https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/19/chris-hedges-the-lord-of-chaos/
The Lord of Chaos
The politicians and shills in the media who orchestrated 20 years of military debacles in the Middle East, and who seek a world dominated by U.S. power, must be held accountable for their crimes.
Two decades ago, I sabotaged my career at The New York Times. It was a conscious choice. I had spent seven years in the Middle East, four of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief. I was an Arabic speaker. I believed, like nearly all Arabists, including most of those in the State Department and the CIA, that a “preemptive” war against Iraq would be the most costly strategic blunder in American history. It would also constitute what the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the “supreme international crime.” While Arabists in official circles were muzzled, I was not. I was invited by them to speak at The State Department, The United States Military Academy at West Point and to senior Marine Corps officers scheduled to be deployed to Kuwait to prepare for the invasion.
Mine was not a popular view nor one a reporter, rather than an opinion columnist, was permitted to express publicly according to the rules laid down by the newspaper. But I had experience that gave me credibility and a platform. I had reported extensively from Iraq. I had covered numerous armed conflicts, including the first Gulf War and the Shi’ite uprising in southern Iraq where I was taken prisoner by The Iraqi Republican Guard. I easily dismantled the lunacy and lies used to promote the war, especially as I had reported on the destruction of Iraq’s chemical weapons stockpiles and facilities by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspection teams. I had detailed knowledge of how degraded the Iraqi military had become under U.S. sanctions. Besides, even if Iraq did possess “weapons of mass destruction” that would not have been a legal justification for war.
The death threats towards me exploded when my stance became public in numerous interviews and talks I gave across the country. They were either mailed in by anonymous writers or expressed by irate callers who would daily fill up the message bank on my phone with rage-filled tirades. Right-wing talk shows, including Fox News, pilloried me, especially after I was heckled and booed off a commencement stage at Rockford College for denouncing the war. The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial attacking me. Bomb threats were called into venues where I was scheduled to speak. I became a pariah in the newsroom. Reporters and editors I had known for years would lower their heads as I passed, fearful of any career-killing contagion. I was issued a written reprimand by The New York Times to cease speaking publicly against the war. I refused. My tenure was over.
What is disturbing is not the cost to me personally. I was aware of the potential consequences. What is disturbing is that the architects of these debacles have never been held accountable and remain ensconced in power. They continue to promote permanent war, including the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, as well as a future war against China.
The politicians who lied to us — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to name but a few — extinguished millions of lives, including thousands of American lives, and left Iraq along with Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Yemen in chaos. They exaggerated or fabricated conclusions from intelligence reports to mislead the public. The big lie is taken from the playbook of totalitarian regimes.
The cheerleaders in the media for war — Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Richard Cohen, George Packer, William Kristol, Peter Beinart, Bill Keller, Robert Kaplan, Anne Applebaum, Nicholas Kristof, Jonathan Chait, Fareed Zakaria, David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, David Brooks and Michael Ignatieff — were used to amplify the lies and discredit the handful of us, including Michael Moore, Robert Scheer and Phil Donahue, who opposed the war. These courtiers were often motivated more by careerism than idealism. They did not lose their megaphones or lucrative speaking fees and book contracts once the lies were exposed, as if their crazed diatribes did not matter. They served the centers of power and were rewarded for it.
Many of these same pundits are pushing further escalation of the war in Ukraine, although most know as little about Ukraine or NATO’s provocative and unnecessary expansion to the borders of Russia as they did about Iraq.
“I told myself and others that Ukraine is the most important story of our time, that everything we should care about is on the line there,” George Packer writes in The Atlantic magazine. “I believed it then, and I believe it now, but all of this talk put a nice gloss on the simple, unjustifiable desire to be there and see.”
Packer views war as a purgative, a force that will jolt a country, including the U.S., back to the core moral values he supposedly found amongst American volunteers in Ukraine.
“I didn’t know what these men thought of American politics, and I didn’t want to know,” he writes of two U.S. volunteers. “Back home we might have argued; we might have detested each other. Here, we were joined by a common belief in what the Ukrainians were trying to do and admiration for how they were doing it. Here, all the complex infighting and chronic disappointments and sheer lethargy of any democratic society, but especially ours, dissolved, and the essential things — to be free and live with dignity — became clear. It almost seemed as if the U.S. would have to be attacked or undergo some other catastrophe for Americans to remember what Ukrainians have known from the start.”
