The Peasant Who Completed a Work Worthy of God
by Bill Bonner
It is a small and thankless matter to plant a tree. Oaks, for example, usually grow so slowly that the planter rarely lives to see them in graceful maturity. Still, people plant trees.
Jean Giono tells the story of a man who – for no reasons but his own – began planting oak trees in the South of France.
"About forty years ago I was taking a long trip on foot over mountain heights quite unknown to tourists in that ancient region where the Alps thrust down into Provence. All this, at the time I embarked upon my long walk through these deserted regions, was barren and colourless land. Nothing grew there but wild lavender."
There were few trees and fewer men in that desolate area. But a solitary shepherd had an idea. He began carrying with him a bag of acorns and a heavy iron rod. As he tended his sheep, he poked the iron bar into the ground and dropped an acorn into the hole. This he did for decades. There was no re-forestry program. There were no government grants. There were no parks commissions, no botanists, no taxes, no fees. There was just a lone shepherd, aged 55. Mr. Giono met him before World War I.
His name was Elzeard Bouffier. He had only the company of his sheep and his dog. He had never studied environmental science, nor perhaps ever even gone to school. But he could see that the land had changed since his youth. The area had been rich in grass and trees...animals...and human beings. You could tell because whoever had once lived there had left behind their stone houses on the hillsides. They had apparently overgrazed the grass and overworked the land. Worst of all, they had over-cut the forests that once grew there. Of the twisted oaks that used to provide shade and hold the moisture close to the ground...only a few remained.
Bouffier asked no one’s permission. He put no issues or referendums on the ballot. He rallied no citizens and spoke to no town meetings. As far as we know his name never appeared in the paper – until after he was dead. But he went about the work that he had taken up himself...with no pay, no thanks, and not even any notice.
He planted thousands of oak trees, many of which died at first. And for the rest too, progress was as slow as an oak. But gradually, more and more took root. And each one provided more shade...more moisture...and a more hospitable place for other life to take root. Animals returned...and then hunters...and then game wardens.
"In 1933 [Bouffier] received a visit from a forest ranger who notified him of an order against lighting fires out of doors for fear of endangering the growth of this natural forest," Giono reported. "It was the first time, the man told him naively, that he had ever heard of a forest growing of its own accord. At that time Bouffier was about to plant beeches at a spot some twelve kilometers from his cottage. In order to avoid traveling back and forth – for he was then seventy-five – he planned to build a stone cabin right at the plantation. The next year he did so."
The re-growth of the "natural forest," was a wonder to everyone. In 1935 a government delegation came to examine it. They didn’t know what to make of it. They merely placed it under government protection.
By now the oaks were 20 to 25 feet tall. The slopes were covered with them. And the old man was still at work, planting his stealth forest.
"I remembered how the land had looked in 1913," Giono wrote. "A desert...[but] Peaceful, regular toil, the vigorous mountain air, frugality and, above all, serenity in the spirit had endowed this old man with awe-inspiring health. He was one of God’s athletes. I wondered how many more acres he was going to cover with trees."
By 1945, another war had passed. Bouffier was 87 years old and still at it. He had spent the second war as he had spent the first one. While millions of armed men tried to improve the world by killing each other, the good shepherd continued to improve his world. And in the process he improved ours.
Giono:
"In 1913 this hamlet of ten or twelve houses had three inhabitants. They had been savage creatures, hating one another, living by trapping game, little removed, physically and morally, from the conditions of prehistoric man. All about them nettles were feeding upon the remains of abandoned houses. Their condition had been beyond hope. For them, nothing but to await death – a situation which rarely predisposes to virtue.
"[Now] everything was changed. Even the air. Instead of the harsh dry winds that used to attack me, a gentle breeze was blowing, laden with scents. A sound like water came from the mountains; it was the wind in the forest; most amazing of all, I heard the actual sound of water falling into a pool. I saw that a fountain had been built, that it flowed freely and – what touched me most – that someone had planted a linden beside it, a linden that must have been four years old, already in full leaf, the incontestable symbol of resurrection.
"On the site of the ruins I had seen in 1913 now stand neat farms, cleanly plastered, testifying to a happy and comfortable life. The old streams, fed by the rains and snows that the forest conserves, are flowing again. Their waters have been channeled. On each farm, in groves of maples, fountain pools overflow on to carpets of fresh mint. Little by little the villages have been rebuilt. People from the plains, where land is costly, have settled here, bringing youth, motion, the spirit of adventure. Along the roads you meet hearty men and women, boys and girls who understand laughter and have recovered a taste for picnics. Counting the former population, unrecognizable now that they live in comfort, more than 10,000 people owe their happiness to Elzeard Bouffier.
"When I reflect that one man, armed only with his own physical and moral resources, was able to cause this land of Canaan to spring from the wasteland, I am convinced that, in spite of everything, humanity is admirable. But when I compute the unfailing greatness of spirit and the tenacity of benevolence that it must have taken to achieve this result, I am taken with an immense respect for that old and unlearned peasant who was able to complete a work worthy of God.
"Elzeard Bouffier died peacefully in 1947 at the hospice in Banon."
R.I.P.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Saturday, February 17, 2007
A real hero.
by Sara Yoheved Rigler A yeshiva student's heroic choice.
If anyone in the Cracow ghetto stood a chance of surviving the Holocaust, it was Avraham Shapiro*. At 22 years old, he was a smart and resourceful young man whose mind had been honed during years of yeshiva study. He understood that the Germans were out to annihilate every Jew, and he took the precautions necessary to save himself and his middle-aged parents. He got expertly counterfeited papers identifying the three members of his family as foreign nationals. He built and stocked a bunker in a remote place underneath the ghetto. And he procured a map of the sewers and planned out an escape route for the day the ghetto would be liquidated. His master scheme was to escape to the safety of Hungary.
Then one day an 18-year-old neighbor named Chaya Rivka knocked on the Shapiros' door holding a baby. The baby, who was 20 months old and who could neither stand nor sit up by himself, was her nephew Chaim. His parents had been shipped off to Treblinka. Chaya Rivka knew that the Shapiros had foreign citizenship papers. She calculated that of all the doomed Jews in the ghetto, the Shapiros had the best chance to escape. She had approached the Shapiro family several times, asking them to take the baby with them to safety, but they had refused. A baby would be a liability that would endanger their own chances of survival.
But this day -- March 11, 1943 -- was different. Chaya Rivka had received notice that she was being deported to a labor camp. She simply couldn't take the baby along. With heart-breaking cries, she begged Avraham, who was the only one home at the time, to take the baby.
"My compassion overwhelmed my intellect, and I decided to accept the child."
Avraham -- the logical thinker, the careful planner -- was prepared to overcome the Nazis, but that day he overcame his own character. As he would later declare, "My compassion overwhelmed my intellect, and I decided to accept the child."
When his parents came home and saw Avraham holding the baby, they were aghast. How could he have forfeited their three lives for such an act of reckless compassion? Avraham replied that the baby was now his, and either the baby escaped with them, or they would all remain in the doomed ghetto.
Avraham's immediate need was to forge a birth certificate proving that the baby was his. He knew a rabbi who had an official stamp, but where to get a form? Somehow Avraham managed to locate a typewriter. He had never in his life typed, but that night he stayed up all night, and by dawn he had produced a credible birth certificate. He ran to the rabbi to stamp it. "At that moment," Avraham later wrote, "a son was born to Avraham Shapiro."
"ALL OF US TOGETHER!"
Two days later the Germans liquidated the Cracow ghetto. They assembled the Jews into a large square and divided them into groups for deportation: the young for work, the elderly for old age homes, and the children for children's residences. Avraham knew it was all a sham. "I never believed the Germans and I always tried to do the opposite of what they said." When someone tried to take the baby from him, Avraham refused to surrender him, shouting, "All of us together!"
It was impossible that day to reach the bunker he had prepared because it was in the other half of the ghetto, separated by a barbed wire fence. Avraham handed the baby to his mother and told his parents not to budge. He would find a temporary hiding place and be back to fetch them.
After a desperate search, he found an empty building with steps leading down from the entrance hall into a cellar. Amidst the peril, he managed to bring his parents and the baby there. Avraham knew that the Germans would search every building and cellar, but Divine Providence had provided an unlikely protection for them. Someone in the building had had sewage problems, and in the desperate circumstances of the ghetto, could not find a plumber. So they had filled a large barrel with the waste from their toilet and put the barrel in the stairwell. With great effort, Avraham managed to overturn the barrel, pouring excrement all over the steps leading down to the cellar. He calculated that the fastidious Germans would not be willing to soil their boots to look for Jews.
That evening they heard the Germans enter the building. To keep the baby from crying and giving them away, they had planned to give him food, but they only had dry challah with no water to soften it to make it edible. So Avraham and his parents quickly chewed the challah, spit it out, and fed the baby the softened morsels. They heard the Nazis complaining about the stink. Avraham was right; they did not deign to descend into the cellar.
This was the night, following the liquidation of the ghetto, that Avraham had planned to escape through the sewers to the "Aryan side" of Cracow. Looking at the baby, however, he was faced with a dilemma. He had heard of Jews who had fled through the sewers with their children, and the children had suffocated on the way. No, he decided, he would not risk the baby's life by escaping through the sewers. He would have to devise a different plan.
Avraham knew that they could not stay in the cellar for long. They would have to make their way to the bunker he had prepared, but a barbed wire fence blocked the way. Avraham, using a pocketknife and superhuman strength, succeeded in cutting a hole in the fence. Stealthily running through the streets, empty of live people but scattered with Jewish corpses, the Shapiro family reached the bunker.
Avraham had previously set up an electric light in the bunker by cutting electric wires out of the wall of their apartment and connecting them in the bunker. However, there was no way to pipe in water. Each day Avraham had to go up and draw water from a faucet. One day he was caught. Despite their protestations that they were foreign nationals with the papers to prove it, the three of them and baby Chaim were sent to the Gestapo prison.
THE FIRE OF LOVE
Using a gold cigarette case weighing 250 grams, they eventually bribed their way out of the prison. They immediately fled Cracow for a nearby village, where they rented a room and hid. It was autumn, 1943. Hungary was practically the last country in Europe where the "Final Solution" had not been implemented. They hired a guide to smuggle them across the border to Slovakia and from there to Hungary.
Throughout the journey they subsisted by eating raw potatoes, which Avraham and his parents chewed, regurgitated, and fed to baby Chaim. Shabbat night, October 28, found them deep in the forest on the Polish side of the border. The family was tired, cold, and frightened of being caught. The guide abruptly announced that they would have to spend the night there because they could not cross the border that night. And without a word, the guide disappeared.
The Shapiros began to organize themselves to sleep. Avraham, who had been carrying Chaim the whole time, suddenly realized that the baby was damp, silent, and not moving. He quickly removed his wrappings and saw that the baby was blue.
Trembling with fear, Avraham quickly gathered wood and branches and lit a fire to warm the baby back to life.
Trembling with fear, Avraham quickly gathered wood and branches and lit a fire to warm the baby back to life. It was an act of exquisite irrationality. The fire was a bold advertisement of their whereabouts, but Avraham's compassion yet again conquered his intellect. He held the baby as close to the fire as was safe, turning him from side to side, while Mrs. Shapiro stood on the other side of the bonfire drying and warming the baby's clothes.
Chaim revived. He regained his color and started to move. And Avraham, who had and would face repeated danger to his own life throughout the Holocaust, would remember those minutes of fear for the baby's life as the most traumatic of the war.
All of Shabbat they waited, wondering if the guide would return. As darkness fell on Saturday night, the guide appeared. When he saw the ashes of the fire, he became enraged at their recklessness.
It was time to proceed toward the border. To prevent a repetition of the calamity, Avraham took a sheet and tied the baby to his chest, facing toward him. This gave him a constant view of Chaim's welfare, but totally blocked his field of vision of the ground. Treading over rocks and rough terrain, all invisible to him, Avraham at one point tripped, tearing off the sole of his shoe. He tied some rags around his foot and kept going. Hours later they crossed the border into Slovakia.
"FOR THE GOOD OF THE CHILD"
Eventually the fugitives made it to Budapest. They were put up in refugee quarters. A Jewish aid worker, hearing that they had with them an orphan baby who was not their own, suggested that they give the baby to the Schonbruns, a well-to-do, childless, religious Jewish couple.
This time Avraham's intellect and compassion converged. Little Chaim, now two years old, was malnourished and sickly, and still could not even sit up by himself. Avraham knew that his baby's welfare required a stable, normal home, where he would be fed three meals a day and be safe from the danger that still hung over the Shapiro family. Over the virulent protests of his mother, who had grown attached to the baby, Avraham took Chaim to the Schonbruns' house. He was impressed not by the lavish furnishings but by the ample bookcases full of holy books. Confident that he was doing what was best for Chaim, Avraham handed his son over to the Schonbruns.
When Avraham occasionally met Mr. Schonbrun in synagogue and inquired about Chaim, he received only cursory answers. Avraham inferred that the Schonbruns did not want Chaim to know anything about his past. "I distanced myself from the family," wrote Avraham, "for the good of the child."
On March 19, 1944, the Germans took over Hungary. On a Shabbat night two months later, Avraham and his father were apprehended in synagogue. They were transferred from place to place until they were finally loaded onto a boxcar heading to Auschwitz. With a knife he had procured from an old cobbler, Avraham was able to enlarge a tiny window in the boxcar. As the train sped through Slovakia on its way to the death camp, Avraham and his father jumped out.
They spent the rest of the war in Slovakia, masquerading as gentiles. As soon as the Russians liberated Slovakia, Avraham and his father made their way back to Budapest, back to the dwelling where they had left Mrs. Shapiro almost a year before. When they opened the door, they found Mrs. Shapiro sitting by the table eating a piece of matzah. It was the first day of Passover, the holiday of freedom.
THE BOX
Only once in post-war Budapest did Avraham spot little Chaim. The child was walking (yes, walking!) on the street with his nanny. "Tears welled up in my eyes," wrote Avraham in his memoirs, "but I never approached the child."
Communist Hungary was no place for religious Jews. Shortly after the war, the Schonbruns left for Belgium, then Montreal, Canada, where Chaim grew up and eventually married. In 1950, Avraham Shapiro got married and moved to Israel.
A couple years after his marriage, Chaim was told, "There's a Jew in Israel who carried you from Poland to Hungary, and saved your life."
But the thread of their lives, knotted together by a compassion stronger than logic or even love of life, was not severed. Avraham continually kept tabs on Chaim, and Divine Providence conspired that Chaim's wife's aunt, who lived in Haifa, was a close friend of Mrs. Avraham Shapiro.
A couple years after his marriage, Chaim was told by his uncle in Belgium, "There's a Jew in Israel who carried you from Poland to Hungary, and saved your life." Chaim, however, had no idea as to the identity of his benefactor, who continued to watch him from afar.
In 1980, at the age of 37, Chaim brought his family to Israel for his son's Bar Mitzvah. His wife's aunt sent him a message that the Jew who had saved his life was named Avraham Shapiro. Mr. Shapiro, now 60, lived in Haifa and was finally ready to meet Chaim.
That very day, Chaim took a taxi from Jerusalem to Haifa. "Our meeting was very emotional," Chaim recalls. "We both cried and cried, and we spoke for hours."
It was the beginning of a close bond between their two families. During the succeeding 27 years, Avraham has attended the weddings of all of Chaim's children, and Chaim has attended the weddings of all of Avraham's grandchildren. "We are very, very close," Chaim attests. "I consider him like a father, and he considers me like a son."
But why had Avraham not made contact with Chaim sooner? Why had it taken him 35 years to reconnect?
The answer was perhaps contained in a box. Before they parted that day in 1980, Avraham told Chaim, "I have something to give you." He handed him a box, saying, "I have waited 35 years to give you this."
Chaim opened the box and saw that it was full of pieces of gold. Avraham explained that before Chaim's mother was shipped off to Treblinka, she had given this box full of gold to her younger sister Chaya Rivka, and charged her to use it to save the life of her only child. When Avraham agreed to take the baby, Chaya Rivka transferred the box to him.
During their flight from Poland, the Shapiro family used up their own supply of gold. Avraham was forced, reluctantly, to use little Chaim's gold. By the time they reached Budapest, there was nothing left. This greatly bothered Avraham. "I had done the mitzvah of saving a life," Avraham explained to Chaim, "and I didn't want to sell this mitzvah for any amount of gold."
In the wake of the war, as soon as Avraham started working, he put aside some of his wages every week to buy gold. It had taken him 35 years, but he finally had the exact amount of gold originally contained in Chaim's mother's box. He handed the box to Chaim, content that he had taken no profit from the enormous mitzvah of saving a life. Chaim refused to accept the gold. Avraham donated it to a myriad of charity organizations in Israel in the name of Chaim Schonbrun.
In the Cracow ghetto, compassion had overcome Avraham Shapiro's intellect. Nothing ever overcame his integrity.
*"Shapiro" is a pseudonym. The protagonist prefers to remain anonymous.
Sara Yoheved Rigler is planning a short lecture tour in America this June. If you are interested in her speaking in your city, please write to srigler@aish.com.
If anyone in the Cracow ghetto stood a chance of surviving the Holocaust, it was Avraham Shapiro*. At 22 years old, he was a smart and resourceful young man whose mind had been honed during years of yeshiva study. He understood that the Germans were out to annihilate every Jew, and he took the precautions necessary to save himself and his middle-aged parents. He got expertly counterfeited papers identifying the three members of his family as foreign nationals. He built and stocked a bunker in a remote place underneath the ghetto. And he procured a map of the sewers and planned out an escape route for the day the ghetto would be liquidated. His master scheme was to escape to the safety of Hungary.
