GOP Set to Steal USA’s Banana Republic Election

U.K. Progressive

Florida Gov. Rick Scott at a bill signing ceremony in Miami.

This is The Monday Line
by Denis G. Campbell

Every four years the world is ‘treated’ to a Presidential election in the USA. Every four years a handful of states display a level of vote larceny that, if it occurred in a third world dictatorship, would have former President Jimmy Carter leading a group of sober faced UN election observers to carefully parse words and discuss “irregularities.” Every four years we are subjected to right wing talking points about Democrats stealing the election because they demand to vote while coffee spews out our noses because the coordinated theft is on the Republican side. These same flim-flam artists stand before microphones and say, teary-eyed, “God Bless our best Democracy in the world!”

Well screw parsing. I’m call ‘bullshit’ and so should you.

Voting is a right and a responsibility. In the 2008 Presidential election, only 61.6% of those eligible to cast votes did, and that was up from the average since 1980 of 56%. As a state official in charge of elections, Secretaries of State used to run adverts encouraging people to vote. Now they spend their time in highly politicised battles to remove voters from the opposite party? That’s what they do in Iran and Uganda, not the USA.

The machines with no paper trail…As we reported here last week there is a need to match hand recounts by precinct size. Paper ballots leave a trail that can prove election fraud deep inside the computerised voting system. So when an Arizona citizen’s group was forced to file Mandamus brief and suit to force the county to follow the law, a (recent Republican Governor Jan Brewer appointed) Pima County Judge got the case. He will rule later Monday on a motion that will force election officials to select and sort ballots in their 1% random hand-count sample along precinct lines.

That specific sort and reporting will help to prove retired NSA Analyst Michael Duniho, Francois Choquette and James Johnson’s assertion that there is a real software ‘fix’ built into the machine.

Of course local county election officials continue to fight this tooth and nail because the trail could lead to them. They have fought transparency since 2006 and yet were quick to claim in the Arizona Star that voting was safer and more secure than ever.

The best example though of how states and counties avoid being called to task is in this letter from the Arizona Secretary of State. The only link back to election machine software fraud is via the Duniho/Choquette/Johnson assertion that the fix is in for larger precincts. So the Pima County election commission conveniently and quietly through secret petition to the Sec State office made sure no one would ever be able to connect those dots.

The Arizona Secretary of State wrote into the 2012 election manual that it would be a good idea to sort paper ballots by precinct for the mandatory hand count by precinct. BUT, Pima County requested and won an exemption from following the state’s election directive for… (wait for it…) the 2012 Presidential election.

So the new rule that would prove election fraud built into the machines has been conveniently overturned by the Republican Arizona Secretary of State. Bananas anyone?

Ohio and Florida Incompetent or Criminal?The GOP is not even trying to gloss over their attempt to steal this election in key swing states. In Florida and Ohio their work is legend. Even in Pennsylvania the House leader actually went on camera and said, “voter ID, that will win this state for Mitt Romney? (Job) Done!”

And the USA’s gutless wonder of an Attorney General, Eric Holder, sits back and lets them do it? Jack and Bobby Kennedy would have had federal troops stationed in both states and Ohio Secretary of State Husted and Florida Governor Scott would have long been removed in handcuffs and leg irons with the Feds supervising these elections.

Husted ignored multiple direct judicial orders. He appealed them all the way to the US Supreme Court and LOST yet still blithely sits in his Columbus, Ohio Office and denies the extension of early voting hours in his state.

Florida Governor Rick Scott has directly defied several court defeats and still tries to purge hundreds of thousands from the voter rolls just before the election. He also refused to do what two Republican governors did before him, expand early voting hours. He instead cut the number of hours by 1/3, eliminated Sunday voting (when African American churches would carpool after services to vote), the elderly have had to queue in the hot sun for up to five hours to cast a ballot and whoops, there have been voting ‘mistakes’ in a state and election George W. Bush won by 537 votes?

• 1,000 African American votes had a ‘glitch’ in Miami,
• Palm Beach County (the county of the 2000 butterfly ballot debacle) had 30,000 absentee ballots go out with the wrong bar code and have to be re-marked by officials on new ballots to be counted (what could possibly go wrong there?) and

• heavily Democratic Broward County also has huge irregularities as problems appear only in large Democratic leaning counties?

Millions enjoy the flexibility of early voting. This means they can vote on the weekend to avoid losing time at work. Early voting though favours Democrats and urban voters. So Republican election officials in the six swing states of Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Michigan have tried throughout this campaign to limit voting, require IDs many elderly and minorities do not have (or they must buy them effectively creating a Jim Crow law poll tax) or simply removed these people from the vote rolls altogether.

Why? Because President Obama leads Hispanic voters by 65 percentage points, African Americans by 90 points and women by 50 points.

And What if I told you…The President’s brother was a Governor of a key state during a hotly contested election and in another the challenger’s son controlled the largest electronic voting machine company? You would think we’re talking about Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela or Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe right?

You would be wrong. George W. Bush’s brother Jeb was Florida Governor when that state pushed him over the top in 2000. Mitt’s son Tagg Romney controls Hart Intercivic and the four other companies are run by bundlers and huge donors for him.

Remember when politicians did everything in their power to avoid the appearance of impropriety? Remember when the crises exploded over under-the-table money hidden in freezers? Now they don’t even try to hide it.

- – - – -

So tomorrow night we will cover the election and pray it does not again become another conservative Supreme Court ‘selection.’ Armies of lawyers have been dispatched around the USA to document and file emergency motions if the election does not go their way.

It could be a very long night or voters, tired of GOP attempts to block and steal could seal the deal very early. There is not much chance of it being anything in between.

In any event, US Democracy loses a bit more lustre and the rest of the world wonders why anyone would buy that export? What good is a win if you steal it? Why is the US GOP only focused on what they can get away with rather than governing?

This is not my late-father’s Republican Party.

