MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: Permanent War for Permanent Profits

“Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”

- Bob Dylan (Visions of Johanna)

A 2001 piece at satirical website The Onion entitled “Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'” published shortly after his inauguration was astonishing in the uncanny ability to so accurately predict the future. Not only did Bush and Cheney use the September 11, 2001 attacks to justify the invasion of the bane of empires that is Afghanistan but also to launch a “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq, a country that had no connection to 9/11. When it comes to Jr. Bush it was a chance to one up the old man who stopped short of toppling Saddam Hussein in 1991 much to the dismay of the neocons and Cheney and Rummy were pushing all the buttons. What the 2003 attack on Iraq did was to throw open the gates of hell itself, result in the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, thousands of American service members and forever taint what remained of the U.S. national image with the descent into the barbaric pits of the torture state as evident at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib Prison.

Bush and Cheney ushered in the societal transformation, exploiting the 9/11 attacks which to this day have never been honestly investigated – in particular the level of U.S. Deep State complicity in covering up Saudi involvement – to hit the reset button on over two and a quarter centuries of history. The Bush regime will forever be responsible for the transformation of the United States of America into that dark and ominous entity known as “The Homeland” as well as the Orwellian concept of perpetual war abroad and totalitarianism at home.

The new era of the Surveillance State Gomorrah was birthed out of the ruins of the World Trade Center and thanks largely to Bush’s successor, Barack Obama it has become a permanent fixture of a rapidly closing society where privacy has been rendered obsolete and black clad militarized police forces enforce the diktats of the chief executive. The courageous actions of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have peeled away the star-spangled curtain from this virulent fascist machine and yet the hydra has only reconfigured itself since and now is pushing for the world war that will lock it into place forever.  Orwell’s O’Brien foretold the future of the United States when he sneeringly and coldly explained to Winston Smith that:

The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that.

We know that no one ever seeks power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

Barack Obama was the logical next step to Bush-Cheney who were in effect the change agents who administered to the new American Homeland birthed from the ashes of 9/11 and united under fascism. The rise of Obama would put a smiling new face upon the new American century, friendly and inclusive to the new generations. As I write this Americans who were toddlers when the towers came down have known no other world than that of the warfare-surveillance-police state. Hitler himself had always made it clear that the children were essential to future of the Reich and had it not imploded under the accumulated weight of his insanity it may have eventually refined itself to resemble a land not much different from The Homeland circa 2014.

Obama has always been a product, the real power is vested in the state itself and his selection of such seasoned servants as Robert Gates (Secretary of Defense), Hillary Clinton (Secretary of State), Rahm Emanuel (Chief of Staff) and Timothy Geithner (Secretary of the Treasury) along with Vice President Joseph Biden made it evident that there would be no real “change” despite the hype and campaign promises. The second term of the Obama administration saw the exit of all four – like rats off a sinking ship – and the arrival of more virulent warmongers the likes of John “Skull and Bones” Kerry (Secretary of State), Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland (former Cheney aide and Assistant Secretary of State) and the wife of PNAC founder Robert Kagan, Samantha Power (U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) and wife of the sinister insider Cass Sunstein and Jack Lew (Secretary of the Treasury) and former Citigroup exec. The rhetoric of Obama has always belied the truth that he is himself a lackey of entrenched power and with the expansion of executive power to include the extrajudicial murder of U.S. citizens, the expanding NSA surveillance colossus and the imminent wars it is apparent that he always was a fraud.

The real boon for the powers that be (TBTB) behind Obama is that as the nation’s first black president it was a slam dunk that he would have as a foil and a cover for the continuation of ruinous national foreign and domestic policy a Republican Congress packed with racists and religious zealots. It is the ultimate form of good cop-bad cop and plays perfectly for the corrupt state-corporate media and the abject morons who are American voters that still believe that there is a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties. The business of America as the center of the global finance capital empire is war and that business continues to thrive. As former longtime Congressional aide Mike Lofgren put it so well in his essay for an appearance with PBS’s Bill Moyers “Anatomy of the Deep State”:

Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.

These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.

Lofgren sums up the concept of the Deep State very well and I would strongly recommend that you go and read his essay as well as the work of longtime Deep State researcher Peter Dale Scott but that is a story for another time. Suffice it to say that business of America is war and there will be no end to the wars until they are the end to us.

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."

-General Smedley D. Butler

Obama and his administration have over the past year been relentlessly pushing  for that next great war, whether it be based on lies about the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad gassing civilian children in a Damascus suburb, underwriting a coup d’etat in Ukraine backed by savage fascists and neo-Nazis or by dancing on the edge of the abyss by pushing for a full blown war with nuclear power Russia it goes on. While none of those have erupted into the massive wealth generating conflict so desired – the lunatic obsession with Russia still has potential – TPTB and the Obama regime may have found a temporary out with yet another U.S. military intervention in Iraq. The rise of the mysterious Islamist bogeyman of ISIS (Islamic Stat of Iran in Syria) is hard to figure as it could be legitimate blowback or yet another of those secret armies that is created through covert funding and support of the U.S. Deep State interests along with foreign assistance. It sure as hell is convenient though.

