Originally posted by culorut
I don't know about you but calling for another Pearl Harbor on that very same web page in order to go to war does not sound like globalization to me, it's control. Maybe you should wake up, read and connect the dots idiot.
Do you want to quote that passage, or do you just want to throw a bunch of websites at me with absolutely no context? Oh, I get it. I'm supposed to make up my own context. Connect those dots which shouldn't be connected. Your investigative skills astound me!
culorut
You can read (I'm not sure of this anymore) but you choose not to and ignore as always. The website is up for every one, don't want to read it?
Your ignorance and problem, not mine.
Lebezniatnikov
quote:
Originally posted by culorut
Do you always ignore that slowly many countries like China, France, England and the USA are moving towards a one world order. Which I might add is about nothing more than control. Never mind the fact that most of you ridiculed the North American Union when it was first brought up and it is now on the very near horizon. Chalk up Canada and Mexico to the list. Amero's anyone?
Global control is upon us, 9/11 and the Iraq (non) WMD's was just a small taste of this control/order (oil in this case). These are the two finest examples to achieving global control using their excuses and your innocent blood. Deny it and I will gladly laugh in your face, it's all laid out for everyone to read.
I do not expect you to see the big picture, other wise you would not be arguing what has been placed right in front of you all along. But to say these things which are occurring right in front of every ones eyes is not occurring is the most ignorant thing of all.
PNAC is a defunct (and disgraced) organization that even its original members disavow.
China is as closed a society to Western influence as any in the world, and certainly would never kowtow to centralized control outside its borders.
You're going to have to do a far sight better than that to convince me of anything.
culorut
I know, I know, you cannot read. I just feel like spoon feeding the children today.
PNAC
According to their own document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses ( .pdf format ) their stated goals would never be realized “absent some catastrophic catalyzing event –like a new Pearl Harbor”.
Established in the spring of 1997 and funded largely by the energy and arms industries, the Project for the New American Century was founded as the neoconservative think tank whose stated goal was to usher in a “new American century”. Having won the cold war and no military threat to speak of, this group of ideologues created a blueprint for the future whose agenda was to capitalize upon our surplus of military forces and funds and forcing American hegemony and corporate privatization throughout the world. In their statement of principles they outline a fourfold agenda:
1) Increase an already enormous military budget at the expense of domestic social programs
2) Toppling of regimes resistant to our corporate interests
3) Forcing democracy at the barrel of a gun in regions that have no history of the democratic process
4) Replacing the UN’s role of preserving and extending international order
George W Bush, whose political career has been nearly fully funded by the energy and defense industries was appointed by the Supreme Court after the disputed election of 2000. Immediately he appointed signatories of PNAC documents to the top levels of the White House and Pentagon.
It has now been proven that once Bush had all of his top levels filled by the PNAC, that our guard against terrorist attacks was let down.
Richard Clarke, whose position as terrorism czar was promoted to a cabinet level position under Clinton, was subsequently demoted from the cabinet and reassigned by Bush to other projects. Dick Cheney himself, has said that Clarke was kept “out of the loop”.
Paul O’Neil, former Secretary of Treasury, has stated that the Bush administration did not treat Al-qaeda as an imminent threat.
The Bush administration ignored and denied the existence of a presidential briefing entitled “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United Sates” until it was revealed to the public. Testifying before the 9-11 commission, Rice referred to this as an "historical document'. We were led to believe that this was the only warning. It has since come out to the public, that she was lying. Lying 52 times over. It has now been learned that Condi didn't disclose that they had, in fact, received 52 warnings in the months leading up to September 11th.
The Bush administration needed a “new Pearl Harbor” to implement the PNAC agenda and they let down their guard until it occurred.
Knowing what we know today, the invasion of Iraq was based on falsehoods and was an unnecessary and dangerous diversion from the effort to reduce terrorist attacks on the United States. Muslim anger at the United States is at an all time high. Iraq posed no threat to us and the process of containment was working. Most importantly, Iraq is in chaos, on the brink of civil war, and now a breeding ground for a hundred new Bin Ladens.
The PNAC members of our government told us that it would be “a cake walk”. That we would be greeted as “liberators”. That we’d see parades in the streets. Terribly undermanned, our military is in the middle of a quagmire where only the best case scenario was planned for.
The museums, the hospitals, the munitions depots, the nuclear facilities were left unprotected at the onset of the invasion. The ministry of oil was securely guarded.
