Stephen Corbett: This week we turn the focus of our open-source investigation to Terrance Yeakey, one of First Responder heroes at the scene of the OKC bombing who saw something that conflicted with the official story of the bombing . . . . something that cost him his life.
[Download MP3 - Documentation]
Friday, August 6, 2010
Estulin: "World is Out of Time-Outs" on Global Depression
Bilderberg researcher and bestselling author Daniel Estulin appeared on The Corbett Report yesterday to discuss the troubling economic information that came out of last month's Bilderberg conference in Sitges, Spain.
The picture painted by Estulin's sources inside the secretive Bilderberg group—and confirmed by readily available financial data—is one of grim economic times where bubbles are bursting all over the world and no corner of the globe will escape the fallout. "From the Chinese real estate bubble[...]to an imminent housing crash in Canada, from the more-than-expected treasury bubble collapse in the United States and also from the meltdown of Spain which is happening as we speak, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, the battle lines are being drawn," he told The Corbett Report by phone from his residence in Spain. "And needless to say these battle lines will very much define which direction humanity will actually go over the next few years."
Related works from The Corbett Report:
Read the rest here:
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Who's Afraid of Bradley Manning?
By Karen Kwaitkowski
U.S. Secretary Robert Gates has stated that WikiLeaks has "moral culpability" for potentially deadly repercussions in Afghanistan and presumably Iraq. Gates said, "The Taliban can glean a lot about U.S. tactics and sources from the documents."
I’m delighted that Gates has brought up the topic of morality. He, son of the Midwest, an Eagle Scout, a trusted CIA operative, and … oops. I should have stopped at Boy Scout.
We easily recognize corruption and immorality in our elected officials – we lap up stories of seat haggling by glossy-haired pols in Chicago, we thrill at the sexcapades of prosecutors and presidents. We marvel at the sheer criminality of Congressional members and their staffs, even as we shudder fearfully at its mighty collective lawlessness.
As constituents, we can look at their crimes early and often. We can check to see if they vote with or against the Constitution, be it state or federal. We can contact them and even speak to them about what we care about, and when that has no effect, we can campaign against them, put in a different criminal, or step away from electoral politics altogether. But we will not be confused as to what is lacking in our elected representatives. They have a law to follow – the Constitutions of various states and of the federal government – and these public documents guide them regardless of creed or party. With rare exceptions, elected officials will fail to follow the basic rules they swore to uphold. We are informed, and entertained.
On the other hand, civil servants, particularly at the federal level, have been given a full pass in the ethics and morality department. We have been told basically that a professional government workforce was created from the void and that it is very good. We hear this even of the CIA, an organization with which Gates is quite familiar. We hear it of the Pentagon, Gates’ current area of responsibility.
Since its inception, much has been written on the extra-legal activities of the CIA. This history exists – and is ongoing, as the more recent role of the CIA in rendition and torture is public knowledge. I’m sorry. Rendition is kidnapping people, including Americans, and holding them for years without charges, without evidence, and without legal representation – and lying about it. Torture, as you may have heard, is something the United States government does not do, even as its agents systematically drug, deprive, waterboard, psychologically abuse, physically rough up, maim, wound, rape, threaten and lie to those we have rendered.
Bob Gates, as a career government civil servant knows all of this, and far, far more. He shares responsibility for the evolution of the CIA even as he escaped the heaviest stench of Iran-Contra. A senior CIA official as the Cold War ended and a new mission needed to be found, under George Herbert Walker Bush, Gates was an indispensable servant. The demonization and manipulation of former CIA asset and Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein fit the bill, and it simply boggles the mind the decisions and actions that Bob Gates was knowledgeable of and involved in between 1986 and 1993. The Iran-Contra Independent Counsel, with a little help from grand Jury secrecy rules, predictably found that prosecution of Gates was not warranted. His role in creating storylines to sell the first Persian Gulf War, in hiding or adjusting evidence to play the world, and in managing state secrets is undeniable, and largely unexamined. He was the ultimate trusted agent – the first CIA career civil servant to ever rise to Director.
