JERUSALEM AND THE EDIFICE COMPLEX, JABULON AND OCCULT THEOCRACY

By David M. Pidcock

The purpose of this article is to show how and why Palestine and the Temple site in Jerusalem were so important in the plans to create a World Super Government run from Jerusalem in an enlarged State of Israel, extending from the Nile in the West; to the Euphrates in the East.

Freemasons of all ranks and degrees have been duped into working towards this goal in the belief that it is sanctioned with divine authority. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to the Regus Manuscript and the Halliwell poem at The Grand Lodge of England the original spiritual home of Freemasonry was, until the early part of the 19th century, the Tower of Babel not the Temple at Jerusalem, and its first Grand Master was its builder Nimrod - God’s enemy, and definitely not King Solomon.

The Zionists knew that Christians and Orthdox Jews would never support a movement that held Nimrod and the Tower of Babel in such high regard, so through the age old process which I call Generic Engineering they switched all the names and thus disguised their real intention, which was to expel the true believers in the God of Christ, Abraham, Ismael, Isaac, Jacob and the tribes of Israel by installing the forces of Anti-God and Anti-Christ in their place.

This new greater Israel includes Jordan, Egypt, the Northern part of Saudi Arabia including Medina (but excluding Mecca), Kuwait, Iraq and Turkey. Turkey was the first domino to fall in 1908, Saudi Arabia in 1915, Palestine 1948, Egypt at Camp David; the Gulf War has almost completed the circle. By using the United States ‘Freedom from War policy 7277’ [The Rockefeller File, page 88-89], George Bush has foolishly tried to enforce Isaiah 2: 3-4 without the necessary justice or mercy.

The United Nations is the Super Government mentioned by master strategist Theodor Herzl and embodied in his notorious Master Plan drawn from Macchiavelli, The Talmud and Satanic Archives from the Luciferian Masonic Brotherhood: The Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion - which in reality are only a dramatised version of his personal diaries and plagiarisms.

The Edifice now under construction is the culmination of efforts by successive generations of materialist Jews, Gentiles, Arabs, and Persians alike. Hamdan Karmath and Abdullah Ibn Maymun, for example, whose disciples have for centuries been working towards the construction of a New Tower of Babel on the site where the Prophet Solomon built the first Temple: the site of the second temple from which Jesus evicted the Money Changers and the site from where the Prophet Muhammad ascended into heaven.

All opposition within the Islamic world towards this creeping annexation of Holy Land for unholy purposes was effectively removed when the West literally blinded the Muslims with their own science and technology. This technology, which was in fact based on their own scientific legacy to the West, had the devastating effect of creating the greatest threat to all systems of belief - “doubt”.

The Prophet Muhammad had warned his followers that this pernicious doubt would affect them when they allowed themselves to be dominated by a Western people professing to be followers of Christ on the one hand, but being in fact the greatest liars the world has ever seen; followers of Anti-Christ or “Dajjal”, as the false prophet is called in Arabic.

This doubt, which almost proved terminal, and from which the Islamic World is only just beginning to emerge after 500 years, would not have had such lasting effects, had the West shown the same degree of gratitude to the Arabs as the Arabs had shown towards the Chinese and the Greeks when recording their contribution towards Islamic science. Under Islamic thinking science developed to reveal the existence of God. In contrast, the learning of the academics and scientists of the West was intended for purely material advancement and secular worldly power which, when combined with their false evidence and assumptions, seemed to establish conclusively that there was and is no God.

Selective integrity is prevalent in the West and peculiar to the Western mind. It will resort at Verdanato falsifying evidence, like the case of Sir Arthur Keith, the ‘Piltdown Faker’, “who perceived that the only way he could become Britain’s most eminent anthropologist was to concoct false evidence to prove his unfashionable scientific theories” [Sunday Verdana23/9/90]. If not, then the self-doubt within the Islamic world would have been short lived. However, one must remember the second rule and prevailing sentiment of the Western academic who, like the Western diplomat, is often sent abroad to lie for his country: “Never give the suckers an even break”. To counter this attack, the Muslims developed an ostrich-like approach, burying their heads in the sand, pretending that it wasn’t really happening to them; forgetting that they, like the Children of Israel before them, were being tested by Islam’s old enemy - Pagan Rome -, but this time from the old empire’s most northerly outpost - Britain.

Modern Muslims adopted the famous Saudi I.B.M. position called Kismet-compatible; that is, when facing a problem that needs physical effort, the only thing we can do or say is: I.B.M., which stands for In-sha’Allah: meaning it will only happen if God wills it; Bukra: meaning tomorrow something may turn up, but don’t hold your breath; and Ma-lish or Mish Mish: never in a month of Sundays, or when the Apricot blooms, which is once every 75 years. Nonetheless, some Afghan Mujahideen have shown how to stand and defend the honour of Islam and in so doing have earned the respect of the British and the Russian Army - twin branches of the Gog-MaGog family axis.

SATANIC PURSES

To all but the most hardened atheist, freemason, or Zionist the evidence provided in this book shows beyond reasonable doubt, that the English, French, and Bolshevik Revolutions were all planned and financed by the same groups, i.e. bankers, lawyers and establishment freemasons working in concert to bring about conditions favourable to their aims and objectives. Karls Marx mentions this in his political writings on the class struggles in France (1848-1850). He says: “After the July revolution [of 1830], as the liberal banker Lafitte was escorting his accomplice, the Duke of Orleans, in triumph to the Hotel de Ville, he let slip the remark: ‘Henceforth the bankers will be in control.’ Lafitte had betrayed the secret of the revolution.” The same applies to the American Civil War, the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the Gulf War; all waged for a hidden agenda. This is however, as we will see, not a new phenomenon, it has just become more widely spread and better orchestrated than at any other time in history.

IS JEHOVAH JAH-BAL-ON THE DEVIL IN DISGUISE?

Many well researched books have been written by Western writers and journalists exposing the secrets of Freemasonry, but to my knowledge none have attempted to seriously use material from Islamic sources in order to reach a better understanding of the subject; out of fear, one suspects, that it might also provoke serious interest in Islam as a viable alternative to the world’s problems. The Qur’an points out the dangers posed by secret societies, in particular Masonic type brotherhoods who opposed practically every Prophet, and clearly condemns their practice of invoking help from the devil in their rituals, like the brotherhood of 9 who conspired to commit murder and perjury amongst the people of Thamud. The Royal Arch Degree actually invokes the devil in its rituals which consist of 9 men in groups of 3 incanting the ancient name of Satan in disguise: Jehovah Jah-Baal-On: The large phallic obelisk at ancient ON was called God, the father, by the priests of On. The Washington Monument is a much larger replica of that Satanic obelisk erected by Priapic Senuseret 1st at ancient On. Hence the term “ The great Satan” comes from this symbol.

Therefore, contrary to the claim of Commander Michael Bernard Shepley Higham RN, Grand Secretary of The United Grand Lodge of England, that Freemasonry is only an adjunct to religion, all those initiated into the higher degrees between the 30th and the 33rd know that they are in fact the world’s greatest society dedicated to the preservation of the Satanic Faith with its Luciferian Doctrine.

JUDAISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM

This is without doubt the most difficult subject to deal with, because of the litigious hypersensitive nature of one allegedly Semitic group who still believe that they meet the specification which at one time qualified them to be considered as God’s Chosen People. Chosen to convey the Good News to all mankind, not to make it an exclusive club.

They are a people currently preoccupied with the latest Holocaust they have had to face, a people who do not welcome any objective investigation into its real causes or the clear prophecies which relate to them, out of the fear that this might devalue its currency value. The ‘Jewish Chronicle’ of April 3rd 1992 did just that by reporting the numbers killed at Auschwitz as being 1 1/2 million, not the 4 million originally claimed.

It is beyond question that The Children of Israel were for a while chosen above all other nations by Almighty God. However, this was always conditional upon them upholding not only the letter of the Law but also the spirit of the everlasting covenant between Abraham and Almighty God. The renewal of this Covenant was made on Mount Sinai during the Exodus, between Moses, Aaron, the Elders of the twelve tribes of Israel and the Almighty God of all Semitic peoples, Ellah or Allah. Remember Moses had to relearn his religion from his Arab father-in-law Jethroe, the Sheikh of Midian, whom Aaron and the Elders acknowledged when they accepted him as their equal and his sacrifice to their Lord, having first kissed him and paid homage to him. [cf. Exodus 18:1-27]

As stated elsewhere, it is very important to remember that the official religion of The Children of Israel was not Judaism, this being a much later development which related purely to the desire of the tribe of Judah to emerge as top nation and spiritual leaders of the first Islamic nation - Israel -, contrary to the Mosaic Law.

The Law given to Moses was that the High Priests of Israel were all to be from the tribe of Levi, not Judah.Therefore Judaism would not have been the name given to the religion by Moses. If a tribal name had been intended it would surely have been the tribe of Levi and Leviism, and not Judah and Judaism as we have been led to believe. The right to Levitical Priesthood could only be inherited from the tribe of Levi in the line of Amran or Imran, as is confirmed in the Qur’an [3:33-37].

This posed a big problem for the early Christian Jews, like Paul who was in charge of damage control for the Temple Elders and their masters, the Money Changers. His task was to usurp the authority of Christ’s real disciples, like Barnabas the Levite, by successfully supplanting their true authentic monotheistic Testaments with his own brand of Greco-Roman polytheism.

Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews in the Scofield Reference Bible states [whether written by Paul or another, the point of view is Pauline]: “We undoubtedly have here the method of Paul’s synagogue address”, and “No book of Scripture more fully authenticates itself as inspired.” - Inspired indeed, but by what spirit?

In Hebrews 5:1, Paul begins his subversive attack on the Levitical Priesthood, casting doubt on the House of Levi in favour of the house of Judah, attempting to undermine the divine right and authority vested in the Levite family of Amran/Imran, whose offspring include Moses, God’s Messenger; Aaron, Israel’s High Priest; Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Elizabeth, her cousin, who were of the daughters of Aaron, i.e. Levites (cf. Luke 1:5).

Pat Boon, the American singer and evangelist, said there are three kinds of Judaism, one Orthodox one unorthodox and the other Christian. In other words, Christianity is Judaism with the ethics and sentiments intact. In trying to sell the idea of a ‘New Jewish Covenant’ to the more Orthodox sects, it was necessary for Paul and others to fabricate plausible stories and arguments in order to hijack control of the Priesthood through which he could then propagate his heretical polytheistic ideas.

