Post Trump Letters to My Democratic Senators

As much as know-nothings and racists, corrupt Democrats who don't listen to or fight for their constituents cost their party the presidency.

Here's one of my letters to my three Democratic senators (one is being replaced at the end of this term by another). I live in a Republican House district, so I have no rep to contact there.

Feel free to copy and send it to your own senators, reps, and state and national party officials.


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Sen. Dianne Feinstein

United States Senate

331 Hart Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20510

November 13, 2016

Sen. Feinstein,

As a Democratic voter old enough to remember the George W. Bush years, I urge you to fight against Republicans and fight for progressive values rather than repeat the shameful enabling that Democrats in both chambers did for nearly all of the Bush presidency.

I am under no illusions that Democrats made some faulty tactical political decisions to pursue a greater good. 

The reality is too many elected Democrats take their marching orders from Wall Street banks and other corporations even when what they want conflicts with the best interests and wishes of the overwhelming majority of your constituents.  This has been especially true on issues like Wall Street deregulation and  bailouts, instead of regulation and vigorous prosecution, enabling the privatization of public education and prisons, and not publicly challenging the business and geopolitical goals of our foreign policy and means of implementing them.

A profound example of this was Obamacare that was written largely by insurance companies with seemingly no provision to control their arbitrary price increases instead of something like Medicare for All or at least a public option that would have served as a threat to private insurers that if they didn't act ethically, their customers could leave them for that.

Democrats in Congress have also supported rather than opposed our profoundly dishonest and criminal policies in Middle East.  Our allies in the Gulf, and indirectly (barely) our own government are supporting groups like ISIS to undermine secular regimes like the one in Syria, and the past one in Libya.

Likewise, the recently declassified Saudi pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 make it clear that Saudi Arabia funded and supported the 9/11 hijackers, which our government did nothing about.  This makes it clear that terrorism is not a problem our government is fighting but a tool and excuse it is using to pursue other goals.  No one in the leadership of Democrats in Congress has ever clearly articulated what those goals are and consistently fought this agenda that I know of.

Worse, once the Cold War ended and Russia became at least as capitalist as us, rather than find a way to cooperate with them, we have violated our word, expanded NATO to their borders, and fomented coups in places like the Ukraine to install regimes hostile to Russian security and economic interests like the transit of oil and gas from Russia to European markets.  A lot of people like myself balked at voting for Hillary Clinton since she had enthusiastically implemented this policy as Secretary of State and during her campaign, announced even more confrontational policies that could have lead to war with nuclear armed Russia.  While we might "win" such a war, millions would lose their lives and trillions dollars would be wasted to benefit very, very few.

While you have been progressive on many domestic issues, your family’s profiting from war contracts makes your support of any policy in that area suspect to say the least.  

Senator Feinstein, I urge you to help make the Democratic Party represent working people instead of just being the corporate party that doesn't pander to bigots.

Urge your colleagues to fight for leaders of the Democratic minority in Congress who will fight for progressive values.  Wall Street tools like Chuck Schumer should not even be considered an option.

Democratic voters will no longer tolerate politicians who give us lip service during election season, their back after, and their loyalty to Wall Street.

Sincerely,

 Professor Smartass

Gov't reaction to Wall Street meltdown like ''punishment'' of Prescott Bush for hiding Nazi money

If an ordinary citizen gave aid and comfort to our arch-enemy in World War II, they would have at minimum expected to spend the rest of their lives in prison or more likely, ended up like the Rosenbergs, executed for helping the Soviets.

Prescott Bush's bank was managing assets of a Nazi financier, including a steel plant that made heavy use of concentration camp labor. Far from being unaware of this, Bush mentioned it in correspondence and was concerned that his bank's ''interests be protected.'' The government found this activity troubling enough that they seized the banks assets under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

Bush's punishment for his involvement?

You would think he would have at least ended up like John Walker Lind, stripped naked, blind-folded, and held in solitary until the trial that put him in prison for life (or shortened his life).

