New names for old: The end of a rebranding exercise
With the registration of hardcaw.com, I have finished the rebranding of my websites. This has seen my main site, The virtual world of adilbookz (adilbookz.com), become Hourglass era: Victorian and Edwardian perspectives (hourglassera.com), and my main blog, tweetextensions.com, become Blimp deflator: Letting out the gas (blimpdeflator.com). As well as being more imaginative, these new names convey more information about the respective sites. And as all three sites are at WordPress, where one doesn’t have to do much more than modify the CSS to produce the desired design, they should in future take up less of my time.
This blog contains all kinds of stuff, in addition to articles on important political developments. There are, for instance, more than a dozen articles from my old Schizophrenia blog at blogspot.com, which I closed after I lost interest in psychology/psychiatry. In short, everything I haven’t placed at Blimp deflator is here. — Alan Ireland, Palmerston North, NZ
The Patriot Act revisited
The following article, by John Kaminski, was published by CommonDreams.org on Friday, November 9, 2001, under the headline “The new USA Patriot Act: Are you a patriot?” I’m reproducing it here for reference purposes, as passage of the Act dealt a body blow to the rule of law and inevitably led to the many of the outrages we have witnessed since 9/11.
The USA Patriot Act, now passed and the law of the land, has eliminated the Constitutional guarantee of probable cause when investigating a crime, and now allows the police — at any time and for any reason — to enter and search your house, your files, your bank account — and not even tell you about it.
Are you a patriot? Well, the fact of the matter is, you are whether you want to be or not. But are you an American or a mindless corporate stooge? Well, that’s another question.
The recent passage and signing of the Patriot Act has effectively nullified at least six amendments of the Bill of Rights addendum to the U.S. Constitution. As a result of this, America is longer America, but a police state, pure and simple. This Patriot Bill is, in fact, a massive violation of the Constitution it purports to uphold and improve.
Among other things, it mandates that judges give police search warrants when they ask for them, for any reason. In fact, judges can’t deny these warrants to police, because police don’t need a stated reason to ask for them.
The Bill of Rights is the cornerstone of American freedom. During the debates on the adoption of the Constitution in the 1790s, its opponents repeatedly charged that the Constitution as drafted would open the way to tyranny by the central government. Many states would not have signed the original Constitution without knowing that these amendments would be added, according to the federal website which displays the Constitution. These amendments became known as the Bill of Rights, which Americans have cherished, protected and fought for for over 200 years.
The Patriot Act rushed through Congress and signed by President George W. Bush is a major step toward a totalitarian state in which individual liberty is crushed by the whim of police and corporate demagogues masquerading as patriots.
The Patriot Act:
Violates the First Amendment freedom of speech guarantee, right to peaceably assemble provision, and petition the government for redress of grievances provision; it violates the First Amendment to the Constitution three times. More on this below.
Violates the Fourth Amendment guarantee of probable cause in astonishingly major and repeated ways. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons of things to be seized.” The Patriot Act, now passed and the law of the land, has revoked the necessity for probable cause, and now allows the police, at any time and for any reason, to enter and search your house — and not even tell you about it.
Violates the Fifth Amendment by allowing for indefinite incarceration without trial for those deemed by the Attorney General to be threats to national security. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, and the Patriot Act does away with due process. It even allows people to be kept in prison for life without even a trial.
Violates the Sixth Amendment guarantee of the right to a speedy and public trial. Now you may get no trial at all, ever.
Violates the Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment).
Violates the 13th Amendment (punishment without conviction). Most of the following information is taken from the ACLU’s written objections to Congress before and after the passage of the Patriot Act. My comments are in brackets [ ]. The Patriot Act does the following (I’m putting the immigration stuff at the bottom because that least affects most of the people who will be reading this):
[It keeps judges out of the process and lets cops do what they want (cops meaning FBI, CIA, etc.)] It minimizes judicial supervision of telephone and Internet surveillance by law enforcement authorities in anti-terrorism investigations and in routine criminal investigations unrelated to terrorism. [Unrelated to terrorism — that means anything. How long do you think before that includes political dissent? Oops, too late, that's already happened.]