The Iraq war cost at least $3 trillion and the 20 years of warfare in the Middle East cost a total of some $8 trillion. The occupation created Shi’ite and Sunni death squads, fueled horrific sectarian violence, gangs of kidnappers, mass killings and torture. It gave rise to al-Qaeda cells and spawned ISIS which at one point controlled a third of Iraq and Syria. ISIS carried out rape, enslavement and mass executions of Iraqi ethnic and religious minorities such as the Yazidis. It persecuted Chaldean Catholics and other Christians. This mayhem was accompanied by an orgy of killing by U.S. occupation forces, such as as the gang rape and murder of Abeer al-Janabi, a 14-year-old girl and her family by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne. The U.S. routinely engaged in the torture and execution of detained civilians, including at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca.
There is no accurate count of lives lost, estimates in Iraq alone range from hundreds of thousands to over a million. Some 7,000 U.S. service members died in our post 9/11 wars, with over 30,000 later committing suicide, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Yes, Saddam Hussein was brutal and murderous, but in terms of a body count, we far outstripped his killings, including his genocidal campaigns against the Kurds. We destroyed Iraq as a unified country, devastated its modern infrastructure, wiped out its thriving and educated middle class, gave birth to rogue militias and installed a kleptocracy that uses the country’s oil revenues to enrich itself. Ordinary Iraqis are impoverished. Hundreds of Iraqis protesting in the streets against the kleptocracy have been gunned down by police. There are frequent power outages. The Shi’ite majority, closely allied with Iran, dominates the country.
The occupation of Iraq, beginning 20 years ago today, turned the Muslim world and the Global South against us. The enduring images we left behind from two decades of war include President Bush standing under a “Mission Accomplished” banner onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier barely one month after he invaded Iraq, the bodies of Iraqis in Fallujah that were burned with white phosphorus and the photos of torture by U.S. soldiers.
The U.S. is desperately attempting to use Ukraine to repair its
image. But the rank hypocrisy of calling for “a rules-based
international order” to justify the $113 billion in arms and other aid
that the U.S. has committed to
send to Ukraine, won’t work. It ignores what we did. We might forget,
but the victims do not. The only redemptive path is charging Bush,
Cheney and the other architects of the wars in the Middle East,
including Joe Biden, as war criminals in the International Criminal
Court....
Many of the apologists for the war in Iraq seek to justify their support by arguing that “mistakes” were made, that if, for example, the Iraqi civil service and army were not disbanded after the U.S. invaded, the occupation would have worked. They insist that our intentions were honorable. They ignore the hubris and lies that led to the war, the misguided belief that the U.S. could be the sole major power in a unipolar world. They ignore the massive military expenditures spent annually to achieve this fantasy. They ignore that the war in Iraq was only an episode in this demented quest.
A national reckoning with the military fiascos in the Middle East would expose the self-delusion of the ruling class. But this reckoning is not taking place. We are trying to wish the nightmares we perpetuated in the Middle East away, burying them in a collective amnesia. “World War III Begins With Forgetting,” warns Stephen Wertheim.
The celebration of our national “virtue” by pumping weapons into Ukraine, by sustaining at least 750 military bases in more than 70 countries and by expanding our naval presence in the South China Sea, is meant to fuel this dream of global dominance.
What the mandarins in Washington fail to grasp is that most of the globe does not believe the lie of American benevolence or support its justifications for U.S. interventions. China and Russia, rather than passively accepting U.S. hegemony, are building up their militaries and strategic alliances. China, last week, brokered an agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia to re-establish relations after seven years of hostility, something once expected of U.S. diplomats. The rising influence of China creates a self-fulfilling prophecy for those who call for war with Russia and China, one that will have consequences far more catastrophic than those in the Middle East.
There is a national weariness with permanent war, especially with inflation ravaging family incomes and 57 percent of Americans unable to afford a $1,000 emergency expense. The Democratic Party and the establishment wing of the Republican Party, who peddled the lies about Iraq, are war parties. Donald Trump’s call to end the war in Ukraine, like his lambasting of the war in Iraq as the “worst decision” in American history, are attractive political stances to Americans struggling to stay afloat. The working poor, even those whose options for education and employment are limited, are no longer as inclined to fill the ranks. They have far more pressing concerns than a unipolar world or war with Russia or China. The isolationism of the far right is a potent political weapon.
The pimps of war, leaping from fiasco to fiasco, cling to the chimera of U.S. global supremacy. The dance macabre will not stop until we publicly hold them accountable for their crimes, ask those we have wronged for forgiveness and give up our lust for uncontested global power. The day of reckoning, vital if we are to protect what is left of our anemic democracy and curb the appetites of the war machine, will only come when we build mass anti-war organizations that demand an end to the imperial folly threatening to extinguish life on the planet.
