The Global Gohar of the USA…

January 4, 2006
Arun Shrivastava CMC

Today Saddam was hanged. Instead the bunch of eunuchs comprising Bush, Blair, Cheney, their side kicks, and their handlers should have been hanged. But they will never be hanged because 30-35% of the people who elect them live in a media-engineered "consensus trance.(1)" So long as the 33-35% of electorates in the western world continue to live in their surreal, make believe, so-called "free" world, the rest of the world can’t have peace.

Every USAmerican must learn this term… Gohar!

"Gohar" [pronounced Go’-haar; verb, noun] is a term used in the state of Bihar of India to describe total decimation of a community.

Gohar is engineered against weaker castes in Bihar by upper castes, aka the ruling castes. Well known Goharists are the big landlords, feudal mentality, and ruthless ways to assert their rights on lands, often others’ lands, illegally occupied. A Gohar is invariably engineered for imagined crimes. If a lower caste peasant refuses to till the land of high caste landlord, or if the men of lower caste refuse to perform menial work for the upper castes, the entire community can be Gohared.

Gohar involves planned attack on the villages of the lower castes. Operational plan is drawn up with military precision. Professional murderers, arsonists and rapists are invited to the hacienda of the lord. These are people from all castes because Goharists believe in professionalism and core competency [favorite theories in the US armed forces]. They are wined and dined, paid cash, 50% advance, 50% after the job is done. Then the plan is executed.

The attack invariably takes place after midnight. When the world is asleep……the Goharists rise to decimate.

The Goharists roll out to the target village in motorcycles, jeeps, and tractors with trailers, armed to the teeth with guns, petrol bombs and swords. Swords are nice weapons: when the Goharists kill they can actually say that they had a nice warm blood bath. Bullets are used sparingly, and often by the cowards.

The Goharists reach the target village and surround it. The leader gives a signal. The arsonists fire their salvos of petrol bombs to set the huts on fire. When the huts are on fire people run out and try to save whatever meager belongings they have. When they come out the sharpshooters shoot the men, leaving the women to be caught and raped by professional rapists. The children are of course casually thrown into burning huts to be roasted alive in front of mothers being gang raped.

As dawn creeps over the horizon, all one can see is the smoldering fire and the ashes, and the dead bodies, and the living dead, and the barely living brutalized women and children. I doubt if any journalist has seen a Gohar in action. I have not seen any but I know of one that took place back in the 1970s.

I wish that every western citizen, particularly those in the US forces, understands this term because the US Government and its lackeys have been directly or indirectly involved in a Gohar in virtually every developing country on earth, just as European colonialists were before the 1950s.

Thus far the men and women in western mainstream media have only reported US Gohars from the safe distance of their hotel room as embedded journos that the Goharists wanted them to see. I truly doubt if any would ever be able to maintain their sanity when they see one true Gohar in action from close proximity. I say this because I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are not automatons; on the contrary I believe that they are human, possibly programmed-humans. Nevertheless, human.

The scaled up US Gohars

Every US citizen should know that in the last 100 years, the US Government has employed "Gohar" in nearly every country of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Whilst an Indian Gohar destroys about 250-300 people every decade, the American Gohars since 1899 have decimated probably closer to 100 million if we take into account "collateral damage". That averages out to about one million dead for every year of the 20th century. Some democidographers, like R.J. Rummel2 [see Rummel’s website http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ ], would have us believe that mega murderers were Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, General Pinochet, General Yahya Khan, and the likes. But who was behind them? Analyze any of these instances of mega murders and it invariably leads to substantial role of the US Government and the US elite. The United States of America shines as the world’s only GIGA-MURDERER, ten times over.

The better known US Government Gohars include the ones in their own country where they killed an estimated 12 million Red Indians and caused the deaths of tens of millions of African slaves, then Japan [first country to be nuked] and Germany [mindless bombing to "shock ad awe"], then Korea, then Vietnam, ………and the Iraqi Gohar has been going on for over the last three years. Latest report indicates over 655,000 Iraqi civilians have been Gohared for their OIL. That makes the US barely 655 Kilo-MURDERER, 200K PLUS EVERY YEAR. The lesser known ones are kept in the basement of the government offices, US Government Offices. If the truth be ever known, "people are going to hang us", as Bush senior said some years ago of what they do within the four walls of the White House.

The ruling elite have convinced the Americans and Europeans that the rest of world hates them. A "professionally trained-in-the-art-of-murder" GI is brain-washed to cut throats, cut off hands, cut out the tongues…because the rest of the world hates the western way of life. Some way of life, some way of killing, some way of defending freedom! Some historical absurdity? You bet.

Any difference?

Scaled up Gohars of the United States seeks total control over nations….. not to export democracy but to take control of people’s resources, the natural resources which local communities have used to ensure their livelihoods for over six millennia. True Gohar seeks to take control of the key resource of weaker castes….LAND.

Earlier the Europeans fought amongst each other to divide the rest of the resource rich world among them and killed innocent men, women and children. Often mindless killing merely to assert racial superiority, as mindless as the assertion of caste superiority of the badland Bihar’s Goharists. With globalization of fascism under the US flag these bird-brained bastards have lined up for the spoils. Like vultures, after the hyenas are gone.

The global Gohars of the US decimates entire nations. It is scaled up operation, vast in scope, awesome in spectacle shown at prime time and grand for the spectators. It pumps up the adrenaline for all: the Goharites, the MSM reporters and the vast sheeple spectators. For them it is spectacle; and it also pumps up the rudimentary libido of the eunuchs.

Leave nothing alive…kill everything living

The American Goharists, aka neocons with PNAC for the global village, should know that all the villages around the world are theirs for the taking. So, I say this,

"Come on Goharists, shoot every man, woman and child on earth……that will leave about 300 million Americans and 470 million Europeans=nice tidy total population of 770 million on earth, same as 1750AD population, to claim all the lands, all the water, all the forests, all the animals, all the natural resources all over the world.

Why bother about diplomatic niceties and the elaborate charade of declaring innocent people as "terrorists? Just blow them up like you blew up the twin towers.

Leave no Islamist jehadist, no Hindoo fundamentalist, no deviant Jew or Christian renegade alive. Leave no Chavez to finger your ass in the UN. Leave no Chinese to threaten you with 9:1 attack force, no figlio du na putana Putin to blow your Baku Cayhan oil pipeline.

Leave no animals alive either, especially tigers.

[And this is my message to Tony Blair and his ilk……When the British came to India they had never seen a tiger; they were used to fox hunting. They thought that every animal has to be about the same size as a fox! When they accompanied Indian Maharajas on tiger shoot and confronted a tiger in full fury, they realized that actually a fox is a different animal that they killed using five hundred hounds and a thousand riders. In India men kill tigers, alone, face to face. But what the British historians never mention in history books is that behind every photograph of a British LORD with his prized tiger shoot is the story of a pair of trousers quietly sent to the local dhobi [washerman] soiled with shit. British shit. Very soon we shall be seeing soiled trousers of US marines, everywhere. If we are all animals, nature has taught us only one way to react. And there is no scope for flight because we’ve nothing to lose. But most importantly, Tony Blair’s trousers, after the Iraq disaster, should be hanged in the British museum; because time is ripe….museums must store historical artifacts in real time.]

And, of course, the rest of the world must fight the American Goharists. When they catch the marines alive, they have every right to hang them, high. They have every right to ensure that each one of the Goharist dies as much a painful death as he or she inflicts on the rest of us. The Vietnamese did them in. Iraqis are doing what the Goharists deserve.

Expand further east, and we are just about ready. The Goharists have no idea how every Shia and Sunni Mussalman felt on 30th of December, 2006. All differences were submerged to condemn the Bushist Goharites. None of their intelligence agencies can ever fathom the level of hatred we Hindoos and Mussalmans have for the US Government. Steeped in the crass, corrupt, Christian Goharism, they have failed to understand the Asian mind. The west Asians that the perverts call the MID-EAST, as if between two "civilized" world of USAmerica and Australia there is some region that falls in between, are truly Asians with civilization going back to the era when your ancestors lived naked up on the trees.

The hanging of Saddam has turned 1 billion Indians, possibly five billion third world citizens against the US Government. All that prevents these billions of people from openly boycotting anything American is the co-opted minions of neoconservative Goharists supported by mercenaries of the Goharists. Use them, now, for tomorrow it may be too late. Hang us all.

The American Goharists in uniform

Is there any difference between a bunch of illiterate mercenaries of Bihar’s badlands and the Americans in uniform? Why, I think Kissinger is absolutely right when he says,"Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." Just as the feudal landlords in the badlands of Bihar fete out the mercenaries, Kissinger and his Goharists feed these men in US-Uniform the best Monsanto-bacon, genetically modified eggs, genetically modified corn-flakes, to metamorphose every gene in these humans to turn them into murderous louts. Thanks to Kissinger, and Baker, and Negroponte, and Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld, and Rice, and…every preppy pimp in the power corridors of DC.