It expands the ability of the government to conduct secret searches — again in anti-terrorism investigations and in routine criminal investigations unrelated to terrorism. [Unrelated to terrorism — that means anything they want it to mean. If we don't agree with Nazi Republican ideas, they can now arrest us.]
It gives the Attorney General and the Secretary of State the power to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations and block any non-citizen who belongs to them from entering the country. Under this provision the payment of membership dues is a deportable offense. [That means, among other things, that Bush and Ashcroft can decide Greenpeace and Ralph Nader are terrorists, and under this law, it can put them in jail.]
It grants the FBI broad access to sensitive medical, financial, mental health, and educational records about individuals without having to show evidence of a crime and without a court order. [It means they can do what they want for no good reason, except to persecute and imprison people with humanistic, noncorporate rip-off views.]
It could lead to large-scale investigations of American citizens for “intelligence” purposes and use of intelligence authorities to by-pass probable cause requirements in criminal cases. [Bye bye peace movement. You're all going to jail; me too.]
It puts the CIA and other intelligence agencies back in the business of spying on Americans by giving the Director of Central Intelligence the authority to identify priority targets for intelligence surveillance in the United States. [This is what America worked so hard for all those years to eliminate.]
It allows searches of highly personal financial records without notice and without judicial review based on a very low standard that does not require probable cause of a crime or even relevancy to an ongoing terrorism investigation. [They can do any of this stuff without any reason whatsoever. This is the kind of freedom these fascists always wanted — freedom to put everyone who disagrees with them in jail.]
It creates a broad new definition of “domestic terrorism” that could sweep in people who engage in acts of political protest and subject them to wiretapping and enhanced penalties. [This means they can jail anyone who disagrees with them, and keep them in jail for life without a trial.]
On immigration specifically, the new law permits the detention of non-citizens facing deportation based merely on the Attorney General’s certification that he has “reasonable grounds to believe” the non-citizen endangers national security. While immigration or criminal charges must be filed within seven days, these charges need not have anything to do with terrorism, but can be minor visa violations of the kind that normally would not result in detention at all. Non-citizens ordered removed on visa violations could be indefinitely detained if they are stateless, their country of origin refuses to accept them, or they are granted relief from deportation because they would be tortured if they were returned to their country of origin.
It permits the Attorney General to indefinitely incarcerate or detain non-citizens based on mere suspicion, and to deny readmission to the United States of non-citizens (including lawful permanent residents) for engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment. [Or, what used to be the First Amendment. Now, it doesn't exist.]
Let me just take a bit more of your valuable time to make a couple of points crystal clear, again using material from the ACLU’s objections to passage of the Patriot Act.
Wiretapping and Intelligence Surveillance
The wiretapping and intelligence provisions in the USA Patriot Act sound two themes: they minimize the role of a judge in ensuring that law enforcement wiretapping is conducted legally and with proper justification, and they permit use of intelligence investigative authority to by-pass normal criminal procedures that protect privacy. Specifically:
1. The USA Patriot Act allows the government to use its intelligence gathering power to circumvent the standard that must be met for criminal wiretaps. Currently FISA surveillance, which does not contain many of the same checks and balances that govern wiretaps for criminal purposes, can be used only when foreign intelligence gathering is the primary purpose. The new law allows use of FISA surveillance authority even if the primary purpose were a criminal investigation. Intelligence surveillance merely needs to be only a “significant” purpose. This provision authorizes unconstitutional physical searches and wiretaps: though it is searching primarily for evidence of crime, law enforcement conducts a search without probable cause of crime.
2. The USA Patriot Act extends a very low threshold of proof for access to Internet communications that are far more revealing than numbers dialed on a phone. Under current law, a law enforcement agent can get a pen register or trap and trace order requiring the telephone company to reveal the numbers dialed to and from a particular phone. To get such an order, law enforcement must simply certify to a judge — who must grant the order — that the information to be obtained is “relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.” This is a very low level of proof, far less than probable cause. This provision apparently applies to law enforcement efforts to determine what websites a person had visited, which is like giving law enforcement the power — based only on its own certification — to require the librarian to report on the books you had perused while visiting the public library. This provision extends a low standard of proof — far less than probable cause — to actual “content” information.
