapons experts and State Department intelligence analysts had concluded that the tubes were not suited for nuclear centrifuge use; and (2) Iraq had an ongoing cooperative relationship with al Queda, when he well knew that no intelligence agency had reached that conclusion. M. On March 18, 2003, BUSH sent a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate which asserted that further reliance on diplomatic and peaceful means alone would not either: (1) adequately protect United States national security against the "continuing threat posed by Iraq" or (2) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant UN Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq, which statement was made without reasonable basis and with reckless indifference to the truth in that, as BUSH well knew, the U.S. intelligence community had never reported that Iraq posed an urgent threat to the United States and there was no evidence whatsoever to prove tha Iraq had either the means or intent to attack the U.S. directly or indirectly. The statement was also false because, as BUSH well knew, the UN weapons inspectors had not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and wanted to continue the inspection process because it was working well. N. In the same March 18, 2003, letter, BUSH also represented that taking action pursuant to the Resolution was "consistent with continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorists attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001," which statement was entirely false and without reasonable basis in that, as BUSH well knew, Iraq had no involvement with al Queda or the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. ALL IN VIOLATION OF TITLE 18, UNITED STATES CODE, SECTION 371. A TRUE BILL/END OF INDICTMENT.I am a student of the Austrian School of Economics. I reject the Chicago School of Economics---The school turns out statists who seek positions in the US government,they are elite, and they intend to control the world, using their lackeys' in the US government. I intend to do everything I can on a daily basis to disrupt the daily functions of government. Already I have been successful on many different levels. I will also tell you that the US government can and will garnish your wages if you reject paying income taxes. But, let me say this, there is immense satisfaction in standing up for what you believe in and dealing with the violent means in which the government gets you to cooperate.

I'd like to meet:

