FROM IRAQ TO THE G8: THE POLITE CRUSHING OF DISSENT AND TRUTH

John Pilger's straight from the heart commentary:


FPF-fwd.: John Pilger

Over the past two weeks, the contrast between two related "global" events has been salutary. The first was the World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul; the second the G8 meeting in Scotland and the Make Poverty History campaign. Reading the papers and watching television in Britain, you would know nothing about the Istanbul meetings, which produced the most searing evidence to date of the greatest political scandal of modern times: the attack on a defenceless Iraq by America and Britain.

The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the invasion and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. "We are here," said the author Arundathi Roy in Istanbul, "to examine a vast spectrum of evidence (about the war) that has been deliberately marginalised and suppressed, its legality, the role of international institutions and major corporations in the occupation, the role of the media, the impact of weapons such as depleted uranium munitions, napalm, and cluster bombs, the use and legitimising of torture . . . This tribunal is an attempt to correct the record: to document the history of the war not from the point of view of the victors but of the temporarily anguished."

"Temporarily anguished" implies that, even faced with such rampant power, the Iraqi people will recover. You certainly need this sense of hope when reading the eyewitness testimonies which demonstrate, as Roy pointed out, "that even those of us who have tried to follow the war closely are not aware of a fraction of the horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq."

The most shocking testimony was given by Dahr Jamail. Unless you read the internet, you will not know who Dhar Jamail is. He is not an amusing Baghdad blogger. For me, he is the finest reporter working in Iraq. With the exception of Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and several others, mostly freelancers, he shames the flak-jacketed, cliché crunching camp followers known as "embeds".

A Lebanese with American citizenship, Jamail has been almost everywhere the camp followers have not. He has reported from the besieged city of Fallujah, whose destruction and atrocities have been suppressed by western broadcasters, notably by the BBC. (See www.medialens. org/ alerts).

In Istanbul, Jamail bore his independent reporter's witness to the thousands of Iraqis tortured in Abu Ghraib and other American prisons. His account of what happened to a civil servant in Baghdad was typical. This man, Ali Abbas, had gone to a US base to inquire about his missing neighbours. On his third visit, he was arrested without charge, stripped naked, hooded and forced to simulate sex with other prisoners .

This was standard procedure. He was beaten on his genitals, electrocuted in the anus, denied water and forced to watch as his food was thrown away. A loaded gun was held to his head to prevent him from screaming in pain as his wrists were bound so tightly that the blood drained from his hands. He was doused in cold water while a fan was held to his body.

"They put on a loud speaker," he told Jamail, "put the speakers on my ears and said, 'Shut up, fuck, fuck, fuck!' He was refused sleep. Shit was wiped on him and dogs were used on him. "Sometimes at night when he read his Koran," said Jamail, "(he) had to hold it in the hallway for light. Soldiers would come by and kick the Holy Koran, and sometimes they would try to piss on it or wipe shit on it." A female soldier told him, "Our aim is to put you in hell . . . These are the orders from our superiors, to turn your lives into hell."

Jamail described how Fallujah's hospitals have been subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment, with US marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching the hospitals. Children were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood.

The two men responsible for this, George Bush and Tony Blair, attended the G8 meeting at Gleneagles. Unlike the Iraq Tribunal, there was saturation coverage, yet no one in the "mainstream" - from the embedded media to the Make Poverty History organisers and the accredited, acceptable celebrities - made the obvious connection of Bush's and Blair's enduring crime in Iraq.

No one stood and said that Blair's smoke-and-mirrors "debt cancellation" at best amounted to less than the money the government spent in a week brutalising Iraq, where British and American violence was the cause of the doubling of child poverty and malnutrition since Saddam Hussein was overthrown (Unicef).

In Edinburgh, a shameless invitation-only meeting of Christian Aid supporters and church leaders was addressed by Britain's treasurer, Gordon Brown, the paymaster of this carnage. Only one person asked him, "When will you stop the rape of the poor's resources? Why are there so many conditions on aid?" This lone protestor was not referring specifically to Iraq, but to most of the world.

He was thrown out, to cheers from among the assembled Christians.

