Petraeus: Murdoch wanted to bankroll campaign

David Petraeus claimed Rupert Murdoch wanted to bankroll his presidential campaign
Jon Swaine, Washington
04 Dec 2012
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9722256/David-Petraeus-claimed-Rupert-Murdoch-wanted-to-bankroll-his-presidential-campaign.html

David Petraeus was urged to run for the US presidency by one of Rupert Murdoch's American lieutenants and told that the media tycoon would bankroll his campaign, it has emerged.

The former CIA director, who resigned last month after having an extramarital affair with his biographer, declined in order to protect his personal life. "My wife would divorce me," he said. "And I love my wife".

Mr Petraeus learned while commanding US forces in Afghanistan last year that Roger Ailes, the chairman of Mr Murdoch's Fox television network, wanted him to challenge President Barack Obama.

Mr Ailes, a key Republican powerbroker who worked for Richard Nixon, told Mr Petraeus that he should reject the job of CIA director – from which he resigned last month – and campaign for the White House.

"I thought the Republican field needed to be shaken up and Petraeus might be a good candidate," Mr Ailes told Bob Woodward, the veteran Washington Post reporter, who disclosed news of the talks.

Mr Ailes passed his message to Mr Petraeus through an emissary sent to interview him in Kabul 18 months ago for Fox News, Mr Murdoch's American news channel, which is beloved by US conservatives.

"I've got something to say to you directly from Roger Ailes," Kathleen McFarland, a national security analyst for the channel, told Mr Petraeus.

"He loves you and everyone at Fox loves you.

"He says that if you're offered chairman [of the joint chiefs of staff], take it," Ms McFarland continued. "But if you're offered anything else, don't take it, resign in six months and run for president".

Mr Petraeus was at the time the subject of fevered speculation among Republicans, who believed that he could return to the US as a respected war hero able to defeat Mr Obama in last month's election. The President's decision to make him CIA director was seen by some analysts as an attempt to sideline a potential political rival.

In their discussion, Ms McFarland added that Mr Ailes could resign from his role as Fox News chief to run a Petraeus 2012 presidential campaign. "Tell him if I ever ran," Mr Petraeus said, laughing, "but I won't, but if I ever ran, I'd take him up on his offer," adding: "He said he would quit Fox and bankroll it."

Challenged over whether Mr Ailes, who is paid about $20 million (£12 million) a year, would be wealthy enough to fund the campaign, Mr Petraeus said: "Maybe I'm confusing that with Rupert," adding: "Rupert's after me as well." Spokesmen for Mr Murdoch declined to comment.

Declaring "I love Roger, he's a brilliant guy", Mr Petraeus politely demurred and said he needed to focus on his home life after stepping down from commanding troops at war.

"It's never going to happen," he said. "My wife would divorce me. And I love my wife".

Referring to his home in Virginia, he added: "We have a beautiful house with his-and-hers bathrooms, believe it or not. I just want to live in it. I've never spent a night in it".

Mr and Mrs Petraeus, who have been married for 37 years, have retreated to their home to repair their relationship after he admitted having an affair with Paula Broadwell, who wrote his biography. The affair did not begin until some time after his comments to Ms McFarland.

Mr Petraeus resigned after it emerged the FBI was investigating the affair as part of an inquiry sparked by a complaint about threatening emails allegedly sent to a female friend of Mr Petraeus by Mrs Broadwell.

Was Petraeus Borked?

Peter Maass
ProPublica, Nov. 14, 2012
http://www.propublica.org/article/was-petraeus-borked

In 1987, when Judge Robert Bork was enmeshed in a partisan struggle over his Supreme Court nomination, a reporter for an alternative weekly in Washington, D.C., got a tip that the judge was a patron of a local video store. Michael Dolan went to Potomac Video, in the western corner of the capital, and asked the assistant manager for a list of videos the judge had checked out. "Cool," the assistant manager said. "I'll look."

Dolan's subsequent story, published in the Washington City Paper, caused a sensation, though not because of the judge's taste in videos, which, it turned out, was unremarkable. There were 146 rentals in less than two years, including lots of Hitchcock and Bond, as well as movies featuring Meryl Streep and Bette Midler. As Dolan wrote, "Despite what all you pervs were hoping, there's not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R."

After a bitter fight, the Senate rejected Bork's nomination. One thing everyone agreed on, however, was that Bork's privacy had been invaded. In 1988, Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, making it illegal to release video lists without a customer's consent to anyone but law enforcement, and then only with an appropriate warrant. It is reasonable to note that the unusually rapid congressional action was perhaps aimed at protecting the privacy of Legislator X as much as Citizen Y. If a reporter could easily get the judge's video list, a senator's list would not be much harder to get, and would probably be a lot more lively.

Will the scandal surrounding David Petraeus, General John Allen, Paula Broadwell, Jill Kelley, and a shirtless F.B.I. agent turn into the same sort of eureka moment that Congress experienced when Bork was, as the saying now goes, "borked"? Although the lustful portion of the Petraeus scandal is hardly disappearing — who else will be drawn into it, and when will we read the emails? — attention is turning toward the apparent ease with which the F.B.I. accessed the electronic communication of Petraeus, Broadwell, Kelley, and Allen. The exact circumstances of how the F.B.I. got its hands on all this material remains to be revealed — for instance, whether search warrants were obtained for everything — but the bottom line appears to be that the F.B.I. accessed a vast array of private information and seriously harmed the careers of at least Petraeus and Broadwell without, as of yet, filing a criminal complaint against anybody. As the law professor and privacy expert James Grimmelmann tweeted the other day, "The scandal isn't what's illegal; the scandal is what's legal (or what the FBI thinks is legal)."

In recent years, a handful of privacy activists — led by the A.C.L.U., the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Center for Democracy & Technology — have filed lawsuits and requested official documents in an effort to reveal and challenge the government's vast surveillance powers. For the most part, they have not succeeded in changing things; the Petraeus scandal appears to show just how much surveillance the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies can conduct without a judge or a company telling them "no, you can't have that."

For instance, in its semiannual transparency report, Google announced this week that it receives more requests for user data from the U.S. government than any other government in the world, and that those requests rose 26 percent in the latest six-month reporting period, to nearly 8,000; the company said that it complied with 90 percent of the requests, either fully or partially. As Chris Soghoian, the A.C.L.U.'s principal technologist and senior policy analyst, wrote this week:

"The guest lists from hotels, IP [computer] login records, as well as the creative request to email providers for 'information about other accounts that have logged in from this IP address' are all forms of data that the government can obtain with a subpoena. There is no independent review, no check against abuse, and further, the target of the subpoena will often never learn that the government obtained data."

It's not just email. In July, Rep. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, cajoled major cellphone carriers into disclosing the number of requests for data that they receive from federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies: In 2011, there were more than 1.3 million requests. As ProPublica reported at the time, "Police obtain court orders for basic subscriber information so frequently that some mobile phone companies have established websites — here's one — with forms that police can fill out in minutes. The Obama Administration's Department of Justice has said mobile phone users have 'no reasonable expectation of privacy.'"

There's a particularly cruel irony in all of this: If you contact your cell-phone carrier or Internet service provider or a data broker and ask to be provided with the information on you that they provide to the government and other companies, most of them will refuse or make you jump through Defcon levels of hops, skips, and clicks. Uncle Sam or Experian can easily access data that shows where you have been, whom you have called, what you have written, and what you have bought — but you do not have the same privileges.

The surveillance, which is being challenged in a number of suits, is conducted through an alphabet soup of laws, regulations, and loopholes, including the Wiretap Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (which extended the Wiretap Act to email, and added the Stored Communications Act for stored email), the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Patriot Act (which amended all the others). One of the remedies that's before Congress is a bill introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, to require that in most cases law-enforcement agents must obtain a search warrant from a judge before getting customer emails from an Internet company. It would also provide more guarantees that citizens be notified that their email is being surveilled. It's only a partial fix, of course; for instance, it does nothing about cell-phone surveillance.

Everyone has an opinion on what should be done, and one of the country's most famous judges is of two minds on the subject. "It seems to me we often hamper enforcement agencies so that they can't do their job, and when we aren't doing that we are cutting them loose so they can abuse their power," said Judge Bork, reached by phone at his home in northern Virginia. "Is there too much intrusion into private lives? I can't answer that very well, because sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't."

Until now, Congress has not stood in the way of the expanding surveillance, mainly because it was justified as part of the effort to prevent another 9/11. But the Petraeus case shows that among the people who have the most to lose from unchecked surveillance are the people who thought they would benefit from it—government elites who allocate the funding and make the laws and operate the bureaucracy of surveillance. Perhaps they will start worrying a bit more about becoming the next Petraeus or Bork. Our legislators, who are not all angels, now have real skin in the game, so to speak.

Sexual privacy under threat in a surveillance society

Naomi Wolf
Mon November 19, 2012
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/19/opinion/wolf-marriage-infidelity

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Naomi Wolf: We live in an increasingly intrusive surveillance society
Wolf says for her, Petraeus story is about terrifying power of Patriot and Espionage acts
She says loss of sexual privacy would be destructive to the human condition
Wolf: We should not rush to judge marriages and those who commit infidelity

Editor's note: Naomi Wolf is the author of "Vagina: A New Biography."

Once again we see the scenario unfold: A powerful man, with tremendous responsibilities, apparently "caught" in a compromising sexual situation with a woman who is not his wife.