This bunch of "dumb, stupid animals" is used to protect the interest of the Goharists who wish to control the world? Whose agenda these dumb, stupid animals further?

* They fight and lay down life to ensure that soda pop laced with pesticides is sold to third world countries?
* They fight and lay down lives to ensure that nice smelling soaps, detergents, shampoos, and perfumes are sold to stinking sweaty third world denizens?
* They bomb farmers, rape women and shoot children to ensure that genetically modified seeds of Monsanto are sold to every farmer to destroy nature’s biodiversity the world over?
* They bomb civilians to make way for Kellogg’s cornflakes?
* They shoot millions on earth at will to ensure that US registered companies steal oil, and every conceivable natural resource the thieves brigade in the White House can think of, world-wide?

This global dance of the evil has many manly sights and sounds as well:

"Some of the dead were mutilated by having "C Company" carved into their chests; some were disemboweled. One GI would later say, "You didn't have to look for people to kill, they were just there. I cut their throats, cut off their hands, cut out their tongues, scalped them. I did it. A lot of people were doing it and I just followed. I just lost all sense of direction."

And why did the "C Company" cut up and mutilated the dead bodies of unarmed civilians? Did they merely lose "all sense of direction?" Can even the most evil Goharist in Bihar’s badlands lose "all sense of direction?"

Or is the truth what Layla Anwar (3)said in her dispatch [22/12/2006] from Iraq

I will tell you but sit still and don't freak out.
It is the agony of realizing that a "Third world", "Arab", "majority
Muslim" country has managed to pierce the Beast with it's deadly
rudimentary arrows.
The Beast is now trapped like a bull in a Corrida, giving its final
kicks before falling to the ground, inert.

An Asian woman’s intellect is worth more than a million bloody marines.

The eunuchs don’t fight

The eunuchs don’t fight because they are neither male nor female. When they think male, they are tormented; when they think female, they feel tormented. Therefore, these bird-brained Machiavellian "Never-do-an-enemy-a-small-injury" cowards make others do their dirty job. They hand the flag to these "dumb stupid animals" and tell them to fight for the flag. And these dumb stupid animals do just that…it is fun and these dumb, stupid animals get paid for having a bit of fun. Any different from badland Bihar’s Goharists?

The days of the likes of Wilfred Owen (4), when men in uniform could philosophize the futility of mindless violence are over.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

For the illiterate, dumb, stupid animals in uniform, in plain English, dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori means "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country." So die, son, and while you kill, inflict as much pain on every peaceful people on earth. Because die you must. There is no salvation for you. But one day each one of you would see in broad daylight the old lie: dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.

Have a nice blood bath

In the grand old tradition of medieval Bihar, every American soldier should carry a sword to enjoy a warm fresh blood bath without soap or shampoo. And then plant the star spangled banner on the slit neck of a man or the dead body of a raped woman. It is macho! And I beseech…...

Come on man, if you are man enough slit the guys, rape their women…….plant your flag and sing your national anthem. And retire to your neighbourhood pub to talk about your manliness over a pint of lager….fighting for democracy, freedom, and liberty of the poor raped dead……………………land!

The United States of America has about 225 year long history. How much trouble, how much pain, how much suffering this one Genetically Engineered Frankenstein has caused nations all over the world and also within their own national boundary is beyond calculation in their short history? One can’t measure grief in dollar terms. The people of the United States of America can’t ever compensate the millions of people their government has destroyed in their name. Never. Even over a millennium.

"We are aware that History can be cruel in the short run but in the long run it is most merciful……. But we possess many things [the USAmericans] don't. We viscerally belong to this Land. We can trace our genealogy back millenniums." [ibid]

And in the same vein, someone closer to DC said the following words, in 1854…...
"Whatever Seattle says, the great chief at Washington can rely upon with as much certainty as he can upon the return of the sun or the seasons….
….There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory. I will not dwell on, nor mourn over, our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface brothers with hastening it, as we too may have been somewhat to blame. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors -- the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people….
…..Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant lined lakes and bays, and ever yearn in tender fond affection over the lonely hearted living, and often return from the happy hunting ground to visit, guide, console, and comfort them."(5)

Asia is our land. We are Asians. Our farmers have tilled the land, sown the land, and harvested their crops…..all by hand. We shall continue to do so, year after year.

Robert McNamara, following 1964 Chinese nuclear bomb blast, blared, "We have enough nuclear bombs to drop that would equal 14 tons of TNT per man, woman and child in China." Bravo, Bob! Where would it leave your own men, women and children? And the North Pole and the South Pole……..and your own rivers, valleys, and forests? Was it momentary lapse of reason or were you already institutionalized? Never mind, history is relentless; the people deserve their leaders.

Arun Shrivastava is a management consultant.
He lives in Delhi and can be contacted on arun1951@yahoo.com

References:

1. The term "consensus trance" is beautifully used by none other than my favourite author Richard Heinberg in a documentary "Oil, Smoke & Mirrors." See Google videos http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8677389869548020370 Also: http://www.oilsmokeandmirrors.com/
He’s the author of "Oil Depletion Protocol" a must read for those who wish to understand USAmerica’s Global Gohar.

2. R.J. Rummel; http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/. Although Rummel is a good researcher, the unfortunate thing about his thesis is the attempt to distill out the true barbarity of the US Government. Not once does he say, in any of his papers that the US Government is the world’s sole Giga-murderer.

3. Layla Anwar, "An Arab Woman’s Blues" http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/

4. This is the audio clip of Wilfred Owen’s famous war poetry "Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori." Do please listen to the recitation by clicking on the url
http://encarta.msn.com/media_681500233_761569981_-1_1/%E2%80
%9CDulce_Et_Decorum_Est%E2%80%9D.html

5. "CHIEF SEATTLE'S 1854 ORATION" - version 1; authentic text of treaty oration; appeared in the Seattle Sunday Star on Oct. 29, 1887, in a column by Dr. Henry A. Smith; see Wikipedia.

Pinochet's Death Spares Bush Family

By Robert Parry December 12, 2006

<>Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s death on Dec. 10 means the Bush Family can breathe a little bit easier, knowing that criminal proceedings against Chile’s notorious dictator can no longer implicate his longtime friend and protector, former President George H.W. Bush.

Although Chilean investigations against other defendants may continue, the cases against Pinochet end with his death of a heart attack at the age of 91. Pinochet’s death from natural causes also marks a victory for world leaders, including George H.W. and George W. Bush, who shielded Pinochet from justice over the past three decades.

The Bush Family’s role in the Pinochet cover-up began in 1976 when then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush diverted investigators away from Pinochet’s guilt in a car bombing in Washington that killed political rival Orlando Letelier and an American, Ronni Moffitt.

The cover-up stretched into the presidency of George W. Bush when he sidetracked an FBI recommendation to indict Pinochet in the Letelier-Moffitt murders.

Over those intervening 30 years, Pinochet allegedly engaged in a variety of illicit operations, including terrorism, torture, murder, drug trafficking, money-laundering and illicit arms shipments – sometimes with the official collusion of the U.S. government.

In the 1980s, when George H.W. Bush was Vice President, Pinochet’s regime helped funnel weapons to the Nicaraguan contra rebels and to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, an operation that also implicated then-CIA official Robert M. Gates, who will be the next U.S. Secretary of Defense.

When Pinochet faced perhaps his greatest risk of prosecution – in 1998 when he was detained in London pending extradition to Spain on charges of murdering Spanish citizens – former President George H.W. Bush protested Pinochet’s arrest, calling it “a travesty of justice” and joining in a successful appeal to the British courts to let Pinochet go home to Chile.

Once Pinochet was returned to Chile, the wily ex-dictator employed a legal strategy of political obstruction and assertions of ill health to avert prosecution. Until his death, he retained influential friends in the Chilean power structure and in key foreign capitals, especially Washington.

Pinochet’s History

Pinochet’s years in the service of U.S. foreign policy date back to the early 1970s when Richard Nixon’s administration wanted to destroy Chile’s democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.

The CIA launched a covert operation to “destabilize” Allende’s government, with the CIA-sponsored chaos ending in a bloody coup on Sept. 11, 1973. Gen. Pinochet seized power and Allende was shot to death when Pinochet’s forces stormed the Presidential Palace.

Thousands of political dissidents – including Americans and other foreigners – were rounded up and executed. Many also were tortured.