Then one day an 18-year-old neighbor named Chaya Rivka knocked on the Shapiros' door holding a baby. The baby, who was 20 months old and who could neither stand nor sit up by himself, was her nephew Chaim. His parents had been shipped off to Treblinka. Chaya Rivka knew that the Shapiros had foreign citizenship papers. She calculated that of all the doomed Jews in the ghetto, the Shapiros had the best chance to escape. She had approached the Shapiro family several times, asking them to take the baby with them to safety, but they had refused. A baby would be a liability that would endanger their own chances of survival.
But this day -- March 11, 1943 -- was different. Chaya Rivka had received notice that she was being deported to a labor camp. She simply couldn't take the baby along. With heart-breaking cries, she begged Avraham, who was the only one home at the time, to take the baby.
"My compassion overwhelmed my intellect, and I decided to accept the child."
Avraham -- the logical thinker, the careful planner -- was prepared to overcome the Nazis, but that day he overcame his own character. As he would later declare, "My compassion overwhelmed my intellect, and I decided to accept the child."
When his parents came home and saw Avraham holding the baby, they were aghast. How could he have forfeited their three lives for such an act of reckless compassion? Avraham replied that the baby was now his, and either the baby escaped with them, or they would all remain in the doomed ghetto.
Avraham's immediate need was to forge a birth certificate proving that the baby was his. He knew a rabbi who had an official stamp, but where to get a form? Somehow Avraham managed to locate a typewriter. He had never in his life typed, but that night he stayed up all night, and by dawn he had produced a credible birth certificate. He ran to the rabbi to stamp it. "At that moment," Avraham later wrote, "a son was born to Avraham Shapiro."
"ALL OF US TOGETHER!"
Two days later the Germans liquidated the Cracow ghetto. They assembled the Jews into a large square and divided them into groups for deportation: the young for work, the elderly for old age homes, and the children for children's residences. Avraham knew it was all a sham. "I never believed the Germans and I always tried to do the opposite of what they said." When someone tried to take the baby from him, Avraham refused to surrender him, shouting, "All of us together!"
It was impossible that day to reach the bunker he had prepared because it was in the other half of the ghetto, separated by a barbed wire fence. Avraham handed the baby to his mother and told his parents not to budge. He would find a temporary hiding place and be back to fetch them.
After a desperate search, he found an empty building with steps leading down from the entrance hall into a cellar. Amidst the peril, he managed to bring his parents and the baby there. Avraham knew that the Germans would search every building and cellar, but Divine Providence had provided an unlikely protection for them. Someone in the building had had sewage problems, and in the desperate circumstances of the ghetto, could not find a plumber. So they had filled a large barrel with the waste from their toilet and put the barrel in the stairwell. With great effort, Avraham managed to overturn the barrel, pouring excrement all over the steps leading down to the cellar. He calculated that the fastidious Germans would not be willing to soil their boots to look for Jews.
That evening they heard the Germans enter the building. To keep the baby from crying and giving them away, they had planned to give him food, but they only had dry challah with no water to soften it to make it edible. So Avraham and his parents quickly chewed the challah, spit it out, and fed the baby the softened morsels. They heard the Nazis complaining about the stink. Avraham was right; they did not deign to descend into the cellar.
This was the night, following the liquidation of the ghetto, that Avraham had planned to escape through the sewers to the "Aryan side" of Cracow. Looking at the baby, however, he was faced with a dilemma. He had heard of Jews who had fled through the sewers with their children, and the children had suffocated on the way. No, he decided, he would not risk the baby's life by escaping through the sewers. He would have to devise a different plan.
Avraham knew that they could not stay in the cellar for long. They would have to make their way to the bunker he had prepared, but a barbed wire fence blocked the way. Avraham, using a pocketknife and superhuman strength, succeeded in cutting a hole in the fence. Stealthily running through the streets, empty of live people but scattered with Jewish corpses, the Shapiro family reached the bunker.
Avraham had previously set up an electric light in the bunker by cutting electric wires out of the wall of their apartment and connecting them in the bunker. However, there was no way to pipe in water. Each day Avraham had to go up and draw water from a faucet. One day he was caught. Despite their protestations that they were foreign nationals with the papers to prove it, the three of them and baby Chaim were sent to the Gestapo prison.
THE FIRE OF LOVE
Using a gold cigarette case weighing 250 grams, they eventually bribed their way out of the prison. They immediately fled Cracow for a nearby village, where they rented a room and hid. It was autumn, 1943. Hungary was practically the last country in Europe where the "Final Solution" had not been implemented. They hired a guide to smuggle them across the border to Slovakia and from there to Hungary.
Throughout the journey they subsisted by eating raw potatoes, which Avraham and his parents chewed, regurgitated, and fed to baby Chaim. Shabbat night, October 28, found them deep in the forest on the Polish side of the border. The family was tired, cold, and frightened of being caught. The guide abruptly announced that they would have to spend the night there because they could not cross the border that night. And without a word, the guide disappeared.
The Shapiros began to organize themselves to sleep. Avraham, who had been carrying Chaim the whole time, suddenly realized that the baby was damp, silent, and not moving. He quickly removed his wrappings and saw that the baby was blue.
Trembling with fear, Avraham quickly gathered wood and branches and lit a fire to warm the baby back to life.
Trembling with fear, Avraham quickly gathered wood and branches and lit a fire to warm the baby back to life. It was an act of exquisite irrationality. The fire was a bold advertisement of their whereabouts, but Avraham's compassion yet again conquered his intellect. He held the baby as close to the fire as was safe, turning him from side to side, while Mrs. Shapiro stood on the other side of the bonfire drying and warming the baby's clothes.
Chaim revived. He regained his color and started to move. And Avraham, who had and would face repeated danger to his own life throughout the Holocaust, would remember those minutes of fear for the baby's life as the most traumatic of the war.
All of Shabbat they waited, wondering if the guide would return. As darkness fell on Saturday night, the guide appeared. When he saw the ashes of the fire, he became enraged at their recklessness.
It was time to proceed toward the border. To prevent a repetition of the calamity, Avraham took a sheet and tied the baby to his chest, facing toward him. This gave him a constant view of Chaim's welfare, but totally blocked his field of vision of the ground. Treading over rocks and rough terrain, all invisible to him, Avraham at one point tripped, tearing off the sole of his shoe. He tied some rags around his foot and kept going. Hours later they crossed the border into Slovakia.
"FOR THE GOOD OF THE CHILD"
Eventually the fugitives made it to Budapest. They were put up in refugee quarters. A Jewish aid worker, hearing that they had with them an orphan baby who was not their own, suggested that they give the baby to the Schonbruns, a well-to-do, childless, religious Jewish couple.
This time Avraham's intellect and compassion converged. Little Chaim, now two years old, was malnourished and sickly, and still could not even sit up by himself. Avraham knew that his baby's welfare required a stable, normal home, where he would be fed three meals a day and be safe from the danger that still hung over the Shapiro family. Over the virulent protests of his mother, who had grown attached to the baby, Avraham took Chaim to the Schonbruns' house. He was impressed not by the lavish furnishings but by the ample bookcases full of holy books. Confident that he was doing what was best for Chaim, Avraham handed his son over to the Schonbruns.
When Avraham occasionally met Mr. Schonbrun in synagogue and inquired about Chaim, he received only cursory answers. Avraham inferred that the Schonbruns did not want Chaim to know anything about his past. "I distanced myself from the family," wrote Avraham, "for the good of the child."
On March 19, 1944, the Germans took over Hungary. On a Shabbat night two months later, Avraham and his father were apprehended in synagogue. They were transferred from place to place until they were finally loaded onto a boxcar heading to Auschwitz. With a knife he had procured from an old cobbler, Avraham was able to enlarge a tiny window in the boxcar. As the train sped through Slovakia on its way to the death camp, Avraham and his father jumped out.
They spent the rest of the war in Slovakia, masquerading as gentiles. As soon as the Russians liberated Slovakia, Avraham and his father made their way back to Budapest, back to the dwelling where they had left Mrs. Shapiro almost a year before. When they opened the door, they found Mrs. Shapiro sitting by the table eating a piece of matzah. It was the first day of Passover, the holiday of freedom.
THE BOX
Only once in post-war Budapest did Avraham spot little Chaim. The child was walking (yes, walking!) on the street with his nanny. "Tears welled up in my eyes," wrote Avraham in his memoirs, "but I never approached the child."
Communist Hungary was no place for religious Jews. Shortly after the war, the Schonbruns left for Belgium, then Montreal, Canada, where Chaim grew up and eventually married. In 1950, Avraham Shapiro got married and moved to Israel.
A couple years after his marriage, Chaim was told, "There's a Jew in Israel who carried you from Poland to Hungary, and saved your life."
But the thread of their lives, knotted together by a compassion stronger than logic or even love of life, was not severed. Avraham continually kept tabs on Chaim, and Divine Providence conspired that Chaim's wife's aunt, who lived in Haifa, was a close friend of Mrs. Avraham Shapiro.
A couple years after his marriage, Chaim was told by his uncle in Belgium, "There's a Jew in Israel who carried you from Poland to Hungary, and saved your life." Chaim, however, had no idea as to the identity of his benefactor, who continued to watch him from afar.
In 1980, at the age of 37, Chaim brought his family to Israel for his son's Bar Mitzvah. His wife's aunt sent him a message that the Jew who had saved his life was named Avraham Shapiro. Mr. Shapiro, now 60, lived in Haifa and was finally ready to meet Chaim.
That very day, Chaim took a taxi from Jerusalem to Haifa. "Our meeting was very emotional," Chaim recalls. "We both cried and cried, and we spoke for hours."
It was the beginning of a close bond between their two families. During the succeeding 27 years, Avraham has attended the weddings of all of Chaim's children, and Chaim has attended the weddings of all of Avraham's grandchildren. "We are very, very close," Chaim attests. "I consider him like a father, and he considers me like a son."
But why had Avraham not made contact with Chaim sooner? Why had it taken him 35 years to reconnect?
The answer was perhaps contained in a box. Before they parted that day in 1980, Avraham told Chaim, "I have something to give you." He handed him a box, saying, "I have waited 35 years to give you this."
Chaim opened the box and saw that it was full of pieces of gold. Avraham explained that before Chaim's mother was shipped off to Treblinka, she had given this box full of gold to her younger sister Chaya Rivka, and charged her to use it to save the life of her only child. When Avraham agreed to take the baby, Chaya Rivka transferred the box to him.
During their flight from Poland, the Shapiro family used up their own supply of gold. Avraham was forced, reluctantly, to use little Chaim's gold. By the time they reached Budapest, there was nothing left. This greatly bothered Avraham. "I had done the mitzvah of saving a life," Avraham explained to Chaim, "and I didn't want to sell this mitzvah for any amount of gold."
In the wake of the war, as soon as Avraham started working, he put aside some of his wages every week to buy gold. It had taken him 35 years, but he finally had the exact amount of gold originally contained in Chaim's mother's box. He handed the box to Chaim, content that he had taken no profit from the enormous mitzvah of saving a life. Chaim refused to accept the gold. Avraham donated it to a myriad of charity organizations in Israel in the name of Chaim Schonbrun.
In the Cracow ghetto, compassion had overcome Avraham Shapiro's intellect. Nothing ever overcame his integrity.
*"Shapiro" is a pseudonym. The protagonist prefers to remain anonymous.
Sara Yoheved Rigler is planning a short lecture tour in America this June. If you are interested in her speaking in your city, please write to srigler@aish.com.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Thursday, February 15, 2007
How the government killed the Challenger crew
The Writing of Challenger Revealed
by Richard C. Cook
My book Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age is being published this month (February 2007) by Thunder’s Mouth Press. It’s the only book by a participant in both the events leading up to the Challenger disaster of 1986 and the investigations which followed it.
I went to work at NASA in July 1985, six months before Challenger blew up 73 seconds after liftoff in the freezing morning temperatures in Florida on January 28, 1986. I had been hired as a resource analyst in the comptroller’s office at headquarters.
My first assignment was to interview the solid rocket booster engineers at headquarters who were looking at problems with the O-ring joints which connected the segments of the rockets. I was shocked when they told me that the flaws in the joints could cause the shuttle to blow up. They said they "held their breath" with every launch. Though a redesign was in the works, the shuttle would "fly as is" for over two more years. I reported this in a memo to management.
There were other problems with the shuttle that caused people at headquarters to say that "sooner or later" there would be a catastrophe which would bring the program to a halt. But no one could stop it. The Space Transportation System had been declared operational by President Reagan after the fourth shuttle flight in 1982.
Besides, the shuttle was becoming a platform for space weapons testing under the Strategic Defense Initiative – "Star Wars" – so it was an integral part of the Reagan military build-up. Whether the military use of the shuttle was in agreement with the stated purpose of NASA’s 1958 enabling legislation – "that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of mankind" – was a question no one seemed to be asking.
The greatest tragedy of the space age took place that cold January morning. Seven astronauts died, including Christa McAuliffe, the teacher-in-space. They were calling her mission "the ultimate field trip."
NASA knew that same afternoon exactly what had happened to cause the disaster. The O-rings had been too cold to seal. A burnthrough in the side of one of the two booster rockets severed the strut which connected it to the external tank. The hydrogen from the tank ignited in a gigantic fireball, and the Challenger orbiter broke into pieces, with the crew cabin emerging intact. The cabin fell 40,000 feet and struck the ocean at 200 miles per hour. At least some of the astronauts were alive on the way down. We know this, because three of their emergency air packs had been activated.
NASA immediately moved to implement a cover-up, but more was going on than met the eye. A few days later a Presidential Commission was created by the White House which had its own cover-up agenda, namely to conceal White House involvement in the launch decision in connection with publicity for the teacher-in-space mission.
So I was sitting with my wife Phyllis in our house in rural Virginia with a pile of documents showing just how thoroughly NASA was aware of the O-ring problems and how they knew such a disaster could happen. I approached the Presidential Commission but sensed something was strange with their approach so quickly backed off. I tried to document internally that engineers were saying it was a preventable accident, but NASA confiscated all the copies of my report – except the one I took home, of course.
I made the decision to leak the O-ring papers, including my own July 23, 1985, warning memo, to the New York Times. The story that resulted, written by science writer Phillip Boffey, won the Pulitzer Prize.
Suffice it to say that almost everything the public learned about Challenger, notably the facts that the O-ring seals were known to be deficient and that the night before the launch, engineers from Morton Thiokol had argued vociferously against launching in the cold weather, originated with whistleblowers who defied their organizations to speak out. These included myself at NASA headquarters, Roger Boisjoly and Alan McDonald of Morton Thiokol, a member of the Presidential Commission, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Richard Feynman, and John Young, NASA’s most veteran astronaut. From one point of view, my book is the largely untold story of the whistleblowers.
But there were many things the official reports did not disclose. While the militarization of the manned space program was the chief underlying cause of the disaster, not one word in the reports of the Commission or the House Science and Technology Committee mentioned this fact. The reports claimed that higher NASA officials were uninformed about the O-ring problems, which was untrue. The reports blamed poor communications and procedures, also untrue. NASA was the world leader in communications and procedures. Nothing was said about the fact that NASA was in the throes of a leadership crisis due to a virtual coup engineered by the political right-wing a few weeks before the explosion. Finally, the Commission claimed there was no political pressure from outside NASA to launch Challenger, which my book shows conclusively to be false.
In fact, Chairman William Rogers admitted to the Senate that the Commission didn’t know why NASA launched when it shouldn’t have. This was repeated in the report of the House Science and Technology Committee. Think of it – two major government investigations, months of hearings and investigations, thousands of pages of records and reports, and they said they didn’t know why it happened.
My book analyzes all these issues through meeting notes, documents, interviews, and analysis, much of which has never before been disclosed in print. And my book, twenty-one years later, does tell you why and how it happened.
February 15, 2007
Richard C. Cook [send him mail] is the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by Publisher’s Weekly, "easily the most informative and important book on the disaster." He worked in the Carter White House and NASA before spending twenty-one years as an analyst with the U.S. Treasury Department. Once a high school history teacher, he is now a writer and consultant on public policy issues. Seeing how our debt-based monetary system has bankrupted our country, he is also working on a book on monetary reform. His website is at richardccook.com.
Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com
by Richard C. Cook
My book Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age is being published this month (February 2007) by Thunder’s Mouth Press. It’s the only book by a participant in both the events leading up to the Challenger disaster of 1986 and the investigations which followed it.
I went to work at NASA in July 1985, six months before Challenger blew up 73 seconds after liftoff in the freezing morning temperatures in Florida on January 28, 1986. I had been hired as a resource analyst in the comptroller’s office at headquarters.
My first assignment was to interview the solid rocket booster engineers at headquarters who were looking at problems with the O-ring joints which connected the segments of the rockets. I was shocked when they told me that the flaws in the joints could cause the shuttle to blow up. They said they "held their breath" with every launch. Though a redesign was in the works, the shuttle would "fly as is" for over two more years. I reported this in a memo to management.
There were other problems with the shuttle that caused people at headquarters to say that "sooner or later" there would be a catastrophe which would bring the program to a halt. But no one could stop it. The Space Transportation System had been declared operational by President Reagan after the fourth shuttle flight in 1982.
Besides, the shuttle was becoming a platform for space weapons testing under the Strategic Defense Initiative – "Star Wars" – so it was an integral part of the Reagan military build-up. Whether the military use of the shuttle was in agreement with the stated purpose of NASA’s 1958 enabling legislation – "that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of mankind" – was a question no one seemed to be asking.