....
https://www.globalresearch.ca/electronic-money-under-the-one-world-order-owo-are-we-on-the-verge-of-becoming-western-money-slaves-solutions-resistance-economy-de-dollarization-and-de-globalization/5600200
“Electronic Money” under “The One World Order” (OWO): Are We Becoming “Money Slaves”?
Solutions? "Resistance Economy", "De-dollarization", "De-globalization"
Electronic money, a cashless society, is perhaps the ultimate and most direct means of the New World Order (NWO), also called One World Order (OWO), to control us all via its financial system. A system that the NWO would like to maintain as the world’s financial system, albeit, it has already been reduced to the western world’s financial system.
Why reduced to the Occident? – Because the Orient, China, Russia and the other countries belonging to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and to the Eurasia Economic Union (EEU) have already largely delinked themselves from the western dollar-based system of fraud. They are saved from slavehood.
This reminds of one of the oldest and world’s worst criminal agent against humanity – still alive and kicking – Henry Kissinger:
“Who controls food, controls the people; who controls energy controls entire continents; and who controls money controls the world.”
He
is, of course, right on all fronts, and has given us this clue already
more than 40 years ago. But nobody has really seriously taken it to
heart and acted upon these edicts.
Many, including me, have written about freeing the world from the NWO money control.
Deglobalizing would be a first step towards freeing us all from the bloody claws of the Washington implemented, and Dark State directed NWO.
Critics often talk of an overhaul and reform of the system. This monetary system cannot be reformed. It is privately owned and rotten to the core. None of the private owners, the Rothschild, Rockefeller clans et al, would allow interfering with their wealth, usurped of the back of the world’s workers and populace at large. Former attempts (e.g. under JFK) to bring the FED (Federal Reserve) under national reign, have resulted in failure.
Compare the dollar-based monetary system to the European Union – which cannot be reformed either. Any ‘reform’ is just fiddling at the margins – as is inherent in the term ‘reform’. And that’s not good enough. As we know by now, the EU was not the construct of Europeans, per se, but an idea behind the ‘deep state’, already at the onset of Phase II of the Great Hundred Year War (WWII – September 1939 to September 1945). Phase I (WWI – 1914 – 1918), as well as Phase II were induced to weaken Europe, to make her ready for full domination.
Imagine a ‘Picador’ of a Spanish bullfight, whose job it is to weaken the bull to the point where the torero and matador have a relatively easy task subduing and killing the bull. Well, Europe is the bull. They don’t want to kill Europe altogether, good old Lady Europe, because they need her as a stepping stone for subjugating the rest of the world, for vital trade that helps justifying and generating the unlimited dollar machine – and, as a cushion to the East, where massive military troops and weapons can be stationed in the name of NATO, to eventually launch, what they would like to think, is the final blow on the East, starting with Russia.
For all this the European (non)-Union was created, her Brussels hub, dominated by the non-elected European Commission (EC) which also dictates most of the rules imposed on her 28-member states – and which are all not-so-coincidentally run by neoliberal, some close to neofascist governments. Of course, by adhering to the Brussels dictate, they have become devoid of national sovereignty. That is a must. A sovereign country would not submit to the horrors of police state and militarization that are in the coming. The euro with the Wall Street (Goldman Sachs – GS) run European Central Bank (ECB) is just a logical add-on to the fake EU. By now, many serious scholars have concluded that neither the EU nor the euro are sustainable, but are doomed to collapse sooner or later.
The EU and the euro are a complex construct, largely manipulated and carried forward by the Dark State’s main secret services, CIA, NSA, Mossad, MI6 with close collaboration of Europe’s national secret services. Hence, the creation of a complete political and monetary vassal, the European Union and her currency, equally fraudulent as its master currency, the US-dollar.
***
It is not by chance that today’s western US-dollar based monetary system, with its center, the Federal Reserve (FED), has been created just at the onset of Phase I of the Hundred Year war, i.e. WWI. In 1910, Rhode Island Senator, Nelson Aldrich, with his heart close to the world of bankers, organized a ”hunting trip” for five top Wall Street (WS) bankers to travel in disguise by train to Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia, where they concocted in a few days the concept of the modern FED – which was to become the ‘mother’ of the new dollar-based world monetary system, now reduced to the western monetary system. The Federal Reserve Act was signed into law in December 1913 by President Woodrow Wilson.
President Woodrow Wilson (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
On his death bed, in 1924 Wilson apparently declared,
“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”
The FED, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS – also called the central bank of all central banks, manipulating gold prices and currency exchanges), as well as the related dollar-machine are totally privately owned. On top of the owner pyramid are the Rothschild and Rockefeller clans, et al. Henceforth, all international monetary transactions had to transit through a WS bank, be it in New York or London. This is the only reason why the US government, i.e. Washington and its dark handlers, are able to hand out economic and financial ‘sanctions’ as they please, to control those, who do not want to bend to their dictate.