In Hebrews 7, the author uses the story of Abraham’s meeting with Melchisedec, the King of Salem, together with the fact that he blessed him and gave him one tenth of the spoils, indicating that the everlasting Covenant between God and Abraham was in fact only a temporary one, subject to cancellation. It states: “Now consider how great this man was, unto whom even the Patriarch Abraham gave the tenth of the spoils. And verily they that are of the sons of Levi, who received the office of the priesthood, have a commandment to take tithes of the people according to the law, that is, of their bretheren, though they come out of the loins of Abraham: But he whose descent is not counted from them received tithes from Abraham ... As I may so say, Levi also, who receiveth tithes, payed tithes in Abraham. For he was yet in the loins of his father, when Melchisedec met him. If therefore perfection were by the Levitical priesthood (for under it the people received the law), what further need was there that another priest should rise after the order of Melchisedec, and not be called after the order of Aaron? For the priesthood being changed, there is made of necessity a change also of the Law.”

“For he of whom these things are spoken pertaineth to another tribe (Juda) of which no man gave attendance at the altar. For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Juda; of which tribe Moses spake nothing concerning priesthood. And yet it is far more evident that after the similitude of Melchisedec there ariseth another priest. Who is made not after the law of a carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life ... for the law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did.”

In Hebrews 7, verse 3, Melchisedec, King of Peace, is described as being: “Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually.”

Hebrews 8:1, “Now of the things which we have spoken this is the sum: We have such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens. A minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched and not man.”

8:7, “For if that first covenant had been faultless, then should no place have been sought for the second. For finding fault with them, He saith, behold the day cometh saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the House of Israel and with the house of Judah.”

This new covenant seems to allow the Children of Israel to run with the hare and bite with the hounds. Consider the the fruits of this new covenant:

NEW YORK “JEWISH LIFE” MAY 1938

“Every Jew who is sincerely interested in the plight of Jews should realize that the best sons of the Jewish people are the Jewish Communists, and that the most faithful ally of the Jews is the Communist Party.” [The Jews, page 135]

Rabbi Moses Miller had this to say: “SOVIET ANTI-SEMITISM : THE BIG LIE”

“From the very first day of its existence the Soviet Union took steps to eradicate anti-semitism. On July 27th 1919, a special decree was issued against anti- semitism." [The Jews, page 135]

The Encyclical of Pope Pius XI makes this comment: “DIVINI REDEMPTORIS” “...We blame only the system with its authors and abettors who considered Russia the best field for experimenting with a plan elaborated years ago, and who from there continued to spread it from one end of the world to the other.” [The Rulers of Russia, page 13]

By their fruits you will know them!

to be continued

Freemasonry exposed:

John Salza, a former 32nd degree Freemason, exposes the secret abominations of Freemasonry

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The U.S. Invades and Occupies Pakistan

by David Miller Smith

We are watching it happen in the streets. The recurring nightmare has become a grim, new reality for the people of Pakistan. After watching the horrors of the U.S. invasions and occupations of Iraq and neighboring Afhanistan for 8 years, the “war on terror” has finally arrived in The Land of the Pure. Obama is fulfilling his campaign promise to Pakistan.

The sudden arrival of U.S. marines, U.S. military Hummers, the hired killers of Blackwater, houses barricaded for U.S. personnel in Islamabad and the construction of the world’s largest U.S. “Embassy” are terrorizing this nation of 180 million people. The U.S. slaughter and destruction in Iraq and neighboring Afghanistan for the last 8 years warn them of what may lie in store for them, their families, their land.

The U.S. Marines

On 9/21/08 a bomb ripped through the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad killing scores of people and injuring hundreds. Prior to the bombing, U.S. marines off-loaded steel boxes from a truck, by-passed security and took them to the 4th floor of the building. US officials refused to cooperate with the government’s attempts to investigate their activities. One year later, U.S. Marines are leading the occupation of Pakistan.

Until this landing of U.S. forces, the nation’s spokesman for Foreign Affairs had been denying that 1000 U.S. marines were on their way to Islamabad. The thousand marines are now in the capital city of Islamabad. Some of them may be quietly slipping into Balochistan where the presence of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) have been reported by foreign journalists. But most are here to defend what will be the largest U.S. embassy/fortress in the world, now under construction and to spearhead the invasion and occupation.

Costs to the U.S. Taxpayer

US Ambassador in Pakistan Anne W. Patterson

The total cost for housing and and general support for the marines alone will be US$112.5 million. US Ambassador Anne W. Patterson said the money is allocated as follows: “$5 million was for Marine quarters, $53.5 for housing infrastructure, $18 million for improvement of general services office area, and $36 million for temporary duty quarters and community support facilities.”

In Patterson’s explanation of the massive expansion of the U.S. Embassy she talked about 4 Billion (that’s with a “B”) dollars:

“The embassy expansion, she said, was a reflection of the long-term commitment that the US intended to have with Pakistan. Moreover, she said, quadrupling of the social, economic and military assistance that would touch $4 billion a year over the next 18 months, necessitated staff increase.”

Ambassador Patterson did not clarify whether the $4 Billion covers the construction which will make this embassy the largest in the world. When this construction is seen in context and coordination with the new level of U.S. occupation of Pakistan, it looks more like a permanent military base than an embassy for running military and covert operations not only in Pakistan but also in the region.

Weapons and Hummers

Eye witnesses and informed journalists have been reporting sightings of U.S. personnel in Islamabad for the past week or so, but now they are seen moving freely throughout the capital. The law (Section 144) provides that Pakistanis who own guns are not permitted to carry them in Islamabad. But U.S. personnel are showing Pakistanis that they are above the law as they openly brandish their weapons. It has also been confirmed that 3,000 U.S. military Hummers, locked and loaded are awaiting dispatch in Karachi’s Port Qasim. For millions of Pakistanis news of these Hummers conjures up images of U.S. troops charging through the streets of Iraqi cities, armed to the teeth, terrifying and often killing unarmed civilians.

On Feb. 23, 2009 the Pentagon revealed that over 70 U.S. military advisers had been secretly working in Pakistan.

Blackwater and the CIA

Pakistanis have known about the 300 U.S. military “advisers” lodged in Tarbela. But news of the arrival of the notorious Blackwater mercenaries in addition to the thousand U.S. marines are riveting their attention. In Pakistan, Blackwater is trading its tainted name for a telling name “Xe Worldwide”, – the name behind which these paid killers are now hiding.

Also, last week, Creative Associates International Inc (CAII), a CIA front, has been operating in Peshawar. They have now sealed off a road and set up shop near the houses of senior Pakistani officials in Islamabad, directly across from a school.

Dr. Shireen Mazari

Dr. Shireen M. Mazari is a scholar and commentator on Strategic Studies and Political Science from Pakistan. She has a Ph.D. from Colombia University and was Director General of Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad, Pakistan and former Chairperson of Department of Defense and Strategic Studies at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. She is critical of the relationship the Pakistan government has with the United States and India. Speaking for an opposition political party (Tehreek-e-Insaaf), Dr. Shireen Mazari speaks about the new arrival of U.S. forces in Pakistan:

“Will some of these go to the Pentagon’s assassination squads, who may take up residence in some of the barricaded Islamabad houses and with whom the present US commander in Afghanistan was directly associated? Ordinary officials at Pakistani airports have also been muttering their concerns over chartered flights flying in Americans whose entry is not recorded – even the flight crews are not checked for visas and so there is now no record-keeping of exactly how many Americans are coming into or going out of Pakistan. Incidentally the CAII’s (CIA/Blackwater) Craig Davis who was deported has now returned to Peshawar! And let us not be fooled by the cry that numbers reflect friendship since we know what numbers meant to Soviet satellites.”

The Pearl Continental, a luxury hotel in Peshawar was bombed on June 9, 2009. The U.S. routinely blames these attacks on Muslim terrorists. The U.S. has also routinely sabotaged peace agreements between the Pakistan government and various resistance groups in Pakistan. Attacks like this are used to justify the current invasion and occupation by the United States.

Given little attention in the corporate media, Peshawar’s Pearl Continental Hotel was bombed on June 9, 2009. At the time of the bombing, Pakistani media reported officially that it was housing U.S. personnel at the time but did not mention Blackwater. However, Blackwater’s name began to surface in rumours and unofficial reports after the Peshawar bombing.

Ahmed Quraishi

On August 5, 2009, Ahmed Quraishi, political analyst, columnist and independent owner news reported on the insertion of U.S. Marines, Blackwater, the CIA and military hardware into Pakistan:

“Pakistanis ask, ‘Who rules our streets, the Pakistani government or the Americans? And who let them in?’

“Three weeks ago a group of concerned Pakistani citizens in Peshawar wrote to the federal interior ministry to complain about the suspicious activities of a group of shadowy Americans in a rented house in their neighborhood, the upscale University Town area of Peshawar. A NGO calling itself Creative Associates International, Inc. leased the house”. According to its Website, CAII describes itself as ‘a privately-owned non-governmental organization that addresses urgent challenges facing societies today … Creative views change as an opportunity to improve, transform and renew …’ The description makes no sense. It is more or less a perfect cover for the American NGO’s real work: espionage…

“In Peshawar, CAII, opened an office to work on projects in the nearby tribal agencies of Pakistan. All of these projects, interestingly, are linked to the US government. CAII’s other projects outside Pakistan are also linked to the US government. In short, this NGO is not an NGO. It is closely linked to the US government.

Meanwhile, when asked about the expansion of the embassy, U.S. Ambassador Anne W. Patterson was “visibly shaken” and replied, “I’m speechless. To spy on Pakistan we don’t need a big US embassy.” Quickly recovering, she added, “And we don’t need to spy either.” Patterson went on to say that Pakistan could turn into a “family station” – whatever that means to a U.S. colonial bureaucrat.

Ahmed further explains the CIA’s cover for the Blackwater mercenaries:

“In Peshawar, CAII told Pakistani authorities it needed to hire security guards for protection. The security guards, it turns out, were none other than Blackwater’s military-trained hired guns. They were used the CAII cover to conduct a range of covert activities in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. The infamous Blackwater private security firm operates as an extension of the US military and CIA, taking care of dirty jobs that the US government cannot associate itself with in faraway strategic places. Blackwater is anything but a security firm. It is a mercenary army of several thousand hired soldiers.

“Pakistani security officials apparently became alarmed by reports that Blackwater was operating from the office of CAII on Chinar Road, University Town in Peshawar. The man in charge of the office, allegedly an American by the name of Craig Davis according to a report in Jang, Pakistan’s largest Urdu language daily, was arrested and accused of establishing contacts with ‘the enemies of Pakistan’ in areas adjoining Afghanistan. His visa has been cancelled, the office sealed, and Mr. Davis reportedly expelled back to the United States.

“It is not clear when Mr. Davis was deported and whether there are other members of the staff expelled along with him. When I contacted the US Embassy over the weekend, spokesman Richard Snelsire’s first reaction was, ‘No embassy official has been deported’.”

Keep in mind that Dr. Shireen Mazari who is in a position to know, stated flatly, “CAII’s Craig Davis who was deported has now returned to Peshawar!”