The greatest tragedy of the space age took place that cold January morning. Seven astronauts died, including Christa McAuliffe, the teacher-in-space. They were calling her mission "the ultimate field trip."
NASA knew that same afternoon exactly what had happened to cause the disaster. The O-rings had been too cold to seal. A burnthrough in the side of one of the two booster rockets severed the strut which connected it to the external tank. The hydrogen from the tank ignited in a gigantic fireball, and the Challenger orbiter broke into pieces, with the crew cabin emerging intact. The cabin fell 40,000 feet and struck the ocean at 200 miles per hour. At least some of the astronauts were alive on the way down. We know this, because three of their emergency air packs had been activated.
NASA immediately moved to implement a cover-up, but more was going on than met the eye. A few days later a Presidential Commission was created by the White House which had its own cover-up agenda, namely to conceal White House involvement in the launch decision in connection with publicity for the teacher-in-space mission.
So I was sitting with my wife Phyllis in our house in rural Virginia with a pile of documents showing just how thoroughly NASA was aware of the O-ring problems and how they knew such a disaster could happen. I approached the Presidential Commission but sensed something was strange with their approach so quickly backed off. I tried to document internally that engineers were saying it was a preventable accident, but NASA confiscated all the copies of my report – except the one I took home, of course.
I made the decision to leak the O-ring papers, including my own July 23, 1985, warning memo, to the New York Times. The story that resulted, written by science writer Phillip Boffey, won the Pulitzer Prize.
Suffice it to say that almost everything the public learned about Challenger, notably the facts that the O-ring seals were known to be deficient and that the night before the launch, engineers from Morton Thiokol had argued vociferously against launching in the cold weather, originated with whistleblowers who defied their organizations to speak out. These included myself at NASA headquarters, Roger Boisjoly and Alan McDonald of Morton Thiokol, a member of the Presidential Commission, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Richard Feynman, and John Young, NASA’s most veteran astronaut. From one point of view, my book is the largely untold story of the whistleblowers.
But there were many things the official reports did not disclose. While the militarization of the manned space program was the chief underlying cause of the disaster, not one word in the reports of the Commission or the House Science and Technology Committee mentioned this fact. The reports claimed that higher NASA officials were uninformed about the O-ring problems, which was untrue. The reports blamed poor communications and procedures, also untrue. NASA was the world leader in communications and procedures. Nothing was said about the fact that NASA was in the throes of a leadership crisis due to a virtual coup engineered by the political right-wing a few weeks before the explosion. Finally, the Commission claimed there was no political pressure from outside NASA to launch Challenger, which my book shows conclusively to be false.
In fact, Chairman William Rogers admitted to the Senate that the Commission didn’t know why NASA launched when it shouldn’t have. This was repeated in the report of the House Science and Technology Committee. Think of it – two major government investigations, months of hearings and investigations, thousands of pages of records and reports, and they said they didn’t know why it happened.
My book analyzes all these issues through meeting notes, documents, interviews, and analysis, much of which has never before been disclosed in print. And my book, twenty-one years later, does tell you why and how it happened.
February 15, 2007
Richard C. Cook [send him mail] is the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by Publisher’s Weekly, "easily the most informative and important book on the disaster." He worked in the Carter White House and NASA before spending twenty-one years as an analyst with the U.S. Treasury Department. Once a high school history teacher, he is now a writer and consultant on public policy issues. Seeing how our debt-based monetary system has bankrupted our country, he is also working on a book on monetary reform. His website is at richardccook.com.
Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
And the beat goes on.
Ulster on the Euphrates: The Anglo-American Dirty War in Iraq
by Chris Floyd
I. Paint it Black
Imagine a city torn by sectarian strife. Competing death squads roam the streets; terrorists stage horrific attacks. Local authority is distrusted and weak; local populations protect the extremists in theirmidst, out of loyalty or fear. A bristling military occupation exacerbates tensions at every turn, while offering prime targets for bombs and snipers. And behind the scenes, in a shadow world of double-cross and double-bluff, covert units of the occupying power run agents on both sides of the civil war, countenancing – and sometimes directing – assassinations, terrorist strikes, torture sessions, and ethnic cleansing.
Is this a portrait of Belfast during "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland? Or a picture of Baghdad today? It is both; and in both cases, one of Britain's most secret – and most criminally compromised – military units has plied its trade in the darkness, "turning" and controlling terrorist killers in a dangerous bid to wring actionable intelligence from blood and betrayal. And America's covert soldiers are right there with them, working side-by-side with their British comrades in the aptly named "Task Force Black," the UK's Sunday Telegraph reports.
Last week, the right-wing, pro-war paper published an early valentine to the "Joint Support Group," the covert unit whose bland name belies its dramatic role at the center of the Anglo-American "dirty war" in Iraq. In gushing, lavish, uncritical prose that could have been (and perhaps was) scripted by the unit itself, the Telegraph lauded the team of secret warriors as "one of the Coalition's most effective and deadly weapons in the fight against terror," running "dozens of Iraqi double-agents," including "members of terrorist groups."
What the story fails to mention is the fact that in its Ulster incarnation, the JSG – then known as the Force Research Unit (FRU) – actively colluded in the murder of at least 15 civilians by Loyalist deaths squads, and an untold number of victims killed, maimed and tortured by the many Irish Republican Army double-agents controlled by the unit. What's more, the man who commanded the FRU during the height of its depredations – Lt. Col. Gordon Kerr – is in Baghdad now, heading the hugger-mugger Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), a large counter-terrorism force made up of unnamed "existing assets" from the glory days in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.
This despite the fact that a 10-year, $100 million investigation by Britain's top police officer, Lord Stevens, confirmed in 2003 that the Kerr-led FRU "sanctioned killings" through "institutionalized collusion" with both Protestant and Catholic militias during the 1980s and 1990s. Stevens sent dossiers of evidence against Kerr and 20 other security apparatchiks to the Blair government's Director of Public Prosecutions, in the expectation that the fiery Scotsman and the others would be put on trial.
But instead prosecuting Kerr, Blair promoted him: first to a plum assignment as British military attach̩ in Beijing Рeffectively the number two man in all of UK military intelligence, as Scotland's Sunday Herald notes Рthen with the SRR posting to Baghdad, where Kerr and his former FRU mates now apply the "methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles," as the Telegraph breathlessly relates.
The Telegraph puff piece is naturally coy about revealing these methods, beyond the fact that, as in Ireland, the JSG uses "a variety of inducements ranging from blackmail to bribes" to turn Iraqi terrorists into Coalition agents. So to get a better idea of the techniques employed by the group in Baghdad, we must return to those "mean streets of Ulster" and the unit's reign of terror and collusion there, which has been thoroughly documented not only by the exhaustive Stevens inquiries, but also in a remarkable series of investigative reports by the Sunday Herald's Neil Mackay, and in extensive stories by the BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, the Times and others.
We will also see how the operations of the JSG and "Task Force Black" dovetail with U.S. efforts to apply the lessons of its own dirty wars – such as the "Salvador Option" – to Iraq, as well as long-running Bush Administration initiatives to arm and fund "friendly" militias while infiltrating terrorist groups in order to "provoke them into action." It is indeed a picture painted in black, a glimpse at the dark muck that lies beneath the high-flown rhetoric about freedom and civilization forever issuing from the lips of the war leaders.
II. Whacking for the Peelers
Gregory Burns had a problem. He was one of Gordon Kerr's FRU informers planted deep inside the IRA, along with two of his friends, Johnny Dignam and Aidan Starrs. But as Mackay noted in a February 2003 story, the already-partnered Burns had acquired a girlfriend on the side, Margaret Perry, 26, a "civilian" Catholic with no paramilitary ties. Forbidden fruit is sweet, of course – but pillow talk is dangerous for an inside man. "Burns didn't keep his mouth shut and [Perry] found out he was working for British intelligence," an FRU officer told Mackay. "He tried to convince her he was a double-agent the IRA had planted in the [British] army – but she didn't buy it."
Burns called his FRU handlers and asked to come in from the cold. He'd been compromised, he said, and now he and his friends needed to get out, with new identities, relocation, good jobs – the usual payoff for trusted agents when the jig was up. But Kerr refused: "He said [Burns] should silence Perry," the FRU man told Mackay. Burns, panicking at thought of the IRA's horrific retributions against informers, insisted: he would have to kill the woman if they didn't bring him in, he told Kerr. Again Kerr refused.
And so Burns arranged a meeting with his lover, to "talk over" the situation. His friends, Aidan and Johnny, volunteered to drive her there: "On the way, they pulled into a forest, beat her to death and buried her in a shallow grave," Mackay notes. Two years later, when her body was found, the IRA put two and two together – and slowly tortured Burns and his two friends to death, after first extracting copious amounts of information about British intelligence operations in Ireland.
'In Kerr's eyes, Burns just wasn't important enough to resettle," the FRU source told the Sunday Herald. "So we ended up with four unnecessary deaths and the compromising of British army intelligence officers, which ultimately put soldiers' lives at risk. To Kerr, it was always a matter of the ends justifying the means."
Then again, Kerr could well afford to sacrifice a few informers here and there to the wrath of the IRA's dreaded "security unit" – because his own prize double agent was the head of that security unit. Codenamed "Stakeknife," Kerr's man presided over, and sometimes administered, the grisly torture-murders of up to 50 men during his tenure in the IRA's upper ranks. The victims included other British double agents who were sacrificed in order to protect Stakeknife's cover, as the Guardian and many other UK papers reported when the agent's work was revealed in 2003. ("Stakeknife" was later identified in the press as Alfredo Scappaticci – an Irishman despite the Italian name, although he continues to deny the charge.)
The FRU also "knowingly allowed soldiers, [police] officers and civilians to die at the hands of IRA bombers in order to protect republican double agents," the Sunday Herald's investigations found. As Mackay reports: "FRU sources said around seven police and army personnel died as a result of military intelligence allowing IRA bombs to be placed during Kerr's time in command of the FRU. They estimate that three civilians also died this way, with casualties in the hundreds."
But some of the worst excesses came from the FRU's handling of operatives on the other side, in the fiercely pro-British Protestant militia the Ulster Defense Association (UDA). Here, among the Loyalists, Kerr's top double agent was Brian Nelson, who became head of intelligence for the UDA. As John Ware put it in the Guardian: "Kerr regarded Nelson as his jewel in the crown… For the next three years [from 1987], Nelson colluded with murder gangs to shoot IRA suspects. Month after month, armed and masked men crashed into homes. Sometimes they got the wrong address or shot the wrong person."
Such as Gerald Slane, a 27-year-old Belfast man shot down in front of his three children. A gun had been found dumped on his property; this, and his Catholicism, was enough to get him assassinated at the order of Kerr's man Nelson. Afterwards, it was found that Slane had no IRA connections.
Another "wrong person" killed by the FRU's agents was the Belfast attorney Pat Finucane, who was shot 14 times in front of his wife and children. Finucane was a civil rights activist who had defended both Catholics and Protestants, but was considered an IRA sympathizer by Loyalists – and a thorn in the side by British authorities. He was killed at Nelson's order by a fellow FRU informer in the UDA, Ken Barrett, who was convicted of the murder but freed last year after as part of an amnesty program in the Northern Ireland peace process. Barrett was unapologetic about his FRU "wetwork" on Finucane. "The peelers [authorities] wanted him whacked," he told a BBC documentary team after his release. "We whacked him and that is the end of the story."
Kerr gave Nelson packages of intelligence files to help facilitate the assassination of UDA targets, including at least four "civilians" with no IRA ties, the Stevens inquiry found. The FRU also obtained "restriction orders" from other British security and military units in Northern Ireland, whereby they would pull their forces from an area when Kerr's UDA agents were going to make a hit there, allowing the killers to get in and get out without hindrance, investigator Nick Davies reports.
Yet the FRU was wary of sharing its own intelligence with other security services – which was the ostensible reason for running the double-agents in the first place. Instead, Kerr engaged in fierce turf wars with other agencies, while "stovepiping" much of his intelligence to the top circles of the UK government, including the cabinet-level Intelligence Committee chaired by then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, when Nelson was finally exposed and brought to trial on five counts of conspiracy to commit murder, Kerr testified in his behalf, noting for the court that Nelson's intelligence "product and his reporting was passed through the intelligence community and at a high level, and from that point of view he has to be considered a very important agent."
As one FRU man told Mackay: "Under Kerr's command…the mindset was one of 'the right people would be allowed to live and wrong people should die.'"
This is the "mindset" now operating in the heart of the Green Zone in Baghdad, where the JSG is carrying out – we are told in glowing terms – precisely the same mission it had in Ulster. a unit which has allowed its agents to torture, murder and commit acts of terrorism, including actions that killed local civilians and the soldiers and intelligence operatives of their own country.
III. The White House Green Light
Of course, Kerr and his Baghdad black-op crew are not alone in the double-dealing world of Iraqi counterinsurgency. The Pentagon's ever-expanding secret armies are deeply enmeshed in such efforts as well. As Sy Hersh has reported ("The Coming Wars," New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2005), after his re-election in 2004, George W. Bush signed a series of secret presidential directives that authorized the Pentagon to run virtually unrestricted covert operations, including a reprise of the American-backed, American-trained death squads employed by authoritarian regimes in Central and South America during the Reagan Administration, where so many of the Bush faction cut their teeth – and made their bones.
"Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” a former high-level intelligence official said to Hersh. "We founded them and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it." A Pentagon insider added: "We’re going to be riding with the bad boys." Another role model for the expanded dirty war cited by Pentagon sources, said Hersh, was Britain's brutal repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya during the 1950s, when British forces set up concentration camps, created their own terrorist groups to confuse and discredit the insurgency, and killed thousands of innocent civilians in quashing the uprising.
Bush's formal greenlighting of the death-squad option built upon an already securely-established base, part of a larger effort to turn the world into a "global free-fire zone" for covert operatives, as one top Pentagon official told Hersh. For example, in November 2002 a Pentagon plan to infiltrate terrorist groups and "stimulate" them into action was uncovered by William Arkin, then writing for the Los Angeles Times. The new unit, the "Proactive, Pre-emptive Operations Group," was described in the Pentagon documents as "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" that brings "together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence and cover and deception."
Later, in August 2004, then deputy Pentagon chief Paul Wolfowitz appeared before Congress to ask for $500 million to arm and train non-governmental "local militias" to serve as U.S. proxies for "counter-insurgency and "counterterrorist" operations in "ungoverned areas" and hot spots around the world, Agence France Presse (and virtually no one else) reported at the time. These hired paramilitaries were to be employed in what Wolfowitz called an "arc of crisis" that just happened to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and strategic pipeline routes of Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America.
By then, the Bush Administration had already begun laying the groundwork for an expanded covert war in the hot spot of Iraq. In November 2003, it created a "commando squad" drawn from the sectarian militias of five major Iraqi factions, as the Washington Post reported that year. Armed, funded and trained by the American occupation forces, and supplied with a "state-of-the-art command, control and communications center" from the Pentagon, the new Iraqi commandos were loosed on the then-nascent Iraqi insurgency – despite the very prescient fears of some U.S. officials "that various Sunni or Shiite factions could eventually use the service to secretly undermine their political competitors," as the Post noted.
And indeed, in early 2005 – not long after Bush's directives loosed the "Salvador Option" on Iraq – the tide of death-squad activity began its long and bloody rise to the tsunami-like levels we see today. Ironically, the first big spike of mass torture-murders, chiefly in Sunni areas at the time, coincided with "Operation Lightning," a much ballyhooed effort by American and Iraqi forces to "secure" Baghdad. The operation featured a mass influx of extra troops into the capital; dividing the city into manageable sectors, then working through them one by one; imposing hundreds of checkpoints to lock down all insurgent movements; and establishing a 24-hour presence of security and military forces in troubled neighborhoods, the Associated Press reported in May 2005. In other words, it was almost exactly the same plan now being offered as Bush's "New Way Forward," the controversial "surge."
But the "Lightning" fizzled in a matter of weeks, and the death squads grew even bolder. Brazen daylight raids by "men dressed in uniforms" of Iraqi police or Iraqi commandos or other Iraqi security agencies swept up dozens of victims at a time. For months, U.S. "advisers" to Iraqi security agencies – including veterans of the original "Salvador Option" – insisted that these were Sunni insurgents in stolen threads, although many of the victims were Sunni civilians. Later, the line was changed: the chief culprits were now "rogue elements" of the various sectarian militias that had "infiltrated" Iraq's institutions.
But as investigative reporter Max Fuller has pointed out in his detailed examination of information buried in reams of mainstream news stories and public Pentagon documents, the vast majority of atrocities then attributed to "rogue" Shiite and Sunni militias were in fact the work of government-controlled commandos and "special forces," trained by Americans, "advised" by Americans and run largely by former CIA assets. As Fuller puts it: "If there are militias in the Ministry of Interior, you can be sure that they are militias that stand to attention whenever a U.S. colonel enters the room." And perhaps a British lieutenant colonel as well
With the Anglo-American coalition so deeply embedded in dirty war – infiltrating terrorist groups, "stimulating" them into action," protecting "crown jewel" double-agents no matter what the cost, "riding with the bad boys," greenlighting the "Salvador Option" – it is simply impossible to determine the genuine origin of almost any particular terrorist outrage or death squad atrocity in Iraq. All of these operations take place in the shadow world, where terrorists are sometimes government operatives and vice versa, and where security agencies and terrorist groups interpenetrate in murky thickets of collusion and duplicity. This moral chaos leaves "a kind of blot/To mark the full-fraught man and best indued/With some suspicion," as Shakespeare's Henry V says.