Warmongering Republicans and the neocon propaganda machine has been worked into a lather over the explosion of violence in Iraq, ostensibly the work if ISIS the great and terrible but largely to wash the blood from their own hands in pimping revisionist history as well as invoking the old German "stabbed in the back" charge against Obama. For months now the calls for a re-engagement of U.S. military forces in Iraq have ratcheted up the pressure on Mr. Transparency with the usual gaggle of deranged right-wing fiends and chickenhawks caterwauling the loudest to send Americans back into harm's way. The neocons will always be the first ones to commit the sons and daughters of American mothers to be fed into the latest Middle East meat grinder to slake their never-ending thirst for the blood of others and of course, the money that funds their damnable political campaigns.

The propaganda has been deafening, never more so than today with the added accelerant of the ongoing indignity of continuing to be punked by the fully-demonized Russian leader Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. Another bite at the Iraq apple, particularly now that Obama has liberal cover in an election year under the bogus pretense of humanitarian intervention or R2P (Responsibility to Protect) to reengage.  He just dialed up the first airstrikes in order to "prevent genocide", just ignore the hypocrisy that Obama has not taken similar action to prevent the Israeli genocide operation ongoing in Gaza but it is after all an election year and Jewish donors may close their wallets to the Democrats were the war criminal Netanyahu to be challenged.

Not that the limited airstrikes to "prevent genocide" in Iraq will ever satisfy the neocons, no amount of death, blood and violence ever will. A recent piece in the Inside Baseball publication of the beltway circle-jerk - Politico -  brings back all of the Bushreich neocon ghouls who are responsible for setting Iraq ablaze to begin with. I excerpt the following from the litany of bullshit that is entitled "Neocons to Obama: No Half Measures":

“We’re not out of Iraq. The pledge [Obama] made [to leave Iraq] was premature — we’re back,” said Elliott Abrams, who served on former President George W. Bush’s National Security Council. “Let’s now do the job, and not do two airstrikes when we really need to do five.”

AND

“I think it’s late in the sense that, if the threat is ISIS, ISIS is a hell of a lot more powerful today than it was six or 12 months ago,” said Abrams, who was also deeply involved in the Reagan administration’s policies in Central America. “So it’s going to be a lot harder to protect the Kurds, the Christians, the Yazidis and Baghdad than it would have been.”

John Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer known for his hardline approach to terrorism suspects, added that “President Obama is obsessed with a legacy as the president who got us out of Iraq (and Afghanistan, for that matter), even at the expense of the U.S. interest in stability in the Middle East.”

AND

Ari Fleischer, Bush’s former spokesman, noted that Obama has received bipartisan support for his actions in Iraq.

“What he did today shows, in a quote-unquote ‘war-weary nation,’ when presidents lead, the public follows,” he said.

ISIL has been publicly on the White House radar for several months, and in June the Obama administration decided to send up to 300 military advisers to Iraq. In a tweet on Friday, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona — a hawk in his own right, though not part of the Bush crowd — pointed out that in a New Yorker interview earlier this year, Obama dismissed ISIL as “jayvee.”

AND

Frederick Kagan, an architect of the military “surge” in Iraq, said the U.S. should have been “attacking” ISIL “all along.” Now that military action is underway, Obama should use the opportunity to deal a major blow to the group, he said.

“We should do as much damage to the organization as we can, as quickly as possible,” he said. “That is a core interest to the United States of America.”

Max Boot, a former adviser to the GOP presidential campaigns of McCain and Mitt Romney, wrote in Commentary that Obama “deserves credit for acting now,” but he argued that the actions this week undermine previous White House claims about Iraqi stability.

Still, Obama’s move to authorize the strikes “indicates that no matter how much he doesn’t want to be involved in Iraq, he understands the cost of doing nothing is too great to stomach,” said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and political adviser to what was the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Several of the observers interviewed noted that ISIL is also a problem in Syria, where thousands have died in that country’s civil war, and where the U.S. has declined to engage militarily. The difference in approach comes across as “cognitive dissonance,” as Rubin put it.

Another problem, some argued, is that the airstrikes seem like a mere tactic, when what’s needed is a broader strategy.

“He doesn’t even get close to Whac-a-Mole,” Rubin gibed. “Instead, it’s more like finger-waving at the mole.”