There is the now-familiar ritual of the threats of embarrassing revelations of intimate conversations, the hunted-down "other woman" who either decides to tell more or not, the nationwide harrumphing and moralizing, and the schadenfreude-stoking musings over the humiliations of the loyal wife. And of course, there is the spectacle of another career -- in David Petraeus' case, one that distinguished him in his service to our country -- in tatters.

But while the media tell a familiar narrative of misjudgment and temptation, to me this story is about the terrifying power of the Patriot Act, married to the terrifying power of the resurrected Espionage Act -- and combined with a lethal admixture of our nation's Puritanism, prurience about and ignorance regarding sexuality.

What happened to Petraeus -- and the recent slew of other powerful men or men threatening to some power blocs, from Eliot Spitzer to Bill Clinton? They were surveilled by political elites in an increasingly intrusive surveillance society, and exposed.

We should understand that the surveillance that keeps tripping up these powerful men is not something about which only heads of state, whistle-blower publishers or generals have to worry. It also includes others in which the allegations of what initiated their downfall are more complex and serious, such as Nicolas Sarkozy and Julian Assange.

Because of the Patriot Act, any of us, if we annoy or threaten powerful interests, can have our e-mails read without our knowledge. Any of us can be subject to a search that could lead from one e-mail correspondent to another until the National Security Agency or the FBI, which have both confirmed that they have invested heavily in domestic surveillance of social networks, find something -- anything -- that could be seen as compromising.

At that point, any of us can be subjected to terrible pressure -- even legal threats -- if what is uncovered can be in any way described as "classified information."

Media's Petraeus frenzy

We live at a time in which our government is vastly over-classifying subjects in the name of public interest or that might embarrass the state. Heaven forbid if anyone provides "material support" for the enemy, which is so vague a term that President Barack Obama's own lawyers confirmed to Judge Katherine Forrest, in my presence during the New York hearing on the National Defense Authorization Act this past spring, that it can be used to include basic journalism about, for instance, the Taliban, or other information the government simply does not wish exposed.

Any of us can be threatened with possessing classified information. This is why Bradley Manning has spent months in solitary confinement in prison.

We can be threatened with the Espionage Act. This is why Assange is hiding in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. If Assange were convicted of receiving classified information, and extradited under the Espionage Act, he could theoretically be shipped to Guantanamo -- for which some congressional voices have called. But that precedent casts a shadow over everyone who might have ever heard about or discussed classified information -- something that is routine in Washington.

There are still many unknowns to the Petraeus story. Maybe it really is just about the CIA and the FBI being very, very worried about Petraeus sleeping with his biographer. But we don't need to buy into this theater. If there is a national security breach -- which would be a real issue if one took place -- that can be investigated and addressed without spectacle or bullying.

In working with these two appalling laws, we need to understand what loss of privacy means: Any of us can be brought down, intimidated, silenced, threatened, by exposure of our personal lives, for any reason.

We all have secrets we do not wish made public. Any of us can be threatened with exposure of infidelity, or sex addiction, or flirtatious communications, or addiction to embarrassing pornographic images, or alcoholism or bipolar disorder, or even our discussions with our doctors, psychiatrists or accountants -- about our most personal information.

It is hard to imagine fully what the loss of sexual privacy means to private life -- and to the human condition.

In the film "The Lives of Others," set in East Germany before the Berlin Wall came down, the state listened in on lovers doing what lovers do: quarrelling, engaging in highly intimate acts of desire and passion, and sometimes, yes, betraying their spouses. But what is clear from the depiction is that whatever private pain such betrayal as infidelity causes, the general pain and the deadening quality for everyone, of living in a society in which there is no privacy -- and no sexual privacy -- is far, far more destructive and more distorting of the human condition.

Sexual privacy is absolutely necessary for human beings to have basic dignity, and that includes the space to make mistakes or do things one may regret. A third of couples, husbands and wives, report that they have committed infidelity. What if all of those marriages were subject to surveillance and exposure?

What if the power regarding who tells you that your spouse has betrayed you, becomes not a private struggle in private life, but a matter for the state to decide? And how many people in marriages that might have survived an infidelity, might have their lives and relationships further shattered by the state, as it can do now, from knowing the details of every single e-mail or credit card record or gift?

Finally, add to this toxic mess American Puritanism and prurience. It is easy to look at what seems to be a man, a mistress and a furious wife, and to assume that one knows all about what has gone on.

But often such situations are complex. Women commit adultery as often as men do, though the media are full of stories asking: Why do men cheat? Indeed, women initiate divorce more often than men do. Female unhappiness in intimate relationships is rife in America, because of some basic misunderstandings of female desire that I have detailed in my new book.

It is not our place to judge and condemn, or to cast the first stone. A new understanding of the dangers of the Patriot and Espionage acts should show us why it is more important than ever for couples to be permitted to experience the pain and betrayal of a possible infidelity in private, without the power of the state breathing down the necks of all involved.

Of course, there is no way ever to justify an infidelity -- betrayal is always wrong. One cannot know from the outside what kind of sexual or emotional loneliness may have been part of any given marriage, what kinds of demons any one of us might struggle with.

Understanding the toxic sexual culture in which American marriages try to thrive should lead us, at least, to see such breakdowns without snap judgments. And understanding the role of a surveillance society in the state's choosing which adulterers to go after should give us pause about joining into to any theatrics of public condemnation.

Unless there was a serious state security issue in relation to this infidelity, what happened between Petraeus and Paula Broadwell should be, personally speaking, the equivalent of classified information: in other words, absolutely none of our business.

Done in by the PATRIOT Act

The Grand Irony of the Petraeus Sex Scandal
Dave Lindorff
Mon, 11/12/2012
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1424

There is a delicious irony to the story of the crash-and-burn career of Four-Star General and later (at least briefly) CIA Director David Petraeus.

The man who was elevated to the ethereal ranks of a General Eisenhower or Robert E. Lee by swooning corporate myth makers like the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin, the Washington Post’s David Iglesias, and the NY Times’ Michael Gordon, was never really that brilliant. It wasn’t his “surge” after all that quieted things down (temporarily) in Iraq; rather it was a deal to pay off the insurgents with cash to stand down until the US could gracefully pull out without the departing troops having to be shoot their way down to Kuwait in full retreat. As for his allegedly “brilliant” counterinsurgency policy of “winning hearts and minds,” we have already seen how well that has worked in Iraq, which is now basically a client state of Iran, and the writing is already on the wall in Afghanistan, where the US is almost universally loathed, with US forces spending most of their time looking out for Afghan soldiers who might turn their guns on their supposed ally and “mentor” American troops.

For a real measure of Gen. Petraeus, go to Admiral William Fallon -- that rare military leader who had the guts to tell President Bush and Cheney he would not allow an attack on Iran “on his watch,” thereby quite possibly saving us all from being at war with Iran years ago. Fallon, who at the time in 2007 was head of Centcom, the military command region covering the entire Middle East, once reportedly called, Petraeus, who was being put in charge of the Iraq theater, an “ass-licking little chicken-shit” -- to his face.

Anyhow, what makes the epic collapse of this consummate political general’s career so exquisite is that it was the post-9-11 spying capabilities of the FBI that allowed its agents to slip unannounced into the email of the General’s paramour, Paula Broadwell (a name that could have been selected by Ian Fleming!), and possibly into the general’s own email too, there to find the evidence, allegedly in the form of X-rated letters, of a covert adulterous relationship underway.

We now know that the FBI was alerted to this breach of decorum (if the illicit romance began while Petraeus was on active duty in Afghanistan, he could be prosecuted under the same rules that have led to the prosecution of many lower ranking offers: bringing ill-repute upon the military) and lack of judgement on the part of the head of the nation’s spooks, by a second woman, Jill Kelley, who was a volunteer military liaison and family friend of the Petraeus clan. Kelley’s closeness to Petraeus allegedly caused the jealous Broadwell to allegedly send threatening emails to her imagined rival, including one that told her to “stay away from my guy!”

It seems likely Kelley, in asking the FBI to put a halt to the threatening emails, would have been quick to point out that Broadwell was having an affair with Petraeus. In any event, once the FBI successfully go the telecom company she was using to allow them into Broadwell’s email, that would have been clear, and it would have been easy work to move on to the general’s own cache of love letters (in which he may have been referred to by Broadwell by what she told The Daily Show's John Stewart was his childhood nickname: "Peaches").

The CIA chief was thus done in by the Patriot Act and other assorted violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, all backed by Gen. Petraeus and his political promoters in Congress and the White House, as well as in the corporate media.

Of course, while we can enjoy this payback, and speculate on how it must be giving the shivers to many a philandering White House staffer and member of Congress, it should also be a warning to us all that the FBI, the CIA, and the myriad other intelligence agencies littering the US landscape, these days have virtually limitless ability to monitor our every email message, tweet and phone call.

Maybe we should invite the now humbled Petreaeus to become the poster child for a renewed battle to restore the Bill of Rights.

General Petraeus: “The Spy Who Loved Him”

Jon Rappoport

It's absurd to think the FBI just found out about CIA Director Petraeus' affair with Paula Broadwell, his biographer. The timing is too convenient.

The FBI knew about the affair some time ago and, under strict orders, kept their mouths shut until just after Election Day. If they hadn't, the scandal would have blown up during Obama's campaign run.

During the period the FBI knew about Petraeus' affair, they also knew he was completely vulnerable to blackmail. In FBI and CIA circles, to have done nothing about it is considered treasonous. Putting a gag on these FBI people had to been done by the White House.