What's more, the "intelligence" churned out by this system is inevitably tainted by the self-interest, mixed motives, fear and criminality of those who provide it. The ineffectiveness of this approach can be seen in the ever-increasing, many-sided civil war that is tearing Iraq apart. If these covert operations really are intended to quell the violence, they clearly have had the opposite effect. If they have some other intention, the pious defenders of civilization – who approve these activities with promotions, green lights and unlimited budgets – aren't telling.
This article originally appeared on Truthout.org.
February 14, 2007
Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.
Copyright © 2007 Chris Floyd
by Chris Floyd
I. Paint it Black
Imagine a city torn by sectarian strife. Competing death squads roam the streets; terrorists stage horrific attacks. Local authority is distrusted and weak; local populations protect the extremists in theirmidst, out of loyalty or fear. A bristling military occupation exacerbates tensions at every turn, while offering prime targets for bombs and snipers. And behind the scenes, in a shadow world of double-cross and double-bluff, covert units of the occupying power run agents on both sides of the civil war, countenancing – and sometimes directing – assassinations, terrorist strikes, torture sessions, and ethnic cleansing.
Is this a portrait of Belfast during "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland? Or a picture of Baghdad today? It is both; and in both cases, one of Britain's most secret – and most criminally compromised – military units has plied its trade in the darkness, "turning" and controlling terrorist killers in a dangerous bid to wring actionable intelligence from blood and betrayal. And America's covert soldiers are right there with them, working side-by-side with their British comrades in the aptly named "Task Force Black," the UK's Sunday Telegraph reports.
Last week, the right-wing, pro-war paper published an early valentine to the "Joint Support Group," the covert unit whose bland name belies its dramatic role at the center of the Anglo-American "dirty war" in Iraq. In gushing, lavish, uncritical prose that could have been (and perhaps was) scripted by the unit itself, the Telegraph lauded the team of secret warriors as "one of the Coalition's most effective and deadly weapons in the fight against terror," running "dozens of Iraqi double-agents," including "members of terrorist groups."
What the story fails to mention is the fact that in its Ulster incarnation, the JSG – then known as the Force Research Unit (FRU) – actively colluded in the murder of at least 15 civilians by Loyalist deaths squads, and an untold number of victims killed, maimed and tortured by the many Irish Republican Army double-agents controlled by the unit. What's more, the man who commanded the FRU during the height of its depredations – Lt. Col. Gordon Kerr – is in Baghdad now, heading the hugger-mugger Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), a large counter-terrorism force made up of unnamed "existing assets" from the glory days in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.
This despite the fact that a 10-year, $100 million investigation by Britain's top police officer, Lord Stevens, confirmed in 2003 that the Kerr-led FRU "sanctioned killings" through "institutionalized collusion" with both Protestant and Catholic militias during the 1980s and 1990s. Stevens sent dossiers of evidence against Kerr and 20 other security apparatchiks to the Blair government's Director of Public Prosecutions, in the expectation that the fiery Scotsman and the others would be put on trial.
But instead prosecuting Kerr, Blair promoted him: first to a plum assignment as British military attach̩ in Beijing Рeffectively the number two man in all of UK military intelligence, as Scotland's Sunday Herald notes Рthen with the SRR posting to Baghdad, where Kerr and his former FRU mates now apply the "methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles," as the Telegraph breathlessly relates.
The Telegraph puff piece is naturally coy about revealing these methods, beyond the fact that, as in Ireland, the JSG uses "a variety of inducements ranging from blackmail to bribes" to turn Iraqi terrorists into Coalition agents. So to get a better idea of the techniques employed by the group in Baghdad, we must return to those "mean streets of Ulster" and the unit's reign of terror and collusion there, which has been thoroughly documented not only by the exhaustive Stevens inquiries, but also in a remarkable series of investigative reports by the Sunday Herald's Neil Mackay, and in extensive stories by the BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, the Times and others.
We will also see how the operations of the JSG and "Task Force Black" dovetail with U.S. efforts to apply the lessons of its own dirty wars – such as the "Salvador Option" – to Iraq, as well as long-running Bush Administration initiatives to arm and fund "friendly" militias while infiltrating terrorist groups in order to "provoke them into action." It is indeed a picture painted in black, a glimpse at the dark muck that lies beneath the high-flown rhetoric about freedom and civilization forever issuing from the lips of the war leaders.
II. Whacking for the Peelers
Gregory Burns had a problem. He was one of Gordon Kerr's FRU informers planted deep inside the IRA, along with two of his friends, Johnny Dignam and Aidan Starrs. But as Mackay noted in a February 2003 story, the already-partnered Burns had acquired a girlfriend on the side, Margaret Perry, 26, a "civilian" Catholic with no paramilitary ties. Forbidden fruit is sweet, of course – but pillow talk is dangerous for an inside man. "Burns didn't keep his mouth shut and [Perry] found out he was working for British intelligence," an FRU officer told Mackay. "He tried to convince her he was a double-agent the IRA had planted in the [British] army – but she didn't buy it."
Burns called his FRU handlers and asked to come in from the cold. He'd been compromised, he said, and now he and his friends needed to get out, with new identities, relocation, good jobs – the usual payoff for trusted agents when the jig was up. But Kerr refused: "He said [Burns] should silence Perry," the FRU man told Mackay. Burns, panicking at thought of the IRA's horrific retributions against informers, insisted: he would have to kill the woman if they didn't bring him in, he told Kerr. Again Kerr refused.
And so Burns arranged a meeting with his lover, to "talk over" the situation. His friends, Aidan and Johnny, volunteered to drive her there: "On the way, they pulled into a forest, beat her to death and buried her in a shallow grave," Mackay notes. Two years later, when her body was found, the IRA put two and two together – and slowly tortured Burns and his two friends to death, after first extracting copious amounts of information about British intelligence operations in Ireland.
'In Kerr's eyes, Burns just wasn't important enough to resettle," the FRU source told the Sunday Herald. "So we ended up with four unnecessary deaths and the compromising of British army intelligence officers, which ultimately put soldiers' lives at risk. To Kerr, it was always a matter of the ends justifying the means."
Then again, Kerr could well afford to sacrifice a few informers here and there to the wrath of the IRA's dreaded "security unit" – because his own prize double agent was the head of that security unit. Codenamed "Stakeknife," Kerr's man presided over, and sometimes administered, the grisly torture-murders of up to 50 men during his tenure in the IRA's upper ranks. The victims included other British double agents who were sacrificed in order to protect Stakeknife's cover, as the Guardian and many other UK papers reported when the agent's work was revealed in 2003. ("Stakeknife" was later identified in the press as Alfredo Scappaticci – an Irishman despite the Italian name, although he continues to deny the charge.)
The FRU also "knowingly allowed soldiers, [police] officers and civilians to die at the hands of IRA bombers in order to protect republican double agents," the Sunday Herald's investigations found. As Mackay reports: "FRU sources said around seven police and army personnel died as a result of military intelligence allowing IRA bombs to be placed during Kerr's time in command of the FRU. They estimate that three civilians also died this way, with casualties in the hundreds."
But some of the worst excesses came from the FRU's handling of operatives on the other side, in the fiercely pro-British Protestant militia the Ulster Defense Association (UDA). Here, among the Loyalists, Kerr's top double agent was Brian Nelson, who became head of intelligence for the UDA. As John Ware put it in the Guardian: "Kerr regarded Nelson as his jewel in the crown… For the next three years [from 1987], Nelson colluded with murder gangs to shoot IRA suspects. Month after month, armed and masked men crashed into homes. Sometimes they got the wrong address or shot the wrong person."
Such as Gerald Slane, a 27-year-old Belfast man shot down in front of his three children. A gun had been found dumped on his property; this, and his Catholicism, was enough to get him assassinated at the order of Kerr's man Nelson. Afterwards, it was found that Slane had no IRA connections.
Another "wrong person" killed by the FRU's agents was the Belfast attorney Pat Finucane, who was shot 14 times in front of his wife and children. Finucane was a civil rights activist who had defended both Catholics and Protestants, but was considered an IRA sympathizer by Loyalists – and a thorn in the side by British authorities. He was killed at Nelson's order by a fellow FRU informer in the UDA, Ken Barrett, who was convicted of the murder but freed last year after as part of an amnesty program in the Northern Ireland peace process. Barrett was unapologetic about his FRU "wetwork" on Finucane. "The peelers [authorities] wanted him whacked," he told a BBC documentary team after his release. "We whacked him and that is the end of the story."
Kerr gave Nelson packages of intelligence files to help facilitate the assassination of UDA targets, including at least four "civilians" with no IRA ties, the Stevens inquiry found. The FRU also obtained "restriction orders" from other British security and military units in Northern Ireland, whereby they would pull their forces from an area when Kerr's UDA agents were going to make a hit there, allowing the killers to get in and get out without hindrance, investigator Nick Davies reports.
Yet the FRU was wary of sharing its own intelligence with other security services – which was the ostensible reason for running the double-agents in the first place. Instead, Kerr engaged in fierce turf wars with other agencies, while "stovepiping" much of his intelligence to the top circles of the UK government, including the cabinet-level Intelligence Committee chaired by then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, when Nelson was finally exposed and brought to trial on five counts of conspiracy to commit murder, Kerr testified in his behalf, noting for the court that Nelson's intelligence "product and his reporting was passed through the intelligence community and at a high level, and from that point of view he has to be considered a very important agent."
As one FRU man told Mackay: "Under Kerr's command…the mindset was one of 'the right people would be allowed to live and wrong people should die.'"
This is the "mindset" now operating in the heart of the Green Zone in Baghdad, where the JSG is carrying out – we are told in glowing terms – precisely the same mission it had in Ulster. a unit which has allowed its agents to torture, murder and commit acts of terrorism, including actions that killed local civilians and the soldiers and intelligence operatives of their own country.
III. The White House Green Light
Of course, Kerr and his Baghdad black-op crew are not alone in the double-dealing world of Iraqi counterinsurgency. The Pentagon's ever-expanding secret armies are deeply enmeshed in such efforts as well. As Sy Hersh has reported ("The Coming Wars," New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2005), after his re-election in 2004, George W. Bush signed a series of secret presidential directives that authorized the Pentagon to run virtually unrestricted covert operations, including a reprise of the American-backed, American-trained death squads employed by authoritarian regimes in Central and South America during the Reagan Administration, where so many of the Bush faction cut their teeth – and made their bones.
"Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” a former high-level intelligence official said to Hersh. "We founded them and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it." A Pentagon insider added: "We’re going to be riding with the bad boys." Another role model for the expanded dirty war cited by Pentagon sources, said Hersh, was Britain's brutal repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya during the 1950s, when British forces set up concentration camps, created their own terrorist groups to confuse and discredit the insurgency, and killed thousands of innocent civilians in quashing the uprising.
Bush's formal greenlighting of the death-squad option built upon an already securely-established base, part of a larger effort to turn the world into a "global free-fire zone" for covert operatives, as one top Pentagon official told Hersh. For example, in November 2002 a Pentagon plan to infiltrate terrorist groups and "stimulate" them into action was uncovered by William Arkin, then writing for the Los Angeles Times. The new unit, the "Proactive, Pre-emptive Operations Group," was described in the Pentagon documents as "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" that brings "together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence and cover and deception."
Later, in August 2004, then deputy Pentagon chief Paul Wolfowitz appeared before Congress to ask for $500 million to arm and train non-governmental "local militias" to serve as U.S. proxies for "counter-insurgency and "counterterrorist" operations in "ungoverned areas" and hot spots around the world, Agence France Presse (and virtually no one else) reported at the time. These hired paramilitaries were to be employed in what Wolfowitz called an "arc of crisis" that just happened to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and strategic pipeline routes of Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America.
By then, the Bush Administration had already begun laying the groundwork for an expanded covert war in the hot spot of Iraq. In November 2003, it created a "commando squad" drawn from the sectarian militias of five major Iraqi factions, as the Washington Post reported that year. Armed, funded and trained by the American occupation forces, and supplied with a "state-of-the-art command, control and communications center" from the Pentagon, the new Iraqi commandos were loosed on the then-nascent Iraqi insurgency – despite the very prescient fears of some U.S. officials "that various Sunni or Shiite factions could eventually use the service to secretly undermine their political competitors," as the Post noted.
And indeed, in early 2005 – not long after Bush's directives loosed the "Salvador Option" on Iraq – the tide of death-squad activity began its long and bloody rise to the tsunami-like levels we see today. Ironically, the first big spike of mass torture-murders, chiefly in Sunni areas at the time, coincided with "Operation Lightning," a much ballyhooed effort by American and Iraqi forces to "secure" Baghdad. The operation featured a mass influx of extra troops into the capital; dividing the city into manageable sectors, then working through them one by one; imposing hundreds of checkpoints to lock down all insurgent movements; and establishing a 24-hour presence of security and military forces in troubled neighborhoods, the Associated Press reported in May 2005. In other words, it was almost exactly the same plan now being offered as Bush's "New Way Forward," the controversial "surge."
But the "Lightning" fizzled in a matter of weeks, and the death squads grew even bolder. Brazen daylight raids by "men dressed in uniforms" of Iraqi police or Iraqi commandos or other Iraqi security agencies swept up dozens of victims at a time. For months, U.S. "advisers" to Iraqi security agencies – including veterans of the original "Salvador Option" – insisted that these were Sunni insurgents in stolen threads, although many of the victims were Sunni civilians. Later, the line was changed: the chief culprits were now "rogue elements" of the various sectarian militias that had "infiltrated" Iraq's institutions.
But as investigative reporter Max Fuller has pointed out in his detailed examination of information buried in reams of mainstream news stories and public Pentagon documents, the vast majority of atrocities then attributed to "rogue" Shiite and Sunni militias were in fact the work of government-controlled commandos and "special forces," trained by Americans, "advised" by Americans and run largely by former CIA assets. As Fuller puts it: "If there are militias in the Ministry of Interior, you can be sure that they are militias that stand to attention whenever a U.S. colonel enters the room." And perhaps a British lieutenant colonel as well
With the Anglo-American coalition so deeply embedded in dirty war – infiltrating terrorist groups, "stimulating" them into action," protecting "crown jewel" double-agents no matter what the cost, "riding with the bad boys," greenlighting the "Salvador Option" – it is simply impossible to determine the genuine origin of almost any particular terrorist outrage or death squad atrocity in Iraq. All of these operations take place in the shadow world, where terrorists are sometimes government operatives and vice versa, and where security agencies and terrorist groups interpenetrate in murky thickets of collusion and duplicity. This moral chaos leaves "a kind of blot/To mark the full-fraught man and best indued/With some suspicion," as Shakespeare's Henry V says.
What's more, the "intelligence" churned out by this system is inevitably tainted by the self-interest, mixed motives, fear and criminality of those who provide it. The ineffectiveness of this approach can be seen in the ever-increasing, many-sided civil war that is tearing Iraq apart. If these covert operations really are intended to quell the violence, they clearly have had the opposite effect. If they have some other intention, the pious defenders of civilization – who approve these activities with promotions, green lights and unlimited budgets – aren't telling.
This article originally appeared on Truthout.org.
February 14, 2007
Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.
Copyright © 2007 Chris Floyd
Friday, February 9, 2007
Follow the Money
The Great Dollar Crash of ‘07
PoorBest
Tuesday, 06 February 2007
By Mike Whitney
The massive equity bubbles which arose from artificially low interest rates and the deliberate destruction of the dollar by reckless increases in the money supply have shifted trillions of dollars from working class Americans to the predatory aristocrats at the top of the economic food chain. The gulf between rich and poor has grown so wide that it now poses a direct threat to our increasingly fragile democracy.
“Whatever future developments may prove to be, my best guess is that the US will continue to maintain a façade of Constitutional government and drift along until financial bankruptcy overtakes it.” Chalmers Johnson, “Empire V. Democracy: Why Nemesis is at our Door”
02/06/07 "ICHBlog" -- - Every time a US Dollar is traded, a check is issued on an account that is overdrawn by $8.6 trillion. (That is the present size of the national debt) It is, without question, the biggest swindle in history. Flimsy sheets of faded-green scrip are eagerly exchanged for costly goods and services without any regard for the real value of the currency.
And, the real value of the currency is absolutely nothing!
How is it that this scam persists when people appear to be aware of the massive debt and deficits which underwrite the dollar? Do they still believe in that puerile fairy tale about “the full faith and credit” of the United States backing up every greenback? Or are they pacified by the wizened graybeards, like Alan Greenspan and Hank Paulson, who soothingly bray about the “strong dollar policy”?
What gibberish.
In truth, the dollar rests on the crumbling foundation of consumerism and oil. The American consumer’s gluttonous appetite for spending has kept the greenback flying high for decades. Economists marvel at America’s lust for electronic gadgetry, the latest fashions, and useless knick-knacks. They call our profligate spending “the engine for global growth”; and indeed it is. No other country in the world is nearly as addicted to binge-spending as the US consumer. As long as he can beg, borrow or steal his way into the shopping mall; the orgy of spending is bound to continue. (Consumer spending is 70% of GDP)
Regrettably, there are signs that the US consumer is beginning to buckle from the weight of personal debt. The Associated Press reported just this week that “people are saving at the slowest rate since the Great Depression… and the Commerce Dept stated that the nation’s personal savings rate for 2006 was a negative 1%, the worst showing in 73 years.”
Additionally, credit card debt has skyrocketed, which is an indication that homeowners are no longer able to siphon easy-money from their home-equity. The nose-diving real estate market has slowed refinancing to a dribble; cutting off the additional $825 billion of cash which was extracted from home-equity just last year.