With Pinochet in control, the CIA turned its attention to helping him overcome the negative publicity that his violent coup had engendered around the world. One “secret” CIA memo, written in early 1974, described the success of “the Santiago Station’s propaganda project.” The memo said:

“Prior to the coup the project’s media outlets maintained a steady barrage of anti-government criticism, exploiting every possible point of friction between the government and the democratic opposition, and emphasizing the problems and conflicts that were developing between the government and the armed forces. Since the coup, these media outlets have supported the new military government. They have tried to present the Junta in the most positive light.” [See Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File]

Despite the CIA’s P.R. blitz, however, Pinochet and his military subordinates insisted on dressing up and acting like a casting agent’s idea of Fascist bullies. The dour Pinochet was known for his fondness for wearing a military cloak that made him resemble a well-dressed Nazi SS officer.

Pinochet and the other right-wing military dictators who dominated South America in the mid-1970s also had their own priorities, one of which was the elimination of political opponents who were living in exile in other countries.

Though many of these dissidents weren’t associated with violent revolutionary movements, the anticommunist doctrine then in vogue among the region’s right-wing military made few distinctions between armed militants and political activists.

By 1974, Chilean intelligence was collaborating with freelancing anti-Castro Cuban extremists and other South American security forces to eliminate any and all threats to right-wing military power.

The first prominent victim of these cross-border assassinations was former Chilean Gen. Carlos Prats, who was living in Argentina and was viewed as a potential rival to Pinochet because Prats had opposed Pinochet’s coup that shattered Chile’s long history as a constitutional democracy.

Learning that Prats was writing his memoirs, Pinochet’s secret police chief Manuel Contreras dispatched Michael Townley, an assassin trained in explosives, to Argentina. Townley planted a bomb under Prats’s car, detonating it on Sept. 30, killing Prats at the door and incinerating Prats’s wife who was trapped inside the car.

On Oct. 6, 1975, a gunman approached Chilean Christian Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton who was walking with his wife on a street in Rome. The gunman shot both Leighton and his wife, severely wounding both of them.

Operation Condor

In November 1975, the loose-knit collaboration among the Southern Cone dictatorships took on a more formal structure during a covert intelligence meeting in Santiago. Delegates from the security forces of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia committed themselves to a regional strategy against “subversives.”

In recognition of Chile’s leadership, the conference named the project after Chile’s national bird, the giant vulture that traverses the Andes Mountains. The project was called “Operation Condor.”

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency confidentially informed Washington that the operation had three phases and that the “third and reportedly very secret phase of ‘Operation Condor’ involves the formation of special teams from member countries who are to carry out operations to include assassinations.”

The Condor accord formally took effect on Jan. 30, 1976, the same day George H.W. Bush was sworn in as CIA director.

In Bush’s first few months, right-wing violence across the Southern Cone of South America surged. On March 24, 1976, the Argentine military staged a coup, ousting the ineffectual President Isabel Peron and escalating a brutal internal security campaign against both violent and non-violent opponents on the Left.

The Argentine security forces became especially well-known for grisly methods of torture and the practice of “disappearing” political dissidents who would be snatched from the streets or from their homes, undergo torture and never be seen again.

Like Pinochet, the new Argentine dictators saw themselves on a mission to save Western Civilization from the clutches of leftist thought.

They took pride in the “scientific” nature of their repression. They were clinical practitioners of anticommunism – refining torture techniques, erasing the sanctuary of international borders and collaborating with right-wing terrorists and organized-crime elements to destroy leftist movements.

Later Argentine government investigations discovered that its military intelligence officers advanced Nazi-like methods of torture by testing the limits of how much pain a human being could endure before dying. Torture methods included experiments with electric shocks, drowning, asphyxiation and sexual perversions, such as forcing mice into a woman’s vagina.

The totalitarian nature of the anticommunism gripping much of South America revealed itself in one particularly bizarre Argentine practice, which was used when pregnant women were captured as suspected subversives.

The women were kept alive long enough to bring the babies to full term. The women then were subjected to forced labor or Caesarian section. The newborns were given to military families to be raised in the ideology of anticommunism while the new mothers were executed.

Many were taken to an airport near Buenos Aires, stripped naked, shackled to other prisoners and put on a plane. As the plane flew over the Rio Plata or out over the Atlantic Ocean, the prisoners were shoved through a cargo door, sausage-like, into the water to drown. All told, the Argentine war against subversion would claim an estimated 30,000 lives.

The 1976 Argentine coup d’etat allowed the pace of cross-border executions under Operation Condor to quicken.

On May 21, gunmen killed two Uruguayan congressmen on a street in Buenos Aires. On June 4, former Bolivian President Juan Jose Torres was slain also in Buenos Aires. On June 11, armed men kidnapped and tortured 23 Chilean refugees and one Uruguayan who were under United Nations protection.

A Grudge

Despite protests from human rights groups, Pinochet and his fellow dictators felt immune from pressure because of their powerful friends in Washington. Pinochet’s sense of impunity led him to contemplate silencing one of his most eloquent critics, Chile’s former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, who lived in the U.S. capital.

Earlier in their government careers, when Letelier was briefly defense minister in Allende’s government, Pinochet had been his subordinate. After the coup, Pinochet imprisoned Letelier at a desolate concentration camp on Dawson Island, but international pressure won Letelier release a year later.

Now, Pinochet was chafing under Letelier’s rough criticism of the regime’s human rights record. Letelier was doubly infuriating to Pinochet because Letelier was regarded as a man of intellect and charm, even impressing CIA officers who observed him as “a personable, socially pleasant man” and “a reasonable, mature democrat,” according to biographical sketches.

By summer 1976, George H.W. Bush’s CIA was hearing a lot about Operation Condor from South American sources who had attended a second organizational conference of Southern Cone intelligence services.

These CIA sources reported that the military regimes were preparing “to engage in ‘executive action’ outside the territory of member countries.” In intelligence circles, “executive action” is a euphemism for assassination.

Meanwhile, Pinochet and intelligence chief Manuel Contreras were putting in motion their most audacious assassination plan yet: to eliminate Orlando Letelier in his safe haven in Washington, D.C.

In July 1976, two operatives from Chile’s intelligence service DINA – Michael Townley and Armando Fernandez Larios – went to Paraguay where DINA had arranged for them to get false passports and visas for a trip to the United States.

Townley and Larios were using the false names Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral and a cover story claiming they were investigating suspected leftists working for Chile’s state copper company in New York. Townley and Larios said their project had been cleared with the CIA’s Station Chief in Santiago.

A senior Paraguayan official, Conrado Pappalardo, urged U.S. Ambassador George Landau to cooperate, citing a direct appeal from Pinochet in support of the mission. Supposedly, the Paraguayan government claimed, the two Chileans were to meet with CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters.

An alarmed Landau recognized that the visa request was highly unusual, since such operations are normally coordinated with the CIA station in the host country and are cleared with CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Though granting the visas, Landau took the precaution of sending an urgent cable to Walters and photostatic copies of the fake passports to the CIA. Landau said he received an urgent cable back signed by CIA Director Bush, reporting that Walters, who was in the process of retiring, was out of town.

When Walters returned a few days later, he cabled Landau that he had “nothing to do with this” mission. Landau immediately canceled the visas.

The Assassination

It remains unclear what – if anything – Bush’s CIA did after learning about the “Paraguayan caper.” Normal protocol would have required senior CIA officials to ask their Chilean counterparts about the supposed trip to Langley.

However, even with the declassification of more records in recent years, that question has never been fully answered.

The CIA also demonstrated little curiosity over the Aug. 22, 1976, arrival of two other Chilean operatives using the names, Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral, the phony names that were intended to hide the identity of the two operatives in the aborted assassination plot.

When these two different operatives arrived in Washington, they made a point of having the Chilean Embassy notify Walters’s office at CIA.

“It is quite beyond belief that the CIA is so lax in its counterespionage functions that it would simply have ignored a clandestine operation by a foreign intelligence service in Washington, D.C., or elsewhere in the United States,” wrote John Dinges and Saul Landau in their 1980 book, Assassination on Embassy Row. “It is equally implausible that Bush, Walters, Landau and other officials were unaware of the chain of international assassinations that had been attributed to DINA.”

Apparently, DINA had dispatched the second pair of operatives, using the phony names, to show that the initial contacts for visas in Paraguay were not threatening. In other words, the Chilean government had the replacement team of Williams and Romeral go through the motions of a trip to Washington with the intent to visit Walters to dispel any American suspicions or to spread confusion among suspicious U.S. officials.

But it’s still unclear whether Bush’s CIA contacted Pinochet’s government about its mysterious behavior and, if not, why not.

As for the Letelier plot, DINA was soon plotting another way to carry out the killing. In late August, DINA dispatched a preliminary team of one man and one woman to do surveillance on Letelier as he moved around Washington.