The latest word is that Petraeus will not testify before Congress about what really happened in Benghazi. He "may be called" on the carpet at a future time, which could mean never.

His absence will help conceal details of the Chris Stevens murder and the build-up of US-sponsored terrorists in the Benghazi sector of Libya.

In fact, Petraeus' initial statements to Congress, behind closed doors on September 14, led legislators to believe that absurd film trailer was the cause of the "uprising" at the house where Stevens was attacked and killed. Was the General's ridiculous declaration made under orders from the White House, who had the blackmail goods on him?

Then, finally, on October 26th, Petraeus, perhaps fed up at how he was being used by the White House to provide cover for the president, stated: "No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need [in Bengazi]. Claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate."

In this whole scenario, we would be looking at a potential case of double blackmail. First by the White House, who knew of the affair sometime ago, and second, by whoever might have wrung CIA and military secrets out of Petraeus because they knew about his affair with Broadwell.

What does that make Paula Broadwell. In intelligence parlance, she would be a classic "honey trap."

By circumstance, by accident, or on purpose?

She has a long military background. A graduate of West Point, she directed counter-terrorism studies at Tufts University. She worked with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. She is no innocent.

She very well knew that, during the time of their extended affair, Petraeus was vulnerable to any number of blackmail vectors. This did not make her waver.

She knew this wasn't just some fling with a lieutenant colonel or even a run-of-the-mill general. Petraeus was head of all forces in the Afghanistan war. Then he was CIA director.

There are a lot of ways to write a biography that don't involve sleeping with the subject and opening him up to blackmail at a very high level.

People from both sides of the aisle in Washington are expressing deep sorrow that an American hero had to resign. What nonsense. They're building cover for Petraeus. They're intentionally avoiding the question of what compromises he may have agreed to during his peak military service and intelligence directorship.

In Afghanistan, Petraeus was Obama's choice to replace Stanley McChrystal, the general who blew his career during a Rolling Stone interview in which his men took pot shots at the president.

It is quite fair to ask whether Petraeus served as Obama's man in Afghanistan under the unspoken but implied threat that, if there were any kerfuffles, any deviations, any criticisms of the White House Afghan policy, Petraeus' affair would become public knowledge.

Despite claims by a friend that the affair with Broadwell began after Petraeus assumed leadership of the CIA, there is a strong possibility it started earlier, when Broadwell was "embedded" with the general in Afghanistan.

Was Paula Broadwell covertly working for the White House during her affair with Petraeus? Was she working for somebody else? Did she start out as an agent? Was she drawn into becoming one because she, too, as a married woman, was open to blackmail?

The public and the mainstream press, playing the part of "oh isn't this too bad but of course nothing really serious or weird or compromising could have happened here," doesn't want to know how the spy game is actually played. They'd rather watch Jeopardy and pop Zoloft.

"Two people, both married, couldn't resist a great passion. It happens. All of us make mistakes. We understand. Even great men can succumb. And she was obviously smitten. What a shame."

Yeah. Sure.

Petraeus, the man, is now a legitimate target for serious questions. If he entered into the affair, knowing full well the blackmail it opened him up to, what is he all about? Where have his loyalties resided?

Some starry-eyed people will think asking about this is "impolite," because, after all, "the man is an American hero." Nonsense.

Then we have questions about Petraeus' potential political career. The press went after him with all sorts of questions about what he might do in the 2012 election. The idea was out there. Could he run for president against Obama? Could he become the next Eisenhower?

If he had decided to make the move, he would have had a formidable number of supporters. But he adamantly said no. Was this a genuine expression of disinterest, or was Petraeus already compromised and under the thumb of the White House?

"All right, David, you're gone from Afghanistan now. You've retired from the Army. The hero returns. Don't get any ideas about running for president. You know what we know about you. By the way, the director of Central Intelligence is open. How would you like that job?"

"Oh no," people say. "This kind of thing would never happen."

Really? What kind of world do you think Washington is? The Peace Corp with martini lunches? The Unitarian Church with occasional brandies and cigars?

Remember Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's famous remark when she was asked about the devastation the US was wreaking in Iraq through its economic sanctions?

May 12, 1996, 60 Minutes. Lesley Stahl says: "We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price---we think the price is worth it."

Now that's the real world of Washington, once the PR people get out of the way.

Blackmail of a famous general, a director of the CIA? That's nothing.

A famous general falling under the power of blackmail? A general who knows some of the deep dark secrets about Dope Inc., the trillion-dollar opium growing operation in Afghanistan, a general whose troops have helped to restore the planting of the poppies there? A general who knows about the longed-for oil pipeline running through Afghanistan and the various persons whom it will benefit?

Could Petraeus have been a target for all manner of blackmail mounted by numerous parties?

Is the Pope Catholic?

The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com.

Most Apt-Named Book of the Month

All In, by Paula Broadwell

Probability of Large-Scale False Flag Terror Event Increasing

Probability of Large-Scale False Flag Terror Event Increasing As European Banking Panic Looms
Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
TARPLEY.net
September 9, 2011
http://tarpley.net/2011/09/09/probability-of-false-flag-terror-event-increasing

Washington DC, Sept. 9, 2011 – Late yesterday, Obama administration officials speaking off the record told reporters that they had a “credible but unconfirmed” threat warning for a terror attack around the time of the 9/11 anniversary is coming Sunday.

This announcement caps a week in which numerous veterans of the original 9/11 false flag terror attack and cover-up have been prodigal with their media warnings that a repetition of the bloody tragedy of 10 years ago is simply a question of time. These figures have included former New York Mayor Giuliani, 9/11 commission chairs Hamilton and Kean, and many others.

Based on the current intelligence constellation, a large-scale false flag terror attack over the coming weeks and months is now increasing in probability. This is because such a terror attack, plus the wars it could unleash and the martial law which it might be used to impose in Europe and North America, would facilitate measures which the ruling finance oligarchs of these nations judge to be essential for their short-term survival. The false flag attack could be blamed on Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, the Palestinians, or a range of others.

Once again, the initiative may be passing into the hands of that rogue network, invisible government, secret government, parallel government, deep state, or special forces underground which exists at the point where Wall Street and City of London financial bosses intersect with the dominant personalities – active-duty and retired – of the Anglo-American secret intelligence establishment.

Imminent Banking Panic Means New and Bigger Bailouts Imposed by Martial Law

The leading factor compelling the Anglo-American power elite into a new false flag terror adventure is the now rapidly worsening breakdown crisis of the European and US banking systems. Almost 2 years of Anglo-American financial warfare against the euro, generally taking the form of credit default swap (CDS) assaults on European government bonds, have now created an extraordinarily serious crisis. There is presently a list of at least one dozen large European banks, each of whom is a candidate to play the role of Lehman Brothers in the blowup which can now be expected for some time over the next two months. This includes the top British banks. This crisis is almost exclusively the handiwork of the City of London and Wall Street, and they have created it in order to relieve pressure on the dollar, and to neutralize the threat to the future role of the dollar as the world reserve currency. Over the past few days, Anglo-American commentators have been chortling as the dollar has picked up a few pennies of value compared to the euro.

The problem for the Anglo-Americans is that panic runs on European banks will quickly be translated into panic runs on US banks, and on the dollar. Institutions like Bank of America, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, and even the vaunted Goldman Sachs, which have existed as zombie banks thanks to government largess since September 2008, are now exhibiting telltale signs of a Lehman-like death spiral. In short, if the European banks blow, the London and New York banks will not be far behind. Maybe the Wall Street geniuses of international financial warfare should have thought of that before they embarked on their current lunatic beggar-my-neighbor campaign against their confreres in continental Europe.

Experience teaches that if the New York money center banks are faced by imminent bankruptcy, their first instinct would be to demand a second bailout of trillions of dollars at US taxpayer expense. The problem for them is that the first bailout has left such a bitter aftertaste that congressional passage of such a monstrous funding bill would be anybody’s guess. From the Wall Street point of view, this makes martial law a much more attractive alternative than in the recent past. Under the impact of a huge false flag event, new bailouts could be railroaded through the Congress or even approved by Wall Street puppet Obama as executive orders and validated later. They could even be approved as a measure necessary for national defense in an emergency. The impact in Europe would be similar.

Martial law declared in response to a terror attack would automatically be used to suppress public protests against the bailouts and austerity cuts decreed by the zombie bankers and hedge fund hyenas. No matter what the ins and outs, a new terror crisis would help Wall Street get its money. And there is nothing like an imminent financial panic to make the Anglo-American ruling elite go collectively bonkers.

The Twelve Tyrants of Austerity Threaten the Pentagon Budget

A second and related problem is represented by the first meeting yesterday of that extralegal pseudo-judicial organism which the American people are increasingly referring to as the Twelve Tyrants. This is the infamous Super Committee or Super Congress, an entity which exists in clear violation of the United States Constitution. If, according to one likely scenario, the Twelve Tyrants, the Congress, and Obama fail to agree on a common program of genocidal austerity against the American people, and automatic budget guillotine will come down around Christmas of this year, and will begin cutting $60 billion per year out of the Pentagon budget. According to a number of observers, this prospect by itself is sufficient to move the intelligence old boys of the rogue network to stage a substantial new terror stunt to protect their current level of funding. If new terror attacks occur, it will be much harder to cut the Pentagon budget. Having been deprived of the Cold War 20 years ago, these bellicose militarists do not intend to be deprived of their ersatz Global War on Terror, and they are prepared to go far off the reservation to assert themselves.

