Rails from the Radical Middle...

Election ’04: Malice in Wonderland Meets the Armageddon Complex

by Solomon Bell

10-24-04 

Am I the only one standing in wonder and disgust at the surreal quality of this pathetic presidential race? Not only do the candidates trip through Wonderland with there stupefying banality, but the elite media trips right along with them, yammering about it all with utmost seriousness. The only thing serious about these elections is what’s at stake for the world, and given that chunk of heavy gravity, you’d think a commensurate reality would be center stage. Instead, it appears that said gravity has tipped the scales right past reality, through the looking glass and down the flippin’ rabbit hole.      

Just what is going on here? Why does the elite media, including the evil right wing Fox News, not push the candidates and their insipid minions beyond the bullshit rhetoric and into substance? Better yet, why don’t they ignore the insipid minions and dig out the truth themselves? Let me answer that. They don't want to. 

Prime example: Mr. Media Tough Guy, (and phone sex aficionado) Bill O’Reilly interviewed Bush a couple of weeks ago. Bill has long railed about the border situation and the problems it poses, the most important being homeland security.   Anybody paying attention, which is to say nobody in the elite media, knows that Middle Easterners have been sneaking across the Mexican border in veritable droves.

In June a group of 53 were captured near Wilcox, Arizona, while another hundred or so escaped. No matter, because most of the 53 were released into Arizona pending hearings! Texas congressman Solomon Ortiz has said, “Similar incidents are happening all over the place. It's very, very scary". A border agent on the case had this to say: "These guys didn't speak Spanish, and they were speaking to each other in Arabic. We are told not to speak to the media about it. It's ridiculous that we don't take this more seriously.”  Indeed, the border patrol has been ordered by Under Secretary for Border and Transportation Security Asa Hutchinson, not to speak to the media about Arabs and other possible terrorists crossing the border with Mexico.       

Twenty-five Chechens (the good Muslims who slaughtered hundreds of children at Beslan) were getting across the border just about the time of the O’Reilly-Bush interview. Just about the time O’Reilly, either in a lapse of courage or a colossal fit of incompetence, failed to ask Bush about border security as concerns terrorism.

A simple little question from O'Reilly like: “Mr. President, how can we believe that you are serious about homeland security while Middle Easterners, quite possibly terrorists, are sneaking across our borders with virtual impunity?” never left his lips. Neither did, "Mr. President, why did Asa Hutchison order the border patrol not to speak to the media about possible Arab terrorists crossing the border?" Oh that Bill. Just “lookin’ out for the folks”!   

But it’s far from just O’Reilly’s selling out to power, it’s the vast majority of the entire elite media’s selling out that has us immersed in this absurd reality.  Nobody is asking the right questions, let alone probing the story independently. I mean c’mon, how is it possible that Arabs and other Muslims sneaking into the country in large and well organized numbers doesn’t make the front pages, lead the nightly news and become a major election issue? Why doesn't Kerry, who will grasp at anything, pound on this? Are these clowns really risking our national security over the possibility of offending Hispanic voters? Go ask Alice, but I'll tell you this: In the event that any future terrorist attack in the US is traced back to the border, whoever is president, ought to be impeached on the spot.  

More from the Wonderland front… The elite media as well as the Bush team knows full well that John Kerry got a dishonorable discharge from the Navy, and was stripped of his medals. Jimmy Carter fixed all that in 1978, which is now the official year of his "honorable" discharge. But since Kerry will not release his military records in full, and the media refuses to pressure him to the way they did Bush over his National Guard service, it remains a "secret".  

Then there's the elite media and the Democrats in cahoots, out there still flinging the  “Go it alone”, “No links between Saddam and Al Qaeda”, “Halliburton is evil”, “Iraq is a diversion in the War on Terror”, “The economy is the worst since Herbert Hoover” crap, while the seemingly hapless Republicans flounder in their tepid attempts to counter it. They are so restrained it’s almost as if they want to lose this election.

For example, Dick Cheney is often accused of linking Saddam to 9/11, and yet he never has. The thing is, he could. When Cheney says there are NO links between Saddam and 9/11, that’s when he’s lying! There are links, including a three-day meeting in Malaysia between an Iraqi agent, two 9/11 hijackers, and Ramzi bin al Shibh, a major Al Qaeda planner of 9/11!

Nevertheless, links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, as well as other terrorist groups training inside Iraq at Salman Pak, are well established and numerous.  (See “Quagmire of Spin: Saddam’s Links to Al