Clearly, the well is running dry; the housing bubble is hang-gliding into the abyss and there’s nothing Fed-master Bernanke can do to save it from its inevitable crash-landing.
The central banks around the world are now watching for any sign that the American consumer is about to give up the ghost. As soon as that happens, bank managers everywhere will swing into action, ditch their U.S.Dollars and head for the exits. When the “global engine” sputters to a halt; it’ll be curtains for the greenback.
The Oil-extortion Racket
The dollar’s link to oil has helped to keep it afloat but, in truth, it’s just another dismal rip-off. More than 70% of the world’s oil is denominated in USD; a virtual monopoly for the USA. Until last year, even Russia was using dollars in its oil transactions with Germany. Imagine a comparable deal, like the US purchasing oil from Canada in rubles?!?
It’s lunacy; and yet this is the system the US hopes to preserve so it can maintain its unique status as the world’s “reserve currency” and keep expanding its debt into perpetuity. It explains why the Federal Reserve has been able to increase the money supply by a whopping 15% for the last 6 years! Trillions of dollars are now circulating in the oil trade keeping the value of the dollar high by creating artificial demand.
The other reason the dollar hasn’t succumbed to hyperinflation is because the current account deficit is running at roughly $800 billion per year. The Asian giants (China and Japan) and the oil exporting countries are mopping up more than $700 billion of our red ink every year!
The dollar’s link to oil forces central banks to maintain humongous stockpiles of USD to pay the steadily rising price of oil that keeps their industries and vehicles running. Otherwise they would have chucked the flaccid greenback years ago and converted to the more steadfast euro.
The so-called ‘global economic system’ has nothing to do with competition, free markets or private enterprise; that’s just public relations gobbledygook. In practice, it is the world’s biggest extortion racket, wherein, the “Godfather”-- Uncle Sam-- holds a gun to the heads of his subjects and forces them to use our fiat-paper to purchase the oil that lubricates their economies.
Why would anyone accept a personal check from a nation that owes the bank more than $8.6 trillion dollars?
Why, indeed?
It’s blackmail, pure and simple; and yet, the Chinese, Japanese etc. continue to play along knowing full-well that we neither have the inclination nor the resources to pay them back in kind?
It’s madness.
Every so often, a rebel nation will try to break the shackle of greenback-tyranny and operate outside the US-run system?
For example, Saddam Hussein switched to euros 6 months before he was carpet-bombed in Shock and Awe. His defiance only hastened his ultimate downfall.
Now Iran and Venezuela are threatening to convert to euros. Is it any surprise that they are both on Bush’s axis-of-evil hit list?
Russia has already made the conversion to euros and rubles (and has considerably depleted his supplies of USD) but, of course, regime change is more difficult when a state has nuclear weapons. Instead, the mainstream media is conducting an impressive “Swift Boat” campaign against Putin, smearing him as a “Russian autocrat” who is “rolling back democracy”. At the same time, the Bush administration is threatening to deploy missile systems in Eastern Europe and ratcheting up the pressure in the former Soviet republics.
Bush would rather restart the Cold War than abandon the supremacy of the greenback.
But, why? Is Dollar-primacy really that crucial to our economy?
The greenback is the baling wire that keeps the global economy in the hands of the doddering old misers at the Federal Reserve. It’s the cornerstone of the whole wretched system; a system which now includes torture, extraordinary rendition, and myriad other war crimes.
The young Muslim men who are abducted off the streets of Europe and Asia and taken to CIA Black Sites where they are waterboarded or stacked in naked pyramids; are tortured in defense of the crumpled piece of green paper we carry in our pants pockets.
Think I’m kidding?
Just look at Bush’s budget for 2007-2008; $700 billion for foreign wars?!? There’s no way the US can pay off that debt through the normal means of increasing exports. In fact, Bush has already said that he plans to preserve his unfunded tax cuts whether they produce massive deficits or not.
What Bush plans to do is force the foreign central banks to hold more dollar-based assets, thus, thrusting our gigantic debt onto our trading partners. According to Bob Chapman of The International Forecaster, “US debt was up 10.1% to $4.085 trillion and accounts for 58.8% OF ALL THE CREDIT ISSUED GLOBALLY LAST YEAR. The US is producing more debt than the rest of the world combined.
As long as foreign lenders are willing to take our paper, Bush will keep expanding our debt. As Chalmers Johnson opined, “We are dependent on ‘the kindness of strangers’”. (The Blanche Dubois economy)
Of course, if the central banks grow tired of this pyramid-scheme and dump the dollar; the world can get on with the business of addressing global warming, poverty, AIDs, Peak Oil, nuclear proliferation etc. That won’t happen as long as the dollar reigns supreme and a small cadre of unelected racketeers at the Fed continue Gerry-rig the system.
Economic justice and equitable distribution of wealth begin with greater parity among the currencies. That requires “regime change” for the greenback and a loosening of its tyrannical grip on the system.
Sleepwalking in the Weimar U.S.A.
The good news is that the Bush administration is pushing the dollar towards extinction anyway. Another few years of $800 billion trade deficits, lavish unfunded tax cuts for the mega-rich, and a Pentagon budget of $700 billion-plus; and the old greenback will be going the way of the Dodo. Jim Willie of GoldenJackass.com summarized it this way:
“Never in the history of central bankers has the hidden coordination, influenced pressure, gargantuan money creation, doctored statistics, and interference with financial markets been so broad, so deep, and so profound. My allegation is clear, that we now live in Weimar times, as has been warned for two years worth of scribbles. Collectively, they have abused the privilege of printing money, and in doing so, have guaranteed a gold bull market. … The more heavily the counterfeit press dispenses electronic dollars, devoted to operations, to credit, to consumer spending, to military adventures, to good old fashioned fraud, the gold bull benefits from ample new oxygen and blood flow”.
Willie is right; the system is rotten to the core. Once the dollar crashes, other currencies rush in to fill the void generating greater competition between the energy and manufacturing giants. A new paradigm will emerge distributing power more equitably among the states. It’s a way to resuscitate a system that is currently held together through force of arms.
Besides, how long will China and Japan continue to abet Washington’s war-mongering adventurism? My guess is that the daggers have already been sharpened in Beijing, Caracas, Delhi and Moscow. Everyone is just waiting for Bush to cross that invisible line in the sand before they fling their greenbacks into the jet-stream and wait for Goliath to tumble.
That “invisible line in the sand” is Iran.
The world is at a crossroads and everyone who can fog a mirror knows it. The superpower model of global governance has failed miserably. We need more responsible stewardship of the planet and its resources.
How can we build our economies when a handful of western plutocrats control the spigot for quickly dwindling oil reserves? How can we attack climate change when those same blinkered reprobates employ pseudo-scientists to dispute global warming? How can we address nuclear proliferation when neocon militarists believe in “useable” low-yield, bunker-busting warheads?
The model is hopelessly shattered. We’d be better off boarding-up the White House and the Federal Reserve and starting from Square One.
The world needs a break from Washington’s wasteful spending and unprovoked wars. At the same time, foreign creditors are increasingly reluctant to keep financing America’s extravagant consumption. And, no one is hoodwinked by Bush’s “war on terror” scam; a conflict that was clearly concocted to assert control over the world’s remaining resources.
The world is realigning according to mutual interests and a shared vision of the future. The rise of energy alliances in Latin America and Asia (particularly the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) which now controls most new oil deposits and output) signals the waning of western influence and the ascendancy of a new energy paradigm. Power is progressively shifting away from Washington.
That’s bad news for the greenback which depends on its linkage to oil to sustain its enormous debt.
The dollar now faces challenges from all directions. Western elites have savaged the country’s economic base by hollowing out our manufacturing base in order to destroy the American labor movement.
Free trade has transformed the US into the biggest creditor nation in history. The country exports nothing but bombs and misery.
Also, as Congressman Ron Paul notes, “Most knowledgeable people assume that inflation of the money supply is not only going to continue, but accelerate. This anticipation, plus the fact that many new dollars have been created over the past 15 years that have not been fully discounted, guarantees the further depreciation of the dollar.”
Eventually, the markets will catch on, foreign lenders will stop buying our Treasuries, and the dollar will fall through the floor.
The laws of gravity apply to economics as well as science.
Red flags are going up everywhere. China’s central bank issued a warning in December about the risks of the weakening dollar:
“If external capital stops flowing into the US, a significant drop in the dollar may occur with consumption and investment shrinking, interest rates rising, and financial markets experiencing turbulence, endangering global financial and economic stability. There could be adjustments to how European private capital, Asian foreign exchange reserves and oil export proceeds are invested.”
Yes, of course, a complete economic meltdown with capital fleeing the United States to foreign countries and the American economy collapsing in a heap.
The Chinese central bank statement adds:
“If the US current account deficit continues to grow faster than GDP, then the investment value of US assets may be subject to doubts and challenges and the willingness of investors to continue holding and buying US financial products may weaken. This could cause changes in capital flows, the exchange rates of major currencies, and the value of foreign exchange assets.”
The Chinese bank is giving the Bush Team a chapter out of Econ. 101: “If you keep spending more than you are taking in; the stock market will fall, the dollar will plummet, and the US economy will tank”.
What could be clearer than that?
The administration, however, chooses to ignore the basic laws of economics and pursue a madcap plan to wage aggressive war across the planet and pilfer the world’s oil reserves.
So far, the results have been less than reassuring.
The Decline of U.S. Sovereignty; blame it on the Fed
The United States set off on the road to perdition when it transferred the power to create money to the privately-owned Federal Reserve. It’s been downhill ever since.
The man who can set interest rates and create money is more powerful than the man who can move armies and change laws. By conferring that authority on the Federal Reserve we have assured that the policies that govern our economy are decided by unelected members of the ruling elite whose choices will naturally reflect the interests of their class.
The wealth gap that has opened up like a yawning chasm between rich and poor in America originated with the class-based policies of the Fed. The massive equity bubbles which arose from artificially low interest rates and the deliberate destruction of the dollar by reckless increases in the money supply have shifted trillions of dollars from working class Americans to the predatory aristocrats at the top of the economic food chain. The gulf between rich and poor has grown so wide that it now poses a direct threat to our increasingly fragile democracy. That’s why Thomas Jefferson said:
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of our currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing of power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
Free people cannot control their own destiny unless they control their own currency. The Federal Reserve must be abolished.
Link to this page: http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/405/2/
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PoorBest
Tuesday, 06 February 2007
By Mike Whitney
The massive equity bubbles which arose from artificially low interest rates and the deliberate destruction of the dollar by reckless increases in the money supply have shifted trillions of dollars from working class Americans to the predatory aristocrats at the top of the economic food chain. The gulf between rich and poor has grown so wide that it now poses a direct threat to our increasingly fragile democracy.
“Whatever future developments may prove to be, my best guess is that the US will continue to maintain a façade of Constitutional government and drift along until financial bankruptcy overtakes it.” Chalmers Johnson, “Empire V. Democracy: Why Nemesis is at our Door”
02/06/07 "ICHBlog" -- - Every time a US Dollar is traded, a check is issued on an account that is overdrawn by $8.6 trillion. (That is the present size of the national debt) It is, without question, the biggest swindle in history. Flimsy sheets of faded-green scrip are eagerly exchanged for costly goods and services without any regard for the real value of the currency.
And, the real value of the currency is absolutely nothing!
How is it that this scam persists when people appear to be aware of the massive debt and deficits which underwrite the dollar? Do they still believe in that puerile fairy tale about “the full faith and credit” of the United States backing up every greenback? Or are they pacified by the wizened graybeards, like Alan Greenspan and Hank Paulson, who soothingly bray about the “strong dollar policy”?
What gibberish.
In truth, the dollar rests on the crumbling foundation of consumerism and oil. The American consumer’s gluttonous appetite for spending has kept the greenback flying high for decades. Economists marvel at America’s lust for electronic gadgetry, the latest fashions, and useless knick-knacks. They call our profligate spending “the engine for global growth”; and indeed it is. No other country in the world is nearly as addicted to binge-spending as the US consumer. As long as he can beg, borrow or steal his way into the shopping mall; the orgy of spending is bound to continue. (Consumer spending is 70% of GDP)
Regrettably, there are signs that the US consumer is beginning to buckle from the weight of personal debt. The Associated Press reported just this week that “people are saving at the slowest rate since the Great Depression… and the Commerce Dept stated that the nation’s personal savings rate for 2006 was a negative 1%, the worst showing in 73 years.”
Additionally, credit card debt has skyrocketed, which is an indication that homeowners are no longer able to siphon easy-money from their home-equity. The nose-diving real estate market has slowed refinancing to a dribble; cutting off the additional $825 billion of cash which was extracted from home-equity just last year.
Clearly, the well is running dry; the housing bubble is hang-gliding into the abyss and there’s nothing Fed-master Bernanke can do to save it from its inevitable crash-landing.
The central banks around the world are now watching for any sign that the American consumer is about to give up the ghost. As soon as that happens, bank managers everywhere will swing into action, ditch their U.S.Dollars and head for the exits. When the “global engine” sputters to a halt; it’ll be curtains for the greenback.
The Oil-extortion Racket
The dollar’s link to oil has helped to keep it afloat but, in truth, it’s just another dismal rip-off. More than 70% of the world’s oil is denominated in USD; a virtual monopoly for the USA. Until last year, even Russia was using dollars in its oil transactions with Germany. Imagine a comparable deal, like the US purchasing oil from Canada in rubles?!?
It’s lunacy; and yet this is the system the US hopes to preserve so it can maintain its unique status as the world’s “reserve currency” and keep expanding its debt into perpetuity. It explains why the Federal Reserve has been able to increase the money supply by a whopping 15% for the last 6 years! Trillions of dollars are now circulating in the oil trade keeping the value of the dollar high by creating artificial demand.
The other reason the dollar hasn’t succumbed to hyperinflation is because the current account deficit is running at roughly $800 billion per year. The Asian giants (China and Japan) and the oil exporting countries are mopping up more than $700 billion of our red ink every year!
The dollar’s link to oil forces central banks to maintain humongous stockpiles of USD to pay the steadily rising price of oil that keeps their industries and vehicles running. Otherwise they would have chucked the flaccid greenback years ago and converted to the more steadfast euro.
The so-called ‘global economic system’ has nothing to do with competition, free markets or private enterprise; that’s just public relations gobbledygook. In practice, it is the world’s biggest extortion racket, wherein, the “Godfather”-- Uncle Sam-- holds a gun to the heads of his subjects and forces them to use our fiat-paper to purchase the oil that lubricates their economies.
Why would anyone accept a personal check from a nation that owes the bank more than $8.6 trillion dollars?
Why, indeed?
It’s blackmail, pure and simple; and yet, the Chinese, Japanese etc. continue to play along knowing full-well that we neither have the inclination nor the resources to pay them back in kind?
It’s madness.
Every so often, a rebel nation will try to break the shackle of greenback-tyranny and operate outside the US-run system?
For example, Saddam Hussein switched to euros 6 months before he was carpet-bombed in Shock and Awe. His defiance only hastened his ultimate downfall.
Now Iran and Venezuela are threatening to convert to euros. Is it any surprise that they are both on Bush’s axis-of-evil hit list?
Russia has already made the conversion to euros and rubles (and has considerably depleted his supplies of USD) but, of course, regime change is more difficult when a state has nuclear weapons. Instead, the mainstream media is conducting an impressive “Swift Boat” campaign against Putin, smearing him as a “Russian autocrat” who is “rolling back democracy”. At the same time, the Bush administration is threatening to deploy missile systems in Eastern Europe and ratcheting up the pressure in the former Soviet republics.
Bush would rather restart the Cold War than abandon the supremacy of the greenback.
But, why? Is Dollar-primacy really that crucial to our economy?
The greenback is the baling wire that keeps the global economy in the hands of the doddering old misers at the Federal Reserve. It’s the cornerstone of the whole wretched system; a system which now includes torture, extraordinary rendition, and myriad other war crimes.
The young Muslim men who are abducted off the streets of Europe and Asia and taken to CIA Black Sites where they are waterboarded or stacked in naked pyramids; are tortured in defense of the crumpled piece of green paper we carry in our pants pockets.
Think I’m kidding?
Just look at Bush’s budget for 2007-2008; $700 billion for foreign wars?!? There’s no way the US can pay off that debt through the normal means of increasing exports. In fact, Bush has already said that he plans to preserve his unfunded tax cuts whether they produce massive deficits or not.
What Bush plans to do is force the foreign central banks to hold more dollar-based assets, thus, thrusting our gigantic debt onto our trading partners. According to Bob Chapman of The International Forecaster, “US debt was up 10.1% to $4.085 trillion and accounts for 58.8% OF ALL THE CREDIT ISSUED GLOBALLY LAST YEAR. The US is producing more debt than the rest of the world combined.
As long as foreign lenders are willing to take our paper, Bush will keep expanding our debt. As Chalmers Johnson opined, “We are dependent on ‘the kindness of strangers’”. (The Blanche Dubois economy)
Of course, if the central banks grow tired of this pyramid-scheme and dump the dollar; the world can get on with the business of addressing global warming, poverty, AIDs, Peak Oil, nuclear proliferation etc. That won’t happen as long as the dollar reigns supreme and a small cadre of unelected racketeers at the Fed continue Gerry-rig the system.
Economic justice and equitable distribution of wealth begin with greater parity among the currencies. That requires “regime change” for the greenback and a loosening of its tyrannical grip on the system.
Sleepwalking in the Weimar U.S.A.