‘Sanctions’ in terms of blocking trade with a Washington-destined country and punishing everyone who does not observe the sanctions, plus, confiscating a country’s foreign assets – are totally illegal before any international court. But there is no international court that is not bought by this sham monetary system. By the same token, this same deceitful banking-monetary scheme induced the last artificial economic ‘crisis’ 2007 / 2008 – and counting, allowing WS to launch a worldwide globalization of banking which de facto, puts worldwide private banking under the oppressive wings of the FED and WS. This, all the more as the World Trade Organization (WTO) a few years earlier made banking deregulation mandatory for any new WTO wannabe member.
How to get out of this slavery before we are totally locked into a system from where to escape may be nearly impossible? The solution sounds simple enough in theory, but of course is much more complex, as it confronts politics, which is controlled by the ‘dark deep state’ of the NWO, or the One World Order which more appropriately describes what we are faced with.
Nations and societies that want to get out of the killer-claws of those who control the NWO, have to start thinking out of the matrix – ‘deglobalizing and de-dollarizing’.
The first step is thinking in a new paradigm. Greece would have had an excellent opportunity to show the world how to become free of those abusive financial vultures, and regain her sovereignty. Hélas, Geece didn’t. She may have not been ‘allowed’ to do so. A huge dark killer sledgehammer was and still is hanging over the country.
“Local production, for local markets, with local money, and local public banking for the promotion of the local economy” is the name of the ‘simple game’.
Beyond this approach, trading between regional friends, culturally similar countries, ‘think-alike’ peoples’ nations, respecting each other’s comparative advantages, would be a normal next step. Trading would become again what the original meaning of the word says: An exchange of goods among equals, where, contrary to the current system, each trading partner is a winner. A good example, still in its infant steps, but progressing, is ALBA (Spanish acronym for Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America; “alba” also means appropriately “dawn” in Spanish). This alliance was launched by Venezuela and Cuba and today comprises some 11 Latin American countries, including Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and a number of small Caribbean nations.
The concept of ALBA could be replicated in many parts of the world. ALBA in many ways is a modern barter system which uses a virtual currency, the Sucre. The currency’s value is the weighted average of each member country’s economic output – plus the US-dollar. – Why the US dollar? I was told by one of the member country’s Minister of Finance that keeping the dollar in, would help avoid a massive boycott of the nascent system by Washington. We can only hope he is right. ALBA needs to gain more strength and new members.
Only half a century ago, this type of trading “within neighbors” was common, and it was OK. It was certainly more equal than today’s WTO-led and globalized trading system, where the ‘small’ – i.e. developing countries, always lose out, for the benefit of the domineering west. The US-creation of the expression “win-win situation” is certainly correct for any trade between a western industrialized country and a developing country following the rules of WTO. The “win-winner“ is always the west. And yet, most developing countries are eager to join the ‘club’, lest, they fear, they may become isolated trade-wise. Well, I am not sure. There are alternatives à la ALBA. Unfortunately, many of their ‘leaders’(sic), are buyable.
Stepping forward into the old system, may be unthinkable for today’s generation, as they have not known – and have been brainwashed to think that “Globalization is the best”.
With GREXT, local money and a new public banking system – detached from Wall Street and European BCE-linked banks, Greece would be already on a fast-track to recovery, regaining their strength as a sovereign proud economy, whose philosophers have, after all, offered the world the concept of ‘democracy’ some 2,500 years ago.
Local public banking is key. Just look at the Bank of North Dakota, a state owned public banking institutions which had kept North Dakota out of the 2007 / 2008 crisis. Except for Ellen Brown, President of the American Public Banking Institute, hardly anybody talks about this success story.
Why? – Because it runs counter to what the FED-WS dominated private banking system is doing. This private banking system is NOT working for the people, or for a country’s economy. It is working for private banking profit – and for the wealth of a few – and for eventually dominating the world’s financial system, so as to enslave the population, by totally controlling their financial resources, their livelihood. Case in point is that Germany’s private banks have made a profit of 1.34 billion euros on the Greek misery, just recently admitted by the German Minister of Finance.
That’s the deadlock we have to break. – How? With an ever more propaganda and lie-infested media that ever more controls the populace? – Imagine, the blood-dripping fangs that keep us hostage are not going to loosen their grip, come hell or high water. We, the People, have to break loose, peacefully, non-violently, by thoughtful actions. The deglobalization concept is akin to the concept of “Resistance Economy”....