This week’s slate of psychopaths set to appear on the Sunday morning war propaganda “news” shows include the two men who were instrumental in the nurturing of ISIS/ISIL, Senator Lindsey Graham and old blood and guts himself Senator John “nuke them all” McCain. It will be like NFL Gameday where the roundtable of shills for the warfare state critique and discuss the upcoming game – this one in particular being the commitment of Mr. Hope and Change to an extended military campaign in Iraq. Obama is the fourth U.S. President to bomb Iraq now in an Oval Office tradition that is becoming as institutionalized as the Easter Egg roll and the pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald accurately now refers to it as a "redundant presidential ritual" in a new piece that he wrote at The Intercept. Obama has now officially joined the club.

 "In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason."

 - Ernest Hemingway

Essential in rolling out the propaganda campaign to sell the star-spangled sheep for yet another war in Iraq are the testimonials and comments of former Iraq war veterans who find a media platform supportive of the warfare state. We saw examples of this during the week when the Iraqi city of Fallujah was overrun by "Islamist militants" therefore defiling the site of a great symbolic American military triumph. Veterans were trotted out to decry the loss of Fallujah and to bitch and moan that their sacrifices were for naught.  What remained unsaid is that the Iraqi city was descended upon by American forces in spring of 2004 after the brutal ambush, murder and hanging of the mutilated bodies off four Blackwater mercenaries in the early days of Bush-Cheney’s "Shock and Awe" attack and invasion of Iraq.

The grotesque abuse of the bodies of the armed intruders, hung from a bridge where they were mocked and had shoes and other debris thrown at them by insurgents was an image that did not jibe with the choreographed war propaganda like saving Private Lynch and the staged pulling down of Saddam’s statue. Americans who were already whipped up into a lynch mob braying for retaliation against Muslims by the neocons after the September 11, 2001 attacks, were outraged and there was hell to pay. The military went into Fallujah heavily armed, often staging house to house raids in a Lidice style orgy of vengeance and were cheered in the land of black SUV’s adorned with those little magnetic yellow ribbon magnets. It was brutal American forces used white phosphorus munitions on the those trapped in besieged city. But that no more gibes with the official glorious narrative than that the atomic bombs dropped on primarily civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to save the millions of American lives that would be lost in an invasion of the Japanese homeland did. Both are total horseshit.

With the latest U.S. military action in Iraq The Guardian dredged up one of the "Iraq war veterans" of the whining, we were stabbed in the back variety. The piece, by a guy named Cody Buzzell is a call for the new round of Iraq bombing. I excerpt the following from "How I learned to stop worrying and love bombing the hell out of Isis":

Even Iraq war veterans find out what’s happening in Iraq on Facebook. A couple months ago, when the terrorists formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) re-invaded Iraq, the group’s greatest-hits videos started flooding my feed again.

Recreational beheadings, cold-blooded mass executions, Sopranos-esque executions, 2Pac-style drive-by’s: the “Isis Gone Wild” YouTube videos are impossibly horrifying, yet somehow impossible not to watch. You can’t believe what you’re seeing because you saw it coming – because you saw it before – and so you click play anyway.

Many of the videos are posted by my disgruntled former platoon mates. They’re the same veterans who wondered, a couple months ago, whether it was all worth it 10 years earlier, what with it all going to hell again. We’re the same vets wondering today, what the hell took so long to do bomb the hell out of these guys?

So on Friday morning, I logged on to the usual nothingness of Facebook, and between the emoticons and selfies, the check-ins and the inspirational memes, there it was – and I actually couldn’t believe what happened next: US begins air strikes against Isis targets in Iraq.

About fucking time, I almost posted in a comment underneath.

Typically missing from the beating of the war drums is any sort of counter by an Iraq war veteran who opposes the new round of intervention and denounces the warmongering politicians and pundits as exactly the scum and vermin that they were in 2003 and continue to be in 2014 shouting for attacking Iraq. Providing exactly that sort of commentary in a scathing essay that literally must have burned the paint off of the walls between which it was written is a brilliant piece by the sort of veteran who understands patriotism in a way that our political class and it's lackeys are incapable of doing.

The essay, entitled “Absolutely Nothing” was written by Jim Wright, a retired US Navy Chief Warrant Officer and Iraq war veteran who has a website named Stone Kettle Station. Mr. Wright’s work, in particular this piece – which a copy authorized by the author is posted at following site - is of monumental importance in that he is one of those who was sent into battle by the scum who view our military people as in the words of Henry Kissinger - "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy. 

Jim Wright hits the bastards with both-barrels:

Sure, let’s go back to Iraq.

Oh, yes, let us do that.

I’ll dig out my uniform and strap on my pistol and gird up my sword and ride into battle yet again.

Just so long as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and every single one of those powdered, Botoxed talking heads at Fox News are in the vanguard. That’s right, you cowards, you put on a uniform and you lead the charge this time around. The Koch brothers and Mitt Romney can pay for it, every goddamned penny, we’ll bleed them until they’re dry and then we’ll pull the gold fillings from their teeth to pay for it right along with the rest of their Wall Street cronies. You fuckers got rich off the last one, you can damned well pay for this one. And when you run out of money, we’ll take your blood, fair’s fair.