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Denis G Campbell is the author of 6 books including 'Billionaire Boys Election Freak Show,' 'The Vagina Wars' & 'Egypt Unsh@ckled.' He is the editor of UK Progressive Magazine and provides commentary to the BBC, itv Al Jazeera English, CNN, MSNBC and others. His weekly 'World View with Denis Campbell' segment can be heard every Thursday on the globally syndicated The David Pakman Show. You can follow him on Twitter via @UKProgressive and on Facebook.

The Struggle for Western Hegemony in the Muslim World

gowans
Stephen Gowans

For half of the last century, Arab nationalists, socialists, communists and others were locked in a battle with the Muslim Brothers for hegemony in the Arab world.—Tariq Ali [1]

The Jihadists who toppled the secular nationalist Gaddafi government—and not without the help of Nato bombers, dubbed “al Qaeda’s air force” [2] by Canadian pilots who participated in the bombing campaign—are no longer disguised in the pages of Western newspapers as a popular movement who thirsted for, and won, democracy in Libya. Now that they’ve overrun the US consulate in Benghazi and killed the US ambassador, they’ve become a “security threat…raising fears about the country’s stability” [3]—exactly what Gaddafi called them, when Western governments were celebrating the Islamists’ revolt as a popular pro-democracy uprising. Gaddafi’s description of the unrest in his own country as a violent Salafist bid to establish an Islamic state was doubtlessly accepted in Washington and other Western capitals as true, but dismissed in public as a transparent ploy to muster sympathy. This was necessary to sanitize the uprising to secure the acquiescence of Western publics for the intervention of their countries’ warplanes to help Islamic guerillas on the ground topple a secular nationalist leader who was practicing “resource nationalism” and trying to “Libyanize” the economy– the real reasons he’d fallen into disgrace in Washington. [4]

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which played a major part in the rebellion to depose Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, may have plotted the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi which led to the death of US ambassador Christopher Stevens, according to US officials.

The uprising of militant Muslim radicals against a secular state was, in many respects, a replay of what had happened in Afghanistan in the late 1970s, when a Marxist-inspired government came to power with aspirations to lift the country out of backwardness, and was opposed by the Mullahs and Islamist guerillas backed by the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and China.

An Afghan Communist explained that,

“Our aim was no less than to give an example to all the backward countries of the world of how to jump from feudalism straight to a prosperous, just society … Our choice was not between doing things democratically or not. Unless we did them, nobody else would … [Our] very first proclamation declared that food and shelter are the basic needs and rights of a human being. … Our program was clear: land to the peasants, food for the hungry, free education for all. We knew that the mullahs in the villages would scheme against us, so we issued our decrees swiftly so that the masses could see where their real interests lay … For the first time in Afghanistan’s history women were to be given the right to education … We told them that they owned their bodies, they would marry whom they liked, they shouldn’t have to live shut up in houses like pens.” [5]

That’s not to say that Gaddafi was a Marxist—far from it. But like the reformers in Afghanistan, he sought to modernize his country, and use its land, labor and resources for the people within it. By official Western accounts, he did a good job, raising his country’s standard of living higher than that of all other countries in Africa.

Gaddafi claimed that the rebellion in Libya had been organized by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, and by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which had vowed to overthrow him and return the country to traditional Muslim values, including Sharia law. A 2009 Canadian government intelligence report bore him out. It described the anti-Gaddafi stronghold of eastern Libya, where the rebellion began, “as an ‘epicenter of Islamist extremism’ and said ‘extremist cells’ operated in the region.” Earlier, Canadian military intelligence had noted that “Libyan troops found a training camp in the country’s southern desert that had been used by an Algerian terrorist group that would later change its name to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.” [6] Significantly, US officials now believe that the AQIM may have plotted the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi. [7]

Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the Libyan rebellion’s most powerful military leader, was a veteran of the U.S.-backed Jihad against the Marxist-inspired reformist government in Afghanistan, where he had fought alongside militants who would go on to form al-Qaeda. Belhaj returned to Libya in the 1990s to lead the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was linked to his al-Qaeda comrades. His aim was to topple Gaddafi, as the Communists had been toppled in Afghanistan. The prominent role Belhaj played in the Libyan uprising should have aroused suspicions among leftists in the West that, as Western governments surely knew, the uprising was not the heroic pro-democracy affair Western media—and those of reactionary Arab regimes—were making it out to be. Indeed, from the very first day of the revolt, anyone equipped with knowledge of Libyan history that went back further than the last Fox News broadcast, would have known that the Benghazi rebellion was more in the mold of the latest eruption of a violent anti-secular Jihad than a peaceful call for democracy. [8]

“On Feb. 15, 2011, citizens in Benghazi organized what they called a Day of Anger march. The demonstration soon turned into a full-scale battle with police. At first, security forces used tear gas and water cannons. But as several hundred protesters armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails attacked government buildings, the violence spiraled out of control.” [9]

As they stormed government sites, the rampaging demonstrators didn’t chant, “Power to the people”, “We are the 99 percent”, or “No to dictatorship.” They chanted “‘No God but Allah, Moammar is the enemy of Allah’.” [10] The Islamists touched off the rebellion and did the fighting on the ground, while U.S.-aligned Libyan exiles stepped into the power vacuum created by Salafist violence and Nato bombs to form a new U.S.-aligned government.

Syria’s Hafiz Asad, and other secular nationalists, from his comrade Salaf Jadid, who he overthrew and locked away, to his son, Bashar, who has followed him, have also been denounced as enemies of Allah by the same Islamist forces who violently denounced Gaddafi in Libya and the leaders of the People’s Democratic Party in Afghanistan. The reason for their denunciation by Islamists is the same: their opposition to an Islamic state. Similarly, Islamist forces have been as strongly at the head of the movement to overthrow the secular nationalists in Syria, as they have the secular nationalists in Libya and the (secular) Marxists in the late 1970s-1980s Afghanistan.

As they stormed government sites, the rampaging demonstrators chanted “‘No God but Allah, Moammar is the enemy of Allah’.”