Then, Townley was sent under a different alias to carry out the murder. After arriving in New York on Sept. 9, 1976, Townley connected with Cuban National Movement leader Guillermo Novo in Union City, New Jersey, and then headed to Washington. Townley assembled a remote-controlled bomb that used pieces bought at Radio Shack and Sears.

On Sept. 18, joined by Cuban extremists Virgilio Paz and Dionisio Suarez, Townley went to Letelier home in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington. The assassination team attached the bomb underneath Letelier’s Chevrolet Chevelle.

Three days later, on the morning of Sept. 21, Paz and Suarez followed Letelier as he drove to work with two associates, Ronni Moffitt and her husband Michael. As the Chevelle proceeded down Massachusetts Avenue, through an area known as Embassy Row, the assassins detonated the bomb.

The blast ripped off Letelier’s legs and punctured a hole in Ronni Moffitt’s jugular vein. She drowned in her own blood at the scene; Letelier died after being taken to George Washington University Hospital. Michael Moffitt survived.

At the time, the attack represented the worst act of international terrorism on U.S. soil. Adding to the potential for scandal, the terrorism had been carried out by a regime that was an ostensible ally of the United States, one that had gained power with the help of the Nixon administration and the CIA.

Threat to Bush

Bush’s reputation was also at risk. As authors Dinges and Landau noted in Assassination on Embassy Row, “the CIA reaction was peculiar” after the cable from Ambassador Landau arrived disclosing a covert Chilean intelligence operation and asking Deputy Director Walters if he had a meeting scheduled with the DINA agents.

“Landau expected Walters to take quick action in the event that the Chilean mission did not have CIA clearance. Yet a week passed during which the assassination team could well have had time to carry out their original plan to go directly from Paraguay to Washington to kill Letelier. Walters and Bush conferred during that week about the matter.”

“One thing is clear,” Dinges and Landau wrote, “DINA chief Manuel Contreras would have called off the assassination mission if the CIA or State Department had expressed their displeasure to the Chilean government. An intelligence officer familiar with the case said that any warning would have been sufficient to cause the assassination to be scuttled. Whatever Walters and Bush did – if anything – the DINA mission proceeded.”

Within hours of the bombing, Letelier’s associates accused the Pinochet regime, citing its hatred of Letelier and its record for brutality. The Chilean government, however, heatedly denied any responsibility.

That night, at a dinner at the Jordanian Embassy, Senator James Abourezk, a South Dakota Democrat, spotted Bush and approached the CIA director. Abourezk said he was a friend of Letelier’s and beseeched Bush to get the CIA “to find the bastards who killed him.” Abourezk said Bush responded: “I’ll see what I can do. We are not without assets in Chile.”

A problem, however, was that one of the CIA’s best-placed assets – DINA chief Contreras – was part of the assassination. Wiley Gilstrap, the CIA’s Santiago Station Chief, did approach Contreras with questions about the Letelier bombing and wired back to Langley Contreras’s assurance that the Chilean government wasn’t involved.

Following the strategy of public misdirection already used in hundreds of “disappearances,” Contreras pointed the finger at the Chilean Left. Contreras suggested that leftists had killed Letelier to turn him into a martyr.

CIA headquarters, of course, had plenty of evidence that Contreras was lying. The Pinochet government had flashed its intention to mount a suspicious operation inside the United States by involving the U.S. Embassy in Paraguay and the deputy director of the CIA. Bush’s CIA even had in its files a photograph of the leader of the terrorist squad, Michael Townley.

Yet, rather than fulfilling his promise to Abourezk to “see what I can do,” Bush ignored leads that would have taken him into a confrontation with Pinochet. The CIA either didn’t put the pieces together or avoided the obvious conclusions the evidence presented.

The Cover-up

Indeed, the CIA didn’t seem to want any information that might implicate the Pinochet regime. On Oct. 6, a CIA informant in Chile went to the CIA Station in Santiago and relayed an account of Pinochet denouncing Letelier.

The informant said the dictator had called Letelier’s criticism of the government “unacceptable.” The source “believes that the Chilean Government is directly involved in Letelier’s death and feels that investigation into the incident will so indicate,” the CIA field report said. [See Kornbluh, The Pinochet File.]

But Bush’s CIA chose to accept Contreras’s denials and even began leaking information that pointed away from the real killers.

Newsweek’s Periscope reported in the magazine’s Oct. 11, 1976, issue that “the Chilean secret police were not involved. …. The [Central Intelligence] agency reached its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile’s rulers were wooing U.S. support, could only damage the Santiago regime.”

Similar stories ran in other newspapers, including the New York Times.

Despite the lack of help from Washington, the FBI’s legal attaché in Buenos Aires, Robert Scherrer, began putting the puzzle together only a week after the Letelier bombing.

Relying on a source in the Argentine military, Scherrer reported to his superiors that the assassination was likely the work of Operation Condor, the assassination project organized by the Chilean government.

Another break in the case came two weeks after the Letelier assassination on Oct. 6, 1976, when anti-Castro terrorists planted a bomb on a Cubana Airlines DC-8 before it took off from Barbados. Nine minutes after takeoff, the bomb exploded, plunging the plane into the Caribbean and killing all 73 people on board including the Cuban national fencing team.

Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who had left the plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb. They named two prominent anti-Castro extremists, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada, as the architects of the attack.

A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents. Although Posada was a CIA-trained Bay of Pigs veteran and stayed in close touch with some former CIA colleagues, senior CIA officials again pleaded ignorance.

For the second time in barely two weeks, Bush’s CIA had done nothing to interfere with terrorist attacks involving anticommunist operatives with close ties to the CIA. [For more on Posada, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush's Hypocrisy: Cuban Terrorists."]

But the Cubana Airlines bombing put federal investigators on the right track toward solving the Letelier assassination. They began to learn more about the network of right-wing terrorists associated with Operation Condor and its international Murder Inc. However, CIA Director Bush continued to assert the innocence of Pinochet’s regime.

On Nov. 1, 1976, the Washington Post cited CIA officials in reporting that “operatives of the present Chilean military Junta did not take part in Letelier’s killing.” The Post added that “CIA Director Bush expressed this view in a conversation late last week with Secretary of State Kissinger.”

Regarding the Letelier murder, George H.W. Bush was never pressed to provide a full explanation of his actions.

When I submitted questions to Bush in 1988 – while he was Vice President and I was a Newsweek correspondent preparing a story on his year as CIA director – Bush’s chief of staff Craig Fuller responded, saying “the Vice President generally does not comment on issues related to the time he was at the Central Intelligence Agency and he will have no comment on the specific issues raised in your letter.”

My editors at Newsweek subsequently decided not to publish any story about Bush’s year at the CIA though he was then running for President and citing his CIA experience as an important element of his resumé.

The Carter Interregnum

After Jimmy Carter became President in 1977, federal investigators cracked the Letelier case, successfully bringing charges against Townley and several other conspirators.

Prosecutor Eugene Propper told me that Bush’s CIA did provide some information about the background of suspects, but didn’t volunteer the crucial information about the Paraguayan gambit or supply the photo of the chief assassin, Townley. “Nothing the agency gave us helped us break this case,” Propper said.

Though U.S. prosecutors grasped the criminal nature of the Pinochet government, the wheels of justice turned slowly. Before the prosecutors could climb the chain of command in Chile, the Republicans had returned to power in 1981, with George H.W. Bush serving as Vice President and acting as a top foreign policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

Despite the mounting evidence of Pinochet’s guilt in a terrorist act on U.S. soil, the dictator emerged from his pariah status of the Carter years to regain his position as a favored ally under Bush and Reagan.

When help was needed on sensitive projects, the Reagan administration often turned to Pinochet. For instance, in 1982, after Reagan decided to tilt Iraq’s way during the Iran-Iraq War, one of Pinochet’s favored arms dealers, Carlos Cardoen, manufactured and shipped controversial weapons to Saddam Hussein’s army.

Regarding these Iraqi arms shipments, former National Security Council aide Howard Teicher swore out an affidavit in 1995 detailing Reagan’s decision and describing the secret roles of CIA Director William Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates, in shepherding the military equipment to Iraq.

Teicher said the secret arming of Iraq was approved by Reagan in June 1982 as part of a National Security Decision Directive. Under it, Casey and Gates “authorized, approved and assisted” delivery of cluster bombs and other materiel to Iraq, Teicher said.

Teicher’s affidavit corroborated earlier public statements by former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe and Iranian-born businessman Richard Babayan, who claimed first-hand knowledge of Gates’s central role in the secret Iraq operations.

In his 1992 book Profits of War, Ben-Menashe wrote that Israeli Mossad director Nachum Admoni approached Gates in 1985 seeking help in shutting down unconventional weapons, especially chemicals, moving through the Chilean arms pipeline to Iraq.