Winston Churchill, Madelaine Albright(Remark to Collin Powell,1993,"What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it.?"), Abraham Lincoln(The Lincoln Myths--Exposed. MYTH #1: "LINCOLN INVADED THE SOUTH TO FREE THE SLAVES". This is another way of saying that slavery was the sole cause of the war, which has recently become the mantra of the Lincoln gatekeepers. The problem for them, however,is that Lincoln never said this and most certainly did not believe it. Nor did anyone else in his government--or in the Northern states. It is unlikely that anyone who voted for Lincoln in 1860 did so because he thought the new president whould order an army to march south to free the slaves in a war that might cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars. On March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln's inauguration as president, the U.S. Senate passed a proposed constitutional amendment that read:"No Amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of the State." The U.S. House of Reprsentatives passed the amendment on February 28, 1861. "Domestic institutions" meant slavery. Two days later, in his first inaugural address, Lincoln promised several times that he had no intention to interfere with Southern slavery, and that even if he did, it would be unconstitutional to do so. He also pledged his support for this amendment, announcing to the world that "holding such a provision (the legality of slavery) to be implied constitutinal law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable". Thus, on the day of his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln did not defend or support the natural, God-given rights of Southern slaves to life, liberty, and property. Quite the opposite: He supported the "rights" of Southern slave ownners to deprive the slaves of those rights. Lincoln was perfectly willing to see Southern slavery persist long pass his own lifetime, for all he knew, as long as the Southern states remained in the Union and continued to pay federal taxes. Lincoln clearly stated the real cause and purpose of the war on numerous occasions, including in his famous August 22, 1862, letter to newspaper editor Horace Greeley. There he wrote, "My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery." His objective was to destroy the secession movement by force of arms, period. The U.S.Congress concurred, announcing to the world on July 22, 1861, that the purpose of the war was not "interference with the rights or established institutions of those states"--that is, slavery--"but to preserve the Union with the rights of the several states unimpaired." Thus, according to both President Lincoln and the Congress, the conflict over states rights was the sole cause of the war. The Confederate states believed the Union was voluntary, that governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that they consequently had a right to secede. Lincon disagreed, and was willing to wage total war to "prove" himself right. Most gatekeepers today will say that states' rights were, at best, a "figleaf." Or they will peddle the false notion that it was made up as an excuse after the war by disgruneled former Confederates. Either way, they are distorting true history and contradicting Lincoln himself.MYTH#2: LINCOLN SAVED THE UNION." In reality, Lincoln did more than any other individual to destroy the voluntary union of the founding fathers. All of the founding documents--the Articles of Confederaton, the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty with Great Britain, the Constitution--refer to the states as "free and independent." That is, the founders construed them as being free and independent of any other state, including the federal government which they--the states--had created as their agent. The states delegated certain narrowly defined and enumerated powers to the federal government but preserved sovereignty for themselves. The federal Constitution was created by a voluntary association of states and three of them--New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia--explicitly reserved the right to withdraw from the constitutional compact should the federal government ever abuse their liberties. Since all states have equal rights under the Constitution, and no state is given more riths than any other, the fact that this contingency was accepted by all the other states implies that this right of secession was naturally asssumed to be enjoyed by all the states. The citizens of the states did not create "a new nation" with the Constitution; they created a compact or a confedereacy of states. This was an uncontroversial view in 1860. Newspapers throughout the North echoed the opinion of the Bangor Daily Union, which editorialized on November 13, 1860, that the Union "depends for its continuance on the free consent and will of the sovereign people of each state, and when consent and will is withdrawn on either part, their Union is gone." Thus, Lincoln "saved" the federal union in the same sense that a man who has been abusing his wife "saves" his marital union by violently forcing his wife back into the home and threatiening to shoot her if she leaves again. The union may well be saved, but it is not the same kind of union that existed on their wedding day. That union no longer exists. The American union of the founding fathers ceased to exist in April 1865.Myth #3: "LINCOLN WAS A CHAMPION OF THE CONSTITUTION." George Orwell himself would blush at this assertion. The only way one could conceivably make this argument is to base the argument exclusively on a few nice things that Lincoln said about the Constitution while generally igoring his actions. For example, he launched an invasion without the consent of Congress; illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political opponents; shut down some three hundred opposition newspapers; censored all telegraph communication; imprisoned a large percentage of the duly elected legislature of Maryland as well as the mayor of Baltimore; illegally orchestrated the secession of West Virginia; deported the most outspoken member of the Democratic opposition, Congressmen Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio; systematically disarmed the border states in violation of the Second Amendment; and effectively declared himself dictator. The gatekeepers try to excuse all of this, but their words ring hollow to anyone familiar with the historical facts.Myth #4:"Lincoln was devoted to equality." Lincoln's words and, more importaant, his actions, throughly contradict this