The secular nationalists’ rise to power in Syria was a heavy blow to the country’s Sunni Islamic militants who resented their society being governed by secular radicals. Worse still from the perspective of the Islamists, the governing radicals were mostly members of minority communities the Sunnis regarded as heretics, and which had occupied the lower rungs of Syrian society. From the moment the secular nationalists captured the state, Islamists went underground to organize an armed resistance. “From their safe haven deep in the ancient warrens of northern cities like Aleppo and Hama, where cars could not enter, the guerrillas emerged to bomb and kill.” [11]

In 1980, an attempt was made to group the Sunni opposition to the secular nationalists under an “Islamic Front’, which promised free speech, free elections, and an independent judiciary, under the banner of Islam. When militant Islamic terrorists murdered Egyptian president Anwar Sadat a year later in Egypt, Islamists in Damascus promised then president Hafiz Asad the same fate. Then in 1982, Jihadists rose up in Hama—“the citadel of traditional landed power and Sunni puratinism” [12]—in a bid to seize power in the city. The ensuing war of the Islamic radicals against the secular nationalist state, a bloody affair which costs tens of thousands of lives, convinced Asad that “he was wrestling not just with internal dissent, but with a large scale conspiracy to unseat him, abetted by Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and the United States.” [13] Patrick Seale, a veteran British journalist who has covered the Middle East for decades, described the Islamists’ movement against Syria’s secular nationalists as a “sort of fever that (rises) and (falls) according to conditions at home and manipulation from abroad.” [14]

Media accounts of Syria’s civil war omit mention of the decades-long hostility between Islamists and secular nationalists—a fierce enmity that sometimes flares into open warfare, and at other times simmers menacingly below the surface—that has defined Syria in the post-colonial period. To do so would take the sheen off the armed rising as a popular, democratic, progressive struggle, a depiction necessary to make Western intervention in the form of sanctions, diplomatic support, and other aid, against the secular nationalists, appear just and desirable. Today, only Trotskyists besotted by fantasies that the Arab Spring is the equivalent of the March 1917 Petrograd uprising, deny that the content of the Syrian uprising is Islamist. But the question of whether the uprising was initially otherwise—a peaceful, progressive and popular movement aimed at opening democratic space and redressing economic grievances–and only later hijacked by Islamists, remains in dispute. What’s clear, however, is that the “hijacking”, if indeed there was one, is not of recent vintage. In the nascent stages of the rebellion, the late New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid noted that the “most puritanical Islamists, known by their shorthand as Salafists, have emerged as a force in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, with suspicions that Saudi Arabia has encouraged and financed them.”[15]

Secular nationalists, socialists and communists in Muslim lands have struggled with the problem of Islamist opposition to their programs, to their atheism (in the case of communists) and to the secular character of the state they have sought to build. The Bolsheviks, perhaps alone among this group, were successful in overcoming opposition in the traditional Muslim territories they controlled in Central Asia, and improving the lives of women, who had been oppressed by conservative Islam. Female seclusion, polygamy, bride price, child and forced marriages, veiling (as well as circumcision of males, considered by the Bolsheviks to be child abuse) were outlawed. Women were recruited into administrative and professional positions and encouraged – indeed obligated – to work outside the home. This followed Friedrich Engels’ idea that women could only be liberated from the domination of men if they had independent incomes. [16]

Western governments, led by the United States, have made a practice of inflaming the Islamists’ hostility to secular nationalists, socialists and communists, using militant Muslim radicals as a cat’s paw to topple these governments, which have almost invariably refused to align themselves militarily with the United States or cut deals against the interests of their own people to fatten the profits of corporate America and enrich Wall Street investment bankers. But whether Washington aggravates fault lines within Muslim societies or not, the fact remains that the fault lines exist, and must be managed, but have not always been managed well.

For example, no matter how admirable their aims were, the reformers in Afghanistan had too narrow a political base to move as quickly as they did, and they rushed headlong into disaster, ignoring Moscow’s advice to slow down and expand their support. The Carter and Reagan administrations simply took advantage of their blunders to build a committed anti-communist guerilla movement.

Salah Jadid, who Hafiz Asad overthrew and locked away. Jadid pursued an unapologetically leftist program, and boasted of practicing “scientific socialism.” The Soviets thought otherwise. Jadid came to power in a conspiracy and never had more than a narrow base of support.

The leftist Syrian regime of Salah Jadid, which Hafiz Asad overthrew, did much that would be admired by leftists today. Indeed, Tariq Ali, in an apology apparently intended to expiate the sin of seeming to support the current Asad government, lauds Jadid’s regime as the “much more enlightened predecessor whose leaders and activists…numbered in their ranks some of the finest intellectuals of the Arab world.” [17] It’s easy to see why Ali admired Asad’s predecessors. Jadid, who lived an austere life, refusing to take advantage of his position to lavish himself with riches and comforts, slashed the salaries of senior ministers and top bureaucrats. He replaced their black Mercedes limousines with Volkswagens and Peugeot 404s. People connected with the old influential families were purged from government. A Communist was brought into the cabinet. Second houses were confiscated, and the ownership of more than one was prohibited. Private schools were banned. Workers, soldiers, peasants, students and women became the regime’s favored children. Feudalists and reactionaries were suppressed. A start was made on economic planning and major infrastructure projects were undertaken with the help of the Soviets. And yet, despite these clearly progressive measures, Jadid’s base of popular support remained narrow—one reason why the Soviets were lukewarm toward him, regarding him as a hothead, and contemptuous of his claim to be practicing “scientific socialism.” [18] Scientific socialism is based on mass politics, not a minority coming to power through a conspiracy (as Jadid and Asad had) which then attempts to impose its utopian vision on a majority that rejects it.

Obama once again bows down to Israel over Palestine

PressTV

US President Barack Obama gestures after his nomination

acceptance speech at the Time Warner Cable Arena in 

Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 6, 2012 on the final 

day of the Democratic National Convention

Obama erred politically and humiliated himself and his party needlessly with his sell-out in Charlotte. He gained nothing in the way of Zionist support because the lobby has made clear from Tel Aviv to New York that it will never trust him on Israel as they increasingly coalesce around the Romney-Ryan ticket.