Ben-Menashe wrote that Gates attended a meeting in Chile in 1986 with Cardoen present at which Gates tried to calm down the Israelis by assuring them that U.S. policy was simply to ensure a channel of conventional weapons for Iraq.

Though Gates denied Ben-Menashe’s and Babayan’s allegations in 1991 – when Gates underwent confirmation hearings to be CIA director – he has never been asked to publicly respond to Teicher’s affidavit which was filed in a Miami court case in 1995.

Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were aware of the discrepancies between the Teicher and Gates accounts when Gates appeared at a Dec. 5, 2006, confirmation hearing to be Secretary of Defense, but no one asked Gates to respond to Teicher’s sworn statement.

A source at the United Nations also has told me that some of the documents captured in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 shed light on the Cardoen arms pipeline, but those records have never been made public.

Key Leads

Other potential avenues for understanding Pinochet’s covert role in supporting anticommunist strategies in the Reagan-Bush era opened recently, as former DINA chief Contreras turned on his old boss.

In a court document filed in early July 2006, Contreras implicated Pinochet and one of his sons in a scheme to manufacture and smuggle cocaine to Europe and the United States, explaining one source of Pinochet’s $28 million fortune.

Contreras alleged that the cocaine was processed with Pinochet’s approval at an Army chemical plant south of Santiago during the 1980s and that Pinochet’s son Marco Antonio arranged the shipments of the processed cocaine. [NYT, July 11, 2006]

At the time of this alleged cocaine smuggling, Pinochet was a close ally of the Reagan administration, providing help on a variety of sensitive intelligence projects, including shipping military equipment to Nicaraguan contra rebels who also were implicated in the exploding cocaine trade to the United States. [For details on the contra-cocaine scandal, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]

Contreras said Eugenio Berrios, a chemist for Chile’s secret police, oversaw the drug manufacturing. Berrios also was accused of producing poisons for Pinochet to use in murdering political enemies. Berrios disappeared in 1992. [For details on the Berrios mystery, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Pinochet’s Mad Scientist.”]

As this drip-drip-drip of evidence accumulated implicating Pinochet and his American allies in serious crimes and international intrigue, it fell to the second generation of George Bush presidents to put a finger in the dike.

Near the end of the Clinton presidency in 2000, an FBI team reviewed new evidence that had become available in the Letelier case and recommended the indictment of Pinochet.

But the final decision was left to the incoming Bush administration – and George W. Bush, like his father, chose to protect Pinochet. In doing so, the younger George Bush also protected his father’s reputation and the legacy of the Bush Family.

Freed from Washington’s legal pressure, Pinochet was able to fend off intermittent attempts in Chile to bring him to justice during the last half dozen years of his life.

“Every day it is clearer that Pinochet ordered my brother’s death,” human rights lawyer Fabiola Letelier told the New York Times on the 30th anniversary of the Letelier-Moffitt assassinations. “But for a proper and complete investigation to take place we need access to the appropriate records and evidence.” [NYT, Sept. 21, 2006]

Ultimately, Pinochet escaped a formal judgment of guilt for his many crimes, dying on the afternoon of Dec. 10, 2006, at the Military Hospital of Santiago from complications resulting from a heart attack.

As Pinochet took his last breath, the Bush Family, too, had reason for a sigh of relief.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

Bush Reaction to Report Worries Father's Aides

US NEWS

By Kenneth T. WalshFri Dec 8, 9:42 AM ET

Former White House advisers to George H.W. Bush are keenly disappointed and concerned about the current President Bush's initial reaction to the report by the Iraq Study Group.

They consider him rather dismissive of the group's conclusions, issued yesterday, which include the view that current Iraq policy is failing. The group recommends a variety of important changes, such as assigning U.S. troops to play more of an advisory and training role and less of a combat role. The ISG also recommends that the United States withdraw most of its combat brigades by early 2008 and that the administration increase diplomatic efforts, including starting talks with Iran and Syria and energetically working toward an Israeli-Palestinian solution.

Adding to the unease were President Bush's comments at his Thursday news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in which he avoided commenting on specifics in the ISG report.

"We have a classic case of circling the wagons," says a former adviser to Bush the elder. "If President Bush changes his policy in Iraq in a fundamental way, it undermines the whole premise of his presidency. I just don't believe he will ever do that."

White House advisers say Bush won't react in detail to the ISG report for several weeks, while he assesses it and awaits various internal government reports on the situation from his own advisers. Bush tells aides he doesn't want to "outsource" his role as commander in chief. Some Bush allies say this is a way to buy some time as the president tries to decide how to deal with rising pressure to alter his strategy in Iraq and hopes the critical media focus on the Iraq war will soften.

Inadvertent Wisdom from George H.W. Bush

Saturday, Nov. 25, 2006

As his father indirectly acknowledged, the President is about to be deluged by advice on Iraq. But the best counsel shouldn't be how to "win" but how to withdraw creatively

By JOE KLEIN


In Abu Dhabi last week, President George H.W. Bush was asked what advice he was giving his son about Iraq. Bush the Elder declined to answer at first. He said that if he shared his view of Iraq with the audience and "it happened to deviate one iota, one little inch, from what the President's doing ... it would be terrible." But he kept on talking: "It'd bring great anxiety not only to him but to his supporters." And talking: "In the early 1960s, Jim Baker and I were the men's doubles champions in tennis in the city of Houston," he said of the former Secretary of State, now co-chairing a panel that is supposed to make recommendations about what to do in Iraq. And then the former President talked some more: "If I were to suggest what they ought to do, it just would not be constructive and certainly would not be helpful to the President. It would cause grief to him."

How sad to watch a man who was such a subtle and sophisticated foreign policy President dance around—and inadvertently acknowledge—the phenomenal disaster created by his son. But the old man has a point: Junior is about to be deluged with advice about Iraq, and most of it will be worthless. There will be calls for regional diplomatic conferences and partition plans and new Iraqi power-sharing deals, plans to increase and plans to diminish the level of U.S. troops or to deploy them differently. Expert advocates will brilliantly argue all these possibilities, but each will have a fatal flaw: the expectation of a rational, cooperative reaction from the Iraqis. That is no longer possible. Iraq no longer exists as a coherent governmental entity. It is being atomized, according to cia Director Michael Hayden, into "smaller and smaller groups fighting over smaller and smaller issues over smaller and smaller pieces of territory."

Hayden's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee a few weeks ago was largely overlooked, but it is stunning. He called the level of violence in Iraq "satanic." He said that as the violence increases, "the center disappears, and normal people acting not irrationally end up acting like extremists." In other words, if you're a resident of Baghdad, the most rational response is to seek protection from one of the militias—al-Qaeda if you're Sunni, the Mahdi Army if you're Shi'ite—or to get out of town. "It's impossible to get your teeth fixed in Baghdad," a U.S. intelligence official told me recently. "All the dentists have left the country."

And so we have reached the point where there is only one meaningful decision left for George W. Bush in Iraq: what to do with our troops there. The President will be tempted to follow the advice coming from the uniformed military rather than from a civilian group like the Baker commission. That's partly because he so foolishly ignored the military's views during the Rumsfeld era but also because the military is likely to share Bush's hope that Iraq is still salvageable. I spoke with several senior officials involved in or familiar with the Pentagon's Iraq review process last week, and they were unanimous in suggesting the need for more troops, at least in the short term, in order to secure Baghdad. They also suggested more and better U.S. advisory teams working with Iraqi military units. "And then we need to be patient," a senior military intelligence official told me. "It could be years before we see any real progress."

Of course, uniformed military leaders have been suggesting more troops were needed ever since the war began. But they've been saying it privately—in an abdication of military responsibility—for fear that they would suffer the same fate as that of General Eric Shinseki, who told a congressional committee that "several hundred thousand" troops would be needed in Iraq and was, in effect, fired by Rumsfeld. "We had a responsibility to speak up," said a general who served in Iraq. "You can say what you will about Paul Wolfowitz, but when he was DepSec, he was always on the phone with those of us who were downrange, asking how things were going and what we needed. But [while they were serving], even some of the generals who later turned on Rumsfeld would give the answer they thought they were supposed to give him: Everything's fine, sir!"

Now, finally, the uniformed brass seem poised to speak more candidly. But that doesn't make a military solution to this disaster any more plausible. "You know, we're trained to complete the mission," a senior military officer told me. "And that's our reflex reaction, to come up with a can-do plan—'Here's how you fix it, sir!' But we may lack perspective now. The situation may be reaching the point of no return." Indeed, the best advice for the military to give the President at this point may not be how to "win" in Iraq—but how to withdraw creatively, how to limit Iran's influence in the Shi'ite regions of the south, how to keep special-operations and quick-strike units based in the region, poised to attack al-Qaeda operations on a regular basis. The United States has lost the war in Iraq, but the "long war" against Islamist extremism will surely continue. The most pressing issue now is how not to lose the battles to come.