claim. "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races," he stated in his August 21, 1858, debate with Stephen Douglas. Incredibly, various Lincoln scholars take a statement like this and somehow conclude that Lincoln "really" meant, "I do have purpose to introduce political and racial equality..."Mostly, statements like this are simply ignored and kept from the innocent eyes fo American schoolchildren. Lincoln opposed the immigration of black people into Illinois; suported the Illinois Black Codes, which deprived the small number of free blacks who resided in the state of any semblance of citizenship; and was a leader of the Illinois Colonization Society, which persuaded the state legislature to allocate funds to "colonize,"or deport, free blacks. As syndicated columnist Joseph Sobran has remarked, Lincoln's position was that blacks could be "equal" all right, but not in the United States. He favored "colonizing them in Africa, Haiti, Central and South America--anywhere but in the United States. This position was supported by the vast majority of Northerners, and Lincoln, as an astute and even brilliant politician, supported it as well. Myth #5: "Lincoln was a great statesman." Imagine that California seceded from the union and an American president responded with the carpet bombing of Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco that destroyed 90% of those cities. Such was the case with General Sherman's bombardment of Atlanta; a naval blockade; a blocking off of virtually all trade; the eviction of thousands of residents from their homes (as occurred in Atlanta in 1864);the destruction of most industries and farms; massive looting of private property by a marauding army; and the killing of one out of four males of military age while maiming for life more than double that number. Would such an American president be considered a "great statesman" or a war criminal? The answer is obvious. A statesman would have recognized the state's right to secede, as enshrined in th Tenth Amendment, among other places, and then worked diligently to persuade the seceded state that a reunion was in its best interest. A great statesman, or even a modest one, would not have impulsively plunged the entire nation into a bloody war. Lincoln's warmongering belligerence and his invasion of all the Southern states in response to Fort Sumter (where no one was harmed or killed) caused the upper South--Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas--to secede after originally voting to remain in the Union. He refused to meet with confederate commissioners to discuss peace and even declined a meeting with Napoleon III of France, who offered to broker a peace agreement. No genuine statesman would have behaved in such a way. After Fort Sumter, Lincoln thanked naval commander Gustavus Fox for assisting him in manipulating the South Carolinians into firing at Fort Sumter. A great statesman does not manipulate his own people into starting one of the bloodiest wars in human history. Myth #6: "Lincoln was a great humanitarian". Great humanitarians do not micromanage the waging of total war, or wage war on civilians, as Lincoln did for the duration of his administration. This included the burning of entire towns populated only by civilians, massive looting and plundering, and even the execution of civilians. A great humanitarian would not express his personal thanks and "the thanks of a nation" to those who committed such atrocities and war crimes, as Lincoln did to General Philip Sheridan. Nor would he have literally laughed at the fate of Southern civilians who had lost everything, as General Sherman said tht he did in his (Sherman)memoirs. Great humanitarians do not become obsessed with allocating tax dollars to the development of more powerful and more devastating weapons of mass destruction to be aimed at their own citizens, as Lincoln did. Historian Lee Kennett was right when he wrote, Marching Through Georgia, that had the Confederates somehow won, they would have been justified in "stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command" as war criminals, especially for waging war on civilians. This is the kind of conclusion that one often comes to from studying the actual history of the War between the States, as opposed to the fanciful reinterpretations of it provided to us by the gatekeepers and assorted court historians.) Woodrow Wilson (Wilson took America into the WWI and with that America changed forever:With U.S. entry innto the Great War, the federal government expanded enormously in size, scope, and power. It virtually nationalized the ocean shipping industy and actually did natiionalize the rairoad, telephone, domestic telegraph, and international telegraphic cable industries. It became deeply engaged in manipulating labor-management relations, securities sales, agricultural production and marketing, the distribution of coal and petroleum, international commerce, and the markets for raw materials and manufactured products. Its Liberty Bond drives dominated the financial capital markets. It turned the newly created Federal Reserve System into a powerful engine of monetary inflation to help satisfy the government's voracious appetite for money and credit. In view of the more than five thousand mobilization agencies of various sorts--boards, committees, corporations, and administrations--contemporaries who described the government's creation as "war socialism" were well justified. During 1917 and 1918, the government built up the armed forces to a strength of 4 million officers and men, drawn from a prewar labor force of 40 million persons. Of those added to the armed forces after the U.S. declaration of war, more than 2.8 million, or 72 percent, were drafted. By employing the draft, the government got more men into the army and got them there more quickly than it could have by recruiting volunteers. Moreover, it got the men's sevices at far less expenese to the Treasury. As the army leadership had recommended and President Wilson had accepted even bfore the declaration of war, the U.S. government obtained is servicemen by following the Prussian model.Men alone, however, did not make an army. They required barracks and training facilities, transportatiion, food, clothing, and health care. They had to be equipped with modern arms and great stocks of ammunition. In short, to be an effective fighting force, a large soldiery required immense amounts of complementary resources. As the buildup began, the requiste resources remained in the possession of private citizens. Although