The anxiety in these circles is increased by news reports that the US presence in Iraq is about to be scaled down to about 3,000 troops. At the same time, public pressure for an early exit from Afghanistan is growing, while others are calling for a strategy based on limited special forces and the use of predator drones, but without large numbers of infantry.

Republican Warmongers Pose as Isolationists

The disgust of the US population with the endless wars of the past decade has gradually transformed much of the Republican Party from a self-professed congeries of warmongers into a purported gaggle of isolationists, as seen in the recent debates. Naturally, for most of these figures the dovish transformation is purely demagogic. A robust false flag terror event would go far towards flipping the Republicans back to the warmongers stance they find inherently congenial.

London and Washington Still Want to Attack Pakistan

Another factor which disturbs the Anglo-American imperialist planners is their inability to launch their military incursion against Pakistan. This had been planned for the immediate aftermath of the May 1st “Bin Laden” publicity stunt, and would have included an attempt by US Special Forces to seize or destroy the Pakistani strategic nuclear deterrent, leaving that country defenseless. The Anglo-Americans have been held in this case by a timely ultimatum from China, specifying that Beijing would treat an attack on Pakistan just like an attack on the Chinese homeland. This has largely checkmated China and Washington ever since. However, in the aftermath of a new false flag event blamed on Pakistan, it would be possible for the Anglo-American to revisit this issue with increased blackmail potential against the Chinese.

The US-UK Assault on Syria is Failing

In the Middle East, the Anglo-American power elite has wagered everything on the successful march of color revolutions backed up with NATO military aggression, leading to the overthrow of most of the existing regimes in the Arab world. Syria poses the most serious test so far for this new Anglo-American strategic doctrine. After all, it was relatively easy for the Anglo Americans to destabilize and overthrow the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, given that these states were already located within the Anglo Americans sphere.

NATO’s Urgent Need to Attack Syria

Libya has proven a much tougher nut to crack, and NATO, and despite a brutal application of genocidal force, has not yet cracked it. Because of Qaddafi’s superior fighting qualities, the long war in Libya has tended to shield Syria from the next, planned wave of NATO attack. In the meantime, the Syrian army has made substantial progress in quelling the armed rebellion mounted by death squads and armed gangs loyal to the Moslem Brotherhood, itself the creation of British intelligence. The optimum time for NATO to invade Syria would have been two months ago, but this proved impossible because so many of NATO’s strictly limited military assets were tied down on the Libyan front. Very soon, there will be very little of the Muslim Brotherhood soldatesca left in Syria for NATO to come and rescue.

A false flag terror attack, however, would immediately change this equation by creating political conditions in which Obama could successfully extort increased military assets from Congress and from Europe to carry out a direct attack on Syria. This in turn would likely embroil NATO in all-out war not just with Syria, but with Hezbollah and Iran as well. If one thinks of a world war evolving along the lines of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe (1618-1648), then this would begin to look very much like such a world war.

Isolated Israel Faces the PLO Demand for Statehood and the Hostility of Turkey

A further exacerbating factor is represented at the ongoing internal political crisis and increasing international isolation of Israel. Right after the 9/11 anniversary, the United Nations General Assembly will convene in New York City. Here there will be a determined attempt by the Palestinian Authority to exert its existence as a sovereign and independent United Nations member state. This bid will enjoy overwhelming sympathy around the world. It is quite possible that the General Assembly will approve the Palestinian request. The United States faces the humiliating isolation of having to block Palestinian statehood with a solo veto in the Security Council. Saudi Arabia is on record as saying that this outcome will lead to a catastrophe in US-Saudi relations.

Will Turkey Decline Role of US-UK Kamikaze Puppet Against Syria?

A further complication involves Turkey. According to the Anglo-American dream scenario, Turkey should by now have attacked Syria, citing the pretext of wanting to stop the refugee flow across the two countries’ common border. For a time it looked like the Turks would indeed accept the role of kamikaze puppet against Syria in the service of London and New York. But, for the moment, it looks like they may have paused. Instead of invading Syria, Turkey is currently engaged in a high profile diplomatic clash with the Israelis, which makes much more sense from the point of view of Turkish interests and internal politics, and which increases the pressure on the desperados of the Netanyahu regime. All this comes at the moment when half a million Israelis have demonstrated in the streets to show their rejection of the militarism and economic austerity measures of Netanyahu.

A Turkish-Egyptian Alliance?

There are even reports of a possible alliance between Egypt and Turkey, which would be most unwelcome to the US, British, and Israelis. The Egyptians, for their part, have become somewhat less subservient neighbors for the Israelis in the Sinai, especially after some Egyptian forces were killed by Israeli bombing raids targeting Gaza.

Iran: Bushehr Goes Online

In the background, the Iranian nuclear program is quietly proceeding. The Bushehr nuclear power station has come online, producing electricity for Iran’s national grid. The Washington Post, citing a September report from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, claims that the Iranian nuclear program represents “an undimmed danger.” In a September 6 editorial, the paper claims that Iran has begun to use a new and more advanced centrifuge for the enrichment of uranium, and that rapid progress is being made in transferring existing centrifuges into a large underground facility located in a mountain near Qom, which makes them all but invulnerable to outside military attack. The protracted campaign of assassination against Iranian nuclear scientists, it would appear, has not been effective in stopping this progress. In the fevered imaginations of imperialist military planners, we may therefore be approaching the point of no return for an attack on Iran.

Neocon Bonapartist Petraeus Now Running the CIA

As of this past Tuesday, the General David Petraeus has now taken control of the US Central Intelligence Agency. Petraeus has long been noted as the favorite Bonapartist of the neocon faction, and their chosen vehicle for a return to power en masse. Petraeus is carrying out a personal union of the Pentagon and the CIA, the two pillars of his projected future authoritarian presidency. If the US ruling elite should decide to jettison Obama, look for Petraeus’ star to rise at the expense of the “bunch of cranks” populating the current Republican field which is “the weakest since 1940,” in the words of John Weaver of the Huntsman camp.

Petraeus to CIA, Panetta to Pentagon

From the London Independent:
General David Petraeus, the US commander in Afghanistan, is set to become CIA director as part of a major shake-up of President Obama's national security team, in which the agency's current director, Leon Panetta, will replace Robert Gates as Defence Secretary.

Petraeus to head CIA as Obama imposes new order on US security
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Thursday, 28 April 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/petraeus-to-head-cia-as-obama-imposes-new-order-on-us-security-2275781.html

Media, Access and McChrystal

http://www.fair.org/blog/2010/06/24/media-access-and-mcchrystal/

Media, Access and McChrystal
06/24/2010
Peter Hart

There's been a discussion (some of it neatly summarized on the Daily Show) of elite journalists' reaction to the explosive comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staffers to Rolling Stone freelancer Michael Hastings. One admission came via a Politico story, captured by NYU's Jay Rosen (6/24/10):

And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.

Rosen notes that this line in the Politico piece was subsequently removed, perhaps because it revealed too much:

Think about what the Politico is saying: an experienced beat reporter is less of a risk for a powerful figure like McChrystal because an experienced beat reporter would probably not want to "burn bridges" with key sources by telling the world what happens when those sources let their guard down.

This is revealing, perhaps, but completely unsurprising. Journalists have been admitting to this sort of thing for years. Take one example (cited in FAIR's Extra! Update, 12/01) from an American University forum (10/1/01) where PBS correspondent Ray Suarez was asked about the failure to pose difficult questions to certain elite guests:

Well, yeah, access is like oxygen when you're a reporter. And if you're going to do something I guess that's going to jeopardize access in the future, you better be pretty sure that this person who is going to perceive what you are about to do to them as burning them is someone that you can do without in the future after you burn them. That's a tough straddle. It shouldn't be, but it is.

For an example of how a beat reporter normally operates, take ABC Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz's assessment of Gen. David Petraeus (Nightline, 6/23/10):

A warrior and a scholar, Petraeus is sometimes jokingly referred to as a water walker, since almost everything he touches seems to turn to gold.

Or recall the days when Donald Rumsfeld was considered a rock star by the Washington press corps. FAIR's Steve Rendall ran down the worst of that here:

"Sixty-nine years old, and you're America's stud," Tim Russert told Rumsfeld when he interviewed him on NBC's Meet the Press (1/20/02); Larry King informed him that "you now have this new image called sex symbol" (CNN's Larry King Live, 12/06/01). Fox News' Jim Angle (12/11/01) called him "a babe magnet for the 70-year-old set."

"I love you, Donald," Margaret Carlson announced on CNN's Capital Gang (12/23/01), where the Time magazine columnist appears regularly in the role of left-of-center pundit. Carlson's Time magazine colleague, veteran defense correspondent Mark Thompson, told the Chicago Tribune (10/22/01), "Although he has not told us very much, he has been like a father figure."

Tags: David Petraeus, Politico, Rolling Stone, Stanley McChrystal

Is Petraeus McChrystal’s replacement or Obama’s?

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_6040.shtml

Is Petraeus McChrystal’s replacement or Obama’s?
By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Jun 25, 2010

Our petulant president’s ego can’t handle a general letting off steam. Neither can any of the spoiled children who comprise “our” government in DC, the capital of the “superpower.”

Generals have to fight wars that civilians start, either from the incompetence of their diplomacy or the arrogance of their hubris. Generals have to get young troops killed because of the stupidity or ambition or corruption of civilian government officials.

All McChrystal did was to let off steam. A real president would have realized that and let it go.

Don’t get me wrong. McChrystal is a militarist, and I am pleased to see him gone.

However, McChrystal didn’t restart America’s aggression against Afghanistan. Obama did.