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,1562913,00.html

The US Empire –Beginning of the End Game

November 24, 2006

By K Gajendra Singh


A 15th century Ottoman Sultan Murat II arranged for Mehmet II , not the favourite son , to be trained in the art of governing at the capital city Edirne ,under an able Grand Vizier. Mehmet II had been a wild and disobedient brat, so Murat II advised his teacher use of the rod , which was done to good effect. A Sunni, Sultan Mehmet II fell under the unwholesome influence of a Shia cleric, fought with the Grand Vizier and the military Janissaries rebelled. Before Mehmet II could create further mess, Murat II returned from Manisa, where he had retired for spiritual pursuits and took back the reins of the empire.

US President George W. Bush, has made such an unholy mess of US polity and its foreign policy that Papa George W. H Bush, a former President , had to create a bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Commission, not only to salvage , whatever remains of his son's Presidency, but to arrest the fast decline of the hyper power, still with enormous powers of destruction. Bush courtiers, led by the Neo-cons with their racist Staussian policies, till 2003 were claiming Washington to be the new Rome, but alas without redeeming graces of an empire, are now ratting on the Bush Regime.

With the Ottoman star on the rise , after the course correction , Mehmet II went on to conquer Constantinople in 1453 , became Fethi (the Victorious ) and extinguished the millennia old Byzantine empire. This laid the foundations for the Ottoman expansion westwards who twice knocked at the Gates of Vienna, a memory which still rankles ,which Europe now uses to keep Turkey outside the Europe Union . The ebb and flow of domination between the East and the West is as old as history, beginning with the Greek –Persian rivalry. US led Christian West, now dominates and exploits Muslim Middle East, Asia and Africa and is ranged against Orthodox Slavs. Iranians remain a hard nut to crack.

Bush has only succeeded in putting the US empire's decline into fast forward mode. Nothing is likely to reverse the course , much to the relief of most of the world , victim of its unilateralist policies. In 6 years USA ,from being a fairly popular country , with its many good points in spite of flaws , has become one of the most unpopular .The US regime has become the most hated , with Bush being rated a greater danger to the world peace than even North Korean dictator Kim Il Jong, even among neighbours and allies like UK.

On Papa Bush's course correction, let me quote from Tom Engelhardt ;

"Sooner or later, failure has a way of stripping most of us of our dreams and pretensions.

'So let's start with a tiny history of failure. George W. Bush's life trajectory of failing upward has had a rhythm to it -- and a rubric, "crony capitalism." Daddy's friends and contacts helped him into and -- after he failed -- out of the oil business, into and out of the baseball business, into and now, it seems, out of the failed game of global politics. His is, as the Boston Globe's Michael Kranish and John Aloysius Farrell put it back in 2002, "the story of a man who struck out numerous times before being bailed out by big hitters who often were family members, friends, or supporters of his father."

'It's appropriate, then, that the man who bailed him out in Florida when he essentially lost the presidency in 2000, Bush family consigliere James A. Baker III, would reappear six years later, in the wake of another failed election, to bail him out again now that he's screwed up the oil heartlands of the planet.

"Daddy -- we're talking here about former President George H.W. Bush -- has three adopted boys: His former National Security Advisor (and alter ego) Brent Scowcroft, who went into opposition to the younger Bush's Iraq policy even before the invasion of 2003 and now lurks quietly in the wings; his former CIA Director Robert Gates; and Baker."

When driven by the Neo-Cons and other war lords , the Bush Administration was beating the war drums against Iraq , in my Asia Times article of 24 August, 2002 , "Bush Family's Phony wars" I had warned that the invasion of Iraq would open a Pandora's box in the region. As history showed it is easy to start a war but difficult to predict its ultimate outcome . ( Extracts below from the article are italicized )

"For the Bush family, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is the tempting Apple in the Middle Eastern Garden of Eden. The results of succumbing to the temptation to take a bite could be as disastrous as they were for Adam and Eve. "

Bush is now received formally only because he is the US President .People from Britain to India demonstrate against his visit .A few days ago in Indonesia , there were vociferous protests against his visit , with his handlers risking a bare 6 hours stay in the country. In the most populous Muslim nation, US popularity has come down from 70% in 2001 to 30 % now ,as it has all around the globe even among allied nations. At the Asian Pacific summit in Vietnam, leaders rebuffed Bush's line on north Korea , which has become a nuclear power with missiles, because of flawed US policy and its preoccupation with the Iraqi quagmire.

In the 7 November mid-term US elections ,in which his Republican party lost control of both the Senate and the House and many Governor mansions, when many party candidates declined to even have Bush for canvassing , he has become a dead 'lame duck' . Pre-election polls showed electorate opposed to Iraq war and Bush's performance by 2 to 1.You can not fool all the people all the time , not even the Americans , where 5 big corporations controlling 90% of US media have kept US public misinformed. But nearly three thousand GI body bags from Iraq war and twenty thousand maimed and injured GIs can no longer be kept hidden.

Americans proudly call their state 'US Incorporated', which it has truly become, a mighty but a dangerous company ; manufacturing , selling arms and using them recklessly all around the world ( while experimenting with chemicals and depleted Uranium munitions ) The Mongols , Turks and other wild tribes used arms for expanding empires but in US Inc , arms manufacture and its use has become an end itself , to hell with the US public interest. From hundreds of billions of US taxpayers money spent so far since the illegal invasion of Iraq , the US arms manufacturers remain the main beneficiaries . They are Lockheed Martin , Boeing ,Northrop Grumman ,Raytheon , General Dynamics , Honeywell Halliburton, BAE Systems and thousands of smaller defense companies and subcontractors .

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th US President in his Farewell Address on Jan. 17, 1961 said ,"[The] conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." --

But now this monster has imposed itself on USA and is expanding , going for more lethal and profitable means of destruction even against international treaties and conventions .The end of the Cold War did not reduce this monster's appetite .US now spends over $ 400 billion on defence ie for attacking other nations , almost equal to what the rest of the world does .Russia spends a mere fraction of it. Members of US Congress are too deeply involved through lobbies and influence peddling and keep this monster alive and kicking. Tame generals after retirement can look forward to cushy jobs in the defence industry. Currently this monster is fed by an almost equal US trade deficit.

The other players in the ruling US oligarchy are energy interests whose members and nominees are the major decision makers in the US Administration .President Bush , Vice-President Dick Cheney , Secretary of State Condi Rice , US Ambassador in Baghdad , you name it .While Americans with gas guzzlers , who contribute half carbon dioxide to climate warming , have paid dearly at the gas station , by manipulation and insider trading US and UK oil multinationals have reaped massive profits .But to US chagrin ,higher oil prices has enriched energy rich Russia, Iran and Venezuela and stand up to USA. While US hold over oil reserves is becoming shaky in the Middle East , emerging economic powers China and India are tying up energy resources around the world .

"In 1991 George Bush Sr sought the removal of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. He failed and left the region in a mess. Now his son, President George W Bush, having inherited Dick Cheney and other chieftains from his father's presidency, is pursuing the family vendetta. Ordinary Iraqis continue to pay the price of this vendetta, with more than half a million children reported to have died from lack of medicines and malnutrition since the 1990 embargo. Iraq's US-friendly neighbors like Jordan and Turkey are suffering too. –

" It is difficult to know what to believe of the leaks regarding the US's current options to oust Saddam, ranging from assassination, fomenting a coup or internal rebellion, air strikes against Baghdad and other Iraqi command centers, to a vast amphibious invasion with massive air support, involving up to 250,000 soldiers. The latest plan, involving around 60,000 troops backed by heavy air power, will begin with a swift attack on Saddam's elite Republican Guards around Baghdad, in the hope that the regular Iraqi army would then abandon Saddam. Such balderdash. The result of any such actions could be as catastrophic as Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden."

The current plans being discussed either by the Administration or by the incoming Democrats party , equally complicit in the illegal invasion of Iraq ( as were the Labour and Conservative parties in UK ) are as fanciful as the plans leaked out before the invasion or those actually implemented .

" Secretary of State Colin Powell, one of a few sane voices in the administration, remains opposed to a military strike just as he was in 1991, as it has no clear strategic objectives. Recent media leaks from the Pentagon and the State Department suggested that "many senior US military officers contend that Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat and that the United States should continue its policy of containment rather than invade Iraq". Soon another leak countered that some in the Establishment favored an "inside-out" plan to "take Baghdad and one or two key command centers and weapons depots first, in hopes of cutting off the country's leadership and causing a quick collapse of the government". Such a plan was once dismissed by General Anthony Zinni, the US Middle East envoy, as a recipe for a "Bay of Goats" disaster, like the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba."