3. In allowing for “nationwide service” of pen register and trap and trace orders, the law further marginalizes the role of the judiciary. It authorizes what would be the equivalent of a blank warrant in the physical world: the court issues the order, and the law enforcement agent fills in the places to be searched. This is not consistent with the important Fourth Amendment privacy protection of requiring that warrants specify the place to be searched. Under this legislation, a judge is unable to meaningfully monitor the extent to which her order was being used to access information about Internet communications.
4. The Act also grants the FBI broad access in “intelligence” investigations to records about a person maintained by a business. The FBI need only certify to a court that it is conducting an intelligence investigation and that the records it seeks may be relevant. With this new power, the FBI can force a business to turn over a person’s educational, medical, financial, mental health and travel records based on a very low standard of proof and without meaningful judicial oversight.
The ACLU noted that the FBI already had broad authority to monitor telephone and Internet communications. Most of the changes apply not just to surveillance of terrorists, but instead to all surveillance in the United States. [All surveillance. The WTO geeks will love this one. Now we can be just like China.]
Law enforcement authorities — even when they are required to obtain court orders — have great leeway under current law to investigate suspects in terrorist attacks. Current law already provided, for example, that wiretaps can be obtained for the crimes involved in terrorist attacks, including destruction of aircraft and aircraft piracy.
The FBI also already had authority to intercept these communications without showing probable cause of crime for “intelligence” purposes under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In fact, FISA wiretaps now exceed wiretapping for all domestic criminal investigations. The standards for obtaining a FISA wiretap are lower than the standards for obtaining a criminal wiretap.
Criminal Justice
The law dramatically expands the use of secret searches. Normally, a person is notified when law enforcement conducts a search. In some cases regarding searches for electronic information, law enforcement authorities can get court permission to delay notification of a search. The USA Patriot Act extends the authority of the government to request “secret searches” to every criminal case. This vast expansion of power goes far beyond anything necessary to conduct terrorism investigations.
The Act also allows for the broad sharing of sensitive information in criminal cases with intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the NSA, the INS and the Secret Service. It permits sharing of sensitive grand jury and wiretap information without judicial review or any safeguards regarding the future use or dissemination of such information.
These information sharing authorizations and mandates effectively put the CIA back in the business of spying on Americans: Once the CIA makes clear the kind of information it seeks, law enforcement agencies can use tools like wiretaps and intelligence searches to provide data to the CIA. In fact, the law specifically gives the Director of Central Intelligence — who heads the CIA — the power to identify domestic intelligence requirements.
The law also creates a new crime of “domestic terrorism.” The new offense threatens to transform protesters into terrorists if they engage in conduct that “involves acts dangerous to human life.” Members of Operation Rescue, the Environmental Liberation Front and Greenpeace, for example, have all engaged in activities that could subject them to prosecution as terrorists. Then, under this law, the dominos begin to fall. Those who provide lodging or other assistance to these “domestic terrorists” could have their homes wiretapped and could be prosecuted.
[If you have any doubt that these are the trappings of a police state, then you need to go back to elementary school and read about the Constitution, which we no longer have.]
[Fox News Channel reports tonight that 90% of the American people are really happy with what Bush has done. I think somebody wrote this all in a book once, that when a free people gave away their freedom, they did it happily and with much fanfare.]
[John Kaminski lives in Englewood, Florida. E-mail: skylax@home.com ]
© Copyrighted 1997-2001 http://www.commondreams.org
The rule of law has been lost
The following article, by Paul Craig Roberts, was published by Information Clearing House on January 19, 2010. It goes to the heart of the matter: The loss of the rule of law — and, most shockingly, the loss of habeas corpus — in much of the Western world during the past few decades. While people of my generation were growing up in the 1950s, with the declarations of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal ringing in our ears, we never imagined that Western countries like the United States and Britain would go the way of grubby fascist dictatorships, and violate all the principles they had punished others for failing to uphold. And if someone had told me that the West, too, would embrace the practice of torture, I would have refused to take them seriously.