People elected Obama because they were tired of Bush’s wars based on lies. So Obama gave us a new war in Pakistan and reignited the Afghan war. No one knows what these wars are about or why the bankrupt US government is wasting vast sums of money, which it has to borrow from foreigners, in order to murder the citizenry in two countries that have never done anything to us.

Just as Bush/Cheney and their criminal neocon government deceived the world that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” that threatened white people everywhere, Obama has conflated the Taliban with al Qaeda. Obama has sold the tale to white countries that unless the US determines how Afghanistan is ruled and by whom, white people are in danger of being exterminated by al Qaeda Taliban terrorists.

The most telling aspect of the McChrystal-Obama contretemps is that it has caused no one in the US government, or media, to ask why the US is still killing women and children in Afghanistan after nine years. The US government is prepared for everyone except itself to be tried at the War Crimes Tribunal.

Fred Branfman writing in AlterNet on June 22 reminds us that unnumbered Iraqis were killed, maimed, tortured and displaced by an American invasion based on lies told by the highest officials in the American government. Yet, no one has been held accountable.

But Gen. McChrystal is held accountable for letting off steam.

Once the Roman Senate, the legislative branch, collapsed, the Caesars, the executive branch, became the captives of the military. Now with Gen. Petraeus once again moved to the fore as McChrystal’s replacement in Afghanistan, we have Obama elevating Petraeus to the Republican presidential nomination in the next election. Thus has Obama replaced himself with a man who will unify the military and executive branch.

Associated Press writers Jennifer Loven and Anne Gearan write (June 23) about the “admired and tightly disciplined Gen. David Petraeus,” the “architect of the Iraq war turnaround,” who is “once again to take hands-on leadership of a troubled war effort.”

Petraeus is an evolved form of general. He “won” in Iraq by paying protection money to the Sunnis who were effectively resisting the US occupation. Petraeus figured out that it was far cheaper and more efficient to put the Sunnis on the US military payroll and to pay them to stop fighting, which is how the war between the Sunnis and the Americans ended. To keep the Americans out of the ongoing large scale sectarian violence that continues to slaughter Iraqis, the US military was confined to remote bases.

If history is a guide, the Afghans will also accept Petraeus’ protection money, and Petraeus has just enough time to buy the Afghan war before the next presidential election.

The Afghans will, of course, take the money and wait us out, just as the Iraqis are doing.

All of this drama is playing out despite the continuing lack of any valid reason for the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Washington idiots, trying to dictate how Iraq and Afghanistan are governed, are destroying constitutional government in the United States. In our hubris to determine how Iraq and Afghanistan are ruled, we are losing our own government.

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com.

New York Times Planted Story on Afghan Mineral Wealth

http://tarpley.net/2010/06/18/afghan-mineral-wealth-designed-to-prolong-us-occupation/

New York Times Planted Story on Afghan Mineral Wealth Designed to Prolong US Occupation, Spur Neocon-Backed Petraeus Presidential Candidacy
Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
June 17, 2010

To provide a new and spurious economic looting argument for making the US occupation of Afghanistan virtually endless, and to advance the candidacy of General David Petraeus as the principal neocon warmonger candidate for president on the Republican ticket in 2012 – these are the purposes of the story planted in the June 13, 2010 New York Times under the byline of James Risen, who is acting as stenographer for the neocons in the great tradition of his predecessor Judith Miller. In retrospect, this article may well be seen as the opening gun of an overt push to place General Petraeus in the White House in 2012 as the new Field Marshal von Hindenburg.

According to this story, a Pentagon survey has determined that Afghanistan possesses at least $1 trillion worth of valuable minerals, including iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and lithium – with lithium being especially valuable because it is used in batteries for computers and for the new designs of electric automobiles. Of course, none of this is news, as the article itself concedes. The surveys done by the US occupation authorities over the last several years are explicitly based on careful studies done by the Soviets during their own occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s. The basic outlines of what is being presented by Risen as front-page news were already published in a May 2004 World Bank report, which was used to dictate minerals legislation to the Afghan government. More recently, Afghan mineral wealth has been hyped by the Afghan embassy in Washington on various occasions, and was a featured theme of the visit here last month by Afghan President Karzai.

Candidate Petraeus Touts “Stunning Potential”

This planted puff piece is based on anonymous “senior US government officials.” The only exception is General David Petraeus, the warlord of the US Central Command, the theater of operations in which Afghanistan is located. Petraeus is directly cited as saying that the Afghan mineral riches whose presence the US has confirmed represent a “stunning potential” for the future development of the country. The implied message from Petraeus to the Washington elite is, to paraphrase, support me and cash in on the riches of Afghanistan, or else wimpy Obama’s self-serving pullout timetable will allow the Chinese to move in.

The repackaging and rehashing of the Afghan mineral story at this time represents a bid to mobilize political support by Wall Street, major minerals corporations, and other predatory interests to keep the US occupation of Afghanistan going far beyond the July 2011 date set by Obama for the beginning of a gradual pullout of US forces. The article makes clear that, if the US should depart from Afghanistan, the immense mineral wealth will fall easy prey to China. China, it is noted, has already taken over a copper mine in Afghanistan. In March of this year, it was a sudden alarm in Washington that Karzai’s Afghanistan was slipping into the Chinese orbit that motivated Obama’s hasty visit to Kabul. The implication is that, whether or not these minerals can actually be developed by the United States, it is imperative to stay in Afghanistan to make sure that they are denied to the Chinese.

The planted story is also designed to counter the growing war fatigue and defeatism among the US-led coalition, which is building up in advance of the NATO summit scheduled for Lisbon, Portugal this coming November. This coalition currently includes 46 nations, representing one third of the military forces deployed, and an even larger portion of the logistics necessary for the occupation. The new British regime has been signaling that its commitment to Afghanistan will not be eternal. Prime Minister David Cameron told British Tommies in Afghanistan that they will be brought home just as soon as their task is finished. Air Chief Marshal Jock Stirrup, the highest ranking uniformed military figure in the UK, is being ousted in a signal of deep cuts to come for the British military establishment. Poland has demanded that NATO come up with a detailed exit plan for ending the Afghan engagement. In Germany, the most recent poll shows about 70% opposition to the endless war, and budget cuts are looming in that country as well. The Netherlands and Canada both intend to withdraw their contingents from Afghanistan next year. Turkey is another country with a presence in Afghanistan that may soon become fed up with this adventure, especially because of the contemptuous and shoddy treatment meted out to the Turks by the State Department over the Iran uranium enrichment and Gaza aid flotilla issues. All signs suggest that, when the Afghan engagement comes up for discussion at the November NATO summit in Lisbon, disaffection and defection will be the dominant notes.

NATO defeatism comes on top of growing disaffection with Obama’s endless war inside the United States: the newest poll has a majority of 53% convinced that prolonging the Afghanistan war is not worth the sacrifices involved. Even more acute is the growing backlash from inside the Democratic Party. Congressman Charlie Rangel of Harlem recently assailed Obama as being “consistent with” Bush and Cheney when it comes to lying about the wars he is conducting.

Petraeus the Neocon, The Thinking Man’s Warmonger

The neocon cabal in Washington has been largely booted out of government by the Brzezinski-Trilateral-Bilderberg financier faction who run Obama. But the neocons are determined not to stay in the wilderness forever, and their chosen vehicle for a comeback is the Petraeus presidential candidacy. Petraeus is now the main unifying figure of the neocon war party. The allegedly thoughtful general was recently lionized at neocon central, the American Enterprise Institute, which gave him its Irving Kristol Award in early May. As Antiwar noted:

… many have speculated of late he is selling himself – as a potential Republican candidate for commander in chief. …. And he probably won’t become the Republican nominee without some heavy lifting from the star-maker machinery at AEI, which would enjoy nothing more than to get its own pocket general into the White House. …. This mutually beneficial relationship is already off to a great start. Thanks to ‘Team Kagan,’ AEI’s Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, and a battery of sycophantic pundits and mainstream journalists, Petraeus’ lack of authentic exceptionalism has been transformed into an unshakable ‘warrior-scholar’ persona with his own ‘legacy’…. But his recent pandering to AEI and the lip-smacking response from Kristol & Co. should make anyone who still maintains a thread of common sense and an institutional memory very concerned.[1]

Petraeus is getting kudos from Max Boot, the Kagans, Frank Gaffney, and other ambitious neocon careerists.