Instead, the whole business was hushed up and he later won a Senate seat.

It seems that something similar is going on with Wall Street today. Can anyone doubt that Wall Street's concerted effort to get themselves deregulated, their Rube Goldberg maze of shell corporations and off-shore accounts, and intentional defrauding of ordinary investors, mortgage holders, and retirees has done more damage to our economy than Tim McVeigh, Osama bin Laden, and all the other terrorists to ever blow up anything in the US combined?

And in fact, the connection to terrorism is not just by analogy, but literal. To the degree that we face a legitimate terrorist threat, it is because business interests demand to be put ahead of human rights, democracy, and even the national security of the United States.

The foremost example of this is how we treated Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev hoped to transition to a European-style social democracy, but the investor class and banks wanted a Russia that was easy to plunder of their natural resources and industry. The result was the standard of living and even life expectancy in Russia DROPPED after the fall of communism, and Putin succeeds partly because he is trying to reclaim their dignity by standing up to us. Oil companies interest in stripping Russia of their oil, gas, and pipeline income further antagonizes a Russia that we now no longer have an ideological beef with. In effect, for the sake of corporate profits, we are reigniting a Cold War with an enemy with thousands of nuclear weapons.

Worse, business is a direct cause of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Bush administrations failure to bring a quick conclusion to the War on Terror. Those in the Islamic world do not hate us for our freedom, but because we take theirs away to ensure that our oil companies have compliant governments to deal with, from overthrowing the democratically elected secular government of Iran in the 1950s to backing the oppressive Saudi government for decades. Oddly, even though the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 found direct involvement of the Saudi government in the attacks nothing was done about it. Whether this was done because we didn't want to jeopardize business ties with Saudis or because the Saudis were doing the Bush administration a favor with the attack, neither is acceptable.

And yet, the punishment of the wealthy who endanger and loot us like this will be much like Prescott Bush's. The public will use our taxpayer dollars to clean up their mess, and they will continue to live lives of leisure and be free exercise their power as ''masters of the universe'' even though they are masters of nothing but moving our money into their pockets.

I have no problem with capitalism in theory, but in practice, we can no longer afford a financial elite that not only ignores the law, but buys our politicians and makes the indefensible legal.

Any solution to this current problem has to involve putting the fear of God or at least fear of the wrath of the American people into these spoiled sociopathic trust fund babies, the likes of which no financial elite has felt since the Russian or even French Revolution.

Anything less than that leaves America and the world at risk from more attacks by these economic terrorists who make 9/11 look like a toddler's temper tantrum.

Prosecuting Bush administration not politics, but matter of national security

After ignoring the grassroots movement to impeach Bush, which had twice as much support as impeaching Clinton and about as much as impeaching Nixon the night before he resigned, the mainstream media is now pooh-poohing the idea of prosecuting Bush administration officials for their domestic and war crimes.
If restoring Constitutional checks and balances and showing that the rich and powerful aren't above the law, especially laws of basic human decency like the Geneva Convention, isn't reason enough, there are some very immediate national security reasons to do so, related to 9/11 and the Iraq War.

In the case of 9/11, that day George W. Bush said,

I have directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

LINK

The Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 found that the Saudi government helped the hijackers, and declassified FBI documents show a Saudi agent picked up two of the hijackers at LAX, set them up in an apartment in his own building, and funneled checks to them from the Saudi ambassador's wife.

Did the Bush administration use this information to punish Saudi Arabia or change the nature of our relationship with them in any way?

No.

He even protected them by classifying the Saudi pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry's report and tried to smooth over uproar caused by the sketchy details that did leak out.

He likewise said little to nothing about Saudi terrorists entering Iraq even though more came from there than any other country according to Israel, our Pentagon, and even the Saudis themselves.

Why didn't Bush do anything about this? Even if you don't believe the Bush administration was involved in 9/11, covering up the Saudi role is at least a bigger crime than Richard Nixon covering up a second rate burglary.