Strap John McCain into the cockpit of an A-4 Skyhawk and let him fly air cover.

If he gets himself shot down and taken prisoner again, well, you know what? Fuck him, leave him to the enemy because frankly his hate and bile and raging insanity have done more damage to this country than Bowe Bergdahl ever did.

The terrorists can keep him.

People like Jim Wright, veterans who actually had skin in the game – their skin need to be heard from and heard from loudly so as to denounce the chickenhawks of the political class and their chicken shit games in sending others off to die for the sake of their fucking political ambitions.They are armchair patriots, cowards and losers, has-beens and never-will bes, psychopaths and petty criminals, zealots and charlatans, loud-mouths and lap top bombardiers, bottom feeders and parasites and to a one of them they only want one thing – to cower behind their precious flag, using as it as a shield for their own repugnant indignities as they howl for the sons and daughters of American mothers to go and sacrifice their lives, their hopes and dreams for nothing more than ratings points ins some stupid and inconsequential fucking political poll.And most of all they are swine who serve a criminal war machine that is the American Empire of the New American Century.

Fuck them all! Jim Wright deserves a seat at the table on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, CNN's State of the Union, ABC's This Week and every one of those sick electronic vomitories where wars are sold like toothpaste, soft drinks or erectile dysfunction pills to a captive audience of flag-waving schmucks and suckers.

As a military veteran myself, I served in the US Navy during one of those extremely rare periods between wars there is nothing that I view that is as shameless and despicable than any of these political swine and vermin standing upon their nationalist soapboxes blathering like some crazed, piss-reeking miscreant outside of a German beer hall about opening that great big can of American whup ass and pouring it out on some hapless over-matched country.

Like Iraq - AGAIN!

(Note: "Absolutely Nothing" excerpted with author's permission)

Donn Marten in Tampa, FL

The Business of America is War

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel spoke on Tuesday in defense of the American war machine and while not explicitly mentioned during his remarks during a speech for The Chicago Council of Global Affairs in defense of the obscene profits generated by America's ongoing global crusades. What would a defense of the Empire and the permanent war be without one of those cherished references to World War II aka "the good war" and Hagel invoked the neoconservative talking point of "isolationism" like a professional card shark dealing dirty from the bottom of the deck. The term is steeped in innuendo to conjure up mental images of Hitler's Nazi war machine and most importantly for maximum emotional value the millions of murdered Jews who were slaughtered along with millions of others because of the disgraceful "isolationism" of the United States. Never is it ever permitted to have an honest debate about non-interventionism and minding our own goddamned business, this is the real reason why the two party criminal syndicate and their whores in the media are so relentlessly trying to keep Rand Paul out of any sort of a position where he may pose this question.

A brief synopsis of SecDef's remarks is excerpted from the organization's website as below:

Despite war-weariness among the American people, the United States faces new and complicated challenges, not least “Russia’s blatant aggression in Ukraine,” and must remain strong and engaged militarily in the world, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told The Chicago Council Tuesday morning.

“We must remain a nation of big shoulders,” Hagel said in a rhetorical tip of the hat to the 500 Chicagoans who turned out for his breakfast-time speech. “America must not succumb to the temptations of looking inward…We must never just return to the garrison.”

And

The nation’s active involvement after World War II and especially its embrace of alliances around the world led to an unprecedented era of prosperity–an era that still exists, he said. Americans may be “increasingly skeptical of foreign engagements,” he said, but this misses the point, because Americans themselves are the greatest beneficiaries of this policy.

As 13 years of war come to an end, Hagel said, America’s military faces “new threats, challenges, and opportunities” created by a “fractured” global landscape. Among these, he said, are the rise of China and other Asian powers, the increasing youth population in the Middle East, new technologies including the possibility of cyber warfare, an increased global economic interdependence, increased nationalism, new sources of energy, and the impact of climate change on such strategically vital regions as the Arctic.

But as these new challenges arise, “history and geography still matter,” Hagel said. As examples, he cited the war in Syria, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the “dangerous provocations” of North Korea, the “simmering tensions” between China and Japan, and “Russia’s blatant aggression in Ukraine.” The secretary suggested no solutions for any of these problems, but indicated that no solution would be possible unless the US plays a role, diplomatically and militarily.

As an example, he cited the commitment of the US and NATO to NATO members among Russia’s neighbors, such as Poland and the Baltic, who are upset about Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine.

Oh lord how the money rolls in when the bodies pile up, cue up The Battle Hymn of the Republic, grab some Kleenex and snap to in saluting our glorious flag for the business of America is war and will always be war until there is no more America. 