Who has benefited from all of this at the expense of over a thousand US soldiers lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives? The very arms and energy industries that funded the PNAC:
· Halliburton, once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney
· Bechtel, once headed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
· [/B]Trireme[/B], a defense company started by Deputy Secretary of Defense, Richard Perle shortly before the invasion
And finally, one last question:
Where did the first oil tanker to leave Iraq after the invasion go?
Answer: Texas
culorut
quote:
Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
PNAC is a defunct (and disgraced) organization that even its original members disavow.
Yes defunct as every one now sees it for exactly what it was. I do not how ever hear Cheney complaining from the billions he made while being an active member and running Halliburton. This is not to say the newly formed Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is not on the same path. Different name, same bull .
Mission Statement
In 2009 the United States--and its democratic allies--face many foreign policy challenges. They come from rising and resurgent powers, including China and Russia. They come from other autocracies that violate the rights of their citizens. They come from rogue states that work with each other in ways inimical to our interests and principles, and that sponsor terrorism and pursue weapons of mass destruction. They come from Al Qaeda and its affiliates who continue to plot attacks against the United States and our allies. They come from failed states that serve as havens for terrorists and criminals and spread instability to their neighbors.
The United States faces these challenges while engaged in military operations across the globe, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sacrifice of American lives and significant economic expenditure in these conflicts has led to warnings of U.S. strategic overreach, and calls for American retrenchment. There are those who hope we can just return to normalcy--to pre-9/11 levels of defense spending and pre-9/11 tactics. They argue for a retreat from America’s global commitments and a renewed focus on problems at home, an understandable if mistaken response to these difficult economic times.
In fact, strategic overreach is not the problem and retrenchment is not the solution. The United States cannot afford to turn its back on its international commitments and allies--the allies that helped us defeat fascism and communism in the 20th century, and the alliances we have forged more recently, including with the newly liberated citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan. Our economic difficulties will not be solved by retreat from the international arena. They will be made worse.
In this new era, the consequences of failure and the risks of retreat would be even greater than before. The challenges we face require 21st century strategies and tactics based on a renewed commitment to American leadership. The United States remains the world’s indispensable nation -- indispensable to international peace, security, and stability, and indispensable to safe-guarding and advancing the ideals and principles we hold dear.
The Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is a newly formed, non-profit, non-partisan organization intending to qualify as a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code that promotes:
* continued U.S. engagement--diplomatic, economic, and military—in the world and rejection of policies that would lead us down the path to isolationism;
* robust support for America’s democratic allies and opposition to rogue regimes that threaten American interests;
* the human rights of those oppressed by their governments, and U.S. leadership in working to spread political and economic freedom;
* a strong military with the defense budget needed to ensure that America is ready to confront the threats of the 21st century;
* international economic engagement as a key element of U.S. foreign policy in this time of great economic dislocation.
FPI looks forward to working with all who share these objectives, irrespective of political party, so that the United States successfully confronts its challenges and make progress toward a freer and more secure future.
A little more background on PNAC 2.0, oops I mean the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI)
NATIONAL SECURITY Introducing FPI March 31, 2009
Today in Washington D.C., neoconservatives William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor will officially launch their new war incubator -- The Foreign Policy Initiative -- with a half-day conference on "the path to success in Afghanistan" (never mind the fact that Kagan and Kristol declared that "the endgame seems to be in sight in Afghanistan" almost seven years ago). Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Kagan, Carnegie Endowment fellow and Washington Post columnist, have long histories of advocating policies that rely heavily on the United States exerting its influence throughout the world by using military force. Senor, who has stayed relatively under the radar, served as Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman in Iraq under L. Paul Bremer. But as the New Yorker's George Packer noted, Senor "slowly lost his credibility in the daily press briefings he gave...during the first year of the occupation of Baghdad." In its initial focus on the war in Afghanistan, FPI chose heavy representation of Iraq war advocates for its panelists and guest speakers. As the Wonk Room's Matt Duss recently wrote, "a far better title" for FPI's maiden voyage would be "Afghanistan: Dealing With The Huge Problems Created By Many Of The People On This Very Stage."
'PNAC=MISSION ACCOMPLISHED': Kristol and Kagan -- with support from Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld -- co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s with the mission "to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire." Military force was always an option, and often the preferred one. Indeed, the group led the charge to get President Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, and it served as a key lobby for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But with neoconservatism now all but dead and its principles soundly rejected in the 2006 and 2008 elections, the face of PNAC 2.0 -- The Foreign Policy Initiative -- is less bellicose. Indeed, as Duss recently noted, "this new very innocuous sounding Foreign Policy Institute" indicates that neoconservatives "understand that they have something of an image problem," adding that it is "encouraging" that they "have some relation to reality." Yet there is no reason to believe there will be much of an ideological shift from its its predecessor, as its main founders -- especially Kristol -- are still deeply wedded to neoconservatism. Indeed, Michael Goldfarb, PNAC alum and editor of The Weekly Standard, wrote on Twitter yesterday: "PNAC=Mission Accomplished; New mission begins tomorrow morning with the launch of FPI."