....
https://www.globalresearch.ca/spying-plain-sight/5812370
Spying on Americans in Plain Sight
Last week, the Biden administration asked Congress to permit its agents to continue to spy on Americans without search warrants. The actual request was to re-authorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. FISA requires warrants from the FISA Court for all domestic spying. Section 702 is a 2008 amendment to FISA. It expressly authorizes warrantless spying of foreign persons.
The Supreme Court has characterized spying as surveillance and surveillance as a search under the Fourth Amendment. That amendment requires search warrants issued by judges and based upon probable cause of crime demonstrated to the judges under oath and specifically describing the place to be searched or thing to be seized for the surveillance to be lawful.
Since FISA Court warrants — issued by a secret court in Washington, D.C. — are not based on probable cause of crime, and since Section 702 does away altogether with the warrant requirement when foreign persons are even peripherally involved, both FISA and its Section 702 are unconstitutional.
Here is the backstory.
After the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 and the full extent of his use of the FBI and the CIA for domestic warrantless surveillance became known, Congress enacted FISA. It proclaims itself to have established the only lawful method for surveillance outside of the Fourth Amendment. This proclamation is a profound constitutional error — an oxymoron — as all surveillance in defiance of the Fourth Amendment is unconstitutional.
That amendment was written in the aftermath of British agents executing general warrants on the colonists. General warrants were not based on probable cause of crime, but rather governmental need. And they did not specifically describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized.
Rather, general warrants — issued by a secret court in London — authorized the bearer in America to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found. The agents ostensibly were looking for proof of tax payments. They were really engaged in spying. They were looking for subversive, revolutionary materials.
After the Revolutionary War was won and the Constitution was ratified, the Bill of Rights was ratified. The Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights protects all “people” from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government — both law enforcement and spies. The courts have interpreted “unreasonable” to mean “without a search warrant.”
The amendment’s drafters’ intentional employment of the word “people” makes it obvious that the amendment protects every person from every search and every seizure by anyone from the government without a warrant. It is not limited to Americans or adults or good people or people the government likes; rather, it protects all people.
In a linguistic effort to accommodate the warrant requirement and its probable cause pre-condition, the congressional drafters of FISA required that the FISA Court may issue warrants for surveillance based on probable cause, not of crime, but of being a foreign government agent. The FISA Court then, on its own, morphed foreign agency into foreign personhood, and then morphed that into communicating with a foreign person.
So, if you text or email or call your cousin in Geneva or an art dealer in Florence, you become a target for a FISA surveillance warrant — merely by communicating with a foreign person.
Even this loosening of Fourth Amendment protection by the Orwellian re-definition of probable cause was not enough to satisfy the rapacious appetite of the government to spy. Thus, President George W. Bush ordered the National Security Agency — the federal government’s 60,000-person strong cadre of domestic spies — to engage in warrantless spying, in defiance of FISA, and on a scale vastly greater than that which Nixon had ordered of the FBI and CIA in the 1970s.
When Congress learned of the warrantless spying, rather than defunding it, it enacted Section 702 as an exception to FISA, and thereby made warrantless spying on foreign persons in America legal. In a direct affront to the Fourth Amendment, Section 702 permits the NSA and its cousins in the 16 other federal spying agencies to spy without warrants on all communications involving foreign persons.
What happens when a foreign person communicates with an American? Section 702 permits warrantless surveillance of Americans who communicate with foreign persons, permits the NSA to maintain a database of all such American persons, permits the FBI to search those databases without a search warrant, and if the NSA learns of evidence of criminal behavior without a warrant, requires it to share that evidence with the FBI.
It gets worse.
Since Department of Justice lawyers have persuaded the FISA Court to issue warrants to spy on Americans who communicate with foreigners out to the sixth degree of communication, the NSA has contended that Section 702 also permits it to spy out to the sixth degree.
How many persons can be spied upon if the NSA’s interpretation of 702 is lawful? Call your cousin in Geneva and NSA can spy on everyone with whom you speak and everyone to whom they speak, and so on, out to the sixth level of communication.
The FBI reported that in 2021, it searched 3.4 million names in the NSA database of Americans who communicated with foreigners. If you take those 3.4 million out to the sixth degree of their American communications, the number grows exponentially. You will have reached 330 million Americans before completion of the process.
Stated differently, the Biden administration, the DOJ, the NSA and the FBI all claim the lawful authority to spy on all persons in America — American and foreign — without a search warrant, without probable cause, without articulable suspicion; and these deep state denizens want that lawful authority congressionally extended beyond its expiration date at the end of this year.
Any member of Congress who votes to do so is unfit for office. Such a vote would be an assault on the Constitution.
No comments:
Post a Comment