The latest cash cow is the US instigated growing bloodbath in Ukraine, one that is being cynically used now to justify the escalation of military spending as well as shilling for the Keystone Excel pipeline as one Senate Democrat, Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu is doing and big energy is salivating over the wet dream of replacing Russia as the top supplier of energy to Europe thanks to the fracking boom. The warmongers in Congress are foaming at the mouth in denouncing Obama’s lame sanctions and becoming restive as it is an election year and more war machine dollars rolling into their states and districts is job security.  The corporate vultures were circling Ukraine even before the ousting of the democratically elected president – see State Department figure Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland’s appearance before assembled corporate interests boasting of the $5 billion taxpayer dollars that had been invested to destabilize the government in Kiev and open the doors for US businesses. Murder industry profiteers such as Lockheed are ecstatic in booming sales thanks to the chaos unleashed by the installation of the "Yats" occupying government and it's neo-Nazi/fascist muscle and are counting on being able to lure Putin into Ukraine to juice arms sales.

Sick and immoral but that's just the way that we roll in the USA, USA, USA!  

CNN Interrupts Flight 370 Coverage for Fort Hood Shooting

The media maxim of "if it bleeds, it leads" has just been substantiated at CNN which broke away from the ongoing blanket coverage of the missing Malaysian jetliner due to another shooting at Fort Hood in Texas. The network, a very pathetic excuse for a news organization anymore now that it has completed the transformation to a personality driven sensationalist outlet for tabloid cheese, celebrity scandal and as is evident with their 24/7 coverage of the doomed Malaysia Air Flight 370 where speculation trumps fact and no shame is spared in milking the human element of the tragedy for maximum effect by descending like a flock of vultures on the loved ones of the missing passengers.

The news of the shooting threw the state-corporate media into a feeding frenzy and the anticipation of having yet another piece of evidence to be parlayed to the masses as proof of that great neocon lie of the Muslim war on America was thick in the air. But alas, there was no Nidal Malik Hasan to be electronically pilloried in the national orgy of the "Two Minutes Hate" only a troubled Iraqi war veteran. The alleged shooter and the victims of this latest act of violence (which are now commonplace in The Homeland) are just the latest casualties in the goddamned endless series of illegal wars of aggression that has been forcibly shoved down the world’s collective throats by neocon swine, liars and cowards.

I don’t imagine that CNN will have to spend too much time cutting into the blanket coverage of the missing airplane - including providing a forum of legitimacy to tin-foil hatter cranks speculating about black holes - simply because this time the Fort Hood shooter isn’t one of those brown skinned Allah worshipping devils. When the killer, a man named Ivan Lopez, a 34 year Puerto Rico native opened fire it wasn’t an act of “terrorism” as defined by the neocon agenda to wipe the Muslim world off of the face of the planet. A war veteran with known mental issues just isn’t much of a story to the bottom feeders at CNN and the rest of the now completely corrupted institution of the mainstream media - move along, nothing to see here.

The military is spinning the story of Lopez having not seen combat to spare them the egg on the face regarding those returning from the murder zones with psychological burdens that are too much to bear. The red, white and blue bunting and military flyovers at sporting events as well as the indoctrination of war worship cover up the truly terrible toll of mental illness, alcoholism and drug abuse, violence and high rate of suicides among those sent to serve as imperial stormtroopers in the corporate wars of the New American Century.

You can bet that CNN won’t be covering that as the latest tragedy at Ft. Hood becomes a blip in their rear view mirror as the network speeds towards the next celebrity sex scandal and hourly updates on the search for the wreckage of Flight 370.

War Propaganda Goes to the Dogs

The Ideological Cornerstone of U.S. Foreign Policy

With the state media going all in to use the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia as an excuse to scare the hell out of the average American with a ludicrous daily diet of 'terrorist' threats a second front has been opened to fire up folks against those dirty Taliban bastards in Afghanistan. The news is spreading that according to sources that there has been a canine member of the military occupiers captured and have posted the video of the animal online. According to some sources the dog is a Belgian Shepherd named "Colonel", this is certain to tug at the heart strings of dog loving Americans who may not get riled up over the actual human casualties of the unending war nor give a rats ass about the permanently maimed military members coming home to bleak futures but animal abuse is a different story.

First off it should probably be said that this animal is not your average house pet, military dogs are trained killers and are often used during the no knock night raids that have spread terror through Afghanistan among the locals. There is nothing quite as unsettling as having the door kicked in by a squad of heavily armed trained killers with their vicious snarling beasts. What is never noted in any of the stories is any reference to cultural perspectives regarding the dog which is an animal while revered as 'man's best friend' in the U.S. of A and other western countries is actually a food source in others. Generally speaking and largely through no fault of their own Americans are by far the most culturally ignorant people on the planet, they have indoctrinated by institutions like the government, the media and a good part of the educational system to view the world through the twisted lens of the John Wayne mythology of American whup ass. The idea of the dog as "man's best friend" also doesn't seem to get in the way of profits though as retailers have little qualms about selling expensive clothing items made with the fur from the animals.