But Ahmed Quraishi explains the denial by the U.S. embassy:

“This defensive answer is similar to the guilt-induced reactions of US embassy staffers in Baghdad and Kabul at the presence of mercenaries working for US military and CIA. I said to Mr. Snelsire that I did not ask about an embassy official being expelled. He said he heard these reports and ‘checked around’ with the embassy officials but no one knew about this. ‘It’s baseless’ [he said]. So I asked him, “Is Blackwater operating in Pakistan, in Peshawar?” ‘Not to my knowledge’. [he answered].

“Fair enough. The US embassies in Baghdad and Kabul never acknowledged Blackwater’s operations in Iraq and Afghanistan either. This is part of low-level frictions between the diplomats at the US Department of State and those in Pentagon and CIA. The people at State have reportedly made it clear they will not acknowledge or accept responsibility for the activities of special operations agents operating in friendly countries without the knowledge of those countries and in violation of their sovereignty. Reports have suggested that sometimes even the US ambassador is unaware of what his government’s mercenaries do in a target country.”

Finally, Ahmed discusses a U.S. diplomat met secretly with an Indian diplomat inside Pakistan, knowing full well that India is considered to be an enemy state of Pakistan:

“In May, a US woman diplomat was caught arranging a quiet [read 'secret'] meeting between a low-level Indian diplomat and several senior Pakistani government officials. An address in Islamabad – 152 Margalla Road – was identified as a venue where the secret meeting took place. The American diplomat in question knew there was no chance the Indian would get to meet the Pakistanis in normal circumstances. Nor was it possible to do this during a high visibility event. After the incident, Pakistan Foreign Office issued a terse statement warning all government officials to refrain from such direct contact with foreign diplomats in unofficial settings without prior intimation to their departments”.

NGOs that are not NGOs

In addition, many U.S. sponsored NGO’s are working to create news reports in mainstream media which are pro-U.S. For this purpose, many Pakistani analysts, retired generals, businessmen, journalists, and academics are being recruited. As Ahmed Quraishi said, “this NGO is not an NGO”, i.e. some Non Governmental Organizations operate under the control and direction of governments who use them for covert operations in foreign countries and fund them surreptitiously.

Conclusion

It’s clear that the current government has given full privileges to the US. They neither know how, nor want to draw a line against U.S. interference in Pakistani affairs. To put it bluntly, they are surrendering the sovereignty of Pakistan to a foreign power. Dr. Shireen Mazari says,

“Whatever the US embassy gives out … the terrified Pakistani leadership echoes.”

The objectives of the U.S. are clear:

• Deeper U.S. penetration will result in the destabilisation of Pakistan, leading to destabilization of the entire region.
  
• These U.S. military installations also strengthening their encirclement of Iran.
  
• The Pakistani political opposition parties are lip stuck at all these developments. The main reason for their silence is that they are as corrupt as the ruling PPP. No political party in Pakistan is in the mood to resist US hegemony.
  

The Pakistan Army no longer shows any interest in directly interfering with political decisions.

After the disastrous eight years under the military dictatorship of Musharraf, the people are also not ready for the Pakistan military to intervene in the political life of the country. The TTP terrorists have just been brought under control – barely. Now millions of Pakistanis are terrified by their new, unwelcome guests from the west – the U.S. terrorists.

We will now have to learn to tolerate and survive under this growing and increasingly dangerous U.S. colonization of Pakistan. T MUJADDIDI

http://www.daily.pk/the-u-s-invades-and-occupies-pakistan-9737/

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When war erupts in the world...

Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace

by Leonard Lewin

The book is written as the fictional account of the experience of "John Doe," a social science professor at a large university in the Middle West. It relates how in 1963, the professor received a message from Washington telling him he had been chosen to serve on a commission of the highest importance.

Even though the book poses as a work of fiction - probably to protect the author from legal and physical danger - many think it is most likely the report of actual events. Among those who take the book to be non-fiction is the outstanding military critic, Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty.

The goal of the commision was "...to determine, accurately and realistically, the nature of the problems that would confront the United States if and when a condition of 'permanent peace' should arrive, and to draft a program for dealing with this contingency."

The caller telling the professor of his appointment did not identify himself or his agency. Doe, however, entertained no serious doubts of the authenticity of the project because he had previous experience with the excessive secrecy that surrounds quasi-government activities. The caller demonstrated an impressively complete and detailed knowledge of Doe's work and personal life.

The others mentioned as being on the commission were known to Doe by reputation. There were fifteen members in all.

Doe agreed to take the assignment and to appear at Iron Mountain, New York. Iron Mountain is an underground nuclear hideout for hundreds of large American corporations, containing emergency storage vaults for important documents. At this site, corporations (Standard Oil of New Jersey, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, Shell) maintain substitute corporate headquarters as well, where essential personnel could presumably survive and continue to work after a nuclear attack.

The commission worked regularly for over two and a half years and produced a report. Doe said the report had been suppressed - both by the Special Study Group itself and by the government interagency committee to which it had been submitted in 1966. Doe felt that the report should be made public. He disagreed only on that one point.

Commission Conclusions and Assumptions:

• Lasting peace, while not theoretically impossible, is probably unattainable. Even if it could be achieved it would almost certainly not be in the best interests of a stable society to achieve it.
• War fulfills certain functions essential to the stability of our society. Until other systems of filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained.
• Poverty is necessary and desirable.
• Standing armies are, among other things, social-welfare institutions in exactly the same sense as are old-people's homes and mental hospitals.
• The space program and the anti-missile missile and fallout shelter programs are understood to have the spending of vast sums of money as their principal goals, not the advancemmt of science or national defense.
• Military draft policies are only remotely concerned with defense.

Some proposals that were seriously considered:

• Organized repression of minority groups
• Reestablishment of slavery
• Deliberate intensification of air and water pollution (part of a program leading to peace)
• The idea of a real peace in the world, general disarnment and so on, was looked on as utopian. Or even crackpot.

"What they wanted from us was a different kind of thinking. It was a matter of approach. Herman Kahn calls it 'Byzantine' - no agonizing over cultural and religious values. No moral posing. It's the kind of thinking that Rand and the Hudson Institute and I.D.A. [Institute for Defense Analysis] brought into war planning. To give the same kind of treatment to the hypothetical problems of peace as they give to a hypothetical nuclear war."

"The report which follows summarizes the results of a two-and-a-half-year study of the broad problem to be anticipated in the event of a general transformation of American society to a condition lacking its most critical current characteristics: its capability and readiness to wage war when doing so is judged necessary or desirable by its political leadership."

"It is surely no exaggeration to say that a condition of general world peace would lead to changes in the social structures of the nations of the world of unparalleled and revolutionary magnitude. ...The world is totally unprepared to meet the demands of such a situation."

The "world war industry" accounts for approximately a tenth of the output of the world's total economy.

"A national economy can absorb almost any mnber of subsidiary reorganizations within its total limits, providing there is no basic change in its own structure." [Evidently the possibility of changing the basic economic structure is ruled out at the outset.]

"Given genuine agreement of intent among the great powers, the scheduling of arms control and elimination present no inherently insurmountable procedural problems."

"No major power can proceed with such a program, however, until it has developed an econonic conversion plan fully integrated with each phase of disarmament. No such plan has yet been develped in the United States."

"Furthermore, disarmament scenarios, like proposals for economic conversion, make no allowance for the non-military functions of war in modern societies, and offer no surrogate for these necessary functions."

" It is the incorrect assumption that war, as an institution, is subordinate to the social system it is believed to serve. "

"This misconception, although profound and far-reaching, is entirely comprehensible. Few social cliches are so unquestioningly accepted as the notion that war is an extension of diplomacy (or of politics, or of the pursuit of economic objectives)."

"The point is that the cliche is not true, and the problems of transition are indeed substantive rather than merely procedural. Although war is 'used' as an instrument of national and social policy, the fact that a society is organized for any degree of readiness for war supersedes its political and economic structure. War itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire. It is the system which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today." [emphasis added]

"It must be emphasized that the precedence of a society's war-making potential over its other characteristics is not the result of the the 'threat' presumed to exist at any one time from other societies. This is the reverse of the basic situation; 'threats' against the national interest' are usually created or accelerated to meet the changing needs of the war system. Only in comparatively recent times has it been considered politically expedient to euphemize war budgets as 'defense' requirements. The necessity for governments to distinguish between 'aggression' (bad) and "defense' (good) has been a by-product of rising literacy and rapid communication. The distinction is tactical only, a concession to the growing inadequacy of ancient war-organizing political rationales.

"Wars are not 'caused' by international conflicts of interest. Proper logical sequence would make it more often accurate to say that war-making societies require - and thus bring about.- such conflicts. The capacity of a nation to make war expresses the greatest social power it can exercise; war-making, active or contemplated, is a matter of life and death on the greatest scale subject to social control. It should therefore hardly be surprising that the military institutions in each society claim its highest priorities."

"...The 'wastefulness' of war production is exercised entirely outside the framework of the economy of supply and demand. As such, it provides the only critically large segment of the total economy that is subject to complete and arbitrary central control. If modern industrial societies can be defined as those which have developed the capacity to produce more than is required for their economic survival (regardless of the equities of distribution of goods within them), military spending can be said to furnish the only balance wheel with sufficient inertia to stabilize the advance of their economies. The fact that war is 'wasteful' is what enables it to serve this function. And the faster the economy advances, the heavier this balance wheel must be."

"...A nation's foreign policy can have no substance if it lacks the means of enforcing its attitude toward other nations. It can do this in a credible manner only if it implies the threat of political organization for this purpose - which is to say that it is organized to some degree for war. War, then, as we have defined it to include all national activities that recognize the possibility of armed conflict, is itself the defining element of any nation's existence vis-a-vis any other nation. Since it is historically axiomatic that the existence of any form of weaponry insures its use, we have used the word 'peace' as virutally synonymous with disarmament. By the same token, 'war' is virtually synonymous with nationhood. The elimination of war implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-state."

"The war system not only has been essential to the existence of nations as independent political entities, but has been equally indispensable to their stable internal political structure. Without it, no government has ever been able to obtain acquiescence in its 'legitimacy,' or right to rule its society. The possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which no government can long remain in power. The historical record reveals one instance after another where the failure of a regime to maintain the credibility of a war threat led to its dissolution, by the forces of private interest, of reactions to social injustice, or of other disintegrative elements."

"In advanced modern democratic societies, the war system has provided political leaders with another political-economic function of increasing importance: it has served as the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary social classes. As economic productivity increases to a level further and further above that of mininun subsistence, it becomes more and more difficult for a society to maintain distribution patterns insuring the existence of 'hewers of wood and drawers of water.' ... Until it is developed, the continuance of the war system must be assured, if for no other reason, among others, than to preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty a society requires as an incentive, as well as to maintain the stability of its internal organization of power."

"The most obvious of these [sociological] functions is the time-honored use of military institutions to provide antisocial elements with an acceptable role in the social structure. ... The younger, and more dangerous, of these hostile social groupings have been kept under control by the Selective Service System."