Worse, it means that we may be vulnerable to another terrorist attack because for all the Patriot Act bluster and trampling of our civil rights, the Bush administration did nothing punish or restrain the real perpetrators.

There is a similar issue with how we became involved in the Iraq War. What was once considered a conspiracy theory, that the Bush administration intentionally lied to get us into the war, is more or less accepted as fact by the mainstream media now.

However, if we don't prosecute those responsible, they are free to return to government at a later date, and do the same thing. That is exactly what Cheney and Rumsfeld did after lying about the nature of the Soviet threat in the 70s.

While the lies and liars from within the administration are pretty well documented, their helpers outside the administration, like those who forged the Niger document claiming that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake, have not been outed and put out of business.

Perhaps most importantly, we have not had a public airing of WHY Bush bothered to trump up a war against Iraq and who it was meant to benefit. There are some clear clues like Cheney's secrecy about the energy task force he led that was pouring over maps Iraq's oilfields, and the Bush commissioned Hydrocarbon Law that would have given 88% of Iraq's oil income to foreign oil companies, a law that Iraqi legislators refused to pass even after being offered millions in bribes each by the oil companies. But those are just clues.

Without a definitive record of who lobbied for the war, who listened to them, and how they got their way, we are vulnerable to being misled into a war again in the future. If those who planned to profit from the war were punished, we would be even less likely to see it happen again.

It is a matter of public record that Bush diverted our attention from those responsible for 9/11 and fabricated a case for war, leaving us vulnerable to terrorist attacks from those he protected and squandering military resources we should have saved for real threats.

We are less safe because of it, and without the complete investigation and prosecution of those responsible, we will continue to be at risk.

If it does not happen, it would be because our government is looking after the interests of the very wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.

Meaning of US troops attack in Syria

Bush is still president, and still trying to spread his war from Iraq to neighboring Syria. The excuse is that insurgents are coming from Syria into Iraq. Even if true, that does not necessarily mean Syria is trying to jam us up--millions of refugees who fled Iraq ended up in Syria, so it's not surprising that some go back with violent intentions. The Syrian government had actually HELPED Bush earlier on in "War on Terror" by letting Bush send prisoners to Syria to be tortured. That stopped when Bush started talking about invading Syria too.

Oddly, Bush never seems to pursue foreign fighters and insurgents into Saudi Arabia even though Israeli, Saudi, and even Pentagon studies say more foreign fighters come into Iraq from Saudi than any other country. And Congress found that it was not Iraq, Iran, or Syria whose intelligence agencies helped the 9/11 hijackers but Saudi. It makes you wonder if terrorism is the excuse not the cause of the war, and the Saudis are helpfully providing the excuse when needed, and dialing it down when it's not (like during and after the surge).

As this attack on Syria shows, we are still in the ironic position of relying on "rogue nations" like Syria and Iran acting with more restraint and foresight than Bush to prevent a wider or even world war.

We had an uneasy peace for decades with two world superpowers with opposing ideologies. Now that Russia and China are capitalist (if not entirely democratic) how hard could it be to come up with a new balance of power arrangement that could preserve the peace even longer than the Cold War?

I guess we won't know until Bush is out of office. If he succeeds in inciting another war or McCain follows him in office, we may never know.

KEY EXCERPTS:




26 October 2008

'US troops' strike inside Syria

"American soldiers" emerged from helicopters and "attacked a civilian building under construction and opened fire on workers inside - including the wife of the building guard - leading to [the deaths] of eight civilians", it added.

"The helicopters then left Syrian territory towards Iraqi territory," Sana said.

The dead include a man, his four children and a married couple, the Syrian report said, without giving details of the children's ages.

****

The area is near the Iraqi border city of Qaim, a major crossing point for fighters, weapons and money travelling into Iraq to fuel the Sunni insurgency.