That set the theme for the G8 week: the silencing and pacifying and co-option of real dissent and truth. It was Frantz Fanon, the great intellectual-activist of Africa, who exposed colonial greed and violence dressed up as polite do-goodery, and nothing has changed, in Africa, as in Iraq. The mawkish images on giant screens behind the pop stars in Hyde Park beckoned a wilful, self-satisfied ignorance. There was none of the images that television refuses to show: of murdered Iraqi doctors with the blood streaming from their heads, cut down by Bush's snipers.

On the front page of the Guardian, the Age of Irony was celebrated as real life became more satirical than satire could ever be. There was Bob Geldoff resting his smiling face on smiling Blair's shoulder, the war criminal and his jester. Elsewhere, there was an heroically silhouetted Bono, who celebrates men like Jeffrey Sachs as saviours of the world's poor while lauding "compassionate" George Bush's "war on terror" as one of his generation's greatest achievements;

and there again was Brown, the enforcer of unfair rules of trade, saying incredibly that "unfair rules of trade shackle poor people"; and Paul Wolfowitz, beaming next to the Archbishop of Canterbury: this is the man who, before he was handed control of the World Bank, devised much of Bush's so-called neo-conservative putsch, the mendacious justification for the bloodfest in Iraq and the notion of "endless war".

FPF-Wolfowitz - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/aavfa

And if you missed all that, there is a downloadable PDF kit from a "one Campaign" e-mail to "help you organise your very own ongoing Live8 party". The suppression of African singers and bands, parked where Geldoff decreed, in an environmental theme park in Cornwall, in front of an audience of less than 50 people, was described correctly by Andy Kershaw as "musical apartheid".

Has there ever been a censorship as complete and insidious and ingenious as this? Even when Stalin airbrushed his purged comrades from the annual photograph on top of Lenin's mausoleum, the Russian people could fill in the gaps. Media and cultural hype provide infinitely more powerful propaganda weapons in the age of Blair. With Diana, there was grief by media. With Iraq, there was war by media. Now there is mass distraction by media, a normalising of the unmentionable that "the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people", wrote the playwright Arthur Miller, "and so the evidence has to be internally denied."

Deploying the unction of Bono, Madonna, Paul McCartney and of course Geldoff, whose Live Aid 21 years ago achieved nothing for the people of Africa, the contemporary plunderers and pawnbrokers of that continent have pulled off an unprecedented scam: the antithesis of 15 February 2003 when two million people brought both their hearts and brains to the streets of London.

"(Ours) is not a march in the sense of a demonstration, but more of a walk, " said Make Poverty History's Bruce Whitehead. "The emphasis is on fun in the sun. The intention is to welcome the G8 leaders to Scotland and ask them to deliver trade justice, debt cancellation and increased aid to developing countries."

Really?

In Lewis Carroll's classic, Alice asked the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter to show her the way out of wonderland. They did, over and again, this way, that way, until she lost her temper and brought down her dream world, waking her up.

The people killed and maimed in Iraq and the people wilfully impoverished in Africa by our governments and our institutions in our name, demand that we wake up.

John Pilger

[enditem]

FPF-item - London blasts boost Bush and Blair:
Url.: http://tinyurl.com/b4fex

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* Bush & Blair have been invited - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/9wbgg

* BBC: 'The war in Iraq is illegal' says United Nation's Secretary General Kofi Annan - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5pl2v

* Torture Court case against Rumsfeld moves on - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/clpbf

* Impeachbush.org is mobilizing a massive impeachment contingent at the huge September 24, 2005 anti-war March on Washington. Assemble at 12 noon at the White House. Sign up here to learn about the plans of the impeachment movement in the next month - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cex28

*Help the troops come home! Url.: http://www.bringemhome.org - We need them badly to fight our so called 'governments' - Url.: http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/

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So, Mr Bremer, where did all the money go?

FPF-fwd.: Upon leaving Iraq, I wrote a year ago, Bremer signed 'Revised Order 17' - granting immunity from prosecution to all foreign troops and contractors in Iraq ! - An incredible 'chuzpa'! - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6jyku

And here's more evidence, proving again that the criminals staging and faking the present 'war theatre', are despicable murderers, bombers and thieves on a global scale, who all must be punished.