manpower could be obtained by conscription, public opinion would not tolerate the outright confiscation of all the property required to turn the men into a well-equipped fighting force. Still, ordinary market mechanisms threatned to operate too slowly and at too great an expense to facilitate the government's plans. The Wilson administration therefore resorted to the vast array of interventions mentioned earlier. All were devices to hasten the delivery of the requisite resources and to diminish the fiscal burden of equipping the huge conscript army for effective service in France. Notwithstanding these contrivances to keep the Treasury's expenses down, enormouusly increased taxes still had to be levied--federal revenues increased by nearly 400 percent between fiscal 1917 and fiscal 1919--and even greater amounts had to be borrowed. The national debt swelled from $1.2 billion in 1916 to $25.5 billion in 1919. To ensure that the conscription-based mobilization could proceed without obstructiin, critics had to bve silenced. The Espionage Act of June 15, 1917, penalized those convicted of willfully obstructing the enlistment services with fines as large as $10,000 and imprishonmnet as long as twenty years. An amendment, the notorious Sedition Act of May 16, 1918, went further, imposing the same harsh criminal penalties on all forms of expression in any way critical of the government, its symbols, or its mobilization of resources for the war. These suppressions of free speech, subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court, established dangerous precedents that derogated from the rights previously enjoyed by citizens under the protection of the First Amendment. The government further subverted the Bill of Rights by censoring all printed materials; peremptorily deporting hundreds of alins without due process of law; and conducting-and encouraging state and local governments as well as vigilante groups to conduct--warrantless searches and seizures, blanket arrests of suspected draft evaders, and other outrages too mumerous to catalog here. In California, the police arrested Upton Sinclair for reading the Bill of Rights at a rally. In New Jersy, the police arrested Roger Baldwin for publicly reading the Constitution. The government also employed a massive propaganda machine to whip up what can only described as public hysteria. The result was countless incidents of intimidation, physical abuse, and even lynching of persons suspected of disloyalty or insufficent enthusiasm for the war. People of German ancestry suffered disproportionately. The connection of the draft with these official subversions of the Constitution was hardly coincidental; it was direct, intentional, and publicly acknowledged. Consider the statement of a contemporary legal authority, Professor John Henry Wigmore: "Where a nation has definitely committed itself to a foreign war, all principles of normal internal order may be suspended. As property may be taken and corporal service may be conscripted, so liberty of speech may be limited or suppressed, so far as deemed needful for the successful conduct of the war...(A)ll rights of the individual, and all internal civic interests, become subordinated to the national right in the struggle for national life." The formula, applied again and again, was quite simple: if it is acceptable to draft men, then it is acceptable to do X, where X is any government violation of any individual rights whatsover. Once the draft had been adopted, then, as Justice Louis Brandeis put it, "all bets are off." When the war ended, the government abandoned most--but not all---of its wartime control measures. The draft ended when the armistice took effect on November 11,1918. By the end of 1920, the bulk of the economic regulatory apparatus had been scrapped, including the Food Administration, the Fuel Administration, the Railraod Administration, the War Industries Board, and the War Labor Board. Some emergency powers migrated into rgular governmnet departments such as State, Labor, and Treasury and continued in force. The Espionage Act and the Trading with the Enemy Act remained on the statute books. Congressional enactments in 1920 preserved much of the federal government's wartime invovement int the railroad and the ocean shipping industries. The War Finance Corporation shifted missions, subsidizing exporters and farmers until the mid-192s Wartime probibition of alcoholic beverages, a purposrted conservation measure, transfogrified into the ill-fated Eighteenth Amendment. Most important, the dominant contemporary interpretation of the war mobilization, including the the belief that federal economic controls had been instrumental in achieving the victory, persisted, especially among the elites who had played leading roles in the wartime economic management. Economic czar Bernard Baruch did much to foster the postwar disseminatiion of this interpretation by historians, journalists, and other shapers of public opinion. Many inerest groups, however, such as the farmers, needed no prompting to arrive at Baruchian conclusion. "By the time the Food Administration dropped its wartime controls, it had weakened farmer resistance to governmental direction of their affairs. Have observed how the government could shape wartime food prices, farmers would expect it also to act in peacetime to maintain the propserity of America's farms. Big businessmen in many industries took a similar lesson away from the war. FDR, Harry Truman (ordered the unnecessary bombing of two Japanese cities killing thousands of innocent civilians,Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan(More than any other person Reagan justified and facilitated the barbarity that raged through Central America in the 1980s claiming the lives of tens of thousands of peasants, clergy and students, men, women and children. Reagan protrayed the bloody conflicts as a necessary front in the cold war, but the Central American violence was always more about entrenched ruling elites determined to retain their privileges against improverished peasants, including descendents of the region's Maya Indians, seeking social, political and economic reforms. One of the most notorious acts of brutality occurred in December 1981 in and around the Salvadoran town of El Mozote. The government's Atlacatl Batalion-freshly trained and newly armed thanks to Reagan's hard-line policies-systematically slaughtered hundreds of men, women and children. When the atrocity was revealed by reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Reagan administration