What is the greatest human achievement? Many would answer in terms of some architectural or engineering feat: The Great Pyramids, skyscrapers, a bridge span, or sending men to the moon. Others might say the subduing of some deadly disease or Einstein’s theory of relativity.
The greatest human achievement is the subordination of government to law. This was an English achievement that required eight centuries of struggle, beginning in the ninth century when King Alfred the Great codified the common law, moving forward with the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century and culminating with the Glorious Revolution in the late seventeenth century.
The success of this long struggle made law a shield of the people. As an English colony, America inherited this unique achievement that made English speaking peoples the most free in the world.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this achievement was lost in the United States and, perhaps, in England as well.
As Lawrence Stratton and I show in our book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions (2000), the protective features of law in the U.S. were eroded in the twentieth century by prosecutorial abuse and by setting aside law in order to better pursue criminals. By the time of our second edition (2008), law as a shield of the people no longer existed. Respect for the Constitution and rule of law had given way to executive branch claims that during time of war government is not constrained by law or Constitution.
Government lawyers told President Bush that he did not have to obey the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which prohibits the government from spying on citizens without a warrant, thus destroying the right to privacy. The U.S. Department of Justice ruled that the President did not have to obey U.S. law prohibiting torture or the Geneva Conventions. Habeas corpus protection, a Constitutional right, was stripped from U.S. citizens. Medieval dungeons, torture, and the windowless cells of Stalin’s Lubyanka Prison reappeared under American government auspices.
The American people’s elected representatives in Congress endorsed the executive branch’s overthrow of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Law schools and bar associations were essentially silent in the face of this overthrow of mankind’s greatest achievement. Some parts of the federal judiciary voted with the executive branch; other parts made a feeble resistance. Today in the name of “the war on terror,” the executive branch does whatever it wants. There is no accountability.
The First Amendment has been abridged and may soon be criminalized. Protests against, and criticisms of, the U.S. government’s illegal invasions of Muslim countries and war crimes against civilian populations have been construed by executive branch officials as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” As American citizens have been imprisoned for giving aid to Muslim charities that the executive branch has decreed, without proof in a court of law, to be under the control of “terrorists,” any form of opposition to the government’s wars and criminal actions can also be construed as aiding terrorists and be cause for arrest and indefinite detention.
One Obama appointee, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, advocates that the U.S. government create a cadre of covert agents to infiltrate anti-war groups and groups opposed to U.S. government policies in order to provoke them into actions or statements for which they can be discredited and even arrested.
Sunstein defines those who criticize the government’s increasingly lawless behavior as “extremists,” which, to the general public, sounds much like “terrorists.” In essence, Sunstein wants to generalize the F.B.I.’s practice of infiltrating dissidents and organizing them around a “terrorist plot” in order to arrest them. That this proposal comes from a Harvard Law School professor demonstrates the collapse of respect for law among American law professors themselves, ranging from John Yoo at Berkeley, the advocate of torture, to Sunstein at Harvard, a totalitarian who advocates war on the First Amendment.
The U.S. Department of State has taken up Sunstein’s idea. Last month Eva Golinger reported in the Swiss newspaper, Zeit-Fragen, that the State Department plans to organize youth in “Twitter Revolutions” to destabilize countries and bring about regime change in order to achieve more American puppet states, such as the ones in Egypt, Jordan, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic states, Britain, and Western and Eastern Europe.
The First Amendment is being closed down. Its place is being taken by propaganda in behalf of whatever government does. As Stratton and I wrote in the second edition of our book documenting the destruction of law in the United States:
“Never in its history have the American people faced such danger to their constitutional protections as they face today from those in the government who hold the reins of power and from elements of the legal profession and the federal judiciary that support ‘energy in the executive.’ An assertive executive backed by an aggressive U.S. Department of Justice (sic) and unobstructed by a supine Congress and an intimidated corporate media has demonstrated an ability to ignore statutory law and public opinion. The precedents that have been set during the opening years of the twenty-first century bode ill for the future of American liberty.”