So, Mr Bremer, where did all the money go?

At the end of the Iraq war, vast sums of money were made available to the US-led provisional authorities, headed by Paul Bremer, to spend on rebuilding the country. By the time Bremer left the post eight months later, $8.8bn of that money had disappeared.

Ed Harriman on the extraordinary scandal of Iraq's missing billions.

England - Guardian newspaper
Url.: http://tinyurl.com/9nh8j

Thursday July 7, 2005 - When Paul Bremer, the American pro consul in Baghdad until June last year, arrived in Iraq soon after the official end of hostilities, there was $6bn left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and at least $10bn from resumed Iraqi oil exports.

Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on May 22 2003, all these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), and intended to be spent by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) "in a transparent manner ... for the benefit of the Iraqi people".

The US Congress also voted to spend $18.4bn of US taxpayers' money on the redevelopment of Iraq. By June 28 last year, however, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20bn of Iraqi money, compared with $300m of US funds.

The "reconstruction" of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan - but the US government funded the Marshall Plan. Defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the "liberated" country, by the Iraqis themselves.

The CPA maintained one fund of nearly $600m cash for which there is no paperwork: $200m of it was kept in a room in one of Saddam's former palaces. The US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.

The "financial irregularities" described in audit reports carried out by agencies of the American government and auditors working for the international community collectively give a detailed insight into the mentality of the American occupation authorities and the way they operated. Truckloads of dollars were handed out for which neither they nor the recipients felt they had to be accountable.

The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8bn that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it has gone.

A further $3.4bn appropriated by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance "security".

Although Bremer was expected to manage Iraqi funds in a transparent manner, it was only in October 2003, six months after the fall of Saddam, that an International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB) was established to provide independent, international financial oversight of CPA spending. (This board includes representatives from the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development.)

The IAMB first spent months trying to find auditors acceptable to the US. The Bahrain office of KPMG was finally appointed in April 2004. It was stonewalled.

"KPMG has encountered resistance from CPA staff regarding the submission of information required to complete our procedures," they wrote in an interim report. "Staff have indicated ... that cooperation with KPMG's undertakings is given a low priority." KPMG had one meeting at the Iraqi Ministry of Finance; meetings at all the other ministries were repeatedly postponed. The auditors even had trouble getting passes to enter the Green Zone.

There appears to have been good reason for the Americans to stall. At the end of June 2004, the CPA would be disbanded and Bremer would leave Iraq. There was no way the Bush administration would want independent auditors to publish a report into the financial propriety of its Iraqi administration while the CPA was still in existence and Bremer at its head still answerable to the press. So the report was published in July.

The auditors found that the CPA didn't keep accounts of the hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in its vault, had awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to American firms without tender, and had no idea what was happening to the money from the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), which was being spent by the interim Iraqi government ministries.

This lack of transparency has led to allegations of corruption. An Iraqi hospital administrator told me that when he came to sign a contract, the American army officer representing the CPA had crossed out the original price and doubled it. The Iraqi protested that the original price was enough. The American officer explained that the increase (more than $1m) was his retirement package.

When the Iraqi Governing Council asked Bremer why a contract to repair the Samarah cement factory was costing $60m rather than the agreed $20m, the American representative reportedly told them that they should be grateful the coalition had saved them from Saddam. Iraqis who were close to the Americans, had access to the Green Zone or held prominent posts in the new government ministries were also in a position personally to benefit enormously.

Iraqi businessmen complain endlessly that they had to offer substantial bribes to Iraqi middlemen just to be able to bid for CPA contracts. Iraqi ministers' relatives got top jobs and fat contracts.

Further evidence of lack of transparency comes from a series of audits and reports carried out by the CPA's own inspector general's office (CPAIG). Set up in January 2004, it reports to Congress. Its auditors, accountants and criminal investigators often found themselves sitting alone at cafe tables in the Green Zone, shunned by their CPA compatriots. Their audit, published in July 2004, found that the American contracts officers in the CPA and Iraqi ministries "did not ensure that ... contract files contained all the required documents, a fair and reasonable price was paid for the services received, contractors were capable of meeting delivery schedules, or that contractors were paid in accordance with contract requirements".