Recently , the Pentagon suggested three options for Iraq : send in more troops, shrink the force but stay, or pull out. These have been described as Go Big, Go Long and Go Home. But one solution gaining favour among military commanders is summed up as "Go Big but Short While Transitioning to Go Long". No Go home for the time being.

"A US attack could dangerously destabilize the region, harm the global economy, and infuriate Arab and Muslim masses. Former British chief of staff Field Marshal Lord Bramall, warned in a letter to the Times that an invasion would pour "petrol rather than water" on the flames and provide al-Qaeda with more recruits. He quoted a predecessor who during the 1956 Suez crisis said: "Of course we can get to Cairo, but what I want to know is what the bloody hell we do when we get there?"

But Bush Administration driven by Neo-Cons , Iraqi quislings like Ahmed Chalabi and Iyyad Alawi thought that after the "Shock and Awe" , the Iraqi natives will welcome US troops with flowers and obey commands in spite of the history of successful Iraqi resistance against British occupation in 1920 and 30s. So much for planning.

Powell was cajoled into lying about WMDs in the Security Council before the invasion , smirching his own standing and seriously denting US credibility in the world. After he was eased out, his chief aide publicly denounced the cabal of Cheney , Defence Secretary Rumsfeld and other neo-cons for having high jacked US policy making . Even when it was proved by US teams that there were no WMDs or plans for nuclear bombs or connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda , Cheney and others continued to disseminate lies .A retired US Ambassador , who exposed the US lie on Iraq getting Uranium from Niger, was harassed , cover of his wife Valery Plame , a CIA operative exposed , a crime under US laws.


"Bay of Goats"

US and UK troops now face a Dunkirk in Iraq , with US convoys being stopped near the Kuwait border and mercenaries escorting them being abducted .The time for escape is running out from the blow back of the 'Desert Storm". Billions of dollars have been outsourced to mercenaries outfits and others with little audit or control over the loot. Even the British , who occupy regions inhabited by Shias , who were happy with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime but oppose foreign occupation , are quitting Basra and are camping in the safety of the Desert , protected by jets and helicopter gun ships .

" However, there is room for hope that worse may not come to worst: a saving grace of the US constitutional system of checks and balances is that Bush may be the most powerful man in the world, but he can't ignore Congress. And, however much George Bush Sr might hate Saddam, he would not want his son's presidency to end in disgrace."

It is quite clear that such hopes based on "US constitutional system of checks and balances ' did not materialize .The system has degenerated and collapsed and needs drastic overhaul . It is morphing into a dictatorship , with Patriot laws , racial profiling , unauthorized telephone tapping and spying in universities .The retraction of liberties in UK is equally bad , with big brother watching every move on video cameras and hundreds of British born and bred Muslims ready to volunteer even as suicide bombers.

A people elect the government they deserve as they did in USA in 2000 and 2004 .Only in USA a Presidency can be won by legal jiggery pokey , when lawyers , even when elevated to the august Supreme Court still remain loyal party lawyers and did not allow votes for Al Gore, Bush's rival to be counted . This has for ever tarnished the standing and credibility of US legal system and its democratic pretensions. It is not the only fundamental flaw from which the US democracy suffers . How can there be democracy , when 5 Corporate entities control media ,where billions of dollars are required to be collected against IOY's to fight elections . There are lobbies galore , more than 50 for each Congressman , which spend US$ 2.4 Billion (Billion ) a year in wining, dining and corrupting the lawmakers .The many Congress scandals are only a tip of the iceberg of corruption.

Most of the Congressmen are millionaires and each term enriches them further .No wonder the poor in US remain neglected , their number increasing and income disparities widening . There are 37 million poor , one in every four blacks . The top 1 percent of the population now owns 33.4 percent of US wealth while the bottom 50 percent has 2.5 percent. The Bush-Cheney team has racked up another $3 trillion in debt in just 6 years. The US national debt now stands at $8.4 trillion dollars while the trade deficit has ballooned to $800 billion nearly 7% of GDP

Unless these and other flaws are corrected , US will remain an incorporated company and not a true democracy. It has morphed into a vehicle for the corporate interests , of the corporate interests and by the corporate interests .Period .Capitalism may be driven by greed , but in USA , greed has become end all and be all , the new faith and cult .Rampant consumerism has become its daily ritual , planet earth warming may be damned .Greedy scientists can be hired to say whatever you want , that tobacco smoking was not linked to cancer .

"Bush left reality behind. Now we are all trapped'

US analyst William Pfaff recently wrote ,"For Americans, Iraq has ceased to be a video game running along the edge of public consciousness. The midterm congressional elections demonstrate that the US public wants to get out of Iraq almost as much as the British, as does the attention suddenly given to the Baker-Hamilton Commission, which was actually set up months ago.

"But how is exit to be accomplished? Clearly the White House does not know, nor does the US army. The Baker-Hamilton Commission is unlikely to know, as its members were chosen because they represent the higher reaches of the conventional wisdom.

"In America, it's as though Bush, his inner cabinet, and the neocons have been playing a video game, with fictional characters and victims, virtual death and torture. Now the disc has suddenly finished, and it's time to shut down the player.

"This is not just a figure of speech. American policy has been running on images rather than evidence of real nations and people doing things for real human motives. It has been populated by abstractions: Global Terrorist Conspiracies, Rogue Nations, Fanatics Who Hate Our Freedoms, Generations of Terrorism and The Global Menace of Al-Qaeda.

"We are the leading nation, the most moral, born with the redemptive mission to create what the Puritan preacher Jonathan Winthrop called the 'City on the Hill', the democracy 'of the people and by the people' that originated the modern world with our repudiation of monarchy and inherited privilege, establishing the greatest of republics, saving the Four Freedoms for the world by winning (alone!) both First and Second World Wars, then the Cold War, and now confronting the ultimate test of the 'long war' against Evil itself, incarnate as Terror.

"Today this is the language of government, journalism, politics and foreign policy in the US, spoken in the policy discussions at Washington think-tanks and on the editorial pages of newspapers.

"Is this Orwellian? Or is it just demagogy, politicians' lies, White House spin, journalistic laziness, formulations conceived to sell books? Or could it be cynical manipulation by apprentice dictators, energy industry and weapons-maker magnates, closet fascists? It is not Orwellian in that the neocon ideologues, George Bush and Tony Blair, certainly believe all this. They are not being manipulated.

"It is not Orwellian because the creators of this cartoon-like conceptual world have themselves become actors in the virtual universe their ideas and actions have made. They have left reality behind - or they simply ignore it, as they did in invading Iraq."

Let me quote from another of my 4 year old piece "The decline of the American Century ' of 11 September, 2002 Asia Times online;

"If the American public were told that an attack on Iraq would not be like the 1990-91 computer game [ which the US media obediently disseminated ] and might cause many thousands of casualties (given the low US threshold last tested in Mogadishu), that Arabs might destroy oilfields which bring prosperity to oil companies and cheap gas to their cars, and that US nationals might even be attacked in Muslim countries, Bush's popularity would plummet immediately.

"What is needed is not regime change or so-called "US-ushered democracy" in Iraq (as in Afghanistan), in a region of Hama Rule "rule or die". Saudi Arabia is ruled by an incongruous alliance of luxury-loving princes and Wahhabis, who enforce medieval punishments at home and promote fanaticism abroad, yet Washington does not demand regime change there. Another repressive US-supported regime in Egypt continues to provide recruits for al-Qaeda. Opening a Pandora's box in the Middle East would release bottled-up historical forces with unpredictable results, like Ayatollah Khomeini after the ouster of the Shah of Iran.
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"The United States, with 5 percent of the world's population, controls 30 percent of world resources. And US corporate interests, forming perhaps 1 percent of this population, control these massive resources. They want to control the world without accountability, not even to the American people.

"Perhaps it is in the United States itself where its ill-informed and misinformed people need not just a regime change but a system change. Where energy and military-industry corporate interests have hijacked power from the people to pursue their narrow objectives. Where corporate chiefs enjoy coercive powers even the Communist Party chiefs in the former Soviet Union would have envied. Where blacks, Hispanics and the poor cannot freely choose a president (as in Florida, where only by not counting their votes did George Bush become the president).

The United States needs a regime and a system under which people can question, without being labeled unpatriotic or enemies, failures of a system that could not and cannot protect them."

What now;

The 10 key members of the Baker-Hamilton Commission are not military strategists or geopolitical thinkers who might offer a solution to Iraq , They are basically old establishment hands extending back to the Reagan era. Jim Baker , with help from his buddy Eduard Shevardnadze and a trusting and naïve Mikhail Gorbachev , frightened by Ronald Regan's threat of Star wars , and later a drugged Yeltsin, Soviet Union was dismantled , with West entering Russian strategic space .In Iraq and the region, those on the other side are apart from Iran, Syria , a resurgent and wiser Russia under Vladimir Putin and rising giant China , which holds US trillion dollars .