showed off its new strategy of "perception management",denying the facts and challenging the intergrity of the journalists. Because of that P.R. offensive, the reality about the El Mozote massacre remained in doubt for almost a decade until the war ended and a United Nations forensic team dug up hundreds of skeletons, including many little ones of childred. Now the Washington Post has added a new grisly dtail. Several months after the massacre, the Salvadoran army returned to the scene and collected the skulls of some El Mozote children as novelty items, the Post reported. "They worked well as candle holders", recalled one of the soldiers, Jose Wilfredo Salgado, "and better as good luck charms." Now, a quarter century later, describing his role piling the tiny skulls into sascks as souvenirs, Salgado acknowledged that he had "lost his love of humanity." The Post reported that "witnessing the aftermath of what his colleagues did in Mozote and reflecting on those skulls changed his mind about how the war was being fought." Salgada said his mentor, Col. Domingo Monterrose, who later died ina helicopter crash, had ordered an act of "genocide" in El Mozote. "If Monterossa had lived," the Post reported. "Salgada said, he should have been prosecuted for "war crimes like a Hitler." But what about the American officials who were the enablers and the protectors of Central America's mass murderers? While Monterrosa may have ordered massacres in El Mozote and other towns in El Salvador, President Reagan and other senior U.S. officials collaborated in and covered up those crimes, along with acts of genocide in Guatemala and terrorism in Nicaragua. Yet, the U.S. officials who supplied the guns, helicopters, advanced technology and political cover have never been called to account. Some, like former State Department official Elliot Abrams, have moved on to oversee the bloody chaos in Iraq. After leaving office, Reagan was showered with honors, including having dozens of government sites named for him, including National Airport in Washington. Criticism also should fall on President Bill Clinton, who came into office after the end of the Cold War but rejected suggestions that he authorize an American truth commission to investigate U.S. complicity in the era's crimes and separate fact from fiction, as was done in Argentina, South Africa and other countries. Only late in his eight-presidency did Clinton agree to declassify documents for use by a Guatemaian truth commission examining three decades of political violence that had torn that Central American country apart and claimed some 200,000 lives. But the worst of the Guatemaian violence--like the bloodletting in El Salvador, Nicaragua and to a lesser extent Honduras--came after the election of Reagan in November 1980. That outcome touched off celebration in the walled-off, well-to-do neighborhoods across Central America. After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's rich and powerful were thrilled to have someone in the White House who understood their problems and would let them do the needed dirty work. Once in office, Reagan and his administration swung into action, deflecting condemnation of Salvadoran security forces for the rape/murders of four American churchwomen as well as playing down the staggerering number of political slayings that left decaying and mutilated corpses on street corners and in trash dumps. Reagan also put the Central Intelligence Agency to work arming and training an army of Nicaraguan exiles to launch raids into northern Nicaragua and destabilize that country's leftist Sandinista government. The contra army soon gained a reputation for rape, torture, murder, drug trafficking and terrorism. THE GUATEMALAN GENOCIDE: Reagan also chipped away at an arms embargo imposed on Guatemala by Carter who was offended by its ghastly human rights record. A fundamental plan of Reagan's strategy was to silence criticism of the atrocities whether the accusations were coming from the news media, human rights groups or the U.S. intelligence community. In April 1981, for instance, a secret CIA cable described a Guatemalan army massacre of peasants at Cocob, near Nebvaj in the Ixil Indian territory. On April 17, 1981, government troops attacked the area, which was believed to support leftist guerrillas, the cable said. According to a CIA source, "the social population appeared to fully support the guerrillas" and "the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved." The CIA cable added that "the Guatemalan authorities admitted that "many civilian were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were non-combatants." While keeping the CIA account secret, Reagan permitted Guatemala's army to buy $3.2 million in military trucks and jeeps in June 1981. Confident of Reagan's sympathies, the Guatemalan government continued its political repression without apology. According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, Guatemalan leaders met with Reagan's roving ambassador, retired Gen. Vernon Walters, and left no doubt about their plans, Guatemala's military dictator, Gen. Fernado Romeo Lucas Garcia, "made clear that his government will continue as before--that the repression will continue," the cable said. Human rights groups saw the same picture. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981 blaming the Guatemalan government for "thousands of illegal executions." But the Reagan administration sought to confuse the American public. A State Department "white paper" in December 1981 blamed the violence on leftist "extremist groups" and their "terrorist methods," inspired and supported by Cuba's Fidel Castro. )JIMMY CARTER, BILL CLINTON, JOHN BOLTON, GEORGE H.W. BUSH,GEORGE W. BUSH(Bill of Rights Under Bush: A Timeline/2001 January: Presidential directive delays indefinitely the the scheduled release of presidential documents (authorized by the Presidential Records Act of 1978) pertaining to the Reagan-Bush administration. Bush and Cheney begin process of radically broadening scope of documents and information which can be deemed classified:FEBUARY" The National Security Agency (NSA) sets up Project Groundbreaker, a domestic call monitoring program infrastructure. Spring: Bush administration order authorizes NSA monitoring of domestic phone and internet traffic. May: US Supreme Court rules that medical necessity is not a permissible defense against federal marijuana statutes. September: In immediate aftermath of 9-11 terror attacks, Department of Justice authorizes detention without charge for