"Informed persons in this country have never accepted the official rationale for a peacetime draft - military necessity, preparedness, etc.- as worthy of serious consideration. ...The arrmed forces in every civilization have provided the principal state-supported haven for what we now call the 'unemployable.' The typical European standing army (of fifty years ago) consisted of '...troops unfit for employment in commerce, industry, or agriculture, led by officers unfit to practice any legitimate profession or to conduct a business enterprise.'"

"In general, the war system provides the basic motivation for primary social organization. In so doing, it reflects on the societal level the incentives of individual human behavior. The most important of these, for social purposes, is the individual psychological rationale for allegiance to a society and its values. Allegiance requires a cause; a cause requires an enemy. This much is obvious; the critical point is that the enemy that defines the cause must seem genuinely formidable. Roughly speaking, the presumed power of the 'enemy' sufficient to warrant an individual sense of allegiance to a society must be proportionate to the size and complexity of the society. Today, of course, that power must be one of unprecedented magnitude and frightfulness."

"War provides for the periodic necessary readjustment of standards of social behavior (the 'moral climate') and for the dissipation of general boredom, one of the most consistently undervalued and unrecognized of social phenomena."

"War as an ideological clarifier. ... Except for secondary considerations, there cannot be, to put it as simply as possible, more than two sides to a question because there cannot be more than two sides to a war."

"Experiments have been proposed to test the credibility of an out-of-our-world invasion threat; it is possible that a few of the more difficult-to-explain 'flying saucer' incidents of recent years were in fact early experiments of this kind."

"Anotber possible surrogate for the control of potential enemies of society is the reintroduction, in some form consistent with modern technology and political processes, of slavery. ... The traditional association of slavery with ancient preindustrial cultures should not blind us to its adaptability to advanced forms of social organization, nor should its equally traditional incompatibility with Western moral and economic values. It is entirely possible that the development of a sophisticated form of slavery [slave labor camps, ideological robothood?] may be an absolute prerequisite for social control in a world at peace. As a practical matter, conversion of the code of military discipline to a euphemized form of enslavement would entail surpirisingly little revision; the logical first step would be the adoption of some form of 'universal' military service."

http://www.hermes-press.com/lewin1.htm

The Secret Government

By Christopher Hayes

It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered.

Though these words echo his famous endorsement of working "the dark side" in order to triumph in the "war on terror," they were not, in fact, written by Dick Cheney. They come from the Doolittle Report, which was commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1954 to craft an intelligence strategy for winning the cold war. From a strategic perspective, the threat posed by global communism, headquartered in a massive, nuclear-armed superpower with almost 6 million men under arms, and Al Qaeda, a networked, globally distributed group of thousands of nonstate actors, could not be more different. But the national security state's understanding of each as an existential threat was, and continues to be, nearly identical. The enemy is ingenious, relentless and unencumbered by the procedural and moral niceties that hamstring the bureaucrats of a liberal democracy. Victory--indeed, survival--requires us to become more like them.

And so: the CIA contracted a Mafia boss to murder Fidel Castro, sent biotoxins to the Republic of Congo with orders to poison Patrice Lumumba and tested LSD on unsuspecting citizens (one of whom jumped out of a window to his death). It fomented coups and bloodshed against democratically elected governments, while the National Security Agency, in coordination with the major telegram companies, read every single telegram coming in or going out of the country for three decades. The FBI infiltrated peaceful antiwar groups, breaking up marriages of activists with forged evidence of infidelity, while surveilling civil rights leaders with an assortment of bugs and break-ins. It even attempted to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide, shipping him tapes of him midcoitus with a mistress and a note that said, "There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation."

We know all this (and much more) thanks to the work of the Church Committee. Chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church in 1975-76, the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities labored for sixteen months to produce a 5,000-page report that is a canonical history of the secret government. Over the past three decades the Church Committee has faded into relative obscurity. (I was somewhat surprised to discover how few people my age had heard of it.) But in the wake of further disclosures of crimes and abuses committed by the Bush administration and the escalating war of words between the CIA and Congress over just how much Congress knew about (and approved) these activities, the specter of the committee has begun to haunt Capitol Hill.

Mostly, the Church Committee is invoked by conservatives as a cautionary tale, a case of liberal overreach that handicapped the nation's intelligence operations for decades. Dick Cheney bemoaned the fact that his time as President Ford's chief of staff was "the low point" of presidential authority, thanks to a feckless Congress "all too often swayed by the public opinion of the moment."

But a growing chorus of voices, some of whom served on the original committee and some of whom currently occupy oversight positions in Congress, have begun to refer to the Church Committee as a model for the kind of sustained inquiry needed today. Congressman Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, has served on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence since 2003. When I met him recently, his office had a table full of books and papers about intelligence oversight and the Church Committee's legacy. "The intelligence community has not undergone comprehensive examination since then," he said, "and it needs it."

In a recent interview with the Washington Independent, former Senator Gary Hart, who served on the Church Committee, said there are "sufficient parallels" between the abuses of the cold war and those revealed in the past few years to "warrant a kind of sweeping investigation." Senators Pat Leahy and Russ Feingold have expressed support for a commission of inquiry. Even former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who previously criticized the post-Church intelligence community's risk-averse ways, is on board. "In a democracy with Congressional oversight...when you've had this period where there appears to have been excesses, [where] there appears to have been illegality," he told me, "you need a comprehensive checkup."

The original Church Committee ushered in an era of reforms that we've come to take for granted: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts and executive orders banning assassinations. But it's hard to survey the legal and moral wreckage of the "war on terror" and conclude that those reforms have stood the test of time. When the country faced another "implacable" enemy, the reforms of the Church Committee were subverted, circumvented, rolled back and outpaced.

To take just the most recent examples, press reports indicate that the CIA may have been training agents to conduct assassinations of Al Qaeda leaders during the first six months of the Obama administration, before either CIA director Leon Panetta or Congress was notified. What's more, according to reports in the New York Times and this magazine, the CIA outsourced parts of an assassination program to the private security firm Blackwater. As this article goes to press, Attorney General Eric Holder has appointed a special prosecutor, John Durham, to determine if a criminal investigation should go forward against CIA agents and contractors for torturing detainees. Durham's narrowly defined inquiry targets fewer than a dozen cases and falls far short of the "sweeping investigation" called for by Hart, Clarke and others.

Once again, it seems a comprehensive accounting is long overdue.

On December 22, 1974, the New York Times published an explosive front-page story by Seymour Hersh. Drawn from leaked portions of a 704-page internal CIA review of covert activities, known within the agency as "the family jewels," the article detailed the activities of a massive domestic spying program called Operation Chaos. "Huge CIA Operation Reported Against Antiwar Forces and Other Dissidents During the Nixon Years," read the headline.

The article created an uproar. In the wake of Watergate and the revelations of Nixon's recklessly lawless executive branch, the public was primed to think the worst. Church, a liberal, saw an opportunity to ferret out abuses, rein in an out-of-control intelligence apparatus and give himself a prime platform from which to run for president. He advocated for a special committee to investigate the activities of the various intelligence agencies. Senate Republicans objected, and the White House sought to cut off momentum by establishing its own commission of inquiry, chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. But the press didn't let up. Hersh published more startling revelations, and CBS's Daniel Schorr began airing reports of the CIA's involvement in international assassinations. For a nation that had suffered the traumatic deaths of JFK, RFK and MLK in the past dozen years, this was the last straw. "Murder," playwright Lillian Hellman wrote in a New York Times op-ed. "We didn't think of ourselves that way once upon a time."

On January 27, 1975, the Senate voted to create the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. (The committee also had a House counterpart, chaired by Otis Pike.) Each of its eleven members, six Democrats and five Republicans, appointed a staff liaison. The committee was given broad latitude, subpoena power and, crucially, a staff of 150. "We were in a huge auditorium in the new Senate office building," recalls Barbara Banoff, who joined the staff of the committee as a young attorney from New York. "They were just little cubicles with office dividers; if somebody was yelling at one place in the auditorium, everyone else could hear them."

The staff was impressive. Chief counsel Frederick "Fritz" A.O. Schwarz was a top-flight litigator at a white-shoe New York firm. Other positions were filled by career intelligence officers, attorneys and academics. "I thought the committee was outstanding," says Loch Johnson, who served as Church's special assistant on the committee and now edits the journal Intelligence and National Security. "I was kind of amazed by that.... Usually in committees you get a hodgepodge.... Look at the résumés of the people: a lot of great attorneys and social scientists with well-regarded credentials."

Immediately, Schwarz says, it became apparent that the magnitude of the task before them was overwhelming. "We had to pick a few subjects and look at the subjects in real depth because if we didn't do that...there were so many things that were coming in as tips that we could never get any of them well."

The committee broke its staff up into task forces, each focusing on a discrete area, such as the CIA, assassinations and the FBI's domestic spying. Sensing the particularly acute outrage over revelations of the CIA's assassination plots, the committee worked hard to produce an interim report on the matter, which it released on November 20, 1975. It contained many of the more lurid examples of CIA high jinks--including plans to kill Castro with poisoned cigars--that would come to define the agency's image for an entire generation of Americans.

As the staff dug deeper, they came to realize that something was very rotten indeed at the heart of the national security state. "I think we were all shocked at the extent of the abuses of power by these agencies," says Johnson. "We had, of course, read Sy Hersh's piece. Cointelpro--that was not a part of Sy Hersh's article, and that was simply shocking. Not only did it involve domestic surveillance but domestic covert action. There were a number of things that were really eye-opening."

The committee's investigations had a radicalizing effect on even the top staffers like Schwarz and minority counsel Curtis Smothers. "As they were reading our reports," says Banoff, "we'd hear from Fritz, who had just read some draft report on some particularly outrageous misdeed: 'Goddamn it!' And he'd pound the desk. And then from Curtis: 'Those bastards!' Pound the desk. It was like a counterpuntal hymn."

Contrary to right-wing caricature, the committee was not staffed with crusading liberals. Indeed, almost every former staff member I interviewed made a point of emphasizing that the staff was not particularly ideological and operated without fear or favor. "The best thing they did," says Banoff, was "they didn't have separate majority and minority staff. I never got asked what party I belonged to, at all. That wasn't what Fritz was looking for. The staffs were integrated; we all worked together. We really did. We didn't have any obstructionism from a senator or a senator's designee."

Bill Bader, a former CIA analyst and naval intelligence officer chosen to run the committee's CIA task force, doesn't quite agree. "John Tower and Barry Goldwater [Republican senators on the committee] didn't think there should be anything at all," says Bader. "That was their whole view of the whole thing, and they made Church and [fellow committee member Walter] Mondale's life kind of miserable." That said, at the staff level Bader says his relationships inside the CIA helped a great deal. "But most of the analytical world was very happy for me to have that role because they knew me, because they knew I was fair, serious and I didn't have an ax to grind."