Peter Beinart has compared Petraeus to Dwight Eisenhower, the 1952 GOP candidate, and thinks that Petraeus may be highly effective as a candidate in the current anti-politician atmosphere. Beinart, currently at the New America Foundation, comments:

Today’s GOP has a right-wing base that can damage Obama, but none of its favorites have a prayer of winning the White House. The reason is that just like the Republican right of the early 1950s, which kept insisting that the New Deal constituted socialism (or fascism), today’s conservative activists have not accommodated themselves to some basic shifts in public mood…. powerful forces within the GOP will begin looking for a candidate who doesn’t have to kowtow to the party’s activist base. They’ll need someone with enough personal appeal to avoid the culture war food-fights that obsess the Republican base, someone who exudes moral traditionalism and fiscal prudence without appearing fanatical or intolerant. Such obfuscation won’t satisfy the GOP’s hard-right core, of course, but John McCain—another soldier-turned-pol—has already shown that the right’s stranglehold on the nominating process can be broken. Like McCain in 2008, Petraeus could largely skip the Iowa caucuses, which evangelicals dominate, and instead focus on New Hampshire, where independents can vote. In both 2000 and 2008, it was New Hampshire that boosted McCain, and New Hampshire, as it turns out, is the closest thing Petraeus has to a home state. From there it would be on to South Carolina, where military pedigrees go a long way…. Parties that have grown narrow and extreme tend to spiral downward until they nominate someone who is not beholden to their narrow, extreme base. That person has to be so popular that he or she can defy the normal rules about how candidates get nominated. Right now, David Petraeus is the only Republican who fits the bill. In the weeks ahead, McChrystal may become a conservative folk hero for opposing Obama on Afghanistan. But for Democrats looking toward 2012 and 2016, it’s Petraeus who represents the real threat.[2]
The warmonger regroupment around Petraeus has been noticed across the Atlantic by the June 12 London Economist, which measures a Petraeus-Daniels ticket against a Palin-Huckabee one. In another article, the city of London house organ notes that, in addition to Huckabee, Romney, Palin, Pawlenty, and Barbour, “a few even hope that General David Petraeus could be lured in.” In reality, Petraeus is more than eager. If current US reactionary politics resembles the mad Hatter’s tea party with Alice and the white rabbit, as the Economist cover suggests, perhaps Petraeus can bring power out of chaos.

Once we know that the neocons are running the Petraeus for President campaign, much else becomes clear, especially if we recall the neocon methods used in connection with the Iraq invasion of 2003. The planted puff piece about Afghan minerals has neocon fingerprints all over it; it may have been concocted at the AEI. It implies that NATO states that stick with the US might receive a piece of the action when it comes to looting these natural resources. This is exactly the way that reconstruction contracts in Iraq were employed under neocon auspices. Back in those days, the Germans and the French were excluded because they had opposed the neocon-induced war hysteria of 2003.

One big objection to making the Afghan occupation infinite has to do with the tremendous monetary costs involved, which the sovereign debt crisis has made it harder for the participating governments to bear. Here we should remember the pie-in-the-sky promised by Wolfowitz and other neocons in 2002-2003, when they proclaimed that an invasion of Iraq would be self-financing, thanks to the promised looting of Iraqi oil, which in reality has never materialized in the promised form. Back in those years, there were even more extravagant neocon fantasies about what could be done by bringing Iraqi oil production under US control. Some neocons recommended a massive increase in Iraqi oil output with the goal of radically lowering the world price of oil and busting the OPEC cartel. All of this, we note in retrospect, was never accomplished.

Exercitus facit imperatorem: The Army Creates the Emperor

The presidency has been won by Washington, Jackson, Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Grant, Garfield, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, so there is no doubt that military leaders have often represented formidable contenders. By contrast, the current Republican field represents a collection of largely discredited hacks and ideological crackpots who would have a very difficult time winning a presidential contest. Palin is an imbecile. Huckabee is a clown. Jindall is a bungler. Pawlenty is a nonentity. Barbour could be a deep south favorite son at the very most. DeMint is in the same regional minor league.

Romney, the asset stripper from Bain Capital, is wired into Wall Street and does well with country club plutocrats, but lacks appeal to the social issue and warmonger reactionary currents inside the GOP. Earlier this year, Romney’s future appeared to be that of vice president and de facto prime minister/austerity enforcer in a Petraeus-Romney administration. But now, many have figured out that the Obama health care bill, with its capitulation to the insurance and big pharma cartels, is directly based on the individual mandate to buy overpriced insurance under government coercion instituted by Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts. Given the current agitation of the Tea Party Romney’s identification with the Obama health bill is now an obstacle to his future aspirations. In response to this problem, various media have begun to tout Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, a former Reagan appointee who does not share Romney’s Massachusetts problems, although he is less effective in other ways. For the moment, we must conclude that the choice between a Petraeus-Romney ticket and a Petraeus-Daniels GOP ticket is still up in the air.

Petraeus: the New von Hindenburg

If the Petraeus candidacy materializes in the way that now seems likely, it will mark a new phase in the ungovernability, economic immiseration, and erosion of democracy in the United States. Unfortunately, the historical parallels for a Petraeus candidacy do not point in the direction of Eisenhower. They point rather towards Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the German commander of World War I who became president of the Weimar Republic in 1925 and during whose reactionary and authoritarian presidency the Hitler movement rapidly grew in power. It was Hindenburg who allowed Hitler to take state power in 1933 by appointing him as Chancellor, leading to the swift consolidation of a totalitarian dictatorship. Hindenburg’s appeal was that he was a general and not a politician, not a creature of corrupt parliamentary haggling and backroom deals, but only accustomed simply to obey or to command. This meant that the Hindenburg presidency had a definite anti-parliamentary and anti-democratic thrust from the very beginning, and that is what we can expect to see if Petraeus ever gets to the White House. With the German parliament paralyzed by about March 1930, Hindenburg’s presidency soon became a continuous state of emergency rule, in which the Field Marshal approved or disapproved emergency decrees submitted by a series of chancellors – Brüning, von Papen, von Schleicher, and finally Hitler.

Petraeus has the advantage of being able to play on the sense of military discipline and loyalty which is ingrained in many Tea Party activists. Even a cursory survey of the Tea Party folk shows that a very large number of them are retired military, and their movement is full of militaristic overtones favorable to foreign aggression. There is reason to believe that many of these activists would immediately place Petraeus, whom they naïvely might view as the victor of Mesopotamia, in a special privileged category above other candidates, and rapidly fall into line. This probable ability to deliver the recalcitrant Tea Party gives Petraeus a great advantage over other Republican hopefuls like Romney, who might be competitive in the general election, but who would have a very hard time fighting their way through Republican primaries dominated by ideological fanaticism.

Obama has been doing yeoman service as a union buster, forcing the United Auto Workers to give up games they had acquired through decades of bitter struggle and sacrifice. Obama and his Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan are leading the charge to bust the teachers’ unions as the centerpiece of a general assault against public employees of all types conducted under the banner of ferocious austerity. Right now, Obama still remains the best strike breaker the Wall Street financier elite can deploy. But Obama is collapsing rapidly, and the ruling elite must prepare an alternative option for 2012. But G. W. Bush left the Republican Party in a shambles, racked by internal dissent and lead by the group of reactionary clowns, mountebanks, and misfits we have already mentioned. Would the Republican Party as it currently exists be sufficient, if put into power, to break the kind of strike wave that that might emerge (as in Greece) from the current policies of retrenchment, drastic austerity, savage cuts in social services, union busting, and tax gouging? There is some doubt that it could.

Petraeus could certainly mobilize the Tea Party to break strikes and protests by workers, students, immigrants, and supporters of social services, but his big advantage would be his ability to lean on the uniformed military establishment and the secret intelligence agencies in a more overt way than other presidents could. Again, the example of von Hindenburg is instructive. A Petraeus presidency would most likely be an exercise in emergency rule, a de facto dictatorship by Executive Order under the color of the existing 9/11 national emergency, or of some other emergency which Petraeus could declare. Petraeus could maintain a certain public detachment in order to preserve his credibility longer, while leaving the dirty details to a vice presidential Prime Minister like Romney or Mitch Daniels, both of whom have experience as state governors. The content of the emergency decrees would inevitably be economic austerity of the most brutal type, combined with unprecedented attacks on civil liberties, against a background of new and catastrophic foreign military adventures.

During this week’s hearings on the wretched state of the Afghan military adventure conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee, committee chair Senator Carl Levin asked if, in the professional military judgment of General Petraeus, Obama’s announced goal of starting the US departure from Afghanistan were advisable. Petraeus pointedly refused to endorse Obamas July 2011 target, first remaining silent for a prolonged interval, then hemming and hawing, and finally offering a highly qualified and grudging assent, while warning that it is necessary to be very careful with timetables. In other words, Petraeus has decided to leave open the option of clashing with Obama over the conduct of the Afghan war. One can imagine a scenario in which Petraeus sometime around July 2011 resigns his command in protest over Obama’s desire to cut and run, and vows to take the issue to the voters. He might even take a leaf from von Hindenburg’s book and accuse Obama of wanting to stab his gallant forces in the back, just when final victory is within their grasp. The precedents for this kind of politics are not good.

[1] Kelley B. Vlahos, “President Petraeus,” May 17, 2010, at http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2010/05/17/president-petraeus/

[2] Peter Beinart, “Petraeus for President?” October 12, 2009, at http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-12/petraeus-for-president/full/

Ex-congressman Cheney wanted to institute ‘coup’

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0524/excongressman-claims-cheney-wanted-institute-coup/

Ex-congressman who allegedly groped staffers claims Cheney wanted to institute ‘coup’
John Byrne
Monday, May 24th, 2010

The same ex-congressman who claimed that there was no sexual intent behind his tickling of a staffer has a new one for ya.

"Gentlemen, what we have here is a constitutional crisis," then-Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY) told editors for Esquire Magazine in January. "If what I've been told is true — and I believe it is — General David Petraeus, a commander with soldiers deployed in two theaters of war, has had multiple meetings with Dick Cheney, the former vice-president of the United States, to discuss Petraeus's candidacy for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And in fact, that's more than a constitutional crisis. That's treason."

The tale is developed by Ryan D'Agostino on Esquire's website as part of a longer profile piece on Massa, who resigned in March after accusations that he had sexually groped multiple male staffers. Massa himself gave conflicting statements about the incidents, telling Fox News' Glenn Beck that "not only did I grope [a staffer], I tickled him until he couldn't breathe," and then later recanting on Larry King, saying "it is not true" he groped anyone he employed. He appears to have a history of serial fabrications.