Pilfering was rife. Millions of dollars in cash went missing from the Iraqi Central Bank. Between $11m and $26m worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the CPA was unaccounted for. The payroll was padded with hundreds of ghost employees.

Millions of dollars were paid to contractors for phantom work. Some $3,379,505 was billed, for example, for "personnel not in the field performing work" and "other improper charges" on just one oil pipeline repair contract.

Most of the 69 criminal investigations the CPAIG instigated related to alleged theft, fraud, waste, assault and extortion. It also investigated "a number of other cases that, because of their sensitivity, cannot be included in this report".

One such case may have arisen when 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5m, was found on a plane in Lebanon that had been sent there by the American-appointed Iraqi interior minister.

At the same time, the IAMB discovered that Iraqi oil exports were unmetered. Neither the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation nor the American authorities could give a satisfactory explanation for this. "The only reason you wouldn't monitor them is if you don't want anyone else to know how much is going through," one petroleum executive told me.

Officially, Iraq exported $10bn worth of oil in the first year of the American occupation. Christian Aid has estimated that up to $4bn more may have been exported and is unaccounted for. If so, this would have created an off-the-books fund that both the Americans and their Iraqi allies could use with impunity to cover expenditures they would rather keep secret - among them the occupation costs, which were rising far beyond what the Bush administration could comfortably admit to Congress and the international community.

In the few weeks before Bremer left Iraq, the CPA handed out more than $3bn in new contracts to be paid for with Iraqi funds and managed by the US embassy in Baghdad. The CPA inspector general, now called the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (Sigir), has just released an audit report on the way the embassy has dealt with that responsibility. The auditors reviewed the files of 225 contracts totalling $327m to see if the embassy "could identify the current value of paid and unpaid contract obligations".

It couldn't. "Our review showed that financial records ... understated payments made by $108,255,875" and "overstated unpaid obligations by $119,361,286". The auditors also reviewed the paperwork of a further 300 contracts worth $332.9m: "Of 198 contract files reviewed, 154 did not contain evidence that goods and services were received, 169 did not contain invoices, and 14 did not contain evidence of payment."

Clearly, the Americans see no need to account for spending Iraqis' national income now any more than they did when Bremer was in charge. Neither the embassy chief of mission nor the US military commander replied to the auditors' invitation to comment. Instead, the US army contracting commander lamely pointed out that "the peaceful conditions envisioned in the early planning continue to elude the reconstruction efforts".

This is a remarkable understatement. It's also an admission that Americans can't be expected to do their sums when they are spending other people's money to finance a war.

Lack of accountability does not stop with the Americans. In January this year, the Sigir issued a report detailing evidence of fraud, corruption and waste by the Iraqi Interim Government when Bremer was in charge. They found that $8.8bn - the entire Iraqi Interim Government spending from October 2003 through June 2004 - was not properly accounted for.

The Iraqi Office of Budget and Management at one point had only six staff, all of them inexperienced, and most of the ministries had no budget departments. Iraq's newly appointed ministers and their senior officials were free to hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in cash as they pleased, while American "advisers" looked on.

"CPA personnel did not review and compare financial, budgetary and operational performance to planned or expected results," the auditors explained. One ministry gave out $430m in contracts without its CPA advisers seeing any of the paperwork. Another claimed to be paying 8,206 guards, but only 602 could be found. There is simply no way of knowing how much of the $8.8bn has gone to pay for private militias and into private pockets.

"It's remarkable that the inspector general's office could have produced even a draft report with so many misconceptions and inaccuracies," Bremer said in his reply to the Sigir report. "At liberation, the Iraqi economy was dead in the water. So CPA's top priority was to get the economy going."

The Sigir has responded by releasing another audit this April, an investigation into the way Bremer's CPA managed cash payments from Iraqi funds in just one part of Iraq, the region around Hillah: "During the course of the audit, we identified deficiencies in the control of cash ... of such magnitude as to require prompt attention. Those deficiencies were so significant that we were precluded from accomplishing our stated objectives." They found that CPA headquarters in Baghdad "did not maintain full control and accountability for approximately $119.9m", and that agents in the field "cannot properly account for or support over $96.6m in cash and receipts".