Particularly crucial was the reluctant compliance of CIA director William Colby. Colby's predecessor, Richard Helms, was of the old school: blatantly contemptuous of oversight of any kind. According to Bader, Helms felt that "this investigation was traitorous, pure and simple; you don't do things like that." Colby, on the other hand, was committed to reforming the agency and, some say, privately feared that if he fought Congress, there was a possibility it would try to get rid of the agency altogether.

Colby's attitude proved crucial to the committee's success. Though endowed with subpoena power, it had no enforcement capability to compel the Ford administration to turn over relevant documents, and at first the administration stonewalled. But the Church Committee benefited greatly from playing good cop to the House Pike Committee's bad cop, which quickly became embroiled in an escalating series of showdowns over testimony and disclosure, which Henry Kissinger also tried to stonewall. The Church Committee emerged as a kind of middle path--the sober, responsible investigators the administration could work with. "One of the reasons that the Senate committee got along well [with the White House]," says staff member Richard Betts, now a professor of political science at Columbia University, "is because [White House officials] were really pissed off at the Pike Committee, which they considered partisan and more flaky."

Committee investigators ultimately read through thousands of previously unreleased files. Without this access, the Church Committee couldn't have exposed what it did. Which prompts the question: were Congress to undertake a similar inquiry today, would the White House cooperate?

So far, the White House's record on disclosure has been disappointing. With the notable and admirable exception of its decision to release the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel's (OLC) memos authorizing torture, the Obama administration has largely continued to fight against disclosure of everything from photos of detainee abuse to even the most basic facts about the US detention center at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. It has invoked the state secrets privilege in federal court to keep hidden details about the Bush administration's wiretapping program and what exactly happened to detainees at Guantánamo. (Full disclosure: my wife works in the White House counsel's office.)

In these and other cases, however, the White House is fighting outside groups like the ACLU, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which it can try to stonewall in the courts with relatively little press attention. In the case of Congressional subpoenas, it would be impossible to replicate that strategy without provoking a serious political outcry. Indeed, the partisan incentives in such a scenario may work in favor of disclosure. As unlikely as it may seem, Republicans on such a committee might find themselves zealously pursuing more disclosure. When the White House released the notorious OLC torture memos, Dick Cheney responded with an uncharacteristic push for more disclosure, arguing that releasing other documents would show the effectiveness of torture in foiling terror plots.

There was a somewhat similar dynamic in effect with the Church Committee, one that helped create momentum for greater levels of transparency. Since the committee began in the wake of Nixon's resignation and revelations about his deceptions, abuses and sociopathic pursuit of grudges, Church and many Democrats had every reason to believe they would be chiefly unmasking the full depths of Nixon's perfidy. Quickly, however, it became clear that Nixon was a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. Kennedy and Johnson had, with J. Edgar Hoover, put in place many of the illegal policies and programs. Secret documents obtained by the committee even revealed that the sainted FDR had ordered IRS audits of his political enemies. Republicans on the committee, then, had as much incentive to dig up the truth as did their Democratic counterparts.

As historian Kathy Olmsted argues in her book Challenging the Secret Government, Church was never quite able to part with this conception of good Democrats/bad Republicans. Confronted with misdeeds under Kennedy and Johnson, he chose to view the CIA as a rogue agency, as opposed to one executing the president's wishes. This characterization became the fulcrum of debate within the committee. At one point Church referred to the CIA as a "rogue elephant," causing a media firestorm. But the final committee report shows that to the degree the agency and other parts of the secret government were operating with limited control from the White House, it was by design. Walter Mondale came around to the view that the problem wasn't the agencies themselves but the accretion of secret executive power: "the grant of powers to the CIA and to these other agencies," he said during a committee hearing, "is, above all, a grant of power to the president."

A contemporary Church Committee would do well to follow Mondale's approach and not Church's. It must comprehensively evaluate the secret government, its activities and its relationship to Congress stretching back through several decades of Democratic and Republican administrations. Such a broad scope would insulate the committee from charges that it was simply pursuing a partisan vendetta against a discredited Republican administration, but it is also necessary to understand the systemic problems and necessary reforms.

Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit and author of several books sharply critical of Bush's management of the "war on terror," says he would be "happy" to testify before such a committee to explain the rendition program he designed and supervised under Clinton. That program allowed the United States to capture wanted terrorists and send them back to other countries to face prosecution and, in some cases, likely torture and mistreatment. It was this program that would come to serve as the foundation for the Bush policy of "extraordinary rendition," which amounted to the extralegal disappearing of suspected terrorists around the world.

We don't know much about what other secret programs Clinton and other former presidents implemented, but it's possible that under sustained scrutiny the sharp division between the Bush administration and its predecessors will begin to blur.

The Church Committee's final report was released on April 26, 1976, in six books. Its recommendations laid the groundwork for a series of reforms that more or less constitute the current architecture of intelligence oversight. Before the Church Committee, there was no stand-alone intelligence committee overseeing the executive. Whatever communication there was between the two branches of government was decidedly one-way. "[CIA director] Allen Dulles would come up himself to the Hill," Bill Bader told me, "not to a committee room. And he would sit down with [lawmakers] out in the Congressional corridors and whisper things into their ears and say, Can't tell anyone about them. And then he would go back up to the CIA."

In 1976 the Senate created the Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House followed suit with its own Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence a year later. Also in 1976 President Ford signed Executive Order 11905, which flatly stated, "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." Two years later, Congress passed and President Carter signed FISA, which provided clear procedures for covert action, surveillance and oversight. The law created the special FISA court, which grants warrants for wiretapping and surveillance of anyone on American soil as well as Americans abroad. The Church Committee's revelations also had a profound effect on the bureaucratic culture of the CIA, NSA and FBI. At all three agencies, internal legal controls were put in place requiring layers of attorneys to sign off on any possibly questionable activities.

But for all these needed reforms, it's impossible to look at the past eight years and conclude they were sufficient. If cold war presidents were surreptitious and/or cavalier about the lawlessness of their actions, the Bush administration perfected a kind of perverse legalism, using sympathetic lawyers to decree legal that which was manifestly illegal. It was an ingeniously devious approach. By relying on John Yoo, a loyal ideologue inside the OLC, Cheney et al. were able to perform an end run around the extensive legal checks and restraints created precisely as a response to the Church Committee's findings. Indeed, the reason the infamous OLC memos are so garishly specific is that CIA lawyers, still operating with a memory of the Church Committee, were insistent on obtaining explicit sign-off for every action and technique that they (quite rightly) believed to be of dubious legality.

Similarly, Congressional oversight proved no match for a determined executive. Many critics from across the ideological spectrum, from Clarke to Scheuer, note that this is at least partly because Congress often would rather not know what is going on behind the curtain. But the controversy over just what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew about the CIA's use of torture, and when she knew it, underscores how dysfunctional the notification system has become. Created as part of the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, the so-called Gang of Eight system allows a president, under emergency circumstances, to restrict briefings on covert activities to the leader of each party in both houses and the top member of each party of the House and Senate intelligence committees. What was intended as a limited briefing to be given only temporarily during crises has emerged, instead, as the standard.

Clarke explained its shortcomings to me this way: "Essentially what happens, you're a member of the Gang of Eight. You get a phone call: 'We have to come and brief you.' They ask you to go to the vault. They brief you. You can't take notes, you can't have your staff there and you can't tell anybody." In addition, each member is briefed separately and individually, so they can't even discuss the briefing and ask questions in a group setting. "That's oversight?" Clarke asks. "That's a pretense at oversight. That's a box check. The law required us to do that, and we did this."

That "box check" allowed the Bush administration to claim that Democrats in Congress signed off on many of the most obviously illegal programs, from warrantless wiretapping to torture. Democrats can counter that they were barred by law from acting on whatever they knew. In other words, both sides can claim they fulfilled their legal duties.

"One of the things that would be interesting for a modern version of the Church Committee," says Robert Borosage, who worked at the Center for National Security Studies to help publicize the original committee's findings, "was that they'd be forced to confront the fact that a lot of the reforms passed after the first one have failed. So the question becomes, What do we do now?"

While many of the legal and institutional reforms ushered in by the Church Committee have been degraded and evaded, I believe it would be a mistake to argue that the committee failed. Its most enduring legacy is the political and cultural understanding of the relationship between secrecy and abuse; it narrated a moral fable about absolute power corrupting absolutely.

Public debates over intelligence are qualitatively different from other policy discussions. In a debate over whether, say, the economic stimulus has been effective, there is a presumption that all participants are working from a common set of data--GDP growth, unemployment, government spending, etc.--but with different interpretations and emphases. Such is not the case when the issue is the effectiveness of intelligence programs or the scope of covert activities. Those debates are conducted on fundamentally unequal footing. Critics may charge that torture is counterproductive and produces bad intelligence, but defenders of the secret government can wave away such concerns by saying, more or less, You don't know what we know.

What the Church Committee did was to eliminate this inequality by wrenching an entire segment of the state into the light of day. It created a universally accepted set of facts, a canonical public record that turned the secret conversations of the powerful and initiated into the material for a broad debate. It brought the world of intelligence into the public sphere, the place where self-governance ought to take place.

Selling a contemporary inquiry modeled on the Church Committee won't be easy. Since the mid-1970s the right wing has crafted a deeply distorted but potent fable about its impact and legacy. The tale goes like this: the inquisition pursued by the Church Committee subjected intelligence agencies to scorn and burned the agents and analysts. "In the years that followed, it was extremely difficult to get FBI agents to volunteer for counterterrorism assignments," argued two ex-FBI officials in a March op-ed in the Washington Times. "The risk-avoidance culture and excessive restrictions on gathering intelligence that resulted from the Church hearings and other congressional attacks on the intelligence community were major factors in our failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.... [A] new Church Committee-like public inquiry might easily have a similar chilling effect on our ability to recruit good people for future counterterrorism activities."

It's not hard to find lots of people within the intelligence community who will give you more or less the same line. Richard Clarke has little patience for it. "What bothers me," he says, "is the CIA's tendency whenever they're criticized to say, If you do your job, if you do oversight seriously--which Congress almost never does--then we'll pout. Some of us, many, will not just pout; we'll retire early. Our morale will be hurt." And if morale is hurt and the agencies are gutted, they argue, the country will be exposed to attack. In other words: "If you, Congress, do oversight, then we'll all die. Can you imagine FEMA or the agricultural department saying we're all going to retire if you conduct oversight?" Clarke asks in disbelief.

The principle of oversight aside, the right-wing story about the committee ruining intelligence capabilities for a generation posits a golden age of über-competent intelligence-gathering that simply never existed. The activities described in the committee report, more often than not, have a kind of Keystone Kops flavor to them. "From its beginning," says Clarke, "when [the CIA] does covert action as opposed to clandestine activity...it regularly fucks up. I remember sitting with [Defense Secretary] Bob Gates when he was deputy national security adviser, and he said, I don't think CIA should do covert action; CIA ought to be an intelligence collection and analysis [agency]."