ALREADY AT ODDS: Senor told Foreign Policy magazine last week that part of the group's mission is to build "consensus" on major international issues that challenge the current thinking of those who currently hold power in the U.S. government. "We think there needs to be consensus on the other side of these issues," he said. Yet even before the organization's first event, it appears that FPI is having trouble building that "consensus." Kristol called President Obama's recent "historic" message to Iran "an embarrassment" and a "message of weakness," claiming Obama has "no sense of urgency about Iran's nuclear program" and is "kowtowing" to its leaders. However, it appears that Kagan did not get Senor's "consensus" memo. Days later, commenting on Obama's message, Kagan offered a relatively more sensible view. "[T]here is logic to the administration's approach. After all, if the White House is going to give diplomacy and engagement a chance, it might as well do so thoroughly and aggressively," he wrote in the Washington Post. "I honestly can't see the harm in the Obama administration's efforts. I hope they succeed," he said.
EXPECT NO ACCOUNTABILITY: Despite the fact that the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq has been regarded as one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history, expect no remorse from the PNAC/FPI crowd. In fact, Kristol has been declaring victory in Iraq at every step of the way, from saying in April 2003 that the "battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably," to claiming last December, "We've won the war" in Iraq. Just last week, a caller on C-SPAN's Washington Journal asked Kristol if he would apologize for hyping the threat from Saddam Hussein before the war, given that no WMD existed and "the fact that there are 4,500 American lives lost there." "No. I think the war was right, and I think we've succeeded in the war," Kristol replied. While Senor thinks the war has been a huge defeat for Iran (it hasn't), Packer noted that Kagan has "written many words about the war, but has never been able to acknowledge his own intellectual failures on Iraq." Despite the failures of neoconservatism, FPI's mission statement contains the neo-neocon buzz words: military engagement in the world, "rogue regimes," "rogue states," "spread...freedom," "strong military" (with a "defense budget" to back it up), "fascism," "communism," and "pre-9/11 tactics." Discussing FPI with Duss last week, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow asked, "Why is it that people who are catastrophically wrong about big important things like foreign policy and war never, like, flunk out of that as a subject? "There seems to be this special dispensation in American foreign policy that, as long as you are wrong on the side of more military force, then all is forgiven," Duss replied. He added that "the way it works in Washington, if you're arguing for more military intervention which necessitates more military expenditures, you're always going to find someone to fund your think-tank."
yukii
quote:
Originally posted by culorut
You can read (I'm not sure of this anymore) but you choose not to and ignore as always. The website is up for every one, don't want to read it?
Your ignorance and problem, not mine.
Nobody has time to read all the you post in which 99% of it has nothing to do with whatever you'r trying to say. A little bit of advice...when someone asks you to provide some proof, don't just throw out websites and expect us to do your research for you. K?
culorut
Apparently we have a new non-reader who has just joined the forum. Welcome and if you can read (properly) it only takes a few minutes of your time.
If you choose not to then don't complain about it.
culorut
Eisenhower Warns Us of the Military Industrial Complex
Shakka
quote:
Originally posted by culorut
I know, I know, you cannot read. I just feel like spoon feeding the children today.
Yeah, except children will eat bull if you feed it to them while rational adults will choose to separate the from shinola and not live in some fantasy alternative universe.
Krypton
quote:
Originally posted by culorut
Apparently we have a new non-reader who has just joined the forum. Welcome and if you can read (properly) it only takes a few minutes of your time.
If you choose not to then don't complain about it.
(The Nation) This column was written by Christopher Hayes
According to a July poll conducted by Scripps News Service, one-third of Americans think the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or intentionally allowed them to happen in order to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East. This is at once alarming and unsurprising. Alarming, because if tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was complicit in the murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens, they seem remarkably sanguine about this fact. By and large, life continues as before, even though tens of millions of people apparently believe they are being governed by mass murderers. Unsurprising, because the government these Americans suspect of complicity in 9/11 has acquired a justified reputation for deception: weapons of mass destruction, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping. What else are they hiding?