any terror suspects. Over one thousand suspects are brought into detention over the next several months. October: Attorney General John Ashcroft announces change in Department of Justice (DOJ) policy. According to the new policy DOJ will impose far more stringent criteria for the granting of Freedom of Information Act requests. September-October: NSA launches massive new database of information on US phone calls. October: The USA Patriot Act becomes law. Among other things the law: makes it a crime for anyone to contribute money or material support for any group on the State Department's Terror Watch List, allows the FBI to monitor and tape conversations between attorneys and clients, allows the FBI to order librarians to turn over information about patron's reading habits, allows the government to conduct surveillance on internet and email use of US citizens without notice. The act also calls for expanded use of National Security Letters (NSLs), which allow the FBI to search telephone, email and financial records of US citizens without a court order, exempts the government from needing to reveal how evidence against suspected terrorists was obtained and authorizes indefinite detention of immigrants at the discretion of law enforcement and immigration authorities. NJ Superior court judge and civil liberties scholar Anthony Napolitano, author of A Nation of Sheep, has described the law's assault on first and fourth amendment principles as follows,"The Patriot Act's two most principle constitutional errors are an assault on the Fourth Amendment, and on the First. It permits federal agents to write their own search warrants(under the name "national security letters) with no judge having examined evidence and agreed that it's likely that the person or thing the government wants to search will reveal evidence of a crime...Not only that, but the Patriot Act makes it a felony for the recipient of a self -written search warrant to reveal it to anyone. The Patriot Act allows(agents)to serve self-written search warrants on financial institutions, and the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2004 in Orwellian language defines that to include in addition to banks, also delis, bodegas, restaurants, hotels, doctors' offices, lawyers' offices, telecoms, HMOs, hospitals, casinos, jewelry dealers, automobile dealers, boat dealers, and that great financial institution to which we all would repose our fortunes, the post office.NOVEMBER: Executive order limits release of presidential documents. The order gives incumbent presidents the right to veto requests to open any past presidential records and supercedes the congressionally passed law of 1978 mandating release of all presidential records not explicity deemed classified. 2002 Winter: FBI and Department of Defense (DOD), forbidden by law from compiling databases on US citizens, begin contracting with private database firm ChoicePoint to collect, store, search and maintain data. Spring: Secret executive order issued authorizing NSA to wiretap the phones and read emails of US citizens. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) acknowledges it has created both a "No Fly" and a separate "Watch" list of US travelers. MAY: Department of Justice authorizes the FBI to monitor political and religious groups. The new rules permit the FBI to broadly search or monitor the internet for evidence of criminal activity without having any tips or leads that a specific criminal act has been committed. JUNE: Supreme Court upholds the right of school administrators to conduct mandatory drug testing of students without probable cause. NOVEMBER: Homeland Security Act of 2002 establishes separate Department of Homeland Security. Among other things the department will federally coordinate for the first time all local and state law enforcement nationwide and run a Directorate of Information and Analysis with authority to compile comprehensive data on US citizens using public and commercial records including credit card, phone, bank and travel. The department also will be exempt from Freedom of Information Act disclosure requirements. The Homeland Security department's jurisdicton has been widely criticized for being nebulously defined and has extended beyond terrorism into areas including immigration, pornography and drug enforcement. 2003 FEBRUARY: Draft of Domestic Securtiy Enchancement Act (aka Patriot Act 2), a secret document prepared by the Department of Justice is leaked by the Center for Public Integrity. Provisions of the February 7th draft version included: Removal of court-ordered prohibitions against police agencies spying on domestic groups. The FBI would be granted powers to conduct searches and surveillance based on intelligence gathered in foreign countries without first obtaining a court order. Creation of a DNA database of suspected terrorists. Prohibition of any public disclosure of the names of alleged terrorists including those who have been arrested. Exemptions from civil liability for people and businesses who voluntarily turn private information over to the government. Criminalization of the use of encryption to conceal incriminating communications. Automatic denial of bail for persons accused of terrorism-related crimes, reversing the ordinary common law burden of proof principle. All alleged terrorists would be required to demonstrate why they should be released on bail rather than the government being required to demonstrate why they should be held. Expansion of the list of crimes eligible for the death penalty. The United States Environmental Protection Agency would be prevented from releasing "worst case scenario" information to the public about chemical plants. United States citizens whom the government finds to be either members of, or providing material support to, terrorist groups could have their U.S. citizenship revoked and be deported to foreign countries. Although the bill itself has never (yet) been advanced in congress due to public exposure, some of its provisions have become law as parts of other bills. For example The Intelligence Authorizaton Act for Fiscal Year 2004 grants the FBI unprecendented power to obtain records from financial institutions without requiring permission from a judge. Under the law, th FBI does not need to seek a court order to access such records, nor does it need to prove just cause. MARCH: Executive order issued which radically tightens the declassification process of classified government documents, as well as making it easier for government agencies to make and keep infromation