At the peak of its cold war powers, the American security apparatus was able to attain all kinds of information about the Russians (secret information that KGB files have subsequently shown the Russians knew we knew) but was unable to learn the most basic facts about "the enemy." We failed to anticipate the invasion of Afghanistan and routinely overestimated the strength of the Soviet economy. Indeed, the failure to understand and foresee the internal pressures on the Soviet Union may be the greatest failure of US cold war intelligence, one that had absolutely nothing to do with the Church Committee and its aftermath.

In his insightful 1998 book Secrecy, neocon patron saint Daniel Patrick Moynihan argues that by cordoning off discrete pieces of information, secrecy actually impedes intelligence-gathering rather than facilitates it. "Secrecy is for losers," Moynihan concludes. "For people who don't know how important information really is. The Soviet Union realized this too late.... It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most pervasive of Cold War-era regulations."

It's hard to imagine that the White House would be enthusiastic about such an undertaking. Obama has insisted, routinely, unwaveringly, that he is "more interested in looking forward than...in looking backwards." At one level this seems a shocking abrogation of the executive branch's chief constitutional responsibility, to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." But presumably the thinking goes something like this: the president has a limited amount of political capital, and he can spend it on major, once-in-a-generation reforms of the American social contract--universal healthcare and cap and trade--or he can spend it pursuing justice for the perpetrators of the previous administration's crimes. As morally worthy as the latter might be, it won't get anyone healthcare or stop the planet from melting; it won't provide a new foundation for progressive governance.

But as self-consciously pragmatic as this posture is, it's proving wildly impractical to implement. The reason is that the White House has limited control over when and what is revealed about crimes and misdeeds of the Bush years, and every time a new revelation hits the papers, such as the recent disclosures of Blackwater's involvement with the CIA assassination unit and interrogators' use of "mock executions," it dominates the news cycle. Since the White House itself has defined such revelations as a "distraction," every time they are in the news it is, by its own definition, distracted.

The benefit of a new Church Committee would be that it would corral these "distractions" into a coherent undertaking, initiated in Congress, within a fixed time period. It would also provide a framework for systematic investigation of the policies rather than selective prosecutions of those at the bottom of the hierarchy who carried them out.

"Because try as Obama [may] to avoid investigations and looking backwards, he's being dragged into it over and over again," says Clarke. "It would be better for him if Congress just said, You know, Barack, we're just gonna provide these wise men, give them subpoena authority. It's not on you, Barack. There was this excess and that excess and a pattern of excesses, and you know, it clears the air.... Now you have the impression that there's a bunch of stinking turds under the rug."

Perhaps the greatest argument for such an undertaking is the simplest: citizens have a right to know what crimes have been committed in their names. Many of the relevant and damning facts have already been conclusively established. We know we waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, a borderline mentally ill member of the Al Qaeda entourage, eighty-three times in one month. We know the NSA spied on an untold number of Americans without warrants. We know that the CIA sent captured detainees to the custody of regimes with abysmal human rights records, with the explicit understanding they would be tortured.

The Church Committee came at a time when the public was in the midst of a wrenching (and necessary) loss of innocence. But in our age, secret government crimes and plots are almost a cliché. Polling shows trust in government has returned roughly to its mid-'70s nadir. The danger now isn't naïveté but cynicism--that we just come to accept that the government will commit crimes in our name under the cover of secrecy and that such activities are more or less business as usual, about which nothing can be done. But something can be done. Something must be done. And Congress should do it.

Christopher Hayes is The Nation's Washington, DC Editor. His essays, articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation,The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, The Guardian and The Chicago Reader. From 2005 to 2006, Hayes was a Schumann Center Writing Fellow at In These Times. He is currently a fellow at the New America Foundation. His wife works in the White House Counsel's office.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090914/hayes

Related:

International Terrorism R US

The "war on terror" is a Zionist Jihad against Muslims

Banking Secrets Behind Jewish and Armenian Genocide

Making the Final Solution Possible: The Rothschilds and Their Banking Client Who Became Pope


By Clifford Shack

On the holiest of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur, in the autumn of 1931, Guy de Rothschild walked through the massive street gate at 19 Rue Laffitte, for the first time as an adult on adult business. The day was chosen carefully, what others might perceive as the beginning of a banking career, to a Rothschild it was entering into a priesthood. At twenty-two, Guy was assigned letters to write. One of his correspondents was a Cardinal Pacelli, future Pope PiusXII, then in charge of Holy office finances, and who kept a small account at MM. de Rothschild Freres.

In the book, Hitler's Pope, John Cornwall's chronicles the life of Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII. Pacellli was arguably the most dangerous churchman in modern history. As Pontiff during World War II, not only did he fail to speak out against Hitler's Final Solution, but he personally made the Final Solution possible!

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Pacelli was a brilliant Vatican lawyer who helped shape a new ideology of unprecedented papal power. As papal nuncio in Munich and Berlin in the 1920's, he used cunning and moral blackmail to impose Rome's power on Germany. In 1933, he negotiated a treaty with Hitler, the Reich Concordat, which ensured that the Nazis would rise unopposed by the most powerful Catholic community in the world- sealing, by Hitler's own admission, the fate of the Jews in Europe.

How could Eugenio Pacelli possibly have gotten away with such cunning, especially since we know that he was in personal contact with the Rothschilds. Guy de Rothschild was his pen pal eight years before he became Pope. But wait... if Pacelli was Hitler's Pope, and Hitler was a Rothschild... then he was Rothschild's Pope!

How did Eugenio Pacelli become Rothschild's Pope?

Eugenio Pacelli was described routinely, during his pontificate and after his death, as a member of the Black Nobility. The Black Nobility were a small group of aristocratic families of Rome who had stood by the popes following the seizure of their dominions in the bitter struggle for the creation of the nation-state of Italy... Pacelli's father and grandfather before him owed their distinction to membership of the caste of lay Vatican lawyers in the service of the papacy.

Pacelli's immediate family association with the Holy See dates from 1819, when his grandfather, Marcantonio Pacelli, arrived in the Eternal City to study canon law, or Church law, as a protoge of a clerical uncle, Monsiignor Prospero Caterini. By 1834 Marcantonio had become an advocate in the Tribunall of the Sacred Rota, an ecclesiastical court involved in such activities as marriage annulments. While raising ten children (his second child being Eugenio's father, Filippo, born in 1837), Marcantonio became a key official in the service of Pius IX, popularly known as Pio Nono.

The quick tempered, charismatic, and epileptic Pio Nono (Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti), crowned in 1846, was convinced, as had been his predecessors from time immemorial, that the papal territories forming the midriff of the Italian peninsula ensured the independence of the successors to St. Peter. If the Supreme Pontiff were a mere inhabitant of a "foreign" country, how could he claim to befree of local influence? Three years after his coronation, it looked as if Pio Nono had ignominiously lost his sovereignty over the Eternal City to a republican mob. On November 15, 1849, Count Pelligrino Rossi, a lay government minister of the papal states, famous for his biting sarcasm, approached the Palazzo della Cancellleria in Rome and greeted a sullen waiting crowd with a contemptuous smile. As he was about to enter the building, a man leapt forward and stabbed him fatally in the neck. The next day, the Pope's Quirinal summer palace above the city was sacked,, and Pio Nono, disguised in a priest's simple cassock and a pair of large spectacles, fled to the seaside fortress of Gaeta within the safety of the neighboring kingdom of Naples. He took with him Marcantonio Pacelli as his legal and political adviser. From this fastness, Pio Nono hurled denunciations against the "outrageous treason of democracy" and threatened prospective voters with excommunication. Only with the help of French bayonets, and a loan from the Rothschild's, did Pio Nono contrive to return to the Vatican a year later to resume a despised reign over the city of Rome and what was left of the papal territories.

From this we see that the Vatican owed it's existence to the Rothschild's from this point on.

Saint Eugenio

Canonization is the process of making someone into a saint and involves proving that a candidate has lived in such a way that he or she is worthy of sainthood. It is currently practiced by the Roman Catholic Church and its appendages, by the Eastern Orthodox Church, and by the Oriental Orthodox Churches.

Eugenio Pacelli is being considered for canonization. Indeed, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Pacelli, the brilliant Vatican lawyer helped shape a new ideology of unprecedented papal power. And as papal nuncio in Munich and Berlin in the 1920's, he used cunning and moral blackmail to impose Rome's power on Germany. But was there something more going on between Pacelli and Hitler's lawyers in 1933, when the Reich Concordat negotiations were going on? Did the Concordat negotiations provide Pacelli with a cover to aid Hitler's lawyers with handling Germany's Jews. After all the Vatican had centuries of "legal" experience and had cultivated an unsurpassed expertise in dealing with Jews.

Did Pacelli and Vatican lawyers share this valuable legal knowledge with Hitler's legal eagles? They had the knowledge. The Concordat negotiations provided them with a flawless cover. They had opportunity.

The proof is in the pudding.

The table below, found in Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews compares the basic anti-Jewish measures of the Catholic Church and the counterpart measures enacted by the Nazi regime.

Is Pacelli worthy of sainthood? You decide.