FULL TEXT

FORGOTTEN HISTORY: Bush admits no Saddam 9/11 link in 2004 debate

With another presidential election at hand, and terror alerts and odd events about to descend upon us again, it's worth remembering that President George W. Bush admitted during a 2004 presidential debate that the country we invaded and now occupy to the tune of up to trillions of tax dollars spent, over a million Iraqis killed, and thousands of American troops killed and tens of thousands maimed for life, had nothing to do with 9/11.

Nothing.

Bush admitted Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 at least three times.

1. Once in response to polls showing his propaganda had convinced 70% of the public that Iraq was involved in 9/11,
   


2. in 2006 when a reporter accidentally asked an important question,
   
   
3. and in 2004 during a debate with Senator John Kerry (see below).
   

Kerry was not the perfect candidate, but at least in this exchange, he had the better handle on reality; or more precisely, he acknowledged reality whereas Bush lied about and tried to change the subject.

KEY EXCERPTS:

BUSH: I would hope I never have to. I understand how hard it is to commit troops. Never wanted to commit troops. When I was running -- when we had the debate in 2000, never dreamt I'd be doing that.

But the enemy attacked us, Jim, and I have a solemn duty to protect the American people, to do everything I can to protect us....

KERRY: Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, "The enemy attacked us."

Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn't use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world's number one criminal and terrorist...

He also said Saddam Hussein would have been stronger. That is just factually incorrect. Two-thirds of the country was a no-fly zone when we started this war. We would have had sanctions. We would have had the U.N. inspectors. Saddam Hussein would have been continually weakening...

LEHRER: Thirty seconds.

BUSH: First of all, of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that.

FULL TEXT

Republicans have successfully sold themselves as the better party on national security, but when they lie to us on an issue as crucial as this, can we trust them with the safety of our country and families?

the Appeaser in Chief: Bush visits 9/11 funders, the Saudis

Yesterday Bush said anyone who tries to negotiate with terrorists nations are appeasers; today he visited Saudi Arabia, the country that funded the 9/11 attacks and whose intelligence agent picked up two of the hijackers at the airport when they arrived in the US.

In a technical sense, Bush is not an appeaser. There is no indication he is negotiating anything that would lead to fewer terrorist attacks.

Yesterday in the Israeli Knesset, Bush said:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along."

(Story)

Proving he has no idea what the word irony means, today he is visiting Saudi Arabia, the country that the Joint Congressional Inquiry found gave money to the 9/11 hijackers and help getting settled in the US through their agents.



Since that time, Bush and Cheney have visited Saudi Arabia several times.

It hasn't seemed to have affected their terrorist related behavior since the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers pouring into Iraq are coming from Saudi, and Prince Bandar, the former long time ambassador to the US, threatened Britain with more terrorist attacks if they didn't drop a corruption investigation that involved the Saudis.



In response to us cutting them slack on terrorism, they haven't even done anything to lower the price oil despite Bush's public pleas.

Sadly, Bush is partly right. Too many Democrats ignore the fact that Saudi Arabia attacked us on 9/11, fail to ask publicly why the so-called "War on Terror" seems to be aimed every Muslim country EXCEPT the ones behind the attacks, and even visit and glad hand them.

But they do so following the lead of the appeaser in chief, George W. Bush.

FOIA doc shows 9/11Commission lied about hijackers connection to Saudi government

click pic to see full-sized.

A small issue and a big one.

The small is that two of the hijackers made airline reservations for AFTER 9/11, including back to Saudi Arabia. That could arguably be to make their activities look less suspicious--or the guys themselves might not have known they wouldn't survive their 9/11 flights.

The bigger issue is the 9/11 Commission lied about when these two hijackers hooked up with another Saudi in the US and redacted the third guy's name from the report (even though it can be found elsewhere). The report says they met by chance after wandering around LA for a couple of weeks, but their rental agreement shows they met the day the guys arrived since they signed that day.

Their contact who was already in America started receiving stipend checks from the Saudi ambassador's wife, and made constant phone calls to Saudi officials in DC and LA.

The effect of leaving this information out is to obscure the Saudi role in 9/11.

Since this information was provided by the FBI to the 9/11 Commission, it is reasonable to assume the Bush administration saw it too.