Similar assaults on the rule of law can be observed in England. However, the British have not completely given up on accountable government. The Chilcot Inquiry is looking into how Britain was deceived into participating in the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq. President Obama, of course, has blocked any inquiry into how the U.S. was deceived into attacking Iraq in violation of law.
Much damning information has come out about Blair’s deception of the British government and people. Sir David Manning, foreign policy advisor to Blair, told the Chilcot Inquiry that Blair had promised Bush support for the invasion almost a year in advance. Blair had told his country that it was a last minute call based on proof of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Sir William Patey told the inquiry that President Bush began talking about invading Iraq six or seven months prior to September 11, 2001. A devastating official memo has come to light from Lord Goldsmith, Prime Minister Blair’s top law official, advising Blair that an invasion of Iraq would be in breach of international law.
Now a secret and personal letter to Prime Minister Blair from his Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, has surfaced. In the letter, the Foreign Secretary warned the Prime Minister that his case for military invasion of Iraq was of dubious legality and was likely as false as the argument that removing Saddam Hussein would bring Iraqis a better life.
Blair himself must now testify. He has the reputation, whether deserved or not, as one of the slickest liars in the world. But some accountability seems to be heading his way. The Sunday Times (London) reported on January 17 that the latest poll indicates that 52 percent of the British people believe that Blair deliberately misled his country in order to take Britain to war for the Americans. About one quarter of the British people think Blair should be put on trial as a war criminal.
Unlike the U.S., which takes care to keep the government unaccountable to law, Britain is a member of the International Criminal Court, so Blair does stand some risk of being held accountable for the war crimes of President George W. Bush’s regime and the U.S. Congress.
In contrast, insouciant Americans are content for their government to behave illegally. A majority supports torture despite its illegality, and a McClatchy-Ipsos poll found that 51 percent of Americans agree that “it is necessary to give up some civil liberties in order to make the country safe from terrorism.”
As our Founding Fathers warned, fools who give up liberty for security will have neither.
New Zealand ‘saddened’ by murderer’s stroke, 2006
The following is an excerpt from a speech made by New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters at the New Zealand-Israel Trade Awards in Wellington on February 17, 2006.
“We were saddened to hear of Prime Minister Sharon’s sudden illness and have conveyed to him, his family and the people of Israel, a message of support from the Government and people of New Zealand.”
You might imagine, from the above, that “Prime Minister Sharon” was a respectable statesman. You would never guess that he was, in reality, a war criminal who was found by the (Israeli) Kahane Commission to have been complicit in the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982. And you would never imagine that he had a criminal record that went right back to 1953, when he founded Unit 101 — a secret death squad within the IDF that committed several mass murders of civilians.
What right did Mr Peters have to express commiserations to the “people of Israel” from the “people of New Zealand” over the “illness” (a massive stroke) suffered by this monster?
Anti-terrorism law a threat to us all, says David Small, 2001
The following is a New Zealand Press Association report that was published in the Manawatu Standard on October 31, 2001. Everything that Dr David Small said 12 years ago still holds true.
Innocent New Zealanders will be arrested if a new anti-terrorism law is passed, says activist and lecturer David Small. Dr Small, a senior education and development lecturer at Canterbury University, said authorities in his case and others had not differentiated between political and criminal behaviour. This meant that giving authorities more power was dangerous.
The Terrorism (Bombing and Financing) Bill, to be strengthened after a United Nations Security Council resolution passed in response to the terrorist attacks in the United States, is before a select committee. The bill would broaden the definition of terrorism, allowing the financial assets of suspected terrorists to be immediately frozen, and make it a crime to recruit people into terrorist organizations or to be a member of such organizations. It will be illegal for New Zealanders to give money to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization or Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban.