As a former law professor, President Obama knows something about international law and US constitutional law which he taught at the University of Chicago.

But he repudiated both, besmirched his academic bona fides, violated Democratic Party rules and hurt his campaign on 12/5/12 by ordering the Democratic Party to summarily change earlier a twice debated and adopted plank of the Democratic Platform on the subject of the status of Jerusalem.

The reason this observer even took the time to read the 26,561 word, 37 page 2012 Democratic Party Platform which guides every Democratic candidate for both Houses of Congress and the party’s Presidential candidate, and to a lesser degree, thousands of Democratic Party candidates across the USA is, well, nostalgia.

And I read every word from my preferred relaxation spot which is on the top of my fine new14 story Waad apartment building in the Hezbollah security zone of Dahiyeh, South Beirut. The high-rise was rebuilt, (Israel bombed it and 251 other residential buildings during the July 2006 33-day aggression, reducing it to rubble and dust with two US gifted MK-83 1000 lb. bombs) and my perch has a wonderful view of the mountains to the east and the Mediterranean to the west.

As I studied the platform, among my ducks and chickens that I raise on the roof, I couldn’t help thinking of my own experience, now more than a quarter century ago from my time representing Oregon as Democratic National Committeeman under Jimmy Carter and being a member of the 1980 DNC Platform Committee while working in Washington on Ted Kennedy’s issues staff as he tried to wrest our party’s nomination from our incumbent President. It was not easy for the Kennedy campaign to do and as history records our campaign petered out. But not before, not too unlike what occurred this week, a Middle East issue caused some sparks and we had big battles on the Platform Committee.

Here’s what happened. DNC Chairman, Charles Manatt, named by President Carter, appointed me to both the Platform Committee and the DNC Judicial Council. At the time I had not started working for Senator Ted Kennedy. I did not make a connection then, and perhaps I am wrong, but his thinking might have been that if there were any challenges to our Platform procedure they would be ruled on by the DNC Judicial Council and having me on both might be a good idea. One of my colleagues on the Judicial Council was a sprite and ambitious lady from California named Nancy Pelosi. She eventually ascended in the party, through her political skills, hard work, and with the help of her mentor, California’s State Chair Burt Coffee, while this observer… well, descended.

Besides getting bored at the DNC after four years, I did not ingratiate myself much to the DNC leadership when I switched sides and supported the EMK 80 campaign, disrespecting our incumbent president or so our White House contacts Tim Kraft, Hamilton Jordan and the DNC Chairman’s office thought.

But another problem involved my work on the Platform Committee. At the 1980 final session of the Platform Committee I presented a Petition calling for the Party to endorse a State of Palestine and urged US recognition of the PLO. What happened within an hour of my proposal and the Washington Post, New Republic etc articles the next day is a report for another day. But it was not pretty and the NR has been on my case ever since.

The decision made by the DNC Platform committee this year cut the 2004 and 2008 Platform sentence “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel” and was the result of several months of work by the platform committee analyzing written submissions, receiving oral presentations, and participating in discussions and debate sessions around the country. To the party’s credit, removing the earlier language reflected international law, both UN Resolution and international customary law based on the overwhelming consensus of more than 188 member countries of the United Nations with very few exceptions being Israel. All of which assert that the status of Jerusalem, whether it’s to be the capital of Palestine, Israel, both or internationalized, is to be left to final status negotiations between the native Palestinians and their colonial occupiers. Nor did the expunged language reflect Obama’s personal views.

Following reports that the Romney campaign was going to run ads asking where is God and support for Israel in the Democrats platform, Obama hastily and ill-advisedly, in this observers view, ordered the Platform Committee to restore the language of both. At the same time, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the nation’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, which had urged including language about Jerusalem’s status as the Israeli capital in written testimony to the platform drafting committee, made clear that they were troubled by the omission of their favor Jerusalem language.

As required by Democratic Party rules, the language change needs to be approved by a 2/3 floor vote called by Platform Committee Chairman, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He did put the vote at the beginning of the 9/5/12 Convention session. However since video/audio reports, including C-Span, make plain the delegates voted roughly 50/50, well shy of required 2/3’s , Villaraigosa called for a second and then a third vote which produced the same result. Each time there was a cacophony of “No’s’! from the assembled delegates which were ignored.

Mayor Villaraigosa violated Party rules again when he rejected motions for a roll-call vote and repeated ‘points of order” from the floor. He then falsely announced that 2/3’s had agreed to the language change. He then abruptly walked off the podium thereby profoundly disrespecting the party stalwarts who support it with their hard work and organizational skills. The Party now faces the prospect of a full convention vote on the issue or a court challenge if delegates choose not to let Obama’s betrayal stand.

The reason the 2012 Platform Committee Members changed the former language is that the old position was ludicrous according to expert testimony presented at the Platform hearings and also because this year’s platform reflected, to a modest degree at least, the overdue and increasing power of Arab and Muslim Americans who, often as small business people have largely considered themselves Republicans. But more are becoming active in the Democratic Party. These new party activists are informed about the issue of Palestine and take the status of Jerusalem seriously.

Either way the Romney campaign was sure to claim, as they are doing right now that: “Mr. Obama has refused to state his position on Jerusalem and Israel.” Andrea Saul, a Romney spokeswoman, is telling the media: “Now is the time for President Obama to state in unequivocal terms whether or not he believes Jerusalem is Israel’s capital.”

Obama erred politically and humiliated himself and his party needlessly with his sell-out in Charlotte. He gained nothing in the way of Zionist support because the lobby has made clear from Tel Aviv to New York that it will never trust him on Israel as they increasingly coalesce around the Romney-Ryan ticket.

Meanwhile, AIPAC released a statement on 9/6/12: “We welcome reinstatement to the Democratic platform of the language reaffirming Jerusalem as Israel’s capital”.