There is a heavily promoted myth that professional civil servants, whether in uniform or in dress suits, are somehow more bound to the constitution and law and ethics than are politicians, and insultingly, more ethical than the average doctor, lawyer or car mechanic. But of course, they are not. Practically speaking, why would they be? Civil servants are extraordinarily hard to get rid of. Poor performance, lack of ethics, incompetence, immorality – none of these will generally get a civil servant fired, and often, these behaviors produce promotions. Now, these tolerated behaviors may be used to remove a civil servant – but only as needed to make a point of loyalty, as in the case of Rumsfeld’s persecution of Air Force Lt General Fiscus, who had the audacity to suggest that the law must limit Rumsfeld’s desires to detain and torture.
Civil servants – including members of the military – are part of a loyalty-based crime family, led largely by the executive level and his appointees, controlled by executive sponsors, backers and funders, and loyalty is demanded no less seriously than it is demanded by the dons of any crime syndicate. In this environment, just following orders is not only an acceptable excuse, it is all that the bosses ever wish to hear.
Professional civil servants and military members know this. They embrace doublespeak, as Orwell defined it:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
Creating this light of day is the mission of WikiLeaks, and the basic goal of independent media everywhere. But as Daniel Ellsberg experienced, and as whistleblowers in the 21st century from Sibel Edmonds, to Joe Darby, Jim Massey, and Sam Provance, from Joe Wilson and many more who sacrificed careers to speak morally and honestly have all found that the institution is like an angry grizzly, insulted that one man or one woman has the audacity to be sane. How dare they?
The institutionalized barbarism we see in the WikiLeaks "Collateral Murder" was made possible because a 22-year-old soldier could not lie. He was unable to effectively doublethink, and for some reason of upbringing, character, intelligence or basic goodness, could not bear the evilness he saw all around him – in American military behavior, in the institution’s lawlessness, in the immorality of war.
For his innocence and lack of ethical "sophistication," Brad Manning is held in isolation, under a 24-hour suicide watch. For providing a ray of hot light on the carefully constructed lies of our government, those associated with WikiLeaks are being monitored and harassed, and even threatened by various agents of the federal government, and its allies. Bob Gates suggests that Brad Manning is a traitor and that WikiLeaks is morally culpable in sharing information with Afghans that they can use against us.
As made clear by Julian Assange and others, the Afghans – while certainly victims of Washington, DC imperialism – are not victims of our institutional doublethink. They see what we do, how we do it, and they have relatively accurate theories as to why we are doing it. And unlike our generals, Afghans and their neighbors and friends, have developed and are developing a wide variety of effective strategies to get us to go away.
Instead of keeping us safe, prosperous and free, our government demands that we stay uninformed and obedient, and keeps its professional servants in a strict and constant state of doublethink. Gates and Obama and Petraeus are nervous, with their curious doublespeaking mantra that "The leaks are deadly dangerous, but not all that serious." Perhaps they know an open secret: Regular Americans – newly aware, sharply analytical, financially pragmatic and deeply moral – are nearing their potential to become the most fearsome enemy of American empire on the planet.
August 3, 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
Daniel Ellsberg's WikiLeaks wish list
Outlook asked Ellsberg for his wish list of documents to be leaked, declassified or otherwise made public, documents that could fundamentally alter public understanding of key national security issues and foreign policy debates. Below, he outlines his selections and calls for congressional investigations:
Read the list here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/30/AR2010073002673_pf.html
Read the list here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/30/AR2010073002673_pf.html
Sunday, August 1, 2010
What I've Learned About U.S. Foreign Policy
Segment #9: RAMSEY CLARK, former U.S. Attorney General (from the movie: What I've Learned About U.S. Foreign Policy - The War Against The Third World - CIA Covert Operations and US Military Interventions Since WWII - What You Didn't Learn in School and Don't Hear on Main Stream News
Michel Shehadeh introduces Ramsey Clark: “Everyone knows Ramsey Clark is a former U.S. Attorney General and he has been a persistent voice for anti-war movement for three decades. Ramsey has traveled all over the world and has been in Iraq every year since the sanctions were imposed.”
Ramsey Clark: “If you think it’s been a long evening, wait ‘till I get through. But we’re going to have to take some long evenings because this planet is deeply troubled and the greatest cause of that trouble is our own government. In the speech that Rev. James Lawson referred to that Martin Luther King made on April 5th 1967, the most startling thing that he said at the time and the thing that caused the most anger and hatred to be directed toward him, was this sentence: “The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government.”
“Thirty one years ago. Why anyone would have been startled is hard to say because it was an obvious fact. But apparently we need more education in the obvious than we do examination of the obscure and unknown.