Dr Small thinks now is the wrong time to even consider such measures. “It’s at these times (that) people need to cling to civil liberties. They can easily be eroded, and it’s hard to claw them back…”
Dr Small rose to prominence after Security Intelligence Service officers bungled a surveillance operation on Christchurch activist Aziz Choudry in 1996. Two weeks after SIS officers entered Mr Choudry’s house, police illegally searched Dr Small’s home. Last year, the High Court awarded him $20,000 in compensation.
Dr Small said it was interesting that terrorist acts against the US were being considered as acts of war, when such acts were usually described as crimes. He said it was dangerous to have a “war against terrorism”, as any war involved the suspension of civil liberties. “It’s an infinite war. What would constitute the end of a ‘war on terrorism?’ That’s the really scary thing…that in the name of a war on terrorism — which is a war without end — we are being expected to give up a lot of basic freedoms. We’re giving them up to institutions that, even outside times of war, have proved them- selves unworthy of our confidence.”
Dr Small said he was also concerned that the Government had accepted that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban were behind the attacks, without providing the public with any evidence. “The ‘culprits’ for this attack have been named and publicly convicted (by a) lynch-mob, vigilante-style mentality that swept the Western world within hours of this thing happening.” He said the US was heading toward a position where any dissent would not be allowed.
New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark on Afghanistan, 2001
I originally posted the article below at Tweeter Penitentiary — a social network I maintained at Ning until July 2010. I then moved it to my adilbookz.com site, which is now being closed. See “Invasion of Afghanistan wasn’t legal” at blimpdeflator.com.
“While I don’t necessarily wish to draw analogies or parallels, we might still have Hitler sitting in Berlin if we’d been afraid of civilian casualties. It’s not meant, it is not intended, it is not targeted, but it is almost inevitable that someone will be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” — New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark on the bombing of Afghanistan, as quoted by Finlay Macdonald in an editorial in the New Zealand Listener, November 17, 2001.
Well, it is now late 2009 — the equivalent of 1952 or 1953 if we pursue Clark’s reluctant Hitler/World War II analogy. And Hitler, we are told, is still alive and well, and apparently hiding somewhere in his Southern Redoubt. Furthermore, he is reportedly becoming stronger by the day — so strong, in fact, that the whole of West Germany is now threatening to slip from the Allied grasp. American commanders in Bonn are pleading for more troops to stave off defeat and a failure of the mission to rid the world of evil…
Such extrapolations only go to show how inane “Hitler analogies” are, when applied to the West’s military adventures (crusades?) in the Muslim world. Equally stupid, and imperiously flippant, is the second part of Clark’s statement. Isn’t it obvious that an Afghan peasant killed by an American bomb, while going about his/her lawful business, is not in the “wrong place”. Surely, if anyone is in the wrong place, it is the American pilot who drops the bomb — and who then goes back to the safety of his base for a well-earned burger and Coke?
But let us return to Macdonald’s editorial, which continues:
“Excellent. I now find that I can sleep a lot easier knowing that, regrettable though it may be, the smashed up kids and grief-maddened survivors of our misdirected bombs and missiles are a price worth paying for the safe and secure world that we are so assuredly creating. Now I realise that my former misgivings about such trite and sentimental matters as the spilling of innocent blood are precisely the sort of weak, insipid crypto-pacifism that would allow ruthless evil to triumph in this world, were it not for the steely determination and strong stomachs of politicians who do not need to have heard a shot fired in anger to know the truth about war.”
A week earlier, on November 10, 2001, in another editorial in the New Zealand Listener, Gordon Campbell wrote:
“Onwards, into the void. The US war machine (with New Zealand troops riding shotgun) is chasing a military solution in Afghanistan without seeming to have the foggiest idea about what can be put in place afterwards, once sufficient Afghans have been killed. Could someone — Helen Clark? — tell us what peace in Afghanistan might resemble once our “war on terrorism” has been declared to have been gloriously won? Are we there to kill Osama bin Laden, topple the Taliban, re-instate King Zahir Shah, put the Northern Alliance in power, hand the whole mess over to the United Nations or what?