The good news is that the Bush administration is pushing the dollar towards extinction anyway. Another few years of $800 billion trade deficits, lavish unfunded tax cuts for the mega-rich, and a Pentagon budget of $700 billion-plus; and the old greenback will be going the way of the Dodo. Jim Willie of GoldenJackass.com summarized it this way:
“Never in the history of central bankers has the hidden coordination, influenced pressure, gargantuan money creation, doctored statistics, and interference with financial markets been so broad, so deep, and so profound. My allegation is clear, that we now live in Weimar times, as has been warned for two years worth of scribbles. Collectively, they have abused the privilege of printing money, and in doing so, have guaranteed a gold bull market. … The more heavily the counterfeit press dispenses electronic dollars, devoted to operations, to credit, to consumer spending, to military adventures, to good old fashioned fraud, the gold bull benefits from ample new oxygen and blood flow”.
Willie is right; the system is rotten to the core. Once the dollar crashes, other currencies rush in to fill the void generating greater competition between the energy and manufacturing giants. A new paradigm will emerge distributing power more equitably among the states. It’s a way to resuscitate a system that is currently held together through force of arms.
Besides, how long will China and Japan continue to abet Washington’s war-mongering adventurism? My guess is that the daggers have already been sharpened in Beijing, Caracas, Delhi and Moscow. Everyone is just waiting for Bush to cross that invisible line in the sand before they fling their greenbacks into the jet-stream and wait for Goliath to tumble.
That “invisible line in the sand” is Iran.
The world is at a crossroads and everyone who can fog a mirror knows it. The superpower model of global governance has failed miserably. We need more responsible stewardship of the planet and its resources.
How can we build our economies when a handful of western plutocrats control the spigot for quickly dwindling oil reserves? How can we attack climate change when those same blinkered reprobates employ pseudo-scientists to dispute global warming? How can we address nuclear proliferation when neocon militarists believe in “useable” low-yield, bunker-busting warheads?
The model is hopelessly shattered. We’d be better off boarding-up the White House and the Federal Reserve and starting from Square One.
The world needs a break from Washington’s wasteful spending and unprovoked wars. At the same time, foreign creditors are increasingly reluctant to keep financing America’s extravagant consumption. And, no one is hoodwinked by Bush’s “war on terror” scam; a conflict that was clearly concocted to assert control over the world’s remaining resources.
The world is realigning according to mutual interests and a shared vision of the future. The rise of energy alliances in Latin America and Asia (particularly the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) which now controls most new oil deposits and output) signals the waning of western influence and the ascendancy of a new energy paradigm. Power is progressively shifting away from Washington.
That’s bad news for the greenback which depends on its linkage to oil to sustain its enormous debt.
The dollar now faces challenges from all directions. Western elites have savaged the country’s economic base by hollowing out our manufacturing base in order to destroy the American labor movement.
Free trade has transformed the US into the biggest creditor nation in history. The country exports nothing but bombs and misery.
Also, as Congressman Ron Paul notes, “Most knowledgeable people assume that inflation of the money supply is not only going to continue, but accelerate. This anticipation, plus the fact that many new dollars have been created over the past 15 years that have not been fully discounted, guarantees the further depreciation of the dollar.”
Eventually, the markets will catch on, foreign lenders will stop buying our Treasuries, and the dollar will fall through the floor.
The laws of gravity apply to economics as well as science.
Red flags are going up everywhere. China’s central bank issued a warning in December about the risks of the weakening dollar:
“If external capital stops flowing into the US, a significant drop in the dollar may occur with consumption and investment shrinking, interest rates rising, and financial markets experiencing turbulence, endangering global financial and economic stability. There could be adjustments to how European private capital, Asian foreign exchange reserves and oil export proceeds are invested.”
Yes, of course, a complete economic meltdown with capital fleeing the United States to foreign countries and the American economy collapsing in a heap.
The Chinese central bank statement adds:
“If the US current account deficit continues to grow faster than GDP, then the investment value of US assets may be subject to doubts and challenges and the willingness of investors to continue holding and buying US financial products may weaken. This could cause changes in capital flows, the exchange rates of major currencies, and the value of foreign exchange assets.”
The Chinese bank is giving the Bush Team a chapter out of Econ. 101: “If you keep spending more than you are taking in; the stock market will fall, the dollar will plummet, and the US economy will tank”.
What could be clearer than that?
The administration, however, chooses to ignore the basic laws of economics and pursue a madcap plan to wage aggressive war across the planet and pilfer the world’s oil reserves.
So far, the results have been less than reassuring.
The Decline of U.S. Sovereignty; blame it on the Fed
The United States set off on the road to perdition when it transferred the power to create money to the privately-owned Federal Reserve. It’s been downhill ever since.
The man who can set interest rates and create money is more powerful than the man who can move armies and change laws. By conferring that authority on the Federal Reserve we have assured that the policies that govern our economy are decided by unelected members of the ruling elite whose choices will naturally reflect the interests of their class.
The wealth gap that has opened up like a yawning chasm between rich and poor in America originated with the class-based policies of the Fed. The massive equity bubbles which arose from artificially low interest rates and the deliberate destruction of the dollar by reckless increases in the money supply have shifted trillions of dollars from working class Americans to the predatory aristocrats at the top of the economic food chain. The gulf between rich and poor has grown so wide that it now poses a direct threat to our increasingly fragile democracy. That’s why Thomas Jefferson said:
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of our currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing of power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
Free people cannot control their own destiny unless they control their own currency. The Federal Reserve must be abolished.
Link to this page: http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/405/2/
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Thursday, February 8, 2007
To defend and protect
Mexico Invades America
This is amazing. You probably didn't hear about this at all, and if you did, it was probably downplayed by the media into no big deal. But one blogger did the media's job for them--went and actually interviewed the people involved to get the real story. This is ugly, and if (more like since) our government refuses to face the truth, it's going to get worse.
Those of us who are concerned about illegal immigration are often portrayed as ignorant xenophobic bigots. But there are real issues here. And hiding our heads in the sand won't make them go away. This is long, but you need to read the whole thing.
Mexican Gunmen Involved in Arizona Border Incident Actually Uniformed Mexican Force
By Heidi at Euphoric Reality
The excursion into U.S. territory last week by "Mexican gunmen" was not a chance confrontation between the Arizona National Guard and untrained illegal immigrants, but a deliberate "perimeter probe" by an infantry-trained, uniformed Mexican force, officials say.
Euphoric Reality has learned in exclusive interviews with high-ranking sources within both the Arizona National Guard and the U.S. Border Patrol that the incident the mainstream media calls a "standoff" was in reality a military-style operation, carried out by a unit of Mexican troops dressed in military uniforms, flak jackets, and armed with AK-47s in an apparent operation to probe the border defenses and test the limits of the National Guard troops. Using easily recognizable infantry movement tactics (such as arm and hand signals and flanking maneuvers), the Mexican unit deliberately moved in a military formation across the border from Mexico, where they were picked up by National Guard surveillance.
As the hostile force moved north over the next three hours, deeper into Arizona, National Guardsmen wearing night vision goggles were able to ascertain that the approaching gunmen were indeed uniformed (including PAGST helmets) and heavily armed. When the Mexican unit came within approximately 100 yards of the EIT site, the Guardsmen repositioned themselves in order to maintain surveillance and tactical advantage. They observed the Mexican unit sweep through the EIT site, and then rapidly withdrew back into Mexico. No shots were fired by either the Mexican gunmen or the Guardsmen. Border Patrol was on the scene within minutes of the Mexican unit's withdrawal.
The Guardsmen, through an Arizona Border Patrol official, confirmed that the incident appeared to be an intelligence-gathering exercise designed to ascertain what the National Guard's response would be to certain tactics. It is not an isolated incident, and many such probes have been reported by the Guardsmen assigned to the area. Though no shots were fired during this particular incident, shots have been fired near and in the vicinity of the soldiers at the EIT site in other situations, though not at the soldiers themselves. It is not clear from the uniforms if the Mexican soldiers were official Mexican federales or mercenaries hired by the drug cartels.
Since then, follow-on news reports have included statements from the Border Patrol that no shots were fired. This was confirmed today by Major Paul Aguirre, a Public Affairs Officer (PAO) for the Arizona National Guard. Rumors have circulated that the Guardsmen were not armed, and thus unable to defend themselves - and that is not the case. Both Major Aguirre and Rob Daniels, a Public Information Officer (PIO) for the Arizona Border Patrol, state that all Guardsmen assigned to EITs are armed, specifically with M16s and sometimes a sidearm. As well, there have been some contradictory news reports that stated the gunmen came "within yards" of the Guardsmen, while other reports state that the gunmen were approximately 100 yards away. Mr. Daniels clarified that the gunmen came as close as 100 yards to the Guardsmen. He also stated that the Guardsmen did not "retreat" but tactically repositioned themselves to maintain surveillance of the group of armed men while simultaneously radioing for Border Patrol agents. He asserted that the Guardsmen had followed their protocols perfectly, and that their services were invaluable to the Border Patrol agents.
The Myth of Troops Bringing Law Enforcement to the Border
National Guard soldiers on the border are volunteers deployed by the federal government for Operation Jump Start. They are not mandated to perform law enforcement activities and, in fact, are prohibited from doing so under the Posse Comitatus Act while federally deployed. They are assigned to the border mission for the sole purpose of supporting the Border Patrol - mostly performing administrative, engineering, and maintenance duties that free up Border Patrol agents for border enforcement.
The ramifications of this incident hitting the public awareness are significant. There are incidents on the record of specially-trained military commandos attacking Border Patrol agents, and videos in existence of uniformed Mexicans, deep in American territory, claiming to be reporters when confronted by Arizona Minutemen. Hundreds of armed incursions have been documented by the Border Patrol. In one year, June 2005 until June 2006, over 250 armed assaults have been reported by Border Patrol agents, and several agents have been killed.
Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, has gone on the record to dismiss reports of armed incursions by a uniformed military force as "navigational mistakes", claiming that the Mexican soldiers were "lost." However, Chertoff offered no explanation as to why these "lost troops" fired on American agents. The Mexican government claims that uniformed military soldiers coming from Mexico are actually American soldiers disguised as Mexican soldiers. Furthermore, when confronted with the possibility that Mexican commandos called Los Zetas, trained by U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg to support the Drug War, have defected from the military and now work as mercenaries for the drug cartels, Mexican officials have worked very hard to debunk such evidence. In an official report presented to the U.S. on behalf of the Mexican Office of Inter-Intelligence Affairs, Mexico claimed that "the Zeta army, or syndicate, is no more real than the crying lady of Puebla."
Yet, contrary to Mexican denials, Los Zetas do exist, and the U.S. Border Patrol is very familiar with them. In a June 2006 investigative news piece by News Channel 5 in Texas, Zetas discussed their training and murderous missions. They also issued a warning:
"These two members of the Zeta army also have a warning for American law enforcement: They are here, with cells operating in Roma, Rio Grande City and Mission - and more are coming.
'It is not a lie,' Zeta-2 said. 'They need to check good, because it is true.'"
Los Zetas: Guns Gone Bad
During the 1990s, U.S. Army Special Forces trained a number of Mexican federal agents and army units in special warfare tactics as part of an effort to aid the struggling Mexican government in the Drug War involving the violent drug cartels of northern Mexico. It's been said that "the training was remedial in nature, and did not exceed international peace time law of NATO forces training foreign combat forces in tactical warfare." Lest we worry about the operational proficiency of such mercenaries, Wikipedia has this unattributed entry:
"The training lasted a mere three months in the sweltering North Carolina heat. In total, 300 Mexican agents and army officers participated in the summer long exercise. Years later, unsealed documents revealed that the training proved to be no more than an extended boot camp. "It was more a media and propaganda effort then it was for actual tactical training that could be used in combat," one of the US Special Forces Officers that participated in the effort stated. "They brought them [sic] boys here, and most of them could fire a gun already, so we just showed them a lot of video of Special Forces training from the early 70's. We were not about to teach or display tactics that make Special Forces what they are. That's why when I read that these boys that are 'Zetas' were Special Forces trained, I almost wet myself with laughter.'"
What the Zetas may lack in professional specialized training, they make up for in ruthless and savage violence. Last year, Times Magazine exposed much of the brutality in an article called Brutal New Drug Gangs Are Terrorizing The U.S.-Mexico Border, and added further information about the identity of Los Zetas.
"According to Mexican officials, Lazcano was a clean-cut Mexican army recruit from the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz when he was picked a decade ago to be part of the highly trained Airborne Special Forces Group. The unit was sent to the eastern border to battle drug trafficking. But in the late 1990s, Lazcano and more than 30 other members of the special forces began working for drug lord Osiel Cardenas, head of the Matamoros-based Gulf cartel, which at the time controlled almost one-third of the Mexican drug trade. "
Official Mexican propaganda notwithstanding, it can be safely assumed that the Zetas are a paramilitary force that has made regular incursions over our border in sometimes heavily-armed assaults. Whether they are actual Mexican federales or uniformed mercenaries in the employ of the drug cartels remains to be seen. Perhaps a small clue to the uniforms is found in the News Channel Five investigative report:
"The municipal police, the state police, the ministerial police, the police of the state,' Zeta-1 said. 'The soldiers and the federal preventive police. The military on the border. They are bought by the Zetas.' The Zeta's tools even include uniforms given by the police themselves."
Regardless of who the uniformed soldiers are, or who commands them, what is paramount is that our southern border security is breached by foreign troops on an increasingly aggressive basis. While our National Guard troops are effectively hamstrung by political restrictions, foreign military soldiers press the advantage. Border Patrol agents have already given their lives in a heroic effort to guard our border, and it is only a matter of time before we lose American soldiers. Is that what it will take for our government to finally take the matter of border security seriously? This is no longer a matter of local civilian law enforcement; it is a matter of national security. For politicians, no matter their affiliation, to play partisan games with our national safety and security is a betrayal of their constituents' trust, and the constitutional duties of their office.
This is amazing. You probably didn't hear about this at all, and if you did, it was probably downplayed by the media into no big deal. But one blogger did the media's job for them--went and actually interviewed the people involved to get the real story. This is ugly, and if (more like since) our government refuses to face the truth, it's going to get worse.
Those of us who are concerned about illegal immigration are often portrayed as ignorant xenophobic bigots. But there are real issues here. And hiding our heads in the sand won't make them go away. This is long, but you need to read the whole thing.
Mexican Gunmen Involved in Arizona Border Incident Actually Uniformed Mexican Force
By Heidi at Euphoric Reality
The excursion into U.S. territory last week by "Mexican gunmen" was not a chance confrontation between the Arizona National Guard and untrained illegal immigrants, but a deliberate "perimeter probe" by an infantry-trained, uniformed Mexican force, officials say.
Euphoric Reality has learned in exclusive interviews with high-ranking sources within both the Arizona National Guard and the U.S. Border Patrol that the incident the mainstream media calls a "standoff" was in reality a military-style operation, carried out by a unit of Mexican troops dressed in military uniforms, flak jackets, and armed with AK-47s in an apparent operation to probe the border defenses and test the limits of the National Guard troops. Using easily recognizable infantry movement tactics (such as arm and hand signals and flanking maneuvers), the Mexican unit deliberately moved in a military formation across the border from Mexico, where they were picked up by National Guard surveillance.
As the hostile force moved north over the next three hours, deeper into Arizona, National Guardsmen wearing night vision goggles were able to ascertain that the approaching gunmen were indeed uniformed (including PAGST helmets) and heavily armed. When the Mexican unit came within approximately 100 yards of the EIT site, the Guardsmen repositioned themselves in order to maintain surveillance and tactical advantage. They observed the Mexican unit sweep through the EIT site, and then rapidly withdrew back into Mexico. No shots were fired by either the Mexican gunmen or the Guardsmen. Border Patrol was on the scene within minutes of the Mexican unit's withdrawal.
The Guardsmen, through an Arizona Border Patrol official, confirmed that the incident appeared to be an intelligence-gathering exercise designed to ascertain what the National Guard's response would be to certain tactics. It is not an isolated incident, and many such probes have been reported by the Guardsmen assigned to the area. Though no shots were fired during this particular incident, shots have been fired near and in the vicinity of the soldiers at the EIT site in other situations, though not at the soldiers themselves. It is not clear from the uniforms if the Mexican soldiers were official Mexican federales or mercenaries hired by the drug cartels.
Since then, follow-on news reports have included statements from the Border Patrol that no shots were fired. This was confirmed today by Major Paul Aguirre, a Public Affairs Officer (PAO) for the Arizona National Guard. Rumors have circulated that the Guardsmen were not armed, and thus unable to defend themselves - and that is not the case. Both Major Aguirre and Rob Daniels, a Public Information Officer (PIO) for the Arizona Border Patrol, state that all Guardsmen assigned to EITs are armed, specifically with M16s and sometimes a sidearm. As well, there have been some contradictory news reports that stated the gunmen came "within yards" of the Guardsmen, while other reports state that the gunmen were approximately 100 yards away. Mr. Daniels clarified that the gunmen came as close as 100 yards to the Guardsmen. He also stated that the Guardsmen did not "retreat" but tactically repositioned themselves to maintain surveillance of the group of armed men while simultaneously radioing for Border Patrol agents. He asserted that the Guardsmen had followed their protocols perfectly, and that their services were invaluable to the Border Patrol agents.
The Myth of Troops Bringing Law Enforcement to the Border
National Guard soldiers on the border are volunteers deployed by the federal government for Operation Jump Start. They are not mandated to perform law enforcement activities and, in fact, are prohibited from doing so under the Posse Comitatus Act while federally deployed. They are assigned to the border mission for the sole purpose of supporting the Border Patrol - mostly performing administrative, engineering, and maintenance duties that free up Border Patrol agents for border enforcement.