This pattern of deception has not only fed diffuse public cynicism but has provided an opening for alternate theories of 9/11 to flourish. As these theories — propounded by the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement — seep toward the edges of the mainstream, they have raised the specter of the return (if it ever left) of what Richard Hofstadter famously described as "the paranoid style in American politics." But the real danger posed by the Truth Movement isn't paranoia. Rather, the danger is that it will discredit and deform the salutary skepticism Americans increasingly show toward their leaders.
The Truth Movement's recent growth can be largely attributed to the Internet-distributed documentary "Loose Change." A low-budget film produced by two 20-somethings that purports to debunk the official story of 9/11, it's been viewed over the Internet millions of times. Complementing "Loose Change" are the more highbrow offerings of a handful of writers and scholars, many of whom are associated with Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Two of these academics, retired theologian David Ray Griffin and retired Brigham Young University physics professor Steven Jones, have written books and articles that serve as the movement's canon. Videos of their lectures circulate among the burgeoning portions of the Internet devoted to the cause of the "truthers." A variety of groups have chapters across the country and organize conferences that draw hundreds. In the last election cycle, the website www.911truth.org even produced a questionnaire with pointed inquiries for candidates, just like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the Sierra Club. The Truth Movement's relationship to the truth may be tenuous, but that it is a movement is no longer in doubt.
Truth activists often maintain they are simply "raising questions," and as such tend to focus with dogged persistence on physical minutiae: the lampposts near the Pentagon that should have been knocked down by Flight 77, the altitude in Pennsylvania at which cellphones on Flight 93 should have stopped working, the temperature at which jet fuel burns and at which steel melts. They then use these perceived inconsistencies to argue that the central events of 9/11 — the plane hitting the Pentagon, the towers collapsing — were not what they appeared to be. So: The eyewitness accounts of those who heard explosions in the World Trade Center, combined with the facts that jet fuel burns at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit and steel melts at 2,500, shows that the towers were brought down by controlled explosions from inside the buildings, not by the planes crashing into them.
If the official story is wrong, then what did happen? As you might expect, there's quite a bit of dissension on this point. Like any movement, the Truth Movement is beset by internecine fights between different factions: those who subscribe to what are termed LIHOP theories (that the government "let it happen on purpose") and the more radical MIHOP ("made it happen on purpose") contingent. Even within these groups, there are divisions: Some believe the WTC was detonated with explosives after the planes hit and some don't even think there were any planes.
To the extent that there is a unified theory of the nature of the conspiracy, it is based, in part, on the precedent of the Reichstag fire in Germany in the 1930s. The idea is that just as the Nazis staged a fire in the Reichstag in order to frighten the populace and consolidate power, the Bush Administration, military contractors, oil barons and the CIA staged 9/11 so as to provide cause and latitude to pursue its imperial ambitions unfettered by dissent and criticism. But the example of the Reichstag fire itself is instructive. While during and after the war many observers, including officials of the U.S. government, suspected the fire was a Nazi plot, the consensus among historians is that it was, in fact, the product of a lone zealous anarchist. That fact changes little about the Nazi regime, or its use of the fire for its own ends. It's true the Nazis were the chief beneficiaries of the fire, but that doesn't mean they started it, and the same goes for the Bush Administration and 9/11.
The Reichstag example also holds a lesson for those who would dismiss the very notion of a conspiracy as necessarily absurd. It was perfectly reasonable to suspect the Nazis of setting the fire, so long as the evidence suggested that might have been the case. The problem isn't with conspiracy theories as such; the problem is continuing to assert the existence of a conspiracy even after the evidence shows it to be virtually impossible.
In March 2005 Popular Mechanics assembled a team of engineers, physicists, flight experts and the like to critically examine some of the Truth Movement's most common claims. They found them almost entirely without merit. To pick just one example, steel might not melt at 1,500 degrees, the temperature at which jet fuel burns, but it does begin to lose a lot of its strength, enough to cause the support beams to fail.
And yet no amount of debunking seems to work. The Internet empowers people with esoteric interests to spend all kinds of time pursuing their hobbies, and if the Truth Movement was the political equivalent of Lord of the Rings fan fiction or furries, there wouldn't be much reason to pay attention. But the public opinion trend lines are moving in the truthers' direction, even after the official 9/11 Commission report was supposed to settle the matter once and for all.
Of course, the ommission report was something of a whitewash — Bush would only be interviewed in the presence of Dick Cheney, the commission was denied access to other key witnesses, and just this year we learned of a meeting convened by George Tenet the summer before the attacks to warn Condoleezza Rice about al Qaeda's plotting, a meeting that was nowhere mentioned in the report.