“War should emerge from politics, not the other way around. No one in his right mind, the Prussian military genius Karl von Clausewitz once wrote, should ever start a war ‘without first being clear in his mind about what he intends to achieve by that war, and how he intends to achieve it’. The problem with Vietnam, as US Secretary of State Colin Powell said in his autobiography, was that people forgot about von Clausewitz. ‘The politicians and the generals wound up looking at each other for answers that never came.’ Well, it is happening again. Clark has been little help. ‘My opposition to the Vietnem war was not about civilian casualties,’ she told reporters recently. ‘It was about the intervention of New Zealand in a civil war between the Vietnamese … This [by contrast] is an issue of terrorism, that has international implications.’ Hello? New Zealand is now taking sides in an Afghan civil war that has been raging for 23 years, and Vietnam was also alleged to have ‘international implications’ at the time. In fact, the West’s current crusade against terrorism — rife with hype and self-deception — looks a lot like the wars inspired by the domino theory… “
NOTE: At the time of writing (October 14, 2009), Helen Clark is the head of the United Nations Development Programme — the third-highest UN position.
How Israel Wages Game Theory Warfare
You have to know something about game theory to fully understand what is going on in the world today. Were Muslims involved in 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London? Probably not, except as patsies or dupes. Essentially, Islam was framed. This article by Jeff Gates is from Intifada: Voice of Palestine, August 20, 2009. It was formerly at my adilbookz.com site, which is being closed.
In 2005, the Nobel Prize in Economic Science was awarded to Israeli mathematician and game theory specialist Robert J. Aumann, co-founder of the Center for Rationality at Hebrew University. This Jerusalem resident explains: “The entire school of thought that we have developed here in Israel” has turned “Israel into the leading authority in this field.”
Israeli strategists rely on game theory models to ensure the intended response to staged provocations and manipulated crises. With the use of game theory algorithms, those responses become predictable, even foreseeable — within an acceptable range of probabilities. The waging of war “by way of deception” is now a mathematical discipline.
Such “probabilistic” war planning enables Tel Aviv to deploy serial provocations and well-timed crises as a force multiplier to project Israeli influence worldwide. For a skilled agent provocateur, the target can be a person, a company, an economy, a legislature, a nation or an entire culture — such as Islam. With a well-modeled provocation, the anticipated reaction can even become a powerful weapon in the Israeli arsenal.
For instance, a skilled game theorist could foresee that, in response to a 9/11-type mass murder, “the mark” (the U.S.) would deploy its military to avenge that attack. With phony intelligence fixed around a preset goal, a game theory algorithm could anticipate that those forces might well be redirected to invade Iraq — not to avenge 9/11 but to pursue the expansionist goals of Greater Israel.
To provoke that invasion required the displacement of an inconvenient truth (Iraq played no role in 9/11) with what lawmakers and the public could be deceived to believe. The emotionally wrenching nature of that incident was essential in order to induce Americans to abandon rational analysis and to facilitate their reliance on false intelligence.
Americans were (predictably) provoked by that mass murder. The foreseeable reaction — shock, grief and outrage — made it easier for them to believe that an infamous Iraqi Evil Doer was to blame. The displacement of facts with beliefs lies at heart of how Israel, the world’s leading authority in game theory, induces other nations to wage their wars.
False but Plausible
To displace facts with credible fiction requires a period of “preparing the minds” so that the mark will believe a pre-staged storyline. Thus the essential role of a complicit media to promote: (a) a plausible present danger (Iraqi weapons of mass destruction), (b) a plausible villain (a former ally rebranded as an Evil Doer), and (c) a plausible post-Cold War threat to national security (The Clash of Civilizations and “Islamo-fascism”).