D'Agostino expands upon Massa's bold claim partway through his piece, writing:

One month before, in early January, Congressman Massa had called me and sketched out the bare bones of the tale he was now propounding. Four retired generals, he said — "three four-stars and one three-star" — had picked up disturbing reports that Petraeus, the commander of United States Central Command, whose portfolio contains the worst trouble spots on the globe, including Iraq and Afghanistan, had recently met with Cheney — twice — and Cheney was trying to recruit him to run in 2012. Were he to be the nominee, Massa said, Petraeus would be in the unprecedented position of a military man running for president against his own commander in chief.

"We have to see this for what it is," Massa said, his voice pleading. "There is a reason that we have in this country civilian leadership of the military. It is, among other things, to avoid something like this. Because in order to succeed electorally, General Petraeus must fail militarily. You understand? In order to succeed electorally, he must fail in his mission. Were he to run and win — and if he were to run, he would win in a landslide — we would be witness to an American coup d'état. It is the functional equivalent of the political overthrow of the commander in chief."

The congressman punctuated his sentence with a snort of indignation, followed by a short, high laugh. He searched the three other faces in the room for affirmation, any sign at all that we understood the gravity of the situation, because he had to that point been living alone with this unseemly knowledge. For a moment, he was met with silence. The story Massa had just told was staggering, and confusing. And just who was this man sitting before us? His eyes were wide and his voice thundered and a couple of times he seemed just short of hyperventilating. But if this story that four generals — "people whose names you know, very prominent military men" — had brought to him had any basis in fact, and if Petraeus were deliberately undermining his commander in chief, shouldn't somebody be bellowing about it?


"Mark my words, as a naval officer of twenty-four years who has looked at our current conflicts from every angle, I believe that having David Petraeus as president is precisely the way for the Dick Cheneys of the world to perpetuate these wars for the rest of our lives, and to start new wars," he later said, according to the piece. "To have endless wars. Endless war is their goal."

Writes D'Agostino: "He also managed to impress upon us something else: Congressman Eric Massa was a little bit crazy."

At Politico, Glenn Thrush blogs:

Petraeus, who is head of the U.S. Central Command, repeatedly and publicly has rebuked Cheney’s criticisms of Obama on torture policy.

“Whenever we have taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside," Petraeus said on Meet the Press earlier this year.

The Petraeus allegations are among several bizarre moments in the Esquire profile, including Massa's admission that he considered killing himself in March.


D'Agostino catches Massa in lies throughout his piece. One concerns a former staffer who served as Massa's veterans' liason, who he says he has on the phone with him during one of their interviews. The Esquire reporter says he can hear the voice on the line, who says, "I got the impression he didn't want to talk to you, to be honest with you."

In the piece, Massa also says he considered suicide and once wandered through Washington in an Ambien-induced haze.

He even hits on the reporter, saying, "You better watch yourself around gay bars, my friend. It could get interesting."

General David Petraeus tipped as Republican 2012 presidential candidate

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7482356/General-David-Petraeus-tipped-as-Republican-2012-presidential-candidate.html

General David Petraeus tipped as Republican 2012 presidential candidate
Speculation is mounting that Gen David Petraeus could run as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012.
Alex Spillius in Washington
19 Mar 2010

The shrewd and articulate military commander, credited with turning around the Iraq war, will deliver a speech at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire next week, a traditional staging post in the state where the first presidential primaries are held every four years. Each of the last eight presidents has spoken at the college on their way to victory.

It will be the latest in a series of speaking engagements where the head of the US Central Command region, which covers the Middle East and Central Asia, has veered well into foreign policy discussion and often faced questions about his political ambition.

His stock response is the same as any potential aspirant at this early stage - a flat no. But for someone who professes to have no interest in running for president he has a way of talking about it even when he hasn't been asked directly.

In a recent appearance at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia Gen Petraeus turned a question about whether or not he planned to write a book upon retiring into an opportunity to deny he had political ambitions. On other occasions he has laughed off the notion of a White House bid in a slightly disingenuous manner.

Colleagues have begun to semi-seriously joke about the issue. At the annual Washington Alfalfa black tie dinner in late January Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, was heard to remark that Gen Petraeus couldn't make it because "he had an engagement in Iowa", where the first caucuses are held.

"Everybody who knows him or spends time with him has always thought he would have a chance, and he does nothing much to dissuade them," said Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and publisher of the Washington Note blog.

"His closest advisers don't deny the logic or the suggestion," added Mr Clemons, who recently attended a diplomatic Washington dinner party where Gen Petraeus wore business attire rather than uniform.

John Feehery, a well-connected Republican strategist, said: "If Petraeus were to run, he would be a serious contender. "His positions on certain issues are not well known, but his leadership ability is well known and respected by the American people."

Aged 57, Gen Petraeus was catapulted to fame when then President George W Bush sent him to Baghdad in early 2007 to carry out the "surge" strategy that helped rescue Iraq from all-out civil war.

He drew up the counter-insurgency strategy that helped transform that conflict and is now being deployed with some encouraging early signs in Afghanistan.

In what is so far considered a weak field to run against President Barack Obama he would bring cast-iron national security credibility. Of the Republican front-runners, Sarah Palin is regarded as too divisive and Mitt Romney has trouble connecting with voters outside of country clubs.

Registered as a Republican, the general has told friends that like many senior military figures he hasn't voted for several elections in a bid to preserve his independence.

But he has also described himself as a "Rockefeller Republican" – a pro-business, socially liberal New Englander – who would not fit in well with a party lurching to the Right under the influence of the new Tea Party movement.

Like Gen Colin Powell or Gen Wesley Clark, who flirted with and entered the political fray respectively, he may lack the stomach for non-stop campaigning and fund-raising.

Timing is also against him for 2012. For a serious bid, he would have to leave his command late this year while the Afghan war was still blazing and then try and run against his former boss, the president.

Some associates think 2016 is a safer bet, or the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the pinnacle of any military career. There is also conjecture that Mr Obama, who is an admirer, may line him up for a top job if he wins a second four-year term.

Moscow reacts to US buildup in Afghanistan

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4330.shtml

Moscow reacts to US buildup in Afghanistan
By F. William Engdahl
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Feb 6, 2009

Moscow has correctly assessed that the announced Obama troop buildup in Afghanistan has no relevance to the stated aim of combatting the ‘Taliban,’ but rather with a new attempt by the Pentagon strategists to encircle both Russia and China in Eurasia in order to retain US global military dominance. It is not waiting for a new policy from Washington. Rather Russia is acting to secure its perimeter in Central Asia through a series of calculated geopolitical moves reminiscent of the famous Great Game of more than a Century ago. The stakes in this geopolitical power game could not be higher -- the issue of world war or peace in the coming decade.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen are asking Obama to double US troop presence in Afghanistan. Both Gates and Mullen said that while they’re thinking about the war in Afghanistan in terms of a three- to five-year time frame, their immediate goals are ‘unclear.’ That’s highly revealing. It is clear from the deliberate pattern over months, despite vehement protest from Pakistan’s government, of US bombing attacks on villages inside Pakistan, allegedly to hit Taliban targets, that the US intends to widen the conflict to Pakistan as well. What could be the possible aim?

Militarily, adding 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan could never secure peace in that war-torn tribal region. It has been documented that many of the groups whom the US command labels ‘Taliban’ are in fact armed bands controlled by local warlords, and not ideologically close-knit Taliban cadre in any sense. By labelling them Taliban, Washington hopes to convince its NATO allies such as Germany to send their troops to fight in an unwinnable war. Afghanistan presently has an estimated 40 percent unemployment and some five million living below the poverty line. It has been ravaged by more than four decades of continuous war.

Adding a mere 30,000 more for a total of 60,000 US troops in Afghanistan where the current killing rate for US soldiers is running 15 times above that in Iraq, is ludicrous. According to the official US Marine Corps counterinsurgency guidelines, to run a countrywide counterinsurgency strategy with the absolute minimum force levels required by US Army and Marine Corps doctrine, the US would need almost 655,000 troops, or an escalation roughly 600,000 troops higher than the force levels in the proposed Gates strategy. In fact the US strategy as it now appears seems to be a replay of the gradual escalation strategy the US pursued in Vietnam in the early 1960s.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy guidance, as that of her husband, is virtually indistinguishable from the Bush faction’s, has just convened a dinner discussion of leading policy experts on Afghanistan and South Asia. It included Defense Secretary Gates, CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, and National Security advisor Gen. James L. Jones. It follows the appointment of former Ambassador, and hawk, Richard Holbrooke as the State Department’s Special South Asia Envoy.

In January 2008, more than a year ago, present National Security adviser to Obama, General James Jones headed a private Afghan Study Group which recommended drastic steps to ‘revitalize’ the war in Afghanistan. Revitalize a war whose goals have not even been clearly formulated? Not surprisingly, Moscow suspects another agenda is at work when Washington puts such heavy concentration strategically on the issue of the forgotten “war on terror” in Afghanistan, a region with no discernable direct national security implications for the United States or NATO member countries. No conceivable combination in Afghanistan, a failed state if there ever was one, could threaten a war of aggression abroad. The tribal warlords around President Karzai seem to be struggling just to maintain their heroin export flows at record levels.