The situation is complex with great possibilities of the conflict spreading beyond Iraq . Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a key figure in the region recently told "Der Spiegel," "When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere, too." He concluded, "It would be as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars -- no one would be able to get a grip on the consequences."

Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, said, "We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups." He concluded grimly, "The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body."

Many in US have suggested partitioning Iraq .Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador, sees the consequences: "To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale."

Even the cold warrior Henry Kissinger, whom many would like to try for war crimes and who reportedly egged on Bush to stay the course till 'victory ' was achieved ,now admits a military victory in Iraq was no longer possible. He told the BBC that the dramatic collapse of Iraq would have "disastrous consequences."

Kissinger called for an international conference including Iraq's neighbors, the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and India and Pakistan to find out a solution.

Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations told SPIEGEL that the Middle East could become dangerous for years to come. He added that "the old Middle East -- an era which I believe has only recently ended -- was one in which the United States enjoyed tremendous dominance and freedom of maneuver. Oil was available at fairly low prices, the region was largely at peace. I believe largely because of the American decision to go to war in Iraq and how it has been carried out, --It's one of history's ironies that the first war in Iraq, a war of necessity, marked the beginning of the American era in the Middle East and the second Iraq war, a war of choice, has precipitated its end."

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in Geneva on 21 November that "The United States in a way is trapped in Iraq .It cannot stay and it cannot leave. There are those who maintain that its presence is a problem and there are those who say that if it leaves precipitously, the situation will get worse." He added that the departure of U.S. troops from Iraq "should not lead to a further deterioration of the situation." The goal should be to leave when Iraqi authorities can ensure a "reasonable, secure environment.

Annan, who retires at the end of the year said the war in Iraq, and the failure of the U.N. Security Council to prevent the invasion by U.S.-led forces, was the biggest regret he had from his 10-year tenure. "I firmly believe that the war could have been avoided," "The inspectors should have had a bit more time." US media dogs were launched at him when he described US invasion of Iraq against the UN Charter and hence illegal.

Annan welcomed moves to involve Syria and Iran in trying to foster stability in Iraq because it would help bring peace to the region.

New Moves;

News stories are appearing about the US contacts with the Iraqi Resistance , including Baker telling a Saddam Hussein lawyer that Tariq Aziz, former deputy prime minister, would be released from detention by the end of this year, hoping that he will negotiate with the US on behalf of the Baath Party leadership. Condi Rice has appealed to the Gulf Cooperation Council to serve as intermediaries between the US and armed Sunni resistance groups [ except Al Qaeda]

National Security adviser Stephen Hadley carried a six-point message for Iraqi officials on his recent trip to Baghdad: to include Iraqi resistance and opposition leaders in any initiative towards national reconciliation; general amnesty for the armed resistance fighters, dissolve the Iraqi commission charged with banning the Baath party; cancel any federalism proposal to divide Iraq into three regions, and combine central authority for the central government with greater self-rule for local governors , distribute oil revenues in a fair manner to all Iraqis, including the Sunnis whose regions lack the resources.

Prime Minister Al-Maliki was not agreeable since his Shiite followers believe that their historic moment has arrived after one thousand years of Sunni domination. Leaks of talks with the Resistance have been common since even 2003, There is no reason to disbelieve that these US measure are nothing more than the historic tactics of divide-and-rule.

Hard facts on the ground;

It is quite clear that the accusations like WMDs, Iraq's nuclear program and Iraq's linkages with Al Qaeda were just excuses as the then US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz arrogantly boasted after the occupation .It was to control the region , rich in oil and after vanquishing Iran , even control the Caspian Sea basin energy resources too .Azerbaijan and Georgia are already in the US pocket .Wolfowitz, now President of the World Bank , also told the US Congress that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for its reconstruction and enrich US multinationals .Yes , crony capitalism and rampant loot of Iraq revenues have enriched US companies like Haliburton , Bechtel and Republican party members apart from the corrupt ruling quisling government in Iraq .

Except the oil ministry everything in Iraq , even the human heritage Museums were allowed to be looted, ( but because of the Resistance the oil production has been less than during Saddam days ) but under Pentagon supervision , US has gone ahead and built many military bases , about which very little information comes out. Nor is the US media curious to write about it. The US has 55 bases of different sizes in Iraq ; five or six of these are massive including Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, the huge base first named Camp Victory adjacent to Baghdad International Airport, and al-Asad Air Base in western Anbar province, are enormous - big enough to be reasonable-sized US towns with multiple bus routes, neighborhoods, a range of fast-food restaurants, multiple shops, pools, mini-golf courses and the like. Ready for long stay!

Several billion dollars have already been sunk into them. Balad, for instance, already handled the levels of daily air traffic one would normally see at Chicago's ultra-busy O'Hare and being enlarged .The four mega-bases would serve as permanent US jumping-off spots in what Bush administration edcall "the arc of instability" .In all the work is still in progress.

A United Press International reported: "Following hints US troops may remain in Iraq for years, the United States is reportedly building a massive military base at Arbil , in Kurdish northern Iraq." Iraqi Kurdistan , which has functioned as a US protectorate since 1991 Gulf war has always been a logical fallback position for US forces "withdrawing" from a failed Iraq. Turkey had accused Israel of training Kurds there for subversive activities against neighbours .

And the new US embassy building now going up inside Baghdad's well-fortified Green Zone and , almost the size of Vatican City, with "100% independence from city utilities", not to speak of a "swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court and American Club, all housed in a recreation building" and its own anti-missile system. One wonders how long US could use it .Recently a car bomb was attempted inside the secure Green Zone fortress .

You bet USA will easily be parted from these strategic assets .

Barring some exceptions, the Western discourse inflicted on the world with control of media and communications , specially from USA is racist and colonist.

A human tragedy of biblical proportions;

The prestigious British medical journal Lancet based on John Hopkins Medical school study estimated the death of Iraqi following the US invasion and occupation at over 655,000 ( equal to the American civil war ). Similar methodology is used to compute deaths in other wars and famines around the world. When asked at a media conference if, given the Lancet study, Bush stood by the number he had previously cited of 30,000 Iraqi deaths,( in December , 2005 ) .Bush responded, "You know, I stand by the figure. A lot of innocent people have lost their life - 600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is just - it's not credible." Western leaders and media have either ignored these colossal crimes or followed Bush line.

From Colin Powell to US Generals like Tommy Franks all have reiterated ;" We do not do body counts." But whenever a Western hostage is taken or a western soldier killed , you have the whole family , relations and friends and neighbours being interviewed on Western channels. As if non westerners were an inferior human breed.

According to the United Nations' refugee agency (UNHCR) more than three million Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homes to other areas of Iraq and to neighbouring countries are facing bleak future with UNHCR funds having been reduced. 1.5 million Iraqis are internally displaced in Iraq, while 1.6 million Iraqis are refugees in neighbouring countries, the majority in Syria and Jordan.

The discourse on West spreading democracy is just a different version of Christian West's ' self evident' manifest destiny to civilize the natives of the world .Look at the temerity in describing the illegal invasion of Iraq ; Operation Iraqi freedom. And the charade of bringing democracy in the Middle East , when the Western record has been suppression of nationalist and democratic aspirations and forces all around the world . Now that Iraqis whether Sunnis or Shias remain fiercely opposed to the occupation, Neo-cons mutter 'Iraqis don't deserve freedom and democracy." They are an inferior breed.

Western leaders have prostituted words like liberty, freedom and democracy. Nobody likes to be colonised or enslaved ; the Turks, the Algerians, the Vietnamese ,the Afghans , and the Iraqis who fought against the British occupation even in 1920 and 30s. Still the arrogant West wants to colonise, exploit and impose its values on other nations. Chapters and verses have been written in Western media that the Iraqi occupation and colonization would have succeeded with more troops . It would have only meant even more horrendous bloodletting then taking place now , over 100 Iraqis being killed every day . The Vietnamese sacrificed 2 million people and the Algerians one million for their liberty.

Bush and Blair have only endangered the security of many European nations. UK has become the most exposed although some terror alerts were exaggerated for political reasons ie to impose curbs on freedom .Unless US policies are changed ,sooner than later USA will face resistance from its marginalised black community specially black Muslims. How the blacks and Hispanics have remained marginalized became clear at how the Katrina disaster was mishandled.


K Gajendra Singh, Indian ambassador (retired), served as ambassador to Turkey and Azerbaijan from August 1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served terms as ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies. Copy right with the author. E-mail Gajendrak@hotmail.com.