Reports from inside Israeli intelligence suggest that the war-planners who induced the 2003 invasion of Iraq began their psyops campaign no later than 1986 when an Israeli Mossad operation (Operation Trojan) made it appear that the Libyan leadership was transmitting terrorist directives from Tripoli to their embassies worldwide. Soon thereafter, two U.S. soldiers were killed by a terrorist attack in a Berlin discotheque. Ten days later, U.S., British and German aircraft dropped 60 tons of bombs on Libya.
The following is a senior Mossad operative’s assessment (published in 1994 in The Other Side of Deception) of that 1986 operation — five years before the Gulf War and 15 years before the murderous provocation that preceded the invasion of Iraq:
After the bombing of Libya, our friend Qadhafi is sure to stay out of the picture for some time. Iraq and Saddam Hussein are the next target. We’re starting now to build him up as the big villain. It will take some time, but in the end, there’s no doubt that it’ll work.
Could this account by former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky be correct? If so, Tel Aviv’s Iraqi operation required more pre-staging than its relatively simple Libyan deception.
America the Mark
From a game theory perspective, what is the probability of a violent reaction in the Middle East after more than a half-century of serial Israeli provocations — in an environment where the U.S. is identified (correctly) as the Zionist state’s special friend and protector?
During the 1967 War, the Israeli killing of 34 Americans aboard the USS Liberty confirmed that a U.S. president (Democrat Lyndon Johnson) could be induced to condone murderous behavior by Israel. Two decades later, Operation Trojan confirmed that a U.S. president (Republican Ronald Reagan) could be induced to attack an Arab nation based on intelligence fixed by Israel.
For more than six decades, the U.S. has armed, financed, befriended and defended Zionism. This “special relationship” includes the U.S.-discrediting veto of dozens of U.N. resolutions critical of Israeli conduct. From a game theory perspective, how difficult was it to anticipate that — out of a worldwide population of 1.3 billion Muslims — 19 Muslim men could be induced to perpetrate a murderous act in response to U.S support for Israel’s lengthy mistreatment of Arabs and Muslims, particularly Palestinians?
Israeli game theorists operate not from the Center for Morality or the Center for Justice but from the Center for Rationality. As modeled by Zionist war planners, game theory is devoid of all values except one: the ability to anticipate — within an acceptable range of probabilities — how “the mark” will react when provoked. Thus we see the force-multiplier potential for those who wage war with well-planned provocations and well-timed crises.
Israeli behavior is often immoral and unjust but that does not mean it is irrational. For Colonial Zionists committed to the pursuit of an expansionist agenda, even murderous provocations are rational because the response can be mathematically modeled, ensuring the results are reasonably foreseeable. That alone is sufficient for a people who, as God’s chosen, consider it their right to operate above the rule of law.
MY NOTE:
[By 2002] Much of the Bush administration had become an outpost of the Likud party. In fact, many of them were to the right of Ariel Sharon. In their determination to prevent any compromise, to dash all hopes of reviving a settlement based on land-for-peace, the hawks were being consistent with their past record. In the [British] Foreign Office and other parts of Whitehall the fear dawned that the emotional thrust of the neoconservatives’ campaign against Iraq was predicated more on the security needs of Israel, which Saddam really threatened, than that of the US, which — even with the most wilful exaggeration — his weapons of mass destruction had no chance of reaching. — John Kampfner in Blair’s Wars, 2004, The Free Press (Page 215).
Israelis also fire from inside ‘civilian areas’
“We didn’t mean to” is a mantra that is frequently recited in Israel when there is a discussion of the number of civilians — among them many children — who are killed by the Israel Defense Forces. To this, the claim that “they” (Hezbollah and the Palestinians) cynically exploit civilians by locating themselves among them and firing from their midst is automatically added. This claim is made by citizens of a state who know very well where to turn off Ibn Gvirol Street in Tel Aviv to get to the security-military complex that is located in the heart of their civilian city; this claim is repeated by the parents of armed soldiers who bring their weapons home on weekends, and is recited by soldiers whose bases are adjacent to Jewish settlements in the West Bank and who have shelled civilian Palestinian neighborhoods from positions and tanks that have been stationed inside civilian settlements. — Amira Hass, Ha’aretz, August 20, 2006