Canonical Law	Nazi Measures
Prohibition of intermarriage and of sexual intercourse between Christians and Jews, Synod of Elvira, 306	Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, September 15, 1935 (RGBI I, 1146.)
Jews and Christians not permitted to eat together, Synod of Elvira, 306	Jews barred from dining cars (Transport Minister to Interior Minister, December 30, 1939, Document NG-3995.)
Jews not allowed to hold public office, Synod, of Clermont, 535	Law for the Re-establishment of the Professional Civil Service, April 7, 1933 (RGBI I, 175.)
Jews not allowed to employ Christian servants or possess Christian slaves, 3d Synod of Orleans, 538	Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, September 15, 1935 (RGBI I, 1146.)
Jews not permitted to show themselves in the streets during Passion Week, 3d Synod of Orleans, 538	Decree authorizing local authorities to bar Jews from the streets on certain days (i.e., Nazi holidays), December 3, 1938 (RGBI I, 1676.)
Burning of the Talmud and other books, 12th Synod of Toledo, 681	Book burnings in Nazi Germany
Christians not permitted to patronize Jewish doctors, Trulanic Synod, 692	Decree of July 25, 1938 (RGB1 I, 969.)
Christians not permitted to live in Jewish homes, Synod of Narbonne, 1050	Directive by Goring providing for concentration of Jews in houses, December 28, 1938 (Borman to Rosenberg, January 17, 1939, PS-69.)
Jews obliged to pay taxes for support of the Church to the same extent as Christians, Synod of Gerona, 1078	The "Sozialausgleichsabgabe" which provided that Jews pay a special income tax in lieu of donations for Party purposes imposed on Nazis, December 24,1940 (RGBI I, 1666.)
Prohibition of Sunday work, Synod of Szaboles, 1092
Jews not permitted to be plaintiffs, or witnesses against Christians in the Courts, 3d Lateran Council, 1179, Canon 26	Proposal by the Party Chancellery that Jews not be permitted to institute civil suits, September 9, 1942 (Bormann to Justice Ministry, September 9, 1942, NG-151.)
Jews not permitted to withhold inheritance from descendants who had accepted Christianity,3d Lateran Council, 1179, Canon 26	Decree empowering the Justice Ministry to void wills offending the "sound judgment of the people," July 31, 1938 (RGB1 I, 937.)
The marking of Jewish clothes with a badge, 4th Lateran Council, 1215, Canon 68 ( Copied from the legislation by Caliph Omar II [634-44], who had decreed that Christians wear blue belts and Jews, yellow belts.)	Decree of September 1,1941 (RGB1 1,547.)
Construction of new synogogues prohibited, Council of Oxford, 1222	Destruction of synagogues in entire Reich, November 10, 1938 (Heydrich to Goring, November 11, 1938, PS-3058.)
Christians not permitted to attend Jewish ceremonies, Synod of Vienna, 1267	Friendly relations with Jews prohibited, October 24, 1941 (Gestapo directive, L-15.)
Jews not permitted to dispute with simple Christian people about the tenets of the Catholic religion, Synod of Vienna, 1267
Compulsory ghettos, Synod of Breslau, 1267	Order by Heydrich, September 21, 1939 (PS3363.)
Christians not permitted to sell or rent real estate to Jews, Synod of Ofen, 1279	Decree providing for compulsory sale of Jewish real estate, December 3, 1938 (RGBI I, 1709.)
Adoption by a Christian of the Jewish religion or return by a baptized Jew to the Jewish religion defined as a heresy, Synod of Mainz, 1310	Adoption by a Christian of the Jewish religion places him in jeopardy of being treated as a Jew, Decision by Oberlandesgericht Konigsberg, 4th Zivilsenat, June 26, 1942 (Die Judenfrage [Vertrauliche Bellage] , November 1, 1942, pp. 82-83.)
Sale or transfer of Church articles to Jews prohibited, Synod of Lavour, 1368
Jews not permitted to act as agents in the conclusion of contracts between Christians, especially . marriage contracts, Council of Basel, 1434, Sessio XIX	Decree of July 6, 1938, providing for liquidation of Jewish real estate agencies, brokerage agencies, and marriage agencies catering to non-Jews (RGBI I, 823.)
Jews not permitted to obtain academic degrees, Council of Basel, 1434, Sessio XIX	Law against Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities, April 25, 1933 (RGBI I, 225.)

Pacelli presides over the signing of the Reich Concordat at the Vatican on July 20,1933. German Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen is sitting on his right. Did this group secretly formulate the Nazi anti-Jewish measures that were foisted upon Germany's Jews months later?

Hitler in July 1933. That month he declared that his negotiations with Pacelli had created "an aura of trust...in the developing struggle against international Jewry" Of course both Pacelli and Hitler, both associated with the Rothschilds, were agents directly involved with promoting the agenda of the Sabbatean-Frankist Illuminati.

Eugene Pacelli on his coronation day, March 12, 1939, on the eve of World War II.

Pacelli, as Pope Pius XII, broadcasts to the world with Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, at his left shoulder. His 1942 Christmas Eve broadcast trivialized and denied the Nazi Final Solution. This updated article was inspired by a request that I had received to give my opinion of a book written by an orthodox rabbi which praises Eugenio Pacelli's treatment of the Jews during World War II. Orthodox Rabbi declares Pacelli a "Righteous Gentile"

AFRICOM: Pentagon's First Direct Military Intervention In Africa

By Rick Rozoff

The 2009 World Population Data Sheet published by the Washington, DC-based Population Reference Bureau states that the population of the African continent has surpassed one billion. Africans now account for over a seventh of the human race.

Africa's 53 nations are 28% of the 192 countries in the world.

The size and location of the continent along with its human and natural resources - oil, natural gas, gold, diamonds, uranium, cobalt, chromium, platinum, timber, cotton, food products - make it an increasingly important part of a world that is daily becoming more integrated and interdependent.

Africa is also the last continent to free itself from colonial domination. South America broke free of Spanish and Portuguese control in the beginning of the 1800s (leaving only the three Guianas - British, Dutch and French - still colonized) and the post-World War II decolonization of Asia that started with former British East India in 1947 was almost complete by the late 1950s.

Sub-Saharan Africa was not to liberate most of its territory from Belgian, British, French, Spanish and Portuguese colonial masters until the 1960s and 1970s. And the former owners were reluctant to cede newly created African nations any more than nominal independence and the ability to choose their own internal socio-economic orientation and foreign policy alignment.

In the two decades of the African independence struggle the continent was marred by Western-backed coups d'etat and assassinations of liberation leaders which included those against Patrice Lumumba in the former Belgian Congo in 1961, Ben Barka in Morocco in 1965, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966, Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique in 1969, Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau in 1973 and Marien Ngouabi in the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville) in 1977.

In his latest Anti-Empire Report veteran political analyst William Blum wrote, "the next time you hear that Africa can't produce good leaders, people who are committed to the welfare of the masses of their people, think of Nkrumah and his fate. And think of Patrice Lumumba, overthrown in the Congo 1960-61 with the help of the United States; Agostinho Neto of Angola, against whom Washington waged war in the 1970s, making it impossible for him to institute progressive changes; Samora Machel of Mozambique against whom the CIA supported a counter-revolution in the 1970s-80s period; and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (now married to Machel's widow), who spent 28 years in prison thanks to the CIA." [1]

Some of Blum's references are to a series of proxy wars supported by the United States and its NATO allies and in some instances apartheid South Africa and the Mobutu Sese Seko regime in Zaire in the mid-1970s and the 1980s, such as arming and training the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), the unspeakably brutal Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO), and Eritrean and Tigrayan armed separatists in Ethiopia as well as backing the Somali invasion of the Ogaden Desert in that country in 1977.

Over the past five years French troops and bombers have waged deadly attacks inside Cote d'Ivoire, Chad and the Central African Republic either in support of or against rebels, always in furtherance of France's own geopolitical objectives. In the second application of the so-called Blair Doctrine, in 2000 Britain sent troops to its former colony of Sierra Leone and has de facto recolonized the nation, taking control of its military and internal security forces.

But in the post-World War II period there has only been one direct American military action in Africa, the deadly 1986 air strikes against Libya in April of 1986, Operation El Dorado Canyon.

While conducting wars, bombings, military interventions and invasions in Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, the Middle East and recently Southeastern Europe over the past half century, the Pentagon has left the African continent comparatively unscathed. That is going to change after the establishment of the United States Africa Command on October 1 of 2007 and its activation a year later.

The U.S. has intensified military involvement in Africa over the past seven years with such projects as the Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI), launched by the State Department but which deployed US Army Special Forces with the Special Operations Command Europe to Mali and Mauritania among other locations. U.S. military personnel are still engaged in the counterinsurgency wars in Mali and Niger against Tuareg rebels.

The Pan Sahel Initiative was succeeded by the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative (TSCTI) in late 2004 which has American military personnel assigned to eleven African nations: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal.

The Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative was formally launched in June of 2005 with the deployment of 1,000 American troops, among them Green Berets, in Operation Flintlock 05 in North and West Africa to engage with counterparts from seven nations: Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Tunisia.

Until their transfer to the Africa Command (AFRICOM) all 53 nations on the continent except for those in the Horn of Africa (assigned to Central Command) and the island nations of Madagascar and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean (handled by Pacific Command) were within the area of responsibilty of the European Command (EUCOM), whose top commander is simultaneously the Supreme Allied Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

As such the past two EUCOM and NATO commanders, Marine General James Jones (2003-2006) and Army General Bantz John Craddock (2006-June, 2009), were the most instrumental in setting up AFRICOM.

Jones is now U.S. National Security Adviser and at this February's Munich Security Conference opened his speech with "As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. [Henry]Kissinger." [2]

In 2008, while serving as State Department special envoy for Middle East security and chairman of the Atlantic Council of the United States, Jones said, "[A]s commander of NATO, I worried early in the mornings about how to protect energy facilities and supply chain routes as far away as Africa, the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea." [3]

Shortly before stepping down from his military posts with NATO and the Pentagon "NATO's top commander of operations, U.S. General James Jones, has said he sees a potential role for the alliance in protecting key shipping lanes such as those around the Black Sea and oil supply routes from Africa to Europe." [4]

Three years ago a Pentagon web site documented that "Officials at U.S. European Command spend between 65 to 70 percent of their time on African issues, [James] Jones said....Establishing such a group [military task force in West Africa] could also send a message to U.S. companies 'that investing in many parts of Africa is a good idea,' the general said." [5)

During the final months of his dual tenure as NATO's and EUCOM's top military commander, Jones transitioned Africa from EUCOM's to AFRICOM's control while also expanding the role of NATO on the continent.

In June of 2006 the Alliance launched its global Rapid Response Force with its first large-scale military exercises off the coast of the former Portuguese possession of Cape Verde, in the Atlantic Ocean west of Senegal.

U.S press reports of the time offered these details:

"Hundreds of elite North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) troops backed by fighter planes and warships will storm a tiny volcanic island off Africa's Atlantic coast this week in what the Western alliance hopes will prove a potent demonstration of its ability to project power around the world." [6]

"Seven thousand NATO troops conducted war games on the Atlantic Ocean island of Cape Verde on Thursday in the latest sign of the alliance's growing interest in playing a role in Africa.

"The land, air and sea exercises were NATO's first major deployment in Africa and designed to show the former Cold War giant can launch far-flung military operations at short notice.

"'You are seeing the new NATO, the one that has the ability to project stability,' said NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told a news conference after NATO troops stormed a beach on one of the islands on the archipelago in a mock assault on a fictitious terrorist camp.

"NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe James Jones, the alliance soldier in charge of NATO operations, said he hoped the two-week Cape Verde exercises would help break down negative images about NATO in Africa and elsewhere." [7]

NATO's first operation in Africa had occurred a year earlier in May of 2005 when the bloc transported African Union troops to the Darfur region of Sudan, at the crossroads of a war-riven region comprised of the Central African Republic, Chad and Sudan.

The Alliance has since deployed warships to the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden, last year with Operation Allied Protector, and this August 17 NATO announced that it was dispatching British, Greek, Italian, Turkish and U.S. warships to the area for a new mission, Operation Ocean Shield. These operations don't consist of mere surveillance and escort roles but include regular forced boardings, sniper attacks and other uses of armed and often lethal force.

On August 22 a Netherlands contingent of the complementary European Union naval force off Somalia used an attack helicopter against a vessel in the area which subsequently was taken over by troops from a Norwegian warship.

Over three years before, now U.S. National Security Adviser and then NATO chief military commander James Jones addressing what was his major "national security" concern at the time, "raised the prospect of NATO taking a role to counter piracy off the coast of the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea, especially when it threatens energy supply routes to Western nations." [8]

A month later both he and NATO's then top civilian leader, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, reiterated the above commitment.