The agents were mostly Americans in Iraq on short-term contracts. One agent's account balance was "overstated by $2,825,755, and the error went undetected". Another agent was given $25m cash for which Bremer's office "acknowledged not having any supporting documentation".

Of more than $23m given to another agent, there are only records for $6,306,836 paid to contractors.

Many of the American agents submitted their paperwork only hours before they headed to the airport. Two left Iraq without accounting for $750,000 each, which has never been found. CPA head office cleared several agents' balances of between $250,000 and $12m without any receipts.

One agent who did submit receipts, on being told that he still owed $1,878,870, turned up three days later with exactly that amount. The auditors thought that "this suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash", pointing out that if his original figures had been correct, he would have accounted to the CPA for approximately $3.8m more than he had been given in the first place, which "suggests that the receipt documents provided to the DFI account manager were unreliable".

So where did the money go? You can't see it in Hillah. The schools, hospitals, water supply and electricity, all of which were supposed to benefit from these funds, are in ruins. The inescapable conclusion is that many of the American paying agents grabbed large bundles of cash for themselves and made sweet deals with their Iraqi contacts.

And so it continues. The IAMB's most recent audit of Iraqi government spending talks of "incomplete accounting", "lack of documented justification for limited competition for contracts at the Iraqi ministries", "possible misappropriation of oil revenues", "significant difficulties in ensuring completeness and accuracy of Iraqi budgets and controls over expenditures" and "non-deposit of proceeds of export sales of petroleum products into the appropriate accounts in contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 1483".

In the absence of any meaningful accountability, Iraqis have no way of knowing how much of the nation's wealth is being used for reconstruction and how much is being handed out to ministers' and civil servants' friends and families or funnelled into secret overseas bank accounts. Given that many Ba'athists are now back in government, some of that money may even be financing the insurgents.

Both Saddam and the US profited handsomely during his reign. He controlled Iraq's wealth while most of Iraq's oil went to Californian refineries to provide cheap petrol for American voters. US corporations, like those who enjoyed Saddam's favour, grew rich. Today, the system is much the same: the oil goes to California, and the new Iraqi government spends the national wealth with impunity.

· Bremer maintained one slush fund of nearly $600m in cash for which there is no paperwork: $200m of it was kept in a room in one of Saddam's former palaces.

· 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5m, was found on a plane in Lebanon that had been sent there by the new Iraqi interior minister.

· One ministry claimed to be paying 8,206 guards, but only 602 could be found.

· One American agent was given $23m to spend on restructuring; only $6m is accounted for.

This is an edited version of an article that appears in the current issue of the London
Review of Books (lrb). Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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*'The war in Iraq is illegal' says United Nation's Secretary General Kofi Annan - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5pl2v

* Impeachbush.org is mobilizing a massive impeachment contingent at the huge September 24, 2005 anti-war March on Washington. Assemble at 12 noon at the White House. Sign up here to learn about the plans of the impeachment movement in the next month - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cex28

* Because Bremer and his ilk all are Israeli neocons - the abject tail wagging the stupid American Dog of War, it's for once good to see what this Uncle Tom said:

Colin Powell: ''It is not anti-Semitic to criticize the policies of the state of Israel' - Said as 'US Secretary of State' in a speech at the 'Conference on Anti-Semitism of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe' German Ministry of Foreign Affairs - Berlin - April 28th - 2004 - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/22p6c

*Help the troops come home! Url.: http://www.bringemhome.org - We need them badly to fight our so called 'governments' - Url.:
http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/

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The excellent writer John Kaminski: When the cops are the crooks

On Internet sites the question is discussed whether some people -
being more equal than others - may have been warned 'before' -

Exampel from the FPF email box - Url.:http://tinyurl.com/dcorx

FPF - item conc. London Blasts - published yesterday - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/b4fex

*****************************************************

Below is one of our favorites again, writing about the fake al Qaida circus
and the blasts in London. - John Kaminski

******************************************************

When the cops are the crooks

Staged bombings terrorize everyone while the real perps keep getting richer

By John Kaminski


How long are we going to permit this vicious tomfoolery to continue?