We were attacked by an ally, Saudi Arabia, covered their tracks, and used the attacks as an excuse to attack someone else, Iraq.

Why exactly would the Saudis do this if they weren't 100% sure of what our reaction would be? If they were acting on their own, wouldn't they expect at minimum the kind of beat down we gave Afghanistan? Instead, Prince Bandar, whose wife sent the checks to the hijackers, was smoking cigars on the back balcony of the White House with Bush two days after 9/11.

Former Senator Bob Kerrey, who served on the 9/11 Commission, has said this should be investigated. No word from the Bushies on the Commission like Zelikow, who had written a book with Condi.

On a related note, it was recently revealed Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, long time ambassador to the US, made veiled threats of terrorist attacks against Great Britain if they didn't back off a corruption investigation, and Tony Blair took them seriously enough to call off the investigation.

Just for the hell of it, why not call your congressman and senators and ask them why they don't look into this stuff?


KEY EXCERPTS:

FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report
02/28/2008 @ 8:01 am
Filed by Larisa Alexandrovna

Newly-released records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request contradict the 9/11 Commission’s report on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and raise fresh questions about the role of Saudi government officials in connection to the hijackers.

The nearly 300 pages of a Federal Bureau of Investigation timeline used by the 9/11 Commission as the basis for many of its findings were acquired through a FOIA request filed by Kevin Fenton, a 26 year old translator from the Czech Republic. The FBI released the 298-page “hijacker timeline” Feb. 4.

The FBI timeline reveals that alleged hijacker Hamza Al-Ghamdi, who was aboard the United Airlines flight which crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, had booked a future flight to San Francisco. He also had a ticket for a trip from Casablanca to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.

***
“In the official version of the story now, the hijackers drift around L.A. listlessly for two weeks before chancing to come across Bayoumi in a restaurant [according to Bayoumi’s account],” Thompson added. “Whereupon he's an incredible good Samaritan and takes them down to San Diego, pays their rent, etc.”

”But from the FBI's timeline, we now know the hijackers started staying at Bayoumi's place on Jan. 15 – the very same day they arrived,” Thompson says. “So obviously they must have been met at the airport and taken care of from their very first hours in the US. That's huge because the FBI maintains to this day that the hijackers never had any accomplices in the US.”

***

“Bayoumi seemed clearly to be working for some part of the Saudi government,” [New York Times reporter Phillip] Shenon wrote on page 52. “He entered the United States as a business student and had lived San Diego since 1996. He was on the payroll of an aviation contractor to the Saudi government, paid about $2,800 a month, but apparently did no work for the company.”

In fact, Bayoumi was an employee of the Saudi defense contractor Dallah Avco. According to a 2002 Newsweek article about Bayoumi, Dallah Avco is “an aviation-services company with extensive contracts with the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, headed by Prince Sultan, the father of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar.”

Newsweek points to another connection between Bayoumi and Bandar: “About two months after al-Bayoumi began aiding Alhazmi and Almihdhar, [the two hijackers] NEWSWEEK has learned, al-Bayoumi's wife began receiving regular stipends, often monthly and usually around $2,000, totaling tens of thousands of dollars. The money came in the form of cashier's checks, purchased from Washington's Riggs Bank by Princess Haifa bint Faisal, the daughter of the late King Faisal and wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi envoy who is a prominent Washington figure and personal friend of the Bush family. The checks were sent to a woman named Majeda Ibrahin Dweikat, who in turn signed over many of them to al-Bayoumi's wife (and her friend), Manal Ahmed Bagader. The Feds want to know: Was this well-meaning charity gone awry? Or some elaborate money-laundering scheme? A scam? Or just a coincidence?”

According to then-Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), who served as a co-chair of the 9/11 Congressional inquiry that preceded the 9/11 Commission, during the period of Alhazmi and Almihdhar’s [the two hijackers] arrival in the US, Bayoumi had an “unusually large number of telephone calls with Saudi government officials in both Los Angeles and Washington.” (Graham and Nussbaum, 2004, pp. 168-169)

Bayoumi moved to London in 2001 and lived there until his arrest immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. Following his release, Bayoumi returned to Saudi Arabia, where he was interviewed in October 2003 by the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, and Senior Counsel Dieter Snell.