The ramifications of this incident hitting the public awareness are significant. There are incidents on the record of specially-trained military commandos attacking Border Patrol agents, and videos in existence of uniformed Mexicans, deep in American territory, claiming to be reporters when confronted by Arizona Minutemen. Hundreds of armed incursions have been documented by the Border Patrol. In one year, June 2005 until June 2006, over 250 armed assaults have been reported by Border Patrol agents, and several agents have been killed.
Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, has gone on the record to dismiss reports of armed incursions by a uniformed military force as "navigational mistakes", claiming that the Mexican soldiers were "lost." However, Chertoff offered no explanation as to why these "lost troops" fired on American agents. The Mexican government claims that uniformed military soldiers coming from Mexico are actually American soldiers disguised as Mexican soldiers. Furthermore, when confronted with the possibility that Mexican commandos called Los Zetas, trained by U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg to support the Drug War, have defected from the military and now work as mercenaries for the drug cartels, Mexican officials have worked very hard to debunk such evidence. In an official report presented to the U.S. on behalf of the Mexican Office of Inter-Intelligence Affairs, Mexico claimed that "the Zeta army, or syndicate, is no more real than the crying lady of Puebla."
Yet, contrary to Mexican denials, Los Zetas do exist, and the U.S. Border Patrol is very familiar with them. In a June 2006 investigative news piece by News Channel 5 in Texas, Zetas discussed their training and murderous missions. They also issued a warning:
"These two members of the Zeta army also have a warning for American law enforcement: They are here, with cells operating in Roma, Rio Grande City and Mission - and more are coming.
'It is not a lie,' Zeta-2 said. 'They need to check good, because it is true.'"
Los Zetas: Guns Gone Bad
During the 1990s, U.S. Army Special Forces trained a number of Mexican federal agents and army units in special warfare tactics as part of an effort to aid the struggling Mexican government in the Drug War involving the violent drug cartels of northern Mexico. It's been said that "the training was remedial in nature, and did not exceed international peace time law of NATO forces training foreign combat forces in tactical warfare." Lest we worry about the operational proficiency of such mercenaries, Wikipedia has this unattributed entry:
"The training lasted a mere three months in the sweltering North Carolina heat. In total, 300 Mexican agents and army officers participated in the summer long exercise. Years later, unsealed documents revealed that the training proved to be no more than an extended boot camp. "It was more a media and propaganda effort then it was for actual tactical training that could be used in combat," one of the US Special Forces Officers that participated in the effort stated. "They brought them [sic] boys here, and most of them could fire a gun already, so we just showed them a lot of video of Special Forces training from the early 70's. We were not about to teach or display tactics that make Special Forces what they are. That's why when I read that these boys that are 'Zetas' were Special Forces trained, I almost wet myself with laughter.'"
What the Zetas may lack in professional specialized training, they make up for in ruthless and savage violence. Last year, Times Magazine exposed much of the brutality in an article called Brutal New Drug Gangs Are Terrorizing The U.S.-Mexico Border, and added further information about the identity of Los Zetas.
"According to Mexican officials, Lazcano was a clean-cut Mexican army recruit from the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz when he was picked a decade ago to be part of the highly trained Airborne Special Forces Group. The unit was sent to the eastern border to battle drug trafficking. But in the late 1990s, Lazcano and more than 30 other members of the special forces began working for drug lord Osiel Cardenas, head of the Matamoros-based Gulf cartel, which at the time controlled almost one-third of the Mexican drug trade. "
Official Mexican propaganda notwithstanding, it can be safely assumed that the Zetas are a paramilitary force that has made regular incursions over our border in sometimes heavily-armed assaults. Whether they are actual Mexican federales or uniformed mercenaries in the employ of the drug cartels remains to be seen. Perhaps a small clue to the uniforms is found in the News Channel Five investigative report:
"The municipal police, the state police, the ministerial police, the police of the state,' Zeta-1 said. 'The soldiers and the federal preventive police. The military on the border. They are bought by the Zetas.' The Zeta's tools even include uniforms given by the police themselves."
Regardless of who the uniformed soldiers are, or who commands them, what is paramount is that our southern border security is breached by foreign troops on an increasingly aggressive basis. While our National Guard troops are effectively hamstrung by political restrictions, foreign military soldiers press the advantage. Border Patrol agents have already given their lives in a heroic effort to guard our border, and it is only a matter of time before we lose American soldiers. Is that what it will take for our government to finally take the matter of border security seriously? This is no longer a matter of local civilian law enforcement; it is a matter of national security. For politicians, no matter their affiliation, to play partisan games with our national safety and security is a betrayal of their constituents' trust, and the constitutional duties of their office.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
It's all about the money.
Deanna Spingola
February 4, 2007
NewsWithViews.com
We repeatedly hear claims from the Propaganda Ministry that Iran, the current "axis of evil," is developing devastating nuclear power and for this reason deserves sanctions and a warning from the U.S. which, if unheeded, may ultimately result in a "shock and awe" air invasion targeting strategic facilities resulting in inevitable collateral damage, a more socially acceptable word for catastrophic numbers of dead civilians. The real goal is total dominance of the entire oil-rich Middle East through profit-producing war accompanied by expensive reconstruction. There is more profit in death and destruction than there is in life and production.
Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense in the administration of George H. W. Bush, from March 1989 to January 1993 during which time he directed Operation Just Cause in Panama and Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East. In 1992, the Pentagon, under Cheney, paid Brown & Root Services, a private company, $3.9 million to provide a classified document detailing how they could supply goods and services to American troops in potential war zones around the world. Later that very same year, the Pentagon spent an additional $5 million with BRS to update their report. They immediately received a five year contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers "to work alongside American GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia."[1]
Brown & Root Services had been acquired by Halliburton in 1962, a major company in the burgeoning military/industrial complex. As Defense Secretary under George H. W. Bush, Cheney created an "unprecedented lucrative market for the firm he would go on to head - Halliburton."[2]
Always closely allied to greedy politicians, Texas based BRS, a huge campaign contributor, built roads, harbors, landing strips and military bases in South Vietnam from 1962 to 1972. BRS, who paid LBJ's 1948 campaign expenses, had a long relationship with war hawk Lyndon B. Johnson, U.N. devotee,[3] who used the Tonkin Bay incident (read his remarks to Congress) to escalate the Vietnam War after JFK's unfortunate death (Johnson chose the Warren Commission members). "The abuse of political influence is endemic to Brown & Root, a pathology that repeats itself decade after decade."[4] Texas appears to be a unique spawning ground.
After Cheney left the Defense Department on January 20, 1993, he became a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) until October 1995 when this life-long government insider became chairman and CEO of Halliburton who hired him for his Capital Hill cronyism and Pentagon contacts; they were not disappointed. Under Cheney's direction, Halliburton, from 1995-2000, increased its taxpayer-insured, Export-Import bank loans from $100 million to $3.8 billion in addition to nearly doubling the government contract business. The company became one of the Pentagon's top contractors. By 1999, the Pentagon had spent over $1.2 billion with BRS. Then in May 1999, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave BRS another five year contract worth $731 million for services in the Balkans.[5]
President Bill Clinton stated in his Executive Order #12957, dated March 15, 1995, "that the actions and policies of the Government of Iran constituted an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat." That Executive Order entitled "Prohibiting Certain Transactions With Respect to the Development of Iranian Petroleum Resources"[6] which prohibited "certain transactions with respect to the development of Iranian petroleum resources" by any U.S. citizen or company. Members of Congress were aware of this order and it was published in the Federal Register.
The Executive Order notwithstanding, Halliburton CEO Cheney lobbied congressional cronies against sanctioning Iran so that his company could do business with this "axis of evil." Cheney went to the Middle East in March 1996, where he spoke to a group of mostly U.S. businessmen. He said "that Congress should ease sanctions in Iran and Libya to foster better relationships." He further stated: "Let me make a generalized statement about a trend I see in the U.S. Congress that I find disturbing, that applies not only with respect to the Iranian situation but a number of others as well. I think we Americans sometimes make mistakes . . . There seems to be an assumption that somehow we know what's best for everybody else and that we are going to use our economic clout to get everybody else to live the way we would like."[7]
Obviously, Cheney was and continues to be amply rewarded. Cheney is paid between $100,000 and $1,000,000 per year in "deferred compensation."[8] Cheney either hired or promoted many of the executives who currently direct Halliburton and KBR. Interestingly, Cheney resigned from his lucrative Halliburton position on July 25, 2000, to spearhead the selection process in finding a running mate for George W. Bush.
During Cheney's five years at Halliburton, benefactors of many no-bid government contracts, the company made substantial political contributions, mostly to Republicans - a total of $1,212,000 in soft and hard money to candidates and parties. In the previous five years, the company gave $534,750.[9] Do campaign contributions affect votes? See these graphs.
Cheney has been the most powerful number two in U.S. history. It was no surprise that Rumsfeld, long-time cohort, was installed at the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense. Cheney also insisted, despite the strenuous objections of Secretary of State, Colin Powell, that Neo-con Paul Wolfowitz be second in command at the Pentagon. He further insisted, against Powell's objections, on installing "ultra-unilateralist" John Bolton, then vice-president of the American Enterprise Institute as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
Cheney, stacking the administration, was also behind the appointment of Elliott Abrams as the head of the Middle East office on the National Security Council. Cheney chose I. Lewis '"Scooter" Libby as his chief of staff and national security adviser. Libby and Wolfowitz had worked on a 1992 draft strategy that called for global U.S. military dominance. Libby and Cheney purportedly visited CIA headquarters numerous times prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion. This was viewed as applying pressure on CIA analysts to develop a link between Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda.[10]
SNIP!
February 4, 2007
NewsWithViews.com
We repeatedly hear claims from the Propaganda Ministry that Iran, the current "axis of evil," is developing devastating nuclear power and for this reason deserves sanctions and a warning from the U.S. which, if unheeded, may ultimately result in a "shock and awe" air invasion targeting strategic facilities resulting in inevitable collateral damage, a more socially acceptable word for catastrophic numbers of dead civilians. The real goal is total dominance of the entire oil-rich Middle East through profit-producing war accompanied by expensive reconstruction. There is more profit in death and destruction than there is in life and production.
Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense in the administration of George H. W. Bush, from March 1989 to January 1993 during which time he directed Operation Just Cause in Panama and Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East. In 1992, the Pentagon, under Cheney, paid Brown & Root Services, a private company, $3.9 million to provide a classified document detailing how they could supply goods and services to American troops in potential war zones around the world. Later that very same year, the Pentagon spent an additional $5 million with BRS to update their report. They immediately received a five year contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers "to work alongside American GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia."[1]
Brown & Root Services had been acquired by Halliburton in 1962, a major company in the burgeoning military/industrial complex. As Defense Secretary under George H. W. Bush, Cheney created an "unprecedented lucrative market for the firm he would go on to head - Halliburton."[2]
Always closely allied to greedy politicians, Texas based BRS, a huge campaign contributor, built roads, harbors, landing strips and military bases in South Vietnam from 1962 to 1972. BRS, who paid LBJ's 1948 campaign expenses, had a long relationship with war hawk Lyndon B. Johnson, U.N. devotee,[3] who used the Tonkin Bay incident (read his remarks to Congress) to escalate the Vietnam War after JFK's unfortunate death (Johnson chose the Warren Commission members). "The abuse of political influence is endemic to Brown & Root, a pathology that repeats itself decade after decade."[4] Texas appears to be a unique spawning ground.
After Cheney left the Defense Department on January 20, 1993, he became a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) until October 1995 when this life-long government insider became chairman and CEO of Halliburton who hired him for his Capital Hill cronyism and Pentagon contacts; they were not disappointed. Under Cheney's direction, Halliburton, from 1995-2000, increased its taxpayer-insured, Export-Import bank loans from $100 million to $3.8 billion in addition to nearly doubling the government contract business. The company became one of the Pentagon's top contractors. By 1999, the Pentagon had spent over $1.2 billion with BRS. Then in May 1999, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave BRS another five year contract worth $731 million for services in the Balkans.[5]
President Bill Clinton stated in his Executive Order #12957, dated March 15, 1995, "that the actions and policies of the Government of Iran constituted an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat." That Executive Order entitled "Prohibiting Certain Transactions With Respect to the Development of Iranian Petroleum Resources"[6] which prohibited "certain transactions with respect to the development of Iranian petroleum resources" by any U.S. citizen or company. Members of Congress were aware of this order and it was published in the Federal Register.
The Executive Order notwithstanding, Halliburton CEO Cheney lobbied congressional cronies against sanctioning Iran so that his company could do business with this "axis of evil." Cheney went to the Middle East in March 1996, where he spoke to a group of mostly U.S. businessmen. He said "that Congress should ease sanctions in Iran and Libya to foster better relationships." He further stated: "Let me make a generalized statement about a trend I see in the U.S. Congress that I find disturbing, that applies not only with respect to the Iranian situation but a number of others as well. I think we Americans sometimes make mistakes . . . There seems to be an assumption that somehow we know what's best for everybody else and that we are going to use our economic clout to get everybody else to live the way we would like."[7]
Obviously, Cheney was and continues to be amply rewarded. Cheney is paid between $100,000 and $1,000,000 per year in "deferred compensation."[8] Cheney either hired or promoted many of the executives who currently direct Halliburton and KBR. Interestingly, Cheney resigned from his lucrative Halliburton position on July 25, 2000, to spearhead the selection process in finding a running mate for George W. Bush.
During Cheney's five years at Halliburton, benefactors of many no-bid government contracts, the company made substantial political contributions, mostly to Republicans - a total of $1,212,000 in soft and hard money to candidates and parties. In the previous five years, the company gave $534,750.[9] Do campaign contributions affect votes? See these graphs.
Cheney has been the most powerful number two in U.S. history. It was no surprise that Rumsfeld, long-time cohort, was installed at the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense. Cheney also insisted, despite the strenuous objections of Secretary of State, Colin Powell, that Neo-con Paul Wolfowitz be second in command at the Pentagon. He further insisted, against Powell's objections, on installing "ultra-unilateralist" John Bolton, then vice-president of the American Enterprise Institute as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
Cheney, stacking the administration, was also behind the appointment of Elliott Abrams as the head of the Middle East office on the National Security Council. Cheney chose I. Lewis '"Scooter" Libby as his chief of staff and national security adviser. Libby and Wolfowitz had worked on a 1992 draft strategy that called for global U.S. military dominance. Libby and Cheney purportedly visited CIA headquarters numerous times prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion. This was viewed as applying pressure on CIA analysts to develop a link between Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda.[10]
SNIP!
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.
What Do You Call Someone Who Wants to Get Their Hands on Your 5-Year-Old?
by Vin Suprynowicz
Three months ago, Nevada held an election. The Democratic candidate, state Sen. Dina Titus, wanted to grab millions more in tax moneys (you thought it would all be free?) and use it to impose mandatory all-day compulsion schooling for 5-year-olds. She ran against a pleasant congressman and former airline pilot named Jim Gibbons, who said he’d prefer to study the results of a current pilot program before committing to such a huge scheme.
Titus lost. Does that mean her plan to grab every 5-year-old out of Nevada homes under threat of armed force is dead?
Oh, please.
Gov. Gibbons’ weak-kneed "Let’s study it" may postpone the inevitable for a few years, but government-funded mandatory schooling from age 4 to 18 (or will it be 22?) will arrive – and bankrupt us – in our lifetimes.
What will the "studies" show? The same thing studies of the federal "Head Start" program show: universal government-run kindergarten improves academic performance in first grade among the kind of kids who didn’t used to attend kindergarten, but all such improvement washes out by the sixth grade.
Given that the main function of the government schools is to slow everyone down and level everyone out, this should hardly come as a surprise.
No net gain for a price of millions: One would think that makes universal tax-funded kindergarten a non-starter. But parents will overwhelmingly enthuse over the prospect of getting someone else to fund their all-day child care a full year earlier, and the program will be adopted with much glee and celebration.
At no point in this "study of the results" of all-day kindergarten will anyone mention the ongoing growth of social pathologies among the young – violent crime, vandalism, unwed pregnancy, drug use, a thorough scorn for their parents’ beliefs and standards, and a total absence of historical context as they’re led by the nose to demand a new government "program" to solve each new manufactured "crisis."
Even though these unpleasant and very costly outcomes track perfectly with the growing amount of time kids have spent in government-run "schools" over the past 70 years, most Americans will look at you like you’re nuts if you posit any CAUSAL relationship between these problems and locking our kids up in mandatory youth propaganda camps for ever more hours, days, and years.
What is "kindergarten"?
Friedrich Froebel opened the first kindergarten, in Germany, in 1840, as a means of "socializing" children, writes Joel Spring, in The American School, 1642–1885.
"As the name implies, the kindergarten was conceived as a garden of children to be cultivated in the same manner as plants."
The idea was borrowed and brought to America in 1873, when the first kindergarten opened in St. Louis. Its purpose, according to its superintendent, William Torrey Harris, was not literacy, but to rescue children from poverty and bad families by bringing them into the school system early in life.
Education historian Marvin Lazerson, in his study of the Boston school system, found 19th century administrators there saw kindergarten as an indirect means of teaching slum parents how to run good homes. The goal was always to increase the child’s time under government supervision, and to do away with "idle time" – by which these experts meant any time out of school – since (in the words of a Massachusetts superintendent of schools in 1897) "Idleness is an opportunity for evil-doing."