Every time there's an embarrassing incident, a charge of official malfeasance, or some nasty revelation to cover up, the powers that be stage a terrorist incident — randomly throw away the lives of an arbitrary number of innocents — and then blame some fantasy enemy as an excuse to further ratchet up the corrupt oppression of ordinary people.

Notice how the accused perpetrators are never caught — often, as with 9/11, never even adequately identified — or if they are, they turn out to be some brainwashed patsy like John Hinckley or Timothy McVeigh, both of them (and all the assassin-type villains who have been publicly caught and liquidated since JFK's public murder) obviously incapable of carrying out the demonic deeds they are so sensationalistically accused of — without some serious assistance.

The London bombings remind me of the Madrid, Istanbul, and Bali bombings. No one is ever caught. Stereotypically rabid Arabs are blamed. And innocent people everywhere suffer the consequences.

When are we going to put together the pieces and see that this worldwide terror threat that is so ballyhooed in the totally corrupt establishment press is nothing more than stage-managed chaos designed to further consolidate the profit-making power of the super-rich, that all these senseless murders are nothing more than anecdotal sacrifices to the financial plans of the capitalist titans who control most of the world and covet the rest of it?

Will we ever realize what this awful game really is?

We've had plenty of chances, a half-century's worth, at least.

And we've flubbed every single one. We've failed to halt this demonic progression of corporate totalitarianism every time. And as a direct result, each new calculated terror gambit has been a little bit worse.

Yes, plenty of people do see what this demented game is, but they are not the powerful people. It remains the eternal shame of the American people that not a single person in the U.S. representative form of government has had the courage to even acknowledge that serious questions exist about the government-sponsored massacres on 9/11 in New York City or on 4/19 in Oklahoma City.

Oh sure, a few trendy liberals have dipped their toes in the water and mentioned in a barely audible murmur that maybe the Iraq war — which is surely the most cruel and irresponsible action the U.S. government has ever taken (in a long, sorry list of reckless actions taken that have used hollow lies as their justification) — is not quite on the up and up, but even those timid would-be patriots have received no support from the mindlocked corporate media.

And as a result, people are afraid to speak out, for fear of losing their jobs, or even their families, or — in the cases of someone like Paul Wellstone or Hunter S. Thompson — their lives.

So what I want to know is how long we are all going to cower in fear, and continue to make believe that the big U.S. newspapers and TV networks are telling the truth, when it should be clear (IMHO) that they are lying — just like their president and Congress — about just about everything?

It should be clear by now that if we continue to do this, they're going to pick us off, one by one.

But who will have the courage to stand up and say —

Hey, wait a minute!

This is our own government doing these things to us at the behest of the influential people who control them. How else could Halliburton keep getting all those contracts as judges’ heads snap in the opposite direction whenever the subject is mentioned? How else could all those pharmaceutical companies get senators to legislate them immunity for putting poisons in their medicines that create millions of vegetative children?

How much longer are we going to tolerate this egregious level of corruption? Surely we must realize that everything we thought we held dear has already been destroyed by this kind of behavior. I mean, does everybody still secretly harbor the fantasy they will turn into Kenneth Lay and suddenly be able to bilk the public out of hundreds of millions of dollars and then escape because they are protected by their contributions to the Republican National Committee? Is that the new American dream?

I was thinking about these things one recent day as I was riding the train into New York City and perusing its formidable skyline, which of course is now forever missing those two tall square edged towers that used to be the symbol of American fortitude. They are still there, in my mind, ghost towers in the sad shadow of memory, exuding horrifying memories of smoke and dust and little stick figures forever falling into the uncaring abyss of time.

And I was thinking about why they weren’t there anymore, those two tall towers, and remembering some of the things I’d said about that over these past three years, and maybe I was reviewing how I should go on talking about them as the train rattled down the the tracks toward Secaucus.

I have among other things said that the entire Congress and thousands of people who work for the federal government should be indicted as accomplices to mass murder and treason for abetting all the horrible things that the American government has done to the rest of the world — not to even mention its own people — over these past few years, and I began to think about that.