There is no shame when it comes to finding tricks and angles to assist in selling the ongoing fleecing of the American taxpayer into supporting the permanent wars of Oceania at the expense of using the money on anything that even remotely benefits them in the course of their increasingly miserable daily lives. They will be whipped up into an anti-Muslim rage over the plight of "Colonel" though and much like Pavlov's famous dogs they will largely respond to this latest blatantly over the top coordinated propaganda campaign by lining up to salute their blessed flag and payback against the 'ragheads'. I must admit that I feel a bit sorry for the captured animal myself, more than I would for a captured member of our imperial storm troopers who actually have a choice on whether they are going to engage in the ongoing murder, rape, destruction and plunder needed to ensure that American corporations can reap their obscene profits off of war. Nobody has ever put it better than decorated USMC General Smedley D. Butler when he famously declared that "war is a racket".

In an interesting development as of early Friday there has been a slight shift of reportage on the Taliban's capture, while it was reported yesterday that the dog was American there are now emerging stories that it is actually British. Perhaps some within the war mongering establishment felt that following up the ludicrous scare-mongering of the toothpaste bombs with this farce was a bit too obvious and are now slightly backing off. In the end though it won't matter, if the dirty Taliban bastards already posted video of their prized captive and it has elicited outrage just imagine how ready for war that the public will be when the inevitable You Tube video surfaces of them actually dining on the poor, doomed animal at their next tribal buffet.

Was 60 Minutes Fake Benghazi Story Planted?

While not wholly unexpected CBS has failed to hold any of those involved with the now thoroughly discredited Benghazi fantasy story by their ‘ace’ reporter Lara Logan which despite being worked on for around a year was nothing but a massive lie. While CBS executives and Logan rushed to apologize and retract the story after it was exposed that the primary source, a British mercenary goon named Dylan Davies who wrote a book under the pseudonym of Sgt. Morgan Jones entire story was fabricated. One could understand why corporate media titan CBS would have a vested interest in pushing the book, entitled The Embassy House (now withdrawn by the publisher) as it was a product of one of their publishing subsidiaries but to taint the reputation of their hallowed Sunday night McNews program 60 Minutes was risky and stupid. Not that the show holds up to any sort of scrutiny anyway, these days it is nothing but a vacuous zombie money machine that is a shell of the program that it was long ago when the reputation was built. 60 Minutes more often than not serves up the sleazy celebrity swill that the state-corporate media is already awash in as well as puff pieces that burnish the image of war criminals like Dick Cheney but to air such a blatant bit of propaganda as the Logan story is really so over the top that questions need to be asked about whether the story was intentionally planted.

It is not that planted stories, manipulated facts and outright lies are not commonplace given the dismal quality of what passes for media in this country in the waning days of 2013. There are conflicts of interest aplenty, for example the trotting out of former military and establish figures as “experts” on the wars and rumors of wars that have come to permeate our increasingly militarized society. It was certainly not disclosed that many of those trotted out on as “expert” talking heads babbling on about the necessity to attack Syria a few months back worked for firms that would have profited lavishly from an attack. This is actually fairly commonplace, it wasn’t that long ago when former Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff was afforded the credibility that he did not deserve when his firm The Chertoff Group was pimping those naked body scanning machines to the TSA after the bizarre Christmas Day “Underwear Bomber” plot was foiled.  The mainstream media has long been used by elements of the government to sell wars, sow disinformation and trick Americans into blindly accepting their own enslavement to the state. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird being a prototype program that has come to evolve over time and the advent of technology into an all-encompassing propaganda machine.

The 60 Minutes story has been a strange one from the first day that it ran sending the notorious crank Palmetto State Senator Lindsey Graham into one of his standard bitch fits, holding a press conference and threatening to block all of Obama’s nominees. Graham refused to back off after the Logan piece was identified as total bullshit and she was forced to issue an on air apology. The Graham tantrum blew up in his gerbil cheeked face this week when the ongoing abuse of the filibuster (which is incidentally not included anywhere in the Constitution) when former Nevada Gaming Commissioner and current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked the “nuclear option”. While the entire Senate silliness is yet another blatant indictment at how the entire legislative body has been effectively hijacked by wealthy special interests waving fistfuls of campaign donations at the prostitutes in Congress it only came to head because of chronic abusers the likes of Senator Graham who in any functional democracy would have long ago been voted out of office for his flagrant abuses of the public trust.