FULL TEXT

TOON: the anti-war party?

Apologies to Tom Tomorrow:
(his old toon, my new words).

Click pic to see full sized

this modern world tom tomorrow goofus gallant iraq war wmd terrorism oil withdrawal president george w bush cartooneditorial cartoon dlc democratic leadership council republican GOP conservative corruption occupation halliburton political humor colonialism white mans burden professor smartass iraq democratlies peak oil propaganda corporationfascism democracy public relations foreign policy al qaeda northwoods worst president ever failure war criminal idiot retard humor comedy funny smartass comments resistance censored news rebel iraq appropriation bill

Al Qaeda back on Bush buddy list for Iran War

After a brief stint on the outs, from the mid-90s to 9/11, Sunni jihadis aka Al Qaeda, has become useful again, just as they and the Afghan Taliban were when we wanted to chase the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

The story comes from Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Sy Hersh, who broke the My Lai story, and has been ahead of the curve and accurate on Bush's war plans for Iran.

THE REDIRECTION
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?
Issue of 2007-03-05
Posted 2007-02-25


EXCERPTS:

Saudi Al Qaeda history

Nasr compared the current situation to the period in which Al Qaeda first emerged. In the nineteen-eighties and the early nineties, the Saudi government offered to subsidize the covert American C.I.A. proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Hundreds of young Saudis were sent into the border areas of Pakistan, where they set up religious schools, training bases, and recruiting facilities. Then, as now, many of the operatives who were paid with Saudi money were Salafis. Among them, of course, were Osama bin Laden and his associates, who founded Al Qaeda, in 1988.

***
Saudia Al Qaeda future

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country’s right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that “realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.”

FULL TEXT:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070305fa...

He also mentions Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia as our liaison to these forces.

Bandar has admitted Saudi support for Al Qaeda and setting up a car bombing for us during our brief military presence in Lebanon in the 80s.
Saudi money to Al Qaeda:
(towards the end, he claims it is to make them go away)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/etc...
Hersh on Saudi money:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/011022fa...
help with a car bomb:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/target/in...

The Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 found that Saudi intelligence had direct links to at least two of the 9/11 hijackers. I have to wonder if these guys were ever on the outs with us, or simply serving as skins instead of shirts for one game before shifting back.
http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2007/02/probe-thi...

This is part of a growing list of undisputed things in the public record that show that our military action in the Middle East has nothing to do with a "War on Terror." Here's a couple of others:

1. Teaching democracy by ignoring public opinion. Every poll taken of Iraqis has shown that they want our troops to leave. This is rarely mentioned in our TV news though it was covered in USA Today and the Washington Post, and some of the polls were done by the Bush appointed Coalition Provisional Authority and the British Ministry of Defense.
   http://whatiraqiswant.blogspot.com
   
   The war in Iraq has also harmed not helped our reputation in the Arab & Muslim world, where they impolitely notice we support dictators when it suits us like the presidents of Pakistan, Egypt, and one of the least democratic and most oppressive countries on earth, Saudi Arabia.
   http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2006/06/world-opi...
   http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2005/10/pew-polls...
   
   Some might also notice our friendship with the dictator in Uzbekistan who boils his political opponents alive.
   
   Unlike Americans, Arabs have no idealistic illusions about spreading democracy or fighting terrorism as motives for our war in Iraq. They figure it is about oil. The Bushies are doing nothing to disabuse them of that idea.
   
   
2. Forcing unfair oil deals on Iraq that they wouldn't accept without a gun to their head. The oil deals and Hydrocarbon Law the oil companies and Bushies are forcing on the Iraqis give the bulk of the profits to our oil companies (who don't have a good track record of sharing with us, do they?). Other oil rich countries with easily accessible oil like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or Iran would never accept deals like this absent a military occupation.
   