I’ve been one to advocate not voting at all because the process has become so corrupted, and I’ve insisted that in order to fix what is wrong with America and the world the whole rotten system has to come down. Ship everyone in Congress to Guantanamo and let all those innocent Arabs and Afghanis go home to their families where they belong.

But then I started to think about what the system really is — people who rely on their government for their disability checks in order to breathe and eat for another day; millions of government employees at all levels who raise families on their paychecks, worry about medical bills, and try to get their kids into college; millions of other who wouldn’t even live more than a few days should the whole system suddenly crash.

And yet, there it was, staring me in the face, right where the ghost towers stood. The system that made all these people’s lives (including mine) so palatable, so enjoyable, so viable, was the same system that invented (with the help of Israeli intelligence, British bankers and the Muslim brotherhood) the al-Qaeda terror concept, and under the tutelage of the Mossad, MI-5, and the CIA, was setting off all these bombs all over the world and blaming them on fantasy Arabs so that sad amputees could get on buses in Queens and news vendors could hawk the venomous, hate-crime-advocating New York Post on oily street corners in Manhattan and thereby feed their families and find a little joy in their mundane little lives, which were really not that different from mine.

And I thought (as I have so many times), what a warped deal this whole thing is. Do we really have to kill so many, and lie so often, to get so little, even though we need every bit of it?

So then I turned off my mind and turned back to my cuddly companion and thought how lucky I was to be in this time and space, healthy and happy if a little overcritical and introspective.

Later I would think that we are each one of us all alone in this world, and that if we didn’t insist on being honest and not killing people we didn’t have to kill, would the world fall apart because of that? In other words, is all this dramatic killing necessary to enable we Americans to live the bounteous lives we have become accustomed to?

And if it is necessary — if George W. Bush is really right about the way the world is — is this any kind of world I would want to be a part of?

I don’t think so.

And yet, as a sometimes thoughtless American, I take part in the bounty, I reap the dividends of (relative) affluence and amusements that America affords me, and that everyone in the world continues to covet.

So in that sense, I share in the responsibility for the trauma America’s war machine wreaks around the world.

So if forced to make a choice, which one would I choose? The powers that be are continuing to blow up innocent people to make America a soft and sweet place to live. Could it be such a place without the carnage? Without the lies?

Is our dalliance with Super Bowls and Xanax directly dependent on murdering people of color who happen to be sitting on oil we desire?

Is why most of us don’t say anything about what our government does to innocent bystanders because we are deep down the same kind of people as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and can look the other way when somebody has to be eliminated in order to provide us with our creature comforts?

If we are that kind of person, then we shouldn’t be upset about 9/11, about our government’s killing 3,000 of our own citizens, or about blowing up a few people in London, because it needed to be done so we could play our iPods in peace.

But if we are not that kind of person, isn’t it about time we realized that the 9/11 massacre — just like the London bombing — is something that will inevitably happen to us, because we have tolerated violence in the name of profit for more than 200 years, and we have profited mightily from it. Did you really think we could live our whole lives without paying for what we have done to the world?

You who are reading this right now — pretend, just for argument’s sake, you are an American. What do you think is a fair price you should pay for what you have done to the world?

And when the cops are really the crooks, who will you turn to for help, that one fine day, when the bomb the power elite put there to convince the public the enemy is nearby, is ticking on YOUR bus?

[enditem]

John Kaminski is an internet essayist whose stories have been seen on hundreds of websites around the world. They have been collected into two anthologies titled “America’s Autopsy Report” and “The Perfect Enemy” and are for sale on his website, http://www.johnkaminski.com/ - as is the booklet “The Day America Died,” written for those who still believe the government’s false story of what happened on September 11, 2001.

Fwd. in agreement by:

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*The Dutch author this far has worked abroad 4 decades for international media as a fully independent foreign correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the Arab World and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism !

* Impeachbush.org is mobilizing a massive impeachment contingent at the huge September 24, 2005 anti-war March on Washington. Assemble at 12 noon at the White House. Sign up here to learn about the plans of the impeachment movement in the next month - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cex28

*Help the troops come home! Url.: http://www.bringemhome.org - We need them badly to fight our so called 'governments' - Url.:http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/

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