classified. The order delayed by three years the release of declassified government documents dating from 1978 or earlier. It also allowed the government to treat all material sent to Americn officials from foreign governments--no matter how routine--as subject to classification, and expanded the ability of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to shield documents from declassification. Finally it gave the vice president the power to classify information. MARCH: In a ruling seen as a victory for the concentration of ownership of intellectual property and an erosion of the public domain, the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft held that a 20-year extension of the copyright period (from 50 years after the death of the author to 70 years) called for by the Sonny Bono coypright extension not vioate either the Copyright Clause or the First Amendment. APRIL: In Denmore v. Kim, the Supreme Court ruled that even permanent residents could be subject to mandatory detention when facing deportation based on a prior criminal conviction, without any right to an individualized hearing to determine whether they were dangerous or flight risk. FALL: The FBI changes its traditional policy of destroying all data and documents collected on innocent citizens in the course of criminal investigations. This information would, according to the bureau, now be permanently stored. Two years later in late 2005 Executive Order 13388, expanded access to those files for "state, local and tribal governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined. FALL: As authorized by the Patriot Act, the FBI expands the practice of national security letters. NSLs, originally introduced in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, enabled the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents This was extended by the Patriot Act to include permitting clandestine scrutiny of all U.S. residents and visitors whether suspected of terrorism or not. 2004 January: The FBI begins keeping a database of US citizens based on information obtained via NSLs. SPRING: John Ashcroft invokes State Secrets privilege to forbid former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds from testifying in a case brought by families of victims of the 9-11 attacks. Litigation by 9-11 families is subsequently halted. JUNE: Supreme Court upholds Nevada state law allowing police to arrest suspects who refuse to provide identification based on police discetion of "reasonable suspicion." JANUARY: Supreme court rules that police do not need to have probable cause to have drug sniffing dogs examine cars stopped for routine traffic violations. JUNE: Supreme court rules that the federal government can prosecute medical marijuana users even in states which have laws permitting medical marijuana. SUMMER: The Patriot Act, due to expire at the end of 2005, is reauthorized by Congress. WINTER 2005: Senate blocks reauthorization of certain clauses in Patriot Act. 2006(March) Senate passes amended version of Patriot Act, reauthorization, with three basic changes from the original including: recipients of secret court orders to turn over sensitive infromation on individuals linked to terrorism investigations are not allowed to disclose those orders but can challenge the gag order after a year, libraries would not be required to turn over information without the approval of a judge, recipients of an FBI "national security letter"--an investigator's demand fro access to personal of business information--would not have to tell the FBI if they consult a lawyer. New bill also said to extend Congressional oversight over executive department usage guidelines. Shortly after bill is signed George Bush declares oversight rules are not binding.JUNE: Supreme Court rules that evidence obtained in violation of the"knock and announce" rules can still be permitted in court. SEPTEMBER: U.S.Congress and Senate approve the Military Commissions Act, which authorizes torture and strips non-US citizen detainees suspected of terrorist ties of the right of habeas corpus (which includes formal charges, counsel and hearings). It also empowers US presidents at their discretion to declare US citizens as enemy combatants and subject to detention without charge or due process. OCTOBER: John Warner Defense Authorization Act is passed. The act allows a president to declare a public emergency and station US military troops anywhere in America as well as take control of state based national guard units without consent of the governor or other local authorities. The law authorizes presidential deployment of US troops to round up and detain "potential terrorists", "illegal aliens" and "disorderly" citizenry. 2007 MAY: National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51) establishes a new post-disaster plan (with disaster defined as any incident, natural or man-made, resulting in extraordinary mass casualties, damage or disruption) which places the president in charge of all three branches of government, The directive overrides the National Emergencies Act which gives Congress power to determine the duration of a national emergency. JUNE: In "Bong Hits for Jesus" case Supreme Court rules that student free speech rights do not extend to promotion of drug use. JULY: Executive Order 13438: "Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stablization Efforts in Iraq, issued. The order asserts the government's power to confiscate the property "of persons determined to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, and act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of threatening the peace or stablility of Iraq or the Government of Iraq or undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistence to the Iraqi people. OCTOBER: The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Act passes the House of Representatives 400 to 6 (to be voted on in the Senate in 2008). The act proposes the establishment of a commission composed of members of the House and Senate, Homeland Security and others, to "examine and report upon the facts and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologiclly based violence in the United States" and specifically the role of the internet in fostering and disseminating extremism. According to the bill the term "violent radicalization" means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change, while the term "ideologically-based violence means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual's political, religious, or social beliefs."-------SO I COULD SPIT IN THEIR FACE.