   If we were concerned about reducing terrorism, wouldn't we want oil deals in Iraq that couldn't even be suspected of being exploitive?
   
   The chances of that may have been dashed as soon as Bush cancelled Saddam's oil contracts with Russia, France, and others, gave them to American corporations, then signed an executive order saying those companies couldn't be sued by anyone anywhere over pumping Iraq's oil.

Seymour Hersh al qaeda iran terrorism oil president george w bush osama bin laden iraq war occupation dick cheney iraq lies peak oil political opinion agent provocateur george w bush war on terror taliban afghanistan foreign policy new york times cointelpro northwoods worst president ever failure war criminal nazi smartass comments resistance big oil censored news islamofascism

MOTIVATIONAL POSTER: Bush says "What's worse, if gov't knew or didn't?"

I was glad to see that President Bush finally understands how most of us feel about his performance on 9/11.




Actually, he was talking about the Iranian government's knowledge of weapons from Iran filtering into Iraq, but like a lot of things Bush says, it fits his own actions better than whoever he is trying to make us afraid of at the moment.

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TV show depicted plane crashed into WTC six months before 9/11

Bush, Condi, and various other flunkies of the administration said they had no idea planes would be used as weapons. Even if they didn't notice the various military exercises on the scenario, you'd think a couch potato like Bush might have seen this pilot for THE LONE GUNMAN six months before 9/11 on Fox.

Here's a screenshot of the World Trade Center from the cockpit of the airliner:

CLICK TO SEE VIDEO:

Or maybe they saw it but had a good reason not to mention it that was also given in the show:

The Cold War's over, John. But with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms market's flat. But bring down a fully loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you'll find a dozen tin-pot dictators all over the world just clamoring to take responsibility, and begging to be smart-bombed.

There was a similar line in WAG THE DOG, when presidential PR fixer Robert De Niro is caught by the CIA faking a nuclear terrorist threat and war in Albania, he talks his way out of trouble by saying there is no war but his war, and without his war the weapons contractors, Pentagon, and CIA would be out of jobs. So they let him go on his way.

MORE ON THE LONE GUNMAN PILOT

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PROBE THIS: Sen Bob Graham said two 9/11 hijackers had direct ties to Saudi intelligence

And this was in the 27 classified pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11.

This is actually extremely urgent now, considering how badly the Bushies want their war with Iran, Cheney's recent trip to see the Saudis, and America's vulnerability to being hoodwinked by convenient boogeymen again.

KEY EXCERPTS:



9/11 hijackers tied to Saudi government, Graham says in book

By Frank Davies, Knight Ridder | September 5, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers had a support network in the United States that included agents of the Saudi government, and the Bush administration and FBI blocked a congressional investigation into that relationship, Senator Bob Graham wrote in a book to be released Tuesday.

The discovery of the financial backing of the two hijackers "would draw a direct line between the terrorists and the government of Saudi Arabia, and trigger an attempted coverup by the Bush administration," the Florida Democrat wrote.

And in Graham's book, "Intelligence Matters," obtained by The Miami Herald yesterday, he makes clear that some details of that financial support from Saudi Arabia were in the 27 pages of the congressional inquiry's final report that were blocked from release by the administration, despite the pleas of leaders of both parties on the House and Senate intelligence committees.

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He oversaw the Sept. 11 investigation on Capitol Hill with Representative Porter Goss. According to Graham, the FBI and the White House blocked efforts to investigate the extent of official Saudi connections to two hijackers.



http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/09/05/9...

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the OIL motive: Iraq AND Afghanistan

It's been so long that it's easy to forget the war in Afghanistan and overlook it as the "good war" in response to 9/11, but the same oil interests that wanted the war in Iraq were pushing to get a pipeline in Afghanistan and wanted the Taliban replaced with a more compliant negotiating partner--and that was a couple of years before 9/11.