Moscow’s response

Not surpisingly, the Kremlin has reacted to the US plans for Central Asia. The president of Kyrgyzstan just flew to Moscow where he received promises of debt relief and billions of dollars in aid. Kurmanbek Bakiyev was told he would get a write off of Kyrgyzstan’s $180 million debt to Russia, a $2 billion discounted loan and $150 million in financial aid from Russia. On the occasion, President Bakiyev announced plans to close a US air base crucial to the war in Afghanistan. Kyrgyzstan has been home to the only remaining US base in the strategically crucial region to Afghanistan’s north.

After the Bush administration declared its “war on terror” and announced plans to strike Afghanistan to root out the arch evil Osama bin Laden from the caves of Tora Bora in 2001, Washington secured air force basing rights in both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

At about that same time, it covertly began preparing to unleash a series of US-financed ‘regime change’ Color Revolutions in Georgia (The Rose Revolution, in November 2003) and Ukraine (Orange Revolution in 2004). It tried and failed in Belarus as well as Uzbekistan. A glance at a map of Eurasia makes clear the pattern of those pro-NATO efforts was to militarily encircle the territory of Russia, especially as at the time Washington believed it had the government of Kazakhstan in its pocket with military training agreements and Chevron’s large oil investment in Tenghiz.

Once Washington announced in January 2007 that it would station strategic missiles and advanced radar systems in Poland and the Czech Republic to ‘defend against rogue missile attack from Iran,’ as I detail in my soon-to-be-released book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, then-President Putin told the Munich Wehrkunde conference in February 2007 that the true target of the US ‘missile defense’ strategy was not Iran but Russia.

Similarly, today the US insistence the Afghanistan military buildup is about the Taliban, rings equally hollow. That’s clearly why Moscow is acting to secure its borders from a US militarization of the entire Central Asian region. Oil and gas pipeline routes are a major consideration, including US wishes to build a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to India that would deprive Russia’s Gazprom of a vital component of its current gas supply.

The prime objective of the Afghan escalation however, is to draw a new ‘iron curtain,’ this one between the two formidable Eurasian powers with the only capacity to challenge future US global dominance: Russia and China. Should the two former rivals firm up their cooperation not only in raw materials and industrial economic trade, but as well in the military cooperation sphere, as Obama campaign foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has stated, the combination would present a devastating threat to America’s global hegemony.

Now the decision, aided by the help of generous Russian financial concessions, to abruptly cancel US Air Force landing rights at Kyrgyzstan’s Manas Air Base deals a devastating blow to US Great Game’s grand strategy to encircle the key powers of Eurasia -- China and Russia.

When Washington tried to use its various NGOs to foment a Color Revolution in Uzbekistan in 2005, the country’s not-so-democratic president, Islam Karimov, demanded the US evacuate its air bases, repatriate US Peace Corps volunteers, and most NGOs were shut down and foreign media banned. Karimov moved to firm his frayed ties with Moscow at the time. Today Washington is reported to be feverishly trying to reestablish itself in Uzbekistan, but the sudden cancellation of base rights in Kyrgyzstan deals a new devastating blow to the entire Eurasian encirclement Great Game strategy.

With the major NATO supply routes to Afghanistan going through Pakistan from the Port of Karachi, and strikes on those supply lines increasing by the day, the Pentagon is eagerly searching to find alternative supply routes to the North. Militants just blew up a key bridge in Pakistan’s strategic Khyber Pass.

The securing of alternate Afghan supply routes is at least the official explanation. Unofficially, it would also provide the pretext to beef up US military presence in Central Asia. Now, with the loss of Manas Air Base, a gaping hole in the Washington Great Game ‘Mach IV’ has been left.

To further complicate Washington’s strategy, Moscow is moving to firm up defense cooperation ties across former Communist states in Central Asia.

A Central Asia answer to NATO?

The announcement by Kyrgzystan President Bakiyev that he was cancelling US basing rights came during his visit to Moscow February 4 for a summit meeting of the formerly moribund Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a security grouping comprising Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. They reportedly agreed to set up a collective rapid reaction force to ‘counter military aggression, international terrorism, extremism, crime, drug-trafficking and deal with emergency situations.’ Clearly the US plans for a major military build-up in Afghanistan were high on the agenda as well.

The CSTO was established in 1992 to serve as a basis for maintaining some dialogue between Moscow and her former Soviet republics after their declared independence, Russia’s so-called ‘near abroad.’

Today the level of talks is taking on a quite new seriousness as US encirclement operations clearly are seen as a threat to all the Central Asian republics. The CSTO lists its major security ‘threats’ as Pakistan and Afghanistan. The decision to create a truly collective force with a permanent location and a united command would propel the alliance to a new level.

Russian President Medvedev announced the decision to form the collective regional CSTO Rapid Reaction Force: ‘I would like to emphasise the importance of this decision to establish rapid reaction forces. It’s aimed at strengthening the military capacity of our organisation.’ He claimed the new response units would ‘not be less powerful than those of NATO,’ adding that ‘the reason behind the creation of the collective forces of operative functioning is a considerable conflict potential which is accumulating in the CSTO zone.’ Translated from the Russian, that means the US strategic build-up in and around Pakistan and Afghanistan.

At the same time as it hosted the CSTO summit, Russia hosted a meeting of the so-called Eurasian Economic Community in Moscow, EurAsEC. That group consists of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan as full members. EurAsEC, established in 2000, also involves Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine which hold observer status.

They discussed establishing a $10 billion joint assistance fund to deal with the effects of the global economic crisis, as well as establishing an international hi-tech technology exchange center and implementing various innovative projects in member countries.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev captured the vulnerability of Washington’s exposed hypocrisy in Afghanistan when he told the press after the Moscow summit, ‘We are ready for full-fledged and equal cooperation on security in Afghanistan, including with the United States.’ That of course is the last thing the Pentagon strategists wish to hear.

F. William Engdahl is author of “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order” (Pluto Press) and “Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” (www.globalresearch.ca ). His new book, “Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order” (Third Millennium Press) is due for release in late Spring 2009. He may be reached via his website: www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

Paul Krugman: Time to Take a Stand

http://welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com/2007/09/paul-krugman-time-to-take-stand.html

Thursday, September 06, 2007
Paul Krugman: Time to Take a Stand

Here’s what will definitely happen when Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress next week: he’ll assert that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq — as long as you don’t count Sunnis killed by Sunnis, Shiites killed by Shiites, Iraqis killed by car bombs and people shot in the front of the head.

Here’s what I’m afraid will happen: Democrats will look at Gen. Petraeus’s uniform and medals and fall into their usual cringe. They won’t ask hard questions out of fear that someone might accuse them of attacking the military. After the testimony, they’ll desperately try to get Republicans to agree to a resolution that politely asks President Bush to maybe, possibly, withdraw some troops, if he feels like it.

There are five things I hope Democrats in Congress will remember.

First, no independent assessment has concluded that violence in Iraq is down. On the contrary, estimates based on morgue, hospital and police records suggest that the daily number of civilian deaths is almost twice its average pace from last year. And a recent assessment by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found no decline in the average number of daily attacks.

So how can the military be claiming otherwise? Apparently, the Pentagon has a double super secret formula that it uses to distinguish sectarian killings (bad) from other deaths (not important); according to press reports, all deaths from car bombs are excluded, and one intelligence analyst told The Washington Post that “if a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian. If it went through the front, it’s criminal.” So the number of dead is down, as long as you only count certain kinds of dead people.

Oh, and by the way: Baghdad is undergoing ethnic cleansing, with Shiite militias driving Sunnis out of much of the city. And guess what? When a Sunni enclave is eliminated and the death toll in that district falls because there’s nobody left to kill, that counts as progress by the Pentagon’s metric.

Second, Gen. Petraeus has a history of making wildly overoptimistic assessments of progress in Iraq that happen to be convenient for his political masters.

I’ve written before about the op-ed article Gen. Petraeus published six weeks before the 2004 election, claiming “tangible progress” in Iraq. Specifically, he declared that “Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt,” that “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward” and that “there has been progress in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load for their own security.” A year later, he declared that “there has been enormous progress with the Iraqi security forces.”

But now two more years have passed, and the independent commission of retired military officers appointed by Congress to assess Iraqi security forces has recommended that the national police force, which is riddled with corruption and sectarian influence, be disbanded, while Iraqi military forces “will be unable to fulfill their essential security responsibilities independently over the next 12-18 months.”

Third, any plan that depends on the White House recognizing reality is an idle fantasy. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, on Tuesday Mr. Bush told Australia’s deputy prime minister that “we’re kicking ass” in Iraq. Enough said.

Fourth, the lesson of the past six years is that Republicans will accuse Democrats of being unpatriotic no matter what the Democrats do. Democrats gave Mr. Bush everything he wanted in 2002; their reward was an ad attacking Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, that featured images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Finally, the public hates this war and wants to see it ended. Voters are exasperated with the Democrats, not because they think Congressional leaders are too liberal, but because they don’t see Congress doing anything to stop the war.

In light of all this, you have to wonder what Democrats, who according to The New York Times are considering a compromise that sets a “goal” for withdrawal rather than a timetable, are thinking. All such a compromise would accomplish would be to give Republicans who like to sound moderate — but who always vote with the Bush administration when it matters — political cover.

And six or seven months from now it will be the same thing all over again. Mr. Bush will stage another photo op at Camp Cupcake, the Marine nickname for the giant air base he never left on his recent visit to Iraq. The administration will move the goal posts again, and the military will come up with new ways to cook the books and claim success.

One thing is for sure: like 2004, 2008 will be a “khaki election” in which Republicans insist that a vote for the Democrats is a vote against the troops. The only question is whether they can also, once again, claim that the Democrats are flip-floppers who can’t make up their minds.