But I digress…

The disturbing lack of accountability over the 60 Minutes hoax indicates the presence of something far more nefarious than a simple matter of a parent company pushing the books of a publishing division. In a Newsweek piece that just came out entitled “Lara Logan’s Mystery Man” by Jeff Stein examines the potential role of Logan’s husband, Joseph W. Burkett in the scandal. It seems that Mr. Burkett has quite the history as a professional propagandist and at one time worked for a government contracting firm named The Lincoln Group that specialized in planting stories during the Iraq war.  I excerpt the following from the piece:

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Nobody at 60 Minutes has been fired or even publicly disciplined for its odd, inflammatory and dead-wrong October 27 story on the Islamist assault in Benghazi that killed U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. But it has apologized. That mea culpa, however, left some large and troubling questions unanswered; the most important one is how CBS's superstar correspondent, Lara Logan, her producer and other network news executives let security contractor Dylan Davies on the air with his explosive tale about what he did and saw during that attack.

While Davies was the central on-camera personality in that report, the most interesting figure in this mystery was never on screen, nor listed as a contributor to the piece. It is Logan's husband, Joseph W. Burkett, a former Army sergeant and onetime employee of a private intelligence outfit hired by the Pentagon to plant pro-U.S. stories in the Iraqi media in 2005.

One recent account implied that Burkett, 42, was the Svengali behind the now infamous story that pinned responsibility for the Benghazi attack on al Qaeda, without citing any sources.

"He was an employee of the Lincoln Group, a now-shuttered 'strategic communications and public relations firm' hired by the Department of Defense in 2005 to plant positive stories written by American soldiers in Baghdad newspapers during the Iraq War," the website Gawker reported.

The Gawker account also implied Burkett was a key operator in the covert action. A source intimately familiar with Burkett's family told Newsweek that he regularly suggested he was some sort of super-spook.

According to an internal company document obtained by Newsweek, the Lincoln Group specialized in producing films, news clips, and print stories in Baghdad that would be fed to the media through cutouts on an unattributed basis, making them appear as originating from legitimate news organizations.

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If this is indeed the case it calls into question the very essence of Logan’s journalistic integrity. She has no objectivity and as is the case when she went off on Michael Hastings the now deceased journalist for his Rolling Stone magazine piece "The Runaway General" that eventually led to the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal could herself be an embedded disinformation artist. She has been on record with comments extremely critical of Obama's Benghazi response which should have triggered some form of oversight by the CBS management over the segment in question, she also has the distinction of having been on the spot in the Baghdad square when the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down. It was the war's iconic image until it was replaced by the horrific image of Army private Lynddie England with a man on a leash among other gruesome pics from Abu Ghraib prison where U.S. troops were sexually humiliating and torturing Iraqis. The pulling down of Saddam's statute has subsequently been revealed to have been a psy-op, staged and packaged by image masters to bolster public support for the war and it happens to make for an interesting bit of coincidence that the future wife of a paid government disinformation operative would be the one covering it. I have yet to see that question asked but now that Mr. Burkett has been brought up in a story in a national publication it should merit at least some degree of follow-up considering the magnitude of the 60 Minutes false (planted?) story.

Americans should never underestimate just how much of their own taxpayer money is used to brainwash them into an acceptance of a disastrous foreign policy. The business of managing the news is an enormously expensive ongoing effort and the military in the digital age is particularly savvy in the utilization of technology to expand beyond the broadcast and print media into the internet and social networking. The bloated Pentagon budget, one that continues to be hidden from the American public has plenty socked away to hire firms such as the defunct Lincoln Group as well as the Rendon Group, another prominent public relations firm that shills for foreign U.S. military interventions.

According to remarks reportedly made by John  Rendon in a 1996 address to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy:

“‘I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician. I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager.’ He reminded the Air Force cadets that when victorious troops rolled into Kuwait City at the end of the first war in the Persian Gulf, they were greeted by hundreds of Kuwaitis waving small American flags. The scene, flashed around the world on television screens, sent the message that U.S. Marines were being welcomed in Kuwait as liberating heroes.

“‘Did you ever stop to wonder,’ Rendon asked, ‘how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American, and for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?’ He paused for effect. ‘Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then.’”

It has now become virtually impossible for average Americans to be able to come to any serious idea of what actually constitutes the truth in the corrupt state-corporate media. This is precisely the objective of the professionals who use psychology, boatloads of money, slick imagery and paid shills within the networks to manage perception and promote the continuing flow of dollars that could be far better utilized on projects that are desperately needed at home. Money that would be better spent on repairing a decaying and obsolete infrastructure, science and research projects to actually develop things that enhance society instead of blowing things up and making defense industry insiders and investors rich or even paying down the debt. It takes one hell of an effort to be informed these days and a daily intake of numerous news sources including non-domestic as well as a monitoring of state-corporate media to identify the daily spin.

In the words of the late CIA director William Casey: "We will know that we have succeeded when everything the public believes is false."  He never lived long enough to see this come to fruition but we are all living in a world based on this philosophy now.