One imagines that Obama’s nemeses, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, is chortling.

Governments ADMIT That They Carry Out False Flag Terror

Washington's Blog

MOSSAD Agents Posing as "Al Qaeda"

Forget the claims and allegations that false flag terror - governments attacking people and then blaming others in order to create animosity towards those blamed - has been used throughout history.

This essay will solely discuss government admissions to the use of false flag terror.
For example:

• A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that - under orders from the chief of the Gestapo - he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland. Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson

• The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950's to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister

• Israel admits that an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind "evidence" implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this)

• The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: "You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security" (and see this)(Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred)

• As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960's, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the followingABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Official State Department documents show that - only nine months before - the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high-level officials discussedblowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. (While the Joint Chiefs of Staff pushed as a serious proposal for Operation Northwoods to be carried out, cooler heads fortunately prevailed; President Kennedy or his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara apparently vetoed the plan)

• The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him "to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident", thus framing the ANC for the bombing

• An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author)

• Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton says that a Clinton cabinet member proposed letting Saddam kill an American pilot as a pretext for war in Iraq (and see this)
• According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

• The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings

• As reported by BBC, the New York Times, and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the "war on terror".

• Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

• United Press International reported in June 2005:

  U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

• Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers

• At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plain clothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence

• A Colombian army colonel has admitted that his unit murdered 57 civilians, then dressed them in uniforms and claimed they were rebels killed in combat

• U.S. soldiers have admitted that if they kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then "drop" automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants

There are many other instances of false flag attacks used throughout history proven by the historical evidence. See this, this and this. The above are only some examples of governments admitting to using false flag terror.
You can't call it a conspiracy theory when the government itself admits it.
And this is not just ancient history:

• Jimmy Carter's former National Security Adviser - Zbigniew Brzezinski - told the Senate that a terrorist act might be carried out in the U.S. and falsely blamed on Iran to justify war against that nation 
  

• A retired 27-year CIA analyst who prepared and presented Presidential Daily Briefs and served as a high-level analyst for several presidents, would not put it past the government to "play fast and loose" with terror alerts and warnings and even events themselves in order to rally people behind the flag

Declassified FBI and CIA docs confirm Israel stole US uranium to build nukes in 1950s

SOTT

An aerial view of Israel's Dimona plutonium
and uranium processing facility

Newly-disclosed documents have revealed that the Israeli regime stole nuclear material from a US stockpile of enriched uranium to build Tel Aviv's first atomic weapons.

The Institute for Research on Middle Eastern Policy examined hundreds of newly-declassified documents from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other agencies.

The study revealed that Israel used its intelligence operatives in the US as well as American Jews to infiltrate a US uranium stockpile between the 1950s and the 1960s and stole hundreds of kilograms of weapon-grade nuclear materials to manufacture its first atomic bombs.

After decades of Washington-imposed information blackout over the issue, the US Department of Energy finally confirmed in 2001 that 269 kilograms of uranium were stolen from the Numec nuclear facility in Apollo, Pennsylvania .

In the 50s, the US had contracted the supervision of the Numec to Zalman Shapiro, an American Jew suspected to have ties with Tel Aviv.

Over a period of 11 years, following Shapiro's appointment, 269 kilograms of enriched uranium were stolen from the plant under the course of an operation conducted by four Mossad intelligence agents, Rafael Eitan, Avraham Ben-Dor, Ephraim Biegun and Avraham Hermoni.

The Israeli spy agency, Mossad, is known for engaging in intelligence and assassination operations in many different countries.

Meanwhile, US Congress members and the Energy Department officials have refused to revoke Numec's contract or consider it as a security risk, despite warnings of potential sabotage activities and evidence of infiltration at the nuclear site.

Since 1958, when Israel began building its Dimona plutonium- and uranium-processing facility in the Negev desert, it is widely believed to have secretly manufactured numerous nuclear warheads, earning the reputation of being the sole possessor of such weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.

Former US President Jimmy Carter has attested to the existence of the arsenal, which, he says, includes between 200 to 300 nuclear warheads.

Amid the harshly-toned and increasing Western allegations against Iran's peaceful nuclear program, analysts have questioned the West's continued refusal to consider Israel's aggressive military agenda to be a threat against the regional security.

Israel should be stopped or all will be lost: Mark Glenn

PressTV

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) with Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

 An American author says Israel is a threat not only to the innocent people of the Middle East but the entire world and “if this evil is not stopped, all will be lost.”

“Christianity has been corrupted by Zionist interests and is now being used as a tool in infecting the rest of the world,” Mark Glenn, from the Crescent and Cross Solidarity Movement, wrote in a letter addressed to the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Glenn said the Zionists are trying to pit the Christians and Muslims against each other, in what has become the “clash of civilizations,” through corrupt media, corrupt culture, immorality, war, economic exploitation, and a whole host of other diseases.

“Their goal is obvious - to see these two peoples destroy each other so that like some vulture she can pick the carcasses clean for herself,” Glenn said.

He further asked for an extensive interview with the Iranian president on issues ranging from the Israeli plots for the Middle East and how it is trying to bring its “evil desires” about, such as war and terrorism etc., to the conspiracies that the US and Israel have committed against Iran since 1953 to the commonalties between Islam and Christianity.

Israel is widely known to be the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Tel Aviv began building its first plutonium and uranium processing facility, Dimona, in the Negev desert in 1958.

Former US President Jimmy Carter said Israel has a nuclear arsenal that includes between 200 and 300 warheads. Decades of recurrent reporting and aerial footage have also established the possession of atomic arms by Israel.

Under its official policy of nuclear ambiguity, Tel Aviv neither confirms nor denies the possession of nukes and refuses to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or allow inspections of its nuclear facilities.

“I am convinced that if the Christian world were made aware of the fact that their enemies are NOT the Muslims but rather the Zionists who have all but destroyed their religion and culture, that we will be able to eventually get a rope around the neck of this animal where it could be thrown back into the cage where it belongs,” Glenn concluded. 