Music:

Rolling stones,Neil Young, Prince,Bob Seger,eels, Bob Marley, Interseed, Annie Mac, dub Addict, Machine Dub, Rehabilitation, These kids, Refused, Rise Against, Anti-Flag

Movies:

Iraq:The hidden story



The story of what does not get reported in Iraq by the mainstream media. .. .. msprm name="movie" value=" Rancho http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOZ0l-uir6sDeluxe, Dr. Strangelove, Pulp Fiction, Station Agent, Sexy Beast, American Beauty, Caddy Shack, Body Heat, Thank You For Smoking, Bullet,the Fog of War, Why we Fight, V for Vedetta, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Vision Quest,Harold and Maude

Television:

College Football, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiam, Bill Maher, the final 4, House

Books:

The End of America by Naomi Wolf, The Revolution by Ron Paul, Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson, Day of Deceit by Robert Stinnett, The Politics of War by Walter Karp, Bush Vs the United States of America (a Hypothetical indictment of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Collin Powell for committing fraud against the American Poeple) Anything by Charles Bukowski, A Sport and a Pastime(James Salter) Everything written by Noam Chomsky, Blood Meridian(Cormac McCarthy, Chalmers Johnson(Blowback,The sorrows of Empire), A Fan's Note's(Frederick Exley), anything by Walter Mosley,Calculated Chaos by Butler Shaffer, The Road(Cormac McCathy)Speaking of Liberty by Lew Rockwell, Garet Garrett: Defend America First (Antiwar editorials of the Saturday Evening Post 1939-1942),Salvos Against the New Deal, Ex America(The People's Pottage

Heroes:

Guy Fawkes,Ludwig Von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Noam Chomsky, Charles Bukowski,Buthler D. Shaffer, Lew Rockwell, Albert J. Nock, Frank Chodorov, F. A. Baldy Harper, H.L.Mencken, Garet Garrett,John T. Flynn, Suzanne La Follette Felix Morley,Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, Russell Kirk, Noam Chomsky, F. A. Hayek,Randolph Bourne

My Blog

The Fascist Border Patol Agents by Don Bacon

Do Threats Make You Nervous? by Don Baconby Don Bacon .. --> Copyright 2001-2002, Clickability, Inc. All rights reserved.--> .. language=javascript1.2 src="http://a449.g.akamai.net/7/449/1776/000/but...
Posted by V on Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:35:00 PST

Iraq & Afghanistan--All about the Oil by Eric Margolis

At Last, Some Truth About Iraq and Afghanistan by Eric Margolisby Eric Margolis .. --> Copyright 2001-2002, Clickability, Inc. All rights reserved.--> .. language=javascript1.2 src="http://...
Posted by V on Tue, 24 Jun 2008 02:53:00 PST

Haditha Massacre by Justin Raimondo

..TR> ..TR> Imperial 'Justice' The Haditha massacre and what it means to be an empire by Justin Raimondo .. -->startclickprintexclude-->.. -->endclickprintexclude--> When the Marines came into ...
Posted by V on Mon, 23 Jun 2008 02:48:00 PST

Airline Announcements-George Carlin 1/2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DagVklB4VHQ ...
Posted by V on Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:11:00 PST

The End of America--HR who cares?

From: ßlue?Sky?SunshineDate: Jun 22, 2008 4:00 PM And don't be fooled - Obama nor McCain will reverse anything...http://www'>http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LmFjbHUub3JnL3NhZmVm cmVlL25zYXNweWl...
Posted by V on Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:16:00 PST

Talk by Naomi Wolf - The End of America

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjALf12PAWc The Fascist Shift in America!...
Posted by V on Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:27:00 PST

John McCain-Torture Puppet by Andy Worthington

..TR> John McCain, Torture Puppet Senator ignores mounting evidence of torture and abuse by Andy Worthington .. -->startclickprintexclude-->.. -->endclickprintexclude--> This is clearly no time f...
Posted by V on Fri, 20 Jun 2008 06:20:00 PST

Sibel Edmonds & the Nuclear Black Market by Scott Horton

..TR> ..TR> Letting Sibel Edmonds Speak An interview with Sibel Edmondsand Luke Ryland by Scott Horton .. -->startclickprintexclude-->.. -->endclickprintexclude--> Interview conducted June 12, ...
Posted by V on Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:20:00 PST

IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT ENERGY SAVER LIGHT BULBS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-LOtKIIKcg The Great Light Bulb Debate! Your government at work....
Posted by V on Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:10:00 PST

Hillary Supporter Madeline Albright: TOTALLY WORTH IT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuNxtok_A54 ...
Posted by V on Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:54:00 PST