“Last year, U.S. military expenditures, with all the suffering on the planet, all the sickness and hunger and ignorance and pain, the American military budget was $265 billion. The second largest government expenditure for militarism was $48 billion. And that was the Russian Federation. The United States military expenditures exceed those of the top 12 government expenditures on earth by themselves and are more than a third of all the military expenditures on the planet.”
“We have a war party in this country and we’ve had it all along! And you can call it Democrat for a while, you can call it Republican for a while, but it has been the special economic interest in this society that’s governed us from the time that we founded our governments on this continent. And the people have never controlled those governments.”
“We call ourselves the world’s greatest democracy -- we are absolutely a plutocracy! It’s the most obvious thing in the world! Wealth governs this country! And wealth uses military violence to control the rest of the world as best it can! And we’re responsible! And we will pay the price for it!”
“If we don’t control our violence, if we don’t control the effect of the symbol of our glorification of violence, on our children and on the rest of the planet, then this human species is going to be the first to destroy itself completely. And that’s the road the United States government has put us on.”
“The single most pertinent statement on this issue was by Henry Kissinger. When the Iran-Iraq war began, over a million very young men lost their lives in that war. Henry Kissinger said at the beginning of that war, eight years the war, “I hope they kill each other”. And that was exactly our policy. What could be better – have them kill each other – then who has to worry about that region anymore, you know? And don’t think that is not exactly our policy all over the world where there are poor peoples living today. That’s the solution to over-population – call it triage, whatever you want to call it. Let them kill each other, let them die. And they are dying all over Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where the masses of poor people live. They are expendable there as they are expendable here.”
“As appalling as what we’ve done and what we’ve threatened to Iraq, the worst violence that all of our technology could unleash and then the strangulation of the sanctions, the thing we have to realize is, it’s what our government leadership has been doing all along. It is not terribly different than how we addressed the folks that were here to meet the Mayflower standing on the dock. The North American aboriginal peoples, the Indians as we call them.
"A long steady course of destruction of those peoples. It is not terribly different than what we did to the slaves that were brought over in chains from Africa, those that survived the transit, which wasn’t easy. You look in our history books, you don’t read about a Philippine-American War, you read the Philippine history books and they know about the Philippine-American War. We call it the Spanish American War. We were liberating the Filipinos! We killed more than a million. Now we are bragging about the covert actions we are going to engage in against Iraq.”
“Do you doubt for a minute they are planning covert actions in half a dozen other places right now, and we’ll react to them five years after the misery has begun and the people have been devastated? What we have to realize is that if we don’t stand up and stop this now, if we can’t stop these sanctions in Iraq, and with them we can’t prohibit any further use of sanctions that are designed to impact on the poor, then there are no poor people on the planet that will ever be safe from our government and its future acts.”
“It is imperative that we stop them in Iraq today and that we prohibit them in the future as applied to any people, because it is a weapon of mass destruction. We have to stop military interventions by our government completely. We cannot permit more U.S. military interventions in foreign countries. We have to stop economic interventions. We’ve got to cancel foreign debt that has enslaved most of the poor countries on the planet. Cancel it!”
“So let’s organize through every effort and opportunity we have, in our families, in our churches, in our mosques, in our synagogues, in our schools, at our jobs, a massive coalition committed to end militarism and economic exploitation by our government. Thank you. God Bless.”
The End of (Military) History? The US, Israel, and the Failure of the Western Way of War
Yet from start to finish, military might had determined that competition's course as much as ideology. Throughout much of the twentieth century, great powers had vied with one another to create new, or more effective, instruments of coercion. Military innovation assumed many forms. Most obviously, there were the weapons: dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, rockets and missiles, poison gas, and atomic bombs -- the list is a long one. In their effort to gain an edge, however, nations devoted equal attention to other factors: doctrine and organization, training systems and mobilization schemes, intelligence collection and war plans.
All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great Britain, Russia or Germany, Japan or the United States, derived from a common belief in the plausibility of victory. Expressed in simplest terms, the Western military tradition could be reduced to this proposition: war remains a viable instrument of statecraft, the accoutrements of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance its utility.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/29-6
All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great Britain, Russia or Germany, Japan or the United States, derived from a common belief in the plausibility of victory. Expressed in simplest terms, the Western military tradition could be reduced to this proposition: war remains a viable instrument of statecraft, the accoutrements of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance its utility.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/29-6
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