Oddly enough, that was shortly before we started having trouble with al Qaeda, and had to start attacking Afghanistan.

When will people start talking about this and toss aside the embarrassing sack of propaganda crap the Bushies dealt and Democrats keep dipping into as well, criticizing the taste instead of offering a better explanation?

KEY EXCERPTS:

The Surreal Politics of Premeditated War
by R.W. Behan

Common to both the Afghan and Iraqi lines of dots are energy resources, both oil and gas. It is true our country depends on oil and gas, but it is not the American people who need to corner Mid East oil and gas by force. Dozens of oil companies around the world"the "foreign suitors," for example"can supply us with Iraqi oil or Caspian Basin gas, and would be pleased to do so. There is no reason not to rely on them: we are buying more and more Toyotas and Volvos, and fewer Chevrolets and Fords, with no apparent damage to our national security. Why not do the same with gasoline, diesel, and LNG, and avoid armed conflict?

Why not? Because the bottom lines of Exxon-Mobil, Unocal and other domestic oil companies, in the eyes of the Bush Administration, are sacrosanct. It is not the American consumers, then, but only the American oil companies who benefit from George Bush's premeditated wars.

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IRAQ:

By early March, 2001, the Task Force was poring over maps of the Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, tanker terminals, and oil exploration blocks. It studied an inventory of “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts”—dozens of oil companies from 30 different countries, in various stages of exploring and developing Iraqi crude. (These documents were forced into view several years later by a citizen group, Judicial Watch, with a Freedom of Information Act proceeding. It wasn’t easy—the Bush Administration appealed the lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court—but the maps and documents can now be seen and downloaded at : http://www.judicialwatch.org/iraqi-oil-maps.shtml.)

Not a single U.S. oil company, however, was among the “suitors,” and that was intolerable. Mr. Cheney’s task force concluded, “By any estimation, Middle East oil producers will remain central to world security. The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy.”

Condoleezza Rice’s National Security Council, meanwhile, was directed by a top secret memo to “cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered melding two seemingly unrelated areas of policy.” The NSC was ordered to support “the review of operational policies towards rogue states such as Iraq and actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”

***

AFGHANISTAN:

The strategic location of Afghanistan can scarcely be overstated. The Caspian Basin contains some $16 trillion worth of oil and gas resources, and the most direct pipeline route to the richest markets is through Afghanistan.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the first western oil company to express interest and take action in the Basin was the Bridas Corporation of Argentina. It acquired production leases and exploration contracts in the region, and by November of 1997 had signed an agreement with General Dostum of the Northern Alliance and with the Taliban to build a pipeline across Afghanistan.

Not to be outdone, the American company Unocal fought Bridas at every turn, even spurning an invitation from Bridas to join an international consortium in the Basin. Unocal wanted exclusive control of the trans-Afghan pipeline, and hired a number of consultants in its conflict with Bridas: Henry Kissinger, Richard Armitage (now Deputy Secretary of State in the Bush Administration), Zalmay Khalilzad (a signer of the PNAC letter to President Clinton) and Hamid Karzai. (Eventually Bridas sued Unocal in the U.S. courts, and won.)

Unocal and the Clinton Administration hoped to have the Taliban cancel the Bridas contract, but were getting nowhere. Mr. John J. Maresca, a Unocal Vice President, testified to a House Committee of International Relations on February 12, 1998, asking politely to have the Taliban removed and a stable government inserted. His discomfort was well placed.

Six months later terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and two weeks after that President Clinton launched a cruise missile attack into Afghanistan. Clinton issued an executive order on July 4, 1999, freezing the US held assets and prohibiting further trade transactions with the Taliban.

FULL TEXT:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1203-21.htm


MORE OIL MOTIVE FOR IRAQ WAR BACKGROUND AND LINKS



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the Reichstag fire as told by Disney (take two)

click to see animation

What does the Reichstag fire have to do with 9/11?

It was a supposed terrorist act that Hitler used to seize dictatorial powers. For more on the similarities to 9/11: see What Really Happened.

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