So it's hard to blame people for thinking we're not getting the whole story. For six years, the government has prevaricated and the press has largely failed to point out this simple truth. Critics like The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann might lament the resurgence of the "paranoid style," but the seeds of paranoia have taken root partly because of the complete lack of appropriate skepticism by the establishment press, a complementary impulse to the paranoid style that might be called the "credulous style."
In the credulous style all political actors are acting with good intentions and in good faith. Mistakes are made, but never because of ulterior motives or undue influence from the various locii of corporate power. When people in power advocate strenuously for a position it is because they believe in it. When their advocacy leads to policies that create misery, it is due not to any evil intentions or greed or corruption, but rather simple human error. Ahmad Chalabi summed up this worldview perfectly. Faced with the utter absence of the WMD he and his cohorts had long touted in Iraq, he replied, "We are heroes in error."
For a long time the credulous style has dominated the establishment, but its hold intensified after 9/11. When the government speaks, particularly about the Enemy, it must be presumed to be telling the truth. From the reporting about Iraq's alleged WMD to the current spate of stories about how "dangerous" Iran is, time and again the press has reacted to official pronouncements about threats with a near total absence of skepticism. Each time the government announces the indictment of domestic terrorists allegedly plotting our demise, the press devotes itself to the story with obsessive relish, only to later note, on page A22 or in a casual aside, that the whole thing was bunk.
In August 2003, to cite just one example, the New York dailies breathlessly reported what one U.S. official called an "incredible triumph in the war against terrorism," the arrest of Hemant Lakhani, a supposed terrorist mastermind caught red-handed attempting to acquire a surface-to-air missile. Only later did the government admit that the "plot" consisted of an FBI informant begging Lakhani to find him a missile, while a Russian intelligence officer called up Lakhani and offered to sell him one.
Yet after nearly a dozen such instances, the establishment media continue to earnestly report each new alleged threat or indictment, secure in the belief that their proximity to policy-makers gets it closer to the truth. But proximity can obscure more than clarify. It's hard to imagine that the guy sitting next to you at the White House correspondents' dinner is plotting to, say, send the country into a disastrous and illegal war, or is spying on Americans in blatant defiance of federal statutes. Bob Woodward, the journalist with the most access to the Bush Administration, was just about the last one to realize that the White House is disingenuous and cynical, that it has manipulated the machinery of state for its narrow political ends.
Meanwhile, those who realized this was the White House's MO from the beginning have been labeled conspiracy theorists. During the 2004 campaign Howard Dean made the charge that the White House was manipulating the terror threat level and recycling old intelligence. The Bush campaign responded by dismissing Dean as a "bizarre conspiracy theorist." A year later, after Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge retired, he admitted that Dean's charge was, indeed, the truth. The same accusation of conspiracy-mongering was routinely leveled at anyone who suggested that the war in Iraq was and is motivated by a desire for the United States to control the world's second-largest oil reserves.
For the Administration, "conspiracy" is a tremendously useful term, and can be applied even in the most seemingly bizarre conditions to declare an inquiry or criticism out of bounds. Responding to a question from NBC's Brian Williams as to whether he ever discusses official business with his father, Bush said such a suggestion was a "kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant." The credulous style can brook no acknowledgment of unarticulated motives to our political actors, or consultations to which the public is not privy.
The public has been presented with two worldviews, one credulous, one paranoid, and both unsatisfactory. The more the former breaks apart, the greater the appeal of the latter. Conspiracy theories that claim to explain 9/11 are wrongheaded and a terrible waste of time, but the skeptical instinct is, on balance, salutary. It is right to suspect that the operations of government, the power elite and the military-industrial complex are often not what they seem; and proper to raise questions when the answers provided have been unconvincing. Given the untruths to which American citizens have been subjected these past six years, is it any surprise that a majority of them think the government's lying about what happened before and on 9/11?
Still, the persistent appeal of paranoid theories reflects a cynicism that the credulous media have failed to address, because they posit a world of good intentions and face-value pronouncements, one in which the suggestion that a government would mislead or abuse its citizens for its own gains or the gains of its benefactors is on its face absurd. The danger is that the more this government's cynicism and deception are laid bare, the more people — on the left in particular and among the public in general — will be drawn down the rabbit hole of delusion of the 9/11 Truth Movement.
To avoid such a fate, the public must come to trust that the gatekeepers of public discourse share their skepticism about the agenda its government is pursuing. The antidote, ultimately, to the Truth Movement is a press that refuses to allow the government to continue to lie.