The Saudi Royal Snit

While the United States somehow managed to avoid another ruinous war in Syria back in September the push for military strikes against the regime of Bashar al-Assad continues. Despite all of the best efforts of the Obama administration to sell yet another Middle East war to a public that has been slowly bled dry economically by the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan over the last twelve years Barry couldn’t close the deal.  It was close, the propaganda value of the poor, twitching dead children, gassed at Ghouta had enormous emotional power especially when it was continually rebroadcast and invoked in speech after speech by Obama and Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry. The bombers and missiles were nearly flying towards Damascus when Russian President Vladimir Putin pounced on an offhand gaffe about chemical weapons disarmament by Kerry who has long been afflicted with an incurable case of diarrhea of the mouth. Assad eagerly agreed to surrender his chemical weapons stocks and the imminent disaster that could have morphed into World War III was put onto the back burner.

This did not sit well with some, especially those who have been instigating for American intervention to fight their own territorial wars lest they be seen as what they really are, always best to let the western devil do the dirty work lest the revolution fall upon their own opulent palaces. Specifically outraged over the rare bit of American hesitance are our dear 'partners in peace' the Saudis. The House of Saud has been apoplectic over the failure of Obama to order up the attacks based on ginned up evidence that is still inconclusive and more likely the culprits were the radical Islamist militants, some of them cannibals and others affiliated with al Qaeda and backed by the Saudis. The roiling cauldron of animosity boiled over in an ugly public snit at the United Nations when the Saudis rejected a U.N. Security Council seat based on the failure of the body to lunge for the bait at Ghouta and back the plans to tip the balance of the Syrian civil war against Assad. Then in the aftermath of the Kingdom's great insult of giving the finger to the U.S./U.N. the veteran manipulator and media friendly fixer for the royal family Prince Bandar bin Sultan, now the head of Saudi intelligence came out and stated that the Saudis would be making a "major shift" away from the United States going forward.

Predictably this display of petulant indignity by a longtime entitled parasite rattled cages in the establishment.  The ever feckless elitist Kerry immediately flew into action to kiss the asses of the royals in a frantic effort at damage control, hope that he has his bags packed because with the revelations of the Obama NSA Stasi spying on foreign leaders growing by the day he is going to need to pay a lot of lip service in the coming weeks - hope he has a good supply of lip balm on hand. I am sure that while true rulers of this country, the big moneyed interests who most benefit from kowtowing to the rotten, oppressive and decadent Saudi monarchy and the most to lose from a cessation of the graft that millions of Americans would be perfectly happy to see Bandar and the rest of The Kingdom go their own way.

Let us not forget that fifteen of the nineteen September 11, 2001 hijackers hailed from Bandar’s land and that the Bush administration which then allowed planeloads of Saudis leave America while the national airspace was locked down out of fear of more attacks. The Bush family adored bin Sultan so much that they affectionately referred to him as “Bandar Bush” and during his time spent as U.S. ambassador was quite the aficionado of decadent western culture. While the royals funded and encouraged terrorists it was far from uncommon to see Prince Bandar partying with celebrities and wealthy Americans, even at one time reportedly prancing around on the sidelines of Texas Stadium during the 1990's Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl winning dynasty years. If you want to see a picture of the sheer hypocrisy of the Saudis as they currently rage about some perverse and self-serving Orwellian form of 'morality' you need look no further than their outward face of their own moral rot who is the loquacious Bandar Bush. He is a pimp for a regime that treats women like animals, brooks no tolerance for resistance and is among the most regressive countries on the planet. With "friends" like this who the hell needs enemies?

The Saudis have overplayed their hands and outlived their usefulness. With the rising domestic energy production courtesy of the shale boom and technological advances in hydraulic fracturing aka fracking  (which represents problems of its own) we now may finally be able to wean ourselves away from the Middle East tyrants and dependence on oil that requires catering to every whim of their despotic regimes. No wonder that Bandar is shitting bricks these days, there are finally options available and it is about damned time to cast away the vileness that is the Saudi monarchy - like the removal of a painful and annoying anal cyst. They can throw all of the ugly snits that their black hearts desire and while they are flush with money to buy politicians and launch public relations campaigns the era of having to bow down to those desert dwelling reprobates is coming to an end. Bandar Bush and his despicable royal family can continue to sow the seeds of unrest by backing terrorists and may yet succeed in bullying Obama into another regional disaster but their time of disproportionate influence is just about over.

At the end of the dawning day the brutal truth is that they can’t eat their oil. Conversely, once the oppressed religious fanatics that they have so nurtured, funded and sent forth to fight the same Great Satan that they were cutting deals with to fund their whores, yachts and partying finally turn on them absent the protection of the American military and political power structure there will be nowhere to hide.