Mr. Spring comments: "By the early twentieth century the school in fact had expanded its functions into areas not dreamed of in the early part of the previous century. Kindergartens, playgrounds, school showers, nurses, social centers and Americanization centers turned the school into a central social agency in urban America. ...Within this framework, the school became a major agency for social control."
"Today’s advocates of "early intervention" and year-round schools seem to share that objective," comments Sheldon Richman, author of the 1994 book Separating School and State.
In discussing this subject I often turn to the words of former New York City (and state) Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto, because he learned the reality of modern-day compulsion schooling in the trenches, on the front lines – and because his research stands unrefuted.
In Gatto’s talk "Nine Assumptions of Schooling – and Twenty-one Facts the Institution Would Rather Not Discuss" he asks:
"Did you know that in Sweden, a country legendary for its quality of life and a nation which beats American school performance in every academic category, a kid isn’t allowed to start school before the age of 7? The hard-headed Swedes don’t want to pay for the social pathologies attendant on ripping a child away from his home and mother and dumping him into a pen with strangers. ... Did you know that the entire Swedish school sequence is only 9 years long, a net 25 percent time and tax savings over our own 12-year sequence? ...
"Did you know that Hong Kong, a country with a population the size of Norway’s, beats Japan in every scientific and mathematical category in which the two countries compete? Did you know that Hong Kong has a school year ten and one half weeks shorter than Japan’s? How on earth do they manage that if longer school years translate into higher performance? ...
"Or did you know that in Flemish Belgium with the shortest school year in the developed world that the kids regularly finish in the top three nations in the world in academic competition? Is it the water in Belgium or what? Because it can’t be the passionate commitment to government forced schooling, which they don’t seem to possess. ...
"If you trust journalism or the professional educational establishment to provide you with data you need to think for yourself in the increasingly fantastic socialist world of compulsion schooling, you are certainly the kind of citizen who would trade his cow for a handful of colored beans."
"Shortly into the 20th century American schooling decided to move away from intellectual development or skills training as the main justification for its existence and to enter the eerie world of social engineering," Mr. Gatto explains, "a world where ‘socializing’ and ‘psychologizing’ the classroom preempted attention and rewards.
"Once this design was in place – and it was firmly in place by 1917 – all that remained to reach the target was a continual series of experiments on public schoolchildren, some modest in scope, many breathtakingly radical like ‘IQ tests’ or ‘kindergartens’, and a full palette of intermediate colors like ‘multiculturalism’, ‘rainbow’ curricula and ‘universal self esteem’. Each of these thrusts has a real behavioral purpose which is part of the larger utopia envisioned, yet each is capable of being rhetorically defended as the particular redress of some current ‘problem’.
"But the biggest obstacle to a planned society is parents. Parents have their own plans for their own kids. ..."
So kids must be wrested away from their parents and taught that it’s really the state that has their best interests at heart, from the earliest possible age.
And once parental authority is undercut, delinquency becomes inevitable, Gatto reports.
"Delinquent behavior is a direct reaction to the structure of schooling. It is much worse than the press has reported because all urban school districts conspire to suppress its prevalence. Teachers who insist on justice on behalf of pupils and parents are most frequently intimidated into silence. Or dismissed."
In Chapter 15 of his masterwork, The Underground History of American Education, Gatto goes into detail:
"The push to extend ‘day care’ further and further into currently unschooled time importantly assists the formal twelve-year sequence, ensuring utmost tractability among first graders. ...
"The social pathologies we associate with modern children are natural byproducts of our modern system of schooling which produces:
"Children indifferent to the adult world of values and accomplishment, defying the universal human experience laid down over thousands of years that a close study of grown-ups is always the most exciting and one of the most necessary occupations of youth. Have you noticed how very few people, adults included, want to grow up anymore? Toys are the lingua franca of American society for the masses and the classes. ...
"Children with a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is linked to today. Children who live in a continuous present. Conversely, children with no sense of the past and of how the past has shaped and limited the present, shaped and limited their own choices, predetermined their values and destinies to an overwhelming degree.
"Children who lack compassion for misfortune, who laugh at weakness, who betray their friends and families, who show contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly. Children condemned to be alone, to age with bitterness, to die in fear.
"Children who can’t stand intimacy or frankness. Children who masquerade behind personalities hastily fabricated from watching television and from other distorted gauges of human nature. Behind the masks lurk crippled souls. Aware of this, they avoid the close scrutiny intimate relationships demand because it will expose their shallowness of which they have some awareness. ...
"Dependent children who grow up to be whining, treacherous, terrified, dependent adults, passive and timid in the face of new challenges. And yet this crippling condition is often hidden under a patina of bravado, anger, aggressiveness."
Sound familiar? Want more of the same? Dragoon every Nevada kid into the mandatory government homogeneity camps at the age of 5.
February 3, 2007
Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow.
Copyright © 2007 Vin Suprynowicz
by Vin Suprynowicz
Three months ago, Nevada held an election. The Democratic candidate, state Sen. Dina Titus, wanted to grab millions more in tax moneys (you thought it would all be free?) and use it to impose mandatory all-day compulsion schooling for 5-year-olds. She ran against a pleasant congressman and former airline pilot named Jim Gibbons, who said he’d prefer to study the results of a current pilot program before committing to such a huge scheme.
Titus lost. Does that mean her plan to grab every 5-year-old out of Nevada homes under threat of armed force is dead?
Oh, please.
Gov. Gibbons’ weak-kneed "Let’s study it" may postpone the inevitable for a few years, but government-funded mandatory schooling from age 4 to 18 (or will it be 22?) will arrive – and bankrupt us – in our lifetimes.
What will the "studies" show? The same thing studies of the federal "Head Start" program show: universal government-run kindergarten improves academic performance in first grade among the kind of kids who didn’t used to attend kindergarten, but all such improvement washes out by the sixth grade.
Given that the main function of the government schools is to slow everyone down and level everyone out, this should hardly come as a surprise.
No net gain for a price of millions: One would think that makes universal tax-funded kindergarten a non-starter. But parents will overwhelmingly enthuse over the prospect of getting someone else to fund their all-day child care a full year earlier, and the program will be adopted with much glee and celebration.
At no point in this "study of the results" of all-day kindergarten will anyone mention the ongoing growth of social pathologies among the young – violent crime, vandalism, unwed pregnancy, drug use, a thorough scorn for their parents’ beliefs and standards, and a total absence of historical context as they’re led by the nose to demand a new government "program" to solve each new manufactured "crisis."
Even though these unpleasant and very costly outcomes track perfectly with the growing amount of time kids have spent in government-run "schools" over the past 70 years, most Americans will look at you like you’re nuts if you posit any CAUSAL relationship between these problems and locking our kids up in mandatory youth propaganda camps for ever more hours, days, and years.
What is "kindergarten"?
Friedrich Froebel opened the first kindergarten, in Germany, in 1840, as a means of "socializing" children, writes Joel Spring, in The American School, 1642–1885.
"As the name implies, the kindergarten was conceived as a garden of children to be cultivated in the same manner as plants."
The idea was borrowed and brought to America in 1873, when the first kindergarten opened in St. Louis. Its purpose, according to its superintendent, William Torrey Harris, was not literacy, but to rescue children from poverty and bad families by bringing them into the school system early in life.
Education historian Marvin Lazerson, in his study of the Boston school system, found 19th century administrators there saw kindergarten as an indirect means of teaching slum parents how to run good homes. The goal was always to increase the child’s time under government supervision, and to do away with "idle time" – by which these experts meant any time out of school – since (in the words of a Massachusetts superintendent of schools in 1897) "Idleness is an opportunity for evil-doing."
Mr. Spring comments: "By the early twentieth century the school in fact had expanded its functions into areas not dreamed of in the early part of the previous century. Kindergartens, playgrounds, school showers, nurses, social centers and Americanization centers turned the school into a central social agency in urban America. ...Within this framework, the school became a major agency for social control."
"Today’s advocates of "early intervention" and year-round schools seem to share that objective," comments Sheldon Richman, author of the 1994 book Separating School and State.
In discussing this subject I often turn to the words of former New York City (and state) Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto, because he learned the reality of modern-day compulsion schooling in the trenches, on the front lines – and because his research stands unrefuted.
In Gatto’s talk "Nine Assumptions of Schooling – and Twenty-one Facts the Institution Would Rather Not Discuss" he asks:
"Did you know that in Sweden, a country legendary for its quality of life and a nation which beats American school performance in every academic category, a kid isn’t allowed to start school before the age of 7? The hard-headed Swedes don’t want to pay for the social pathologies attendant on ripping a child away from his home and mother and dumping him into a pen with strangers. ... Did you know that the entire Swedish school sequence is only 9 years long, a net 25 percent time and tax savings over our own 12-year sequence? ...
"Did you know that Hong Kong, a country with a population the size of Norway’s, beats Japan in every scientific and mathematical category in which the two countries compete? Did you know that Hong Kong has a school year ten and one half weeks shorter than Japan’s? How on earth do they manage that if longer school years translate into higher performance? ...
"Or did you know that in Flemish Belgium with the shortest school year in the developed world that the kids regularly finish in the top three nations in the world in academic competition? Is it the water in Belgium or what? Because it can’t be the passionate commitment to government forced schooling, which they don’t seem to possess. ...
"If you trust journalism or the professional educational establishment to provide you with data you need to think for yourself in the increasingly fantastic socialist world of compulsion schooling, you are certainly the kind of citizen who would trade his cow for a handful of colored beans."
"Shortly into the 20th century American schooling decided to move away from intellectual development or skills training as the main justification for its existence and to enter the eerie world of social engineering," Mr. Gatto explains, "a world where ‘socializing’ and ‘psychologizing’ the classroom preempted attention and rewards.
"Once this design was in place – and it was firmly in place by 1917 – all that remained to reach the target was a continual series of experiments on public schoolchildren, some modest in scope, many breathtakingly radical like ‘IQ tests’ or ‘kindergartens’, and a full palette of intermediate colors like ‘multiculturalism’, ‘rainbow’ curricula and ‘universal self esteem’. Each of these thrusts has a real behavioral purpose which is part of the larger utopia envisioned, yet each is capable of being rhetorically defended as the particular redress of some current ‘problem’.
"But the biggest obstacle to a planned society is parents. Parents have their own plans for their own kids. ..."
So kids must be wrested away from their parents and taught that it’s really the state that has their best interests at heart, from the earliest possible age.
And once parental authority is undercut, delinquency becomes inevitable, Gatto reports.
"Delinquent behavior is a direct reaction to the structure of schooling. It is much worse than the press has reported because all urban school districts conspire to suppress its prevalence. Teachers who insist on justice on behalf of pupils and parents are most frequently intimidated into silence. Or dismissed."
In Chapter 15 of his masterwork, The Underground History of American Education, Gatto goes into detail:
"The push to extend ‘day care’ further and further into currently unschooled time importantly assists the formal twelve-year sequence, ensuring utmost tractability among first graders. ...
"The social pathologies we associate with modern children are natural byproducts of our modern system of schooling which produces:
"Children indifferent to the adult world of values and accomplishment, defying the universal human experience laid down over thousands of years that a close study of grown-ups is always the most exciting and one of the most necessary occupations of youth. Have you noticed how very few people, adults included, want to grow up anymore? Toys are the lingua franca of American society for the masses and the classes. ...
"Children with a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is linked to today. Children who live in a continuous present. Conversely, children with no sense of the past and of how the past has shaped and limited the present, shaped and limited their own choices, predetermined their values and destinies to an overwhelming degree.
"Children who lack compassion for misfortune, who laugh at weakness, who betray their friends and families, who show contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly. Children condemned to be alone, to age with bitterness, to die in fear.
"Children who can’t stand intimacy or frankness. Children who masquerade behind personalities hastily fabricated from watching television and from other distorted gauges of human nature. Behind the masks lurk crippled souls. Aware of this, they avoid the close scrutiny intimate relationships demand because it will expose their shallowness of which they have some awareness. ...
"Dependent children who grow up to be whining, treacherous, terrified, dependent adults, passive and timid in the face of new challenges. And yet this crippling condition is often hidden under a patina of bravado, anger, aggressiveness."
Sound familiar? Want more of the same? Dragoon every Nevada kid into the mandatory government homogeneity camps at the age of 5.
February 3, 2007
Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow.
Copyright © 2007 Vin Suprynowicz
Freedom is the price for empire.
Nemesis
by Charley Reese
It's axiomatic, based on history, that no nation can maintain an empire abroad and a democracy at home. We are now about to pay for our empire, and the price is American freedom.
This is the message of a new book by Chalmers Johnson, a historian. His latest book is titled Nemesis and is the third work in what has turned out to be a trilogy on the American Empire. The first two were Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire.
No American president in my memory has shown more disdain for the Constitution and its limits on power than George W. Bush. His ridiculous claim that his "signing statements" can alter the laws passed by Congress and his latest claim to alter the rule-making of various government agencies are just two examples.
The outrageous claims by his attorney general that the U.S. could conduct warrantless wiretaps and Internet intercepts and that the Constitution does not guarantee the right of habeas corpus are about as stark a warning that freedom is in grave danger as you could ask for. The Bush administration has politicized science and intelligence and taken this country to war based on lies. It has condoned torture and scoffed at international law by using secret prisons where people are tortured and denied the most basic rights.
The federal authorities can break into your home and plant surveillance devices without notifying you. They can get a list of books you buy or check out of a library and put the bookseller or librarian in prison if the person tells you about it. If you are an alien, perfectly legal, you can still be picked up and held indefinitely.
Of course, it is all done in the name of protecting the American people. That is the standard excuse that has been used since the earliest empires. We're only trying to make sure you're safe, they claim. Well, one should remember that there were no safer streets than Moscow under Stalin or Berlin under Hitler – unless, of course, it was the government that wanted to do you harm.
Given a choice between government security and freedom with risks, always choose freedom. Criminals, including terrorists, don't have much power, but government possesses crushing power. Of course, we Americans are conditioned to view our government as friendly and protective, but that is a mistake.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn made an interesting point in his "Gulag Archipelago." He said the reason so few Russians resisted when the secret police came to get them was because they were innocent. They had done nothing wrong, they were loyal, and they expected their government to realize that their arrest was a mistake. The government didn't, of course, because they were victims of a dictator's paranoia.
Unfortunately, Americans have virtually no control over their government between elections. President Bush has two years to go and can do anything he wants to, including taking us to war with Iran. Government propaganda against Iran is following the exact same pattern as propaganda against Iraq. It is accusing Iran of seeking nuclear weapons in the face of evidence to the contrary. Now it is accusing Iran of making improvised explosive devices for the Iraqi insurgents. That strikes me as a lie. The IED is just a bureaucratic name for a booby trap, and you don't need to be an explosives expert or an electronic wizard to make them.
Congress really has only two choices. It could initiate impeachment proceedings against Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, or it could cut off the funds for the war. I doubt there is enough sand to do either.
February 3, 2007
Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.
© 2007 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Charley Reese Archives
by Charley Reese
It's axiomatic, based on history, that no nation can maintain an empire abroad and a democracy at home. We are now about to pay for our empire, and the price is American freedom.
This is the message of a new book by Chalmers Johnson, a historian. His latest book is titled Nemesis and is the third work in what has turned out to be a trilogy on the American Empire. The first two were Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire.
No American president in my memory has shown more disdain for the Constitution and its limits on power than George W. Bush. His ridiculous claim that his "signing statements" can alter the laws passed by Congress and his latest claim to alter the rule-making of various government agencies are just two examples.
The outrageous claims by his attorney general that the U.S. could conduct warrantless wiretaps and Internet intercepts and that the Constitution does not guarantee the right of habeas corpus are about as stark a warning that freedom is in grave danger as you could ask for. The Bush administration has politicized science and intelligence and taken this country to war based on lies. It has condoned torture and scoffed at international law by using secret prisons where people are tortured and denied the most basic rights.
The federal authorities can break into your home and plant surveillance devices without notifying you. They can get a list of books you buy or check out of a library and put the bookseller or librarian in prison if the person tells you about it. If you are an alien, perfectly legal, you can still be picked up and held indefinitely.
Of course, it is all done in the name of protecting the American people. That is the standard excuse that has been used since the earliest empires. We're only trying to make sure you're safe, they claim. Well, one should remember that there were no safer streets than Moscow under Stalin or Berlin under Hitler – unless, of course, it was the government that wanted to do you harm.
Given a choice between government security and freedom with risks, always choose freedom. Criminals, including terrorists, don't have much power, but government possesses crushing power. Of course, we Americans are conditioned to view our government as friendly and protective, but that is a mistake.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn made an interesting point in his "Gulag Archipelago." He said the reason so few Russians resisted when the secret police came to get them was because they were innocent. They had done nothing wrong, they were loyal, and they expected their government to realize that their arrest was a mistake. The government didn't, of course, because they were victims of a dictator's paranoia.
Unfortunately, Americans have virtually no control over their government between elections. President Bush has two years to go and can do anything he wants to, including taking us to war with Iran. Government propaganda against Iran is following the exact same pattern as propaganda against Iraq. It is accusing Iran of seeking nuclear weapons in the face of evidence to the contrary. Now it is accusing Iran of making improvised explosive devices for the Iraqi insurgents. That strikes me as a lie. The IED is just a bureaucratic name for a booby trap, and you don't need to be an explosives expert or an electronic wizard to make them.
Congress really has only two choices. It could initiate impeachment proceedings against Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, or it could cut off the funds for the war. I doubt there is enough sand to do either.
February 3, 2007
Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.
© 2007 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Charley Reese Archives
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