Bob Fitrakis on New Evidence of 2004 Stolen Election in Ohio

 OpEd News
Joan Brunwasser

The electronic vote count apparatus that was put together to steal the 2004 election is still with us today. We still allow private partisan for-profit companies to control our software and hardware in the election process.

In the new court filing in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case, instead of us and others being dismissed as "conspiracy theorists," people can make up their own minds. They can look at the architectural map showing how J. Kenneth Blackwell, then-Ohio Secretary of State, allowed private contractors to outsource the Ohio 2004 presidential vote count on election night to a private company, SmarTech, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The court case was stalled after the tragic of Bush IT guru Michael Connell in December 2008, one month after we took his deposition about the outsourcing of the vote count in 2004. People have a chance to look at our brief and Connell's under oath deposition with this new filing.

Also, the contracts signed by Connell's company and SmarTech can be read in the filing for the first time. This isn't ancient history. It is state of the art vote theft. It is tied directly to Karl Rove and partisan Republican IT operatives. It could happen in Ohio again, it could happen anywhere in the country. It appears to have just happened in Wisconsin.

Back up a bit please, Bob. The average reader doesn't understand anything about architectural maps or private contractors or even about the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case. How can we give them the basic information they need to evaluate the evidence?

The King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case is a civil rights case filed in 2006 against Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. It was based on evidence showing that during Ohio's 2004 presidential election, black voters were disproportionately purged from the voting rolls, voting machines were deliberately withheld from primarily urban polling sites, and many ballots from minority/young/poor/elderly voters in major urban areas (read: Democratic) were never counted.

The results of the 2004 election have always been at odds with the exit polls. After the election ended, the exit polls showed John Kerry won by three points instead of losing by three points and thus should have won Ohio and become the president.

While investigating the civil rights complaint, evidence emerged that Blackwell (who also served as co-chair of the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign) had hired private contractors to oversee the election. One of the contractors was a long-established Bush IT operative, Mike Connell. Connell originally worked for the former CIA Director George H. W. Bush when he ran for president in 1988.

For some unexplained reason, Connell set up a computer system, which was supposed to be a "back-up" system for reporting the final vote count in Ohio. The system was actually more of a "man-in-the-middle" computer sitting in between Ohio's 88 county central tabulators and the Ohio secretary of state's voting site with the capability to alter the vote count. Within a recent court filing in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case, there is an architectural map depicting this computer system.

The computer system resided in Chattanooga, Tennesseee, run by a company called SmarTech under Jeff Averbeck. Averbeck is another highly-partisan operative who formerly worked for Richard DeVoss of Amway. Averbeck was a Bush-Rove loyalist. On those same stack of servers in Chattanooga was a website directly linked to the White House - gwb3.com .

Part of this information came from a deposition of Mike Connell and information from other IT experts assisting in the lawsuit. All of this evidence is contained in the new court filings. People should read the brief as well as the Connell deposition, the contracts with these Republican companies and then consider the computer set up.

The system is literally designed to hack the vote.

The reader can find the information here:
"New court filing reveals how the 2004 Ohio presidential election was hacked" article on freepress.org

I sn't this just a case of Democratic sour grapes? Why are we just discovering all this now? And where is the corporate press? Isn't this a rather huge, and historic story with huge ramifications? They should be all over this!

Regarding Democratic sour grapes - you'd have to ask the Democrats about that. I'm a Green, co-chair of the Ohio Green Party and former Green candidate for Governor. It was the Green and Libertarian Parties in Ohio who called for recount in Ohio of the 2004 election.

Democrats are equally to blame for allowing private computer companies to corrupt our voting system.

The case was stayed in the court for a period while we tried to work out a consent decree to clean up the election process in Ohio with former Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner (2006-2010). We lifted the stay prior to the 2008 election to take Connell's deposition because of our fear that the private companies may be operating again in Ohio. The death of Connell, who we had planned to depose again, forced us to look in different directions.

Jewish Voice for Peace? Really??

Intifada Palestine
Nahida Izzat

It appears that, yet again, Anti-zionist Jewish organizations are trying to silence Palestine’s supporters, to frame the debate, to secure the future of their brethren in occupied Palestine and to steer the course of Liberation of our Homeland

I would invite people to hear a Palestinian voice, here:

A strategy of liberation requires emancipation

* No decent human-being would demand to live on STOLEN land and still claims to have a fiber of morality.

* No decent human-being could claim that the perpetrator should have the same rights as the victim while claiming to be a humanist.

* Palestinians are under no obligation to hold back their march for freedom, to curtail their aims or to smother their rights for the sake of accommodating and not offending their Jewish supporters.

* Palestinians are always grateful and appreciative of the hard work and dedication of all their supporters whomever they are, however, Palestinians have NO obligation to adopt the aims and objectives of the anti-zionist Jewish supporters instead of their own.

* Dismissing the Palestinian voice as radical, reactionary, intolerant, or unreasonable, and requiring instead the Jewish-anti-zionist stamp of approval to have legitimacy to speak for Palestine, is preposterous and contradicts basic concepts of human rights and does not do justice to Palestinians.

* Palestinians have the ultimate right to choose their vision for their future, of a FREE and sovereign Palestine including the type of government, the writing of constitution, the construction and implementation of their legal and juristic system, which stems from and corresponds to their ethics and reflects and protects their culture.

* Palestinians have the ultimate right to make the final decision on who is allowed to stay in liberated Palestine and who is not, using the legal procedure of their own choice.

* The future of the Palestinian struggle and the aim of liberation of Palestine should not be designed to shield the occupier from paying the full price of his crimes; including the punishment of all those who participated in transgression, and the deportation of the illegitimate Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants who colonized Palestine forcefully and were engaged in acts of aggression against Palestinians including serving in the IOF.

* All refugee and their descendents have the unconditional right to come back home, they as the rightful indigenous owners are also entitled to the reinstatement of ALL confiscated (stolen) land and property, compensation for all their losses over the many years of exile and they are also entitled to Palestinian citizenship wherever they are.

* The aims and aspirations of most Palestinians are not confined to the change of zionist regime or the vacuous declaration of abandonment of zionism by the Jewish-zionist occupiers, but rather to the FULL Liberation of Palestine and the restoration of all their rights.

* It is the privilege of Palestinians to decide who should stay in their homeland and who not.

* After a century of terror, theft and crimes; had the Zionist shown any signs of remorse, respect or willingness to be decent guests, had they embraced with open arms the hospitable people of Palestine rather than destroying them with fire-arms; they might have had a chance to be accepted and forgiven. Not any more, as far as I am concerned. They have lost that opportunity.

As a Palestinian, I see the role of any “Jewish voice for peace” who sincerely desire to contribute to the Liberation of Palestine and justice for Palestinians, and who desire to be identified through their contributions “as Jews”, then their role ought to be focused on cleaning their own house before sorting other people’s houses; i.e. that is to exclude any major role in influencing, leading or directing the Solidarity and/or Liberation Movement of Palestine.

Through taking a leading role in campaigning to blacklist organizations and publications, label intellectuals and limit the spectrum of debate by censoring topics which they deem “controversial”; by framing the debate they act against intellectual integrity, box Palestinians and their supporters mentally and knowingly or not act as gatekeepers. They force people to self-censorship to avoid been accused of antisemitism; hence preventing them from acquiring, sharing or discussing information freely that would allow them to make their own informed decisions.

Palestinians’ grievances against the zionist theft of their land do by no means justify antisemitism accusations, Palestinians and their supporters are no lesser human beings, they are well capable to sieve through information and make their own evaluation, henceforth it is completely unacceptable that some of our anti-zionist Jewish supporters try to dictate to Palestinians:
who they should accept as a supporter and who should they boycott;
what speaker to invite and whose lecture to avoid;

who they should consider progressive and who can be labeled reactionary;
what religion and religious group are above all criticism and what faith is deemed to
be “backward looking and inherently unable to deliver progress”;

what books should be read, and which articles should be thrown away;

what narrative of events should be adopted as “reasonable” and which should be considered a “conspiracy theory”;

what chapter of history should be seen as a “dogmatic unquestionable religion”; and which one should be seen as “hoax” or as a “useless hateful rumors”;

what course of action should be taken and which one should be dismissed a “distraction”;
Furthermore, when censorship is practiced, when some books become forbidden and certain speakers are silenced, it appears to any self-respecting free-thinker that their brain, their ability to analyze and evaluate are being demeaned and patronized.

Rather than wasting their energy campaigning to ostracize or silence some of the most outspoken allies and honest supporters of Palestine, they should rather direct their efforts towards their OWN communities where the rot is anchored and festering: where supremacist ideologies reign supreme, chauvinistic anti-humanist beliefs flourish, delusional concepts entrenched and fostered, and criminal Mossadic activities thrive, and where mossers are ostracized and sayanim are promoted.
This ought to be our Jewish allies’ battlefield.

It is only in this specifically Jewish frame of activity, that separate organizations identified as exclusively Jewish can affect significant change and eventually their claim to speak in the name of their Jewishness be vindicated.

On the contrary, when specifically Jewish organizations or activists ubiquitously claim to be the true representative of Jewish people, or the voice of Judaism, whereas they are but a tiny, minute, insignificant and ineffective minority, and what is more an ostracized and despised minority amidst their larger Jewish communities, then these Jewish organizations by making their false claim of representing Jews or Judaism as they bravely expose Israeli crimes, are projecting nothing less than a smoke screen deflecting from the sinister racist ideology which has produced Zionism in the first place.

Since it is quite obvious that the Jewish members of organizations who claim to be Anti-Zionist, rarely are -if ever, active members of their local Jewish communities and when they try to reach out, they are generally rejected;

since they pretend that exposing the ideologies and activities of their community is a “distraction”;
since they accuse of being “anti-semite” whomever questions the thriving racism and the powerful lobby within the Jewish communities and since they fail to infiltrate the nefarious Judeo-Zionist network in order to affect real change from within:

therefore the claim that they speak for the Jewish people or Judaism is invalid, and the only reasonable consequence is to dissolve their separate “Jewish only” Anti-Zionist or Pro-Palestinian organizations, in order to become an integral part of the Solidarity Movement.

______________________________

 
Nahida Izzat is a Jerusalem-born Palestinian refugee who has lived in exile for over forty two years, after being forced to leave her homeland at the tender age of seven in 1967, during the six-day war. She has a degree in mathematics, but art is one of her favorite pastimes. She loves hand-made things and so makes dolls, cards, and most of her own clothing. She also writes poetry, participates in written dialogues and believes in building bridges, not walls.

The CIA Accurately Predicted How Long World Oil Supplies Would Last—in 1978

Downward Spiral

Perhaps I am atypical, but I’ve always been hypersensitive to what’s going on around me in the real world. Among my earliest childhood memories are the gas lines that followed the 1973 Arab oil embargo; the event which probably planted the seed that sprouted into awareness of peak oil during my fifth decade on this planet. Despite being just a kid at the time, I was keenly aware that my family’s cars needed that gasoline that was being rationed, and we furthermore needed those cars to do just about everything that was important--from my dad getting to work in the morning, to me getting to school, to my mom going grocery shopping every weekend.

My heightened awareness is likely also the reason why I still have vivid memories of a headline that appeared in our local small town newspaper one day several years after those gas lines had abated. The headline read in stark simplicity: “60 to 90 Years' Supply of Oil Left,” and it really grabbed this thirteen-year-old’s attention. Being a thoughtful youth, I did a quick mental calculation and realized that if the headline was accurate it meant if I was lucky there was a chance I would not live to see the end of the oil age.

Flash forward to middle age, and while researching this article I unearthed a reference to what it was that generated that headline from so many years ago. According to a Time magazine story published in October 1978, the source of that “60 to 90 year” figure was an official report produced for the Central Intelligence Agency by Richard Nehring, a policy analyst for the Rand Corporation. The Time article, entitled “Oil: What’s Left Out There?” centered on two basic questions: “How much oil does the world have left?” and “When will it run out?”

These were hotly debated topics at the time. The article points out that President Jimmy Carter, in his drive to get an energy program through Congress, had been relying on a previous CIA analysis estimating that world oil supplies would be depleted by the end of the 1980s. Nehring’s report, therefore, represented a considerable change from the agency’s previous thinking on the issue and also had important political ramifications.

What strikes me looking back in hindsight is just how accurate Nehring’s prediction has turned out to be. It is now nearly 33 years later, and the general consensus among Peak Oil analysts today is that the world has something on the order of 35-40 years of remaining oil supplies at current consumption rates (putting aside the fact that production rates will no doubt fall well before then). Add those two figures together and the headline that grabbed my attention when I was a kid will hit almost the exact middle of its 60-90 year target range.

Even more telling is what the Nehring paper had to say about how his prediction would be affected by increasing oil demand: “If demand does increase and supplies are being used up more quickly, Rand experts believe that energy requirements could still be met through conservation measures and the use of special techniques to squeeze more oil out of existing reserves.” Done and done. Conservation through greater efficiency in the early 1980s caused oil consumption to actually fall for awhile and special techniques are now used to extract more oil from older fields.

Nehring’s credibility is further enhanced by a caution added to his relatively optimistic analysis: “the world's reserves can really be significantly increased only by additional recovery from known fields and by further discoveries of ‘supergiant’ fields containing at least five billion barrels of oil.” As we now know, the former has become standard practice while the latter has not occurred at all. In fact, the Rand report noted at the time that new discoveries of supergiant fields had already almost completely tapered off.

The Time article goes on to list the reasons why the oil crisis seemed somewhat less dire a half-decade after the appearance of those first gas lines. Among the factors cited was the development of already discovered supergiant oil fields in the North Sea, Alaska and Mexico, which we now know were largely responsible for oil prices returning to their pre-oil shock, inflation-adjusted norms during the 1980s and 1990s.

So what do we learn from this little detour through the recent past? First and foremost, the evidence is right there in black-and-white that America’s political leadership has for the past third of a century had available at its disposal a highly accurate prediction from its own intelligence analysts as to how long conventional oil supplies were likely going to last. The fact that the more dire previous predictions regarding oil production relied upon by Carter were just then being overtaken by positive developments in the oil industry did not lessen the obvious need for long term planning to prepare the nation for the inevitable day when the oil would run out for good.

History records what happened next. Despite being the last president to take oil depletion seriously as a political issue, Carter hedged his bets and issued the Carter Doctrine, making it American policy to guarantee uninterrupted oil shipments from the Middle East, by force if necessary. Among his opponents during his 1980 reelection bid was Republican Congressman John Anderson--running as an independent—whose platform called for even more drastic conservation measures like a 50 cent a gallon gasoline tax (equivalent to about $1.50 a gallon today). Both men were of course defeated by Ronald Reagan, the first candidate to run on the notion of unfettered American exceptionalism, including the ludicrous idea that even geologic reality could be overcome by enough positive thinking.

For over three decades Americans have been living in a dream world created by politicians of both parties and reinforced by our mainstream media. Despite some indications that cracks are beginning to appear in the façade, most people have yet to awaken to peak oil reality. The guy driving the Hummer with the “Drill, Baby, Drill” bumper sticker plastered on the back is just as firmly in denial as he ever was. If you don’t believe me, read the comments section below any mainstream press Internet article about high gasoline prices and you’ll see more than you’ll likely ever care to see of the infantile mindset that still predominates among large numbers of our fellow citizens when it comes to energy issues.

As yet another quadrennial political spectacle begins to unfold before us, we must lament the fact that no serious candidate vying to take the presidential oath of office on January 20, 2013, has publicly acknowledged the stark realities of peak oil and resource depletion. Those of us in the peak oil movement are now also aware, of course, that oil production is going to drop off steeply long before we reach Nehring's projected date range for supplies to run out. What was once an inconvenient truth stubbornly denied by Reagan in the name of short-term political advantage is now emerging as the most serious crisis this nation has faced since its founding. That this is so should not come as a surprise to anyone. After all, we were given a very clear warning about what’s coming all the way back in 1978.

$5 million lawsuit targets Jimmy Carter for ‘attacking Israel’

The Ugly Truth

WASHINGTON – Former President Jimmy Carter has become the target of a class action lawsuit over ostensibly mean things he said about Israel in his best-selling 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
 

The lawsuit, filed in New York by an Israeli firm, alleges that the book “contained numerous false and knowingly misleading statements intended to promote the author’s agenda of anti-Israel propaganda and to deceive the reading public instead of presenting accurate information as advertised.”

The five American plaintiffs, two of whom are dual citizens of the US and Israel, seek $5 million in damages over the book (which is being sold for less than $10 on Amazon) on the basis that its criticisms of Israel violated consumer protection safeguards.

The plaintiffs alleged in a press release that the 39th US president and Nobel Peace Prize winner “violated the law and, thus, harmed those who purchased the book” by unfairly “attacking Israel.”

Attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner said her clients’ lawsuit “will expose all the falsehoods and misrepresentations in Carter’s book and prove that his hatred of Israel has led him to commit this fraud on the public.”

Publishing company Simon & Schuster, which is also targeted in the lawsuit, dismissed it as a frivolous act and a “chilling attack on free speech that we intend to defend vigorously.”

“This lawsuit is frivolous, without merit, and is a transparent attempt by the plaintiffs, despite their contentions, to punish the author, a Nobel Peace prize winner and world-renowned statesmen, and his publisher, for writing and publishing a book with which the plaintiffs simply disagree,” Simon & Schuster spokesman Adam Rothberg told the Washington Post.