"NATOs' [commanders] are ready to use warships to ensure the security of offshore oil and gas transportation routes from Western Africa, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO's Secretary General, reportedly said speaking at a session of the foreign committee of PACE [Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe].

"On April 30 General James Jones, commander-in-chief of NATO in Europe, reportedly said NATO was going to draw up a plan for ensuring the security of oil and gas industry facilities.

"In this respect the bloc is willing to ensure security in unstable regions where oil and gas are produced and transported." [9]

Two months earlier a U.S. Defense Department news source reported this from Jones:

"U.S. Naval Forces Europe, (the command's) lead component in this initiative, has developed a robust maritime security strategy and regional 10-year campaign plan for the Gulf of Guinea region.

"Africa's vast potential makes African stability a near-term global strategic imperative." [10]

Jones "raised the prospect of NATO taking a role to counter piracy off the coast of the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea, especially when it threatens energy supply routes to Western nations" in April of 2006 and the Pentagon and NATO have followed through on his pledge and exactly in those two opposite ends of Africa.

At article a few days ago by Daniel Volman, director of the African Security Research Project in Washington, DC, called "Africa: U.S. Military Holds War Games on Nigeria, Somalia" provided details on how far plans by James Jones and the Pentagon have progressed over the past three years.

Working with what sketchy information that had been made public about Unified Quest 2008, last year's rendition of what the U.S. Army web site described in an article of this year under the title of and as "Army war games for future conflicts" [11], conducted by the United States Army War College, Volman's article included this information:

"In addition to U.S. military officers and intelligence officers, Unified Quest 2008 brought together participants from the State Department and other U.S. government agencies, academics, journalists, and foreign military officers (including military representatives from several NATO countries, Australia, and Israel), along with the private military contractors who helped run the war games: the Rand Corporation and Booz-Allen.

"The list of options for the Nigeria scenario ranged from diplomatic pressure to military action, with or without the aid of European and African nations. One participant, U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Mark Stanovich, drew up a plan that called for the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops within 60 days....

"Among scenarios examined during the game were the possibility of direct
American military intervention involving some 20,000 U.S. troops in order to 'secure the oil,' and the question of how to handle possible splits between factions within the Nigerian government. The game ended without military intervention because one of the rival factions executed a successful coup and formed a new government that sought stability.

"[W]hen General Ward [AFRICOM commander] appeared before the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2008, he cited America's growing dependence on African oil as a priority issue for Africom and went on to proclaim that combating terrorism would be 'Africom's number one theater-wide goal.' He barely mentioned development, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping or conflict resolution. [12]

In addition to nations already shelled, targeted and threatened like Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Eritrea, even long-time and staunch U.S. military allies like Nigeria are not beyond the reach of hostile Pentagon action. Nigeria is the main power in the fifteen-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which over the past nine years has deployed troops to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire on the request of the West, but that loyalty will not protect it when its own moment arrives.

The U.S. has employed other countries as regional military proxies - Ethiopia and Djibouti in Northeast Africa, Rwanda in Central Africa, Kenya in both - and has designs on South Africa, Senegal and Liberia for similar purposes.

Since its establishment in October of 2007 AFRICOM has lost little time in marking out the Pentagon's new continent.

Even prior to its formal activation the Pentagon conducted the Africa Endeavor 2008 23-nation military exercise with forces from Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sweden, Uganda, the U.S. and Zambia as well as representatives from ECOWAS and the African Union. [13]

The operation was held under the auspices of the U.S. European Command at the time as AFRICOM wasn't activated until October of that year but it included the participation of the then fledgling AFRICOM and U.S. Marine Forces Europe (MARFOREUR), U.S. Air Forces in Europe and the Marine Headquarters, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa [14], but "Next year's exercise will be sponsored by U.S. Africa Command." [15]

This January the U.S. Department of Defense announced that "The U.S. Army Southern European Task Force [SETAF] officially has assumed its new role as the Army component for U.S. Africa Command."

The Pentagon web site from which the above quote is taken also provided this background information and portents of the future:

"Since the 1990s, SETAF has worked with African nations to conduct military training and provide humanitarian relief in countries such as Liberia, Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and the former Zaire. [Congo is the former Zaire, as Zaire was the former Belgian Congo]

"In the coming years, SETAF, operating as U.S. Army Africa, will continue to grow and build capacity to meet the requirements needed to coordinate all U.S. Army activities in Africa.

“[U.S. Army Africa] is not an episodic, flash in the pan, noncombative evacuation operation.” [16]

In the same month, demonstrating another new AFRICOM component and the continent-wide reach of the American military and its recently acquired client states, it was reported that "Air Force C-17s will soon begin airlifting special equipment for Rwandan Peacekeepers in the Darfur region of Sudan, marking the kickoff of the first major operation engineered by U.S. Africa Command's air component, Seventeenth Air Force, also known as U.S. Air Forces Africa." [17]

This May the newspaper of the American Armed Forces, Stars and Stripes, carried a feature on joint U.S.-British training of the Rwandan army, one which bears a large part of the blame for the deaths of over five million Congolese since 1998: The biggest loss of life in a nation related to armed conflict since tens of millions of Chinese and Soviets were killed during World War II.

Rwandan and Ugandan troops invaded Congo in 1998 and triggered ongoing cross-border fighting which persists to this day. Rwanda and Uganda are both U.S. and British military client states.

The Stars and Stripes feature detailed that American instructors "are currently working with a team from the British army to train instructors with the Rwandan army. Those instructors will then train their own troops — many of whom will serve as peacekeepers in places such as Sudan." [18]

It quoted a British officer, Maj. Charles Malet, who "leads a contingent of British forces based in Kenya," as saying "We’ve been producing short-term training in this part of the world for a long, long time. [U.S. Africa Command] has stood [up]. It’s great to link up and provide a sort of introduction." [19]

The training of the Rwandan armed forces by the United States and its NATO allies has less to do with Darfur than it does with devastated Congo.

In November of 2008 the United Nations reported that "Rwandan forces fired tank shells and other heavy artillery across the border at Congolese troops during fighting" [20] which began when former Congolese general Laurent Nkunda staged an armed rebellion in the east of the country which led to the displacement of 200,000 civilians.

The BBC revealed at the time that "journalists report that some of Laurent Nkunda's rebel fighters are in the pay of the Rwandan army.

"This has renewed fears that the fighting will see a re-run of the five-year Congolese war, which involved nine nations, before it ended in 2003." [21]

The British Financial Times conducted interviews with "former rebels and observers on the ground" who said that "the uprising – led by Laurent Nkunda, the renegade former Congolese general – relies heavily on recruitment in Rwanda and former or even active Rwandan soldiers."

Referring to Rwandan President Paul Kagame, the report added, "Mr Nkunda and Rwanda’s government, military and business elite share a history....Mr Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi, was an intelligence officer in the guerrilla army that Mr Kagame, a Rwandan Tutsi, used to...seize power.

"Mr Kagame launched invasions of Congo in 1996 and 1998 and supported uprisings...." [22]

The following month a U.S. congressional delegation "traveled to Rwanda and Ethiopia to meet with U.S. ambassadors, AFRICOM officials and various ministers of each country, including Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Rwanda Foreign Minister Charles Murigande." [23]

Ethiopia invaded Somalia on America's behest three years ago and Rwanda's repeated incursions into Congo could not have occurred without a green light from Washington.

As an Ugandan commentary at the time of the latest attack on Congo from Rwanda stated, "London, New York and Paris are among the top consumers of minerals from Congo. They lecture humanity on the need to uphold human rights and the sanctity of property rights whilst their thirst for strategic minerals unleashes terror on innocent women and children in Eastern Congo." [24]

Last week an AFRICOM spokesman announced that "The United States military will be sending experts to the war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo this week." The initial deployment will be small, he added, but "more may follow...." [25] AFRICOM would be better advised to monitor the activities of the Rwandan military it trains and arms.

Also last week the Pentagon stated it was deploying "unmanned reconnaissance aircraft in the skies above the Seychelles archipelago" in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar and AFRICOM commander General William Ward said, "We have the recent arrival of our P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft that will aid in conducting the surveillance of Seychelles territorial waters and as we look into the future, (we will) bring unmanned surveillance vehicles." [26]

Two days later Ward said "that the rise of radical Islamist militant group al-Shabab in Somalia makes East Africa a central focus of the U.S. military on the continent."

Voice of America added:

"General William Ward has pledged continued support to Somalia's transitional federal government....He made his remarks during a visit to Nairobi, Kenya, which is a key U.S. ally in region." [27]

Until last October Africa was the only continent other than Australia and Antarctica without a U.S. military command. The fact that one has now been established indicates that Africa has achieved heightened importance for the Pentagon and its Western military allies.

An analysis of why Africa is a major focus of attention and why now rather than earlier was provided by U.S.-based writer Paul I. Adujie in the New Liberian on August 21:

"America's Africa Command, in conceptual terms and actual implementation, is not intended to serve Africa's best interests. It just happens that Africa has grown in geopolitical and geo-economic importance to America and her allies. Africa has been there all along.

"There were, for instance, reports of how the American military, acting
supposedly in partnership or cooperation with the Nigerian military, literally took over Nigerian Defense Headquarters....

"It is probably important to mention that the United States already operates at least three other commands, namely, the European Command (EUCOM), Central Command (CENTCOM) and Pacific Command (PACOM), therefore the Africa Command or (AFRICOM) will be the fourth leg of US military global spread.

"America's Africa Command is...machinery for Western governments to pursue their vaunted economic, political and hegemonic hemispheric influence at the expense of Africans as well as a backdoor through which Westerners can outmaneuver rivals such as China and perhaps Russia in addition." [28]

1) The Anti-Empire Report, August 4th, 2009
2) Real Clear Politics, February 8, 2009
3) Agence France-Presse, November 30, 2008
4) Reuters, November 27, 2006
5) U.S. Department of Defense, August 18, 2006
6) Associated Press, June 21, 2006
7) Reuters, June 22, 2006
8) Associated Press, April 24, 2006
9) Trend News Agency, May 3, 2006
10) U.S. Department of Defense, March 8, 2006
11) U. S. Army, May 6, 2009
12) AllAfrica.com, August 14, 2009
13) United States European Command, July 29, 2008
14) United States European Command, July 16, 2008
15) United States European Command, July 29, 2008
16) U.S. Department of Defense, American Forces Press Service, January 28, 2009
17) U.S. Air Forces in Europe, January 9, 2009
18) Stars And Stripes, May 24, 2009
19) Ibid
20) Associated Press, November 3, 2008
21) BBC News, November 13, 2008
22) Financial Times, November 11, 2008
23) Times-Journal, December 8, 2008
24) Sunday Monitor (Uganda), November 9, 2008
25) Daily Nation (Kenya), August 18, 2009
26) Reuters, August 19, 2009
27) Voice of America News, August 21, 2009
28) New Liberian, August 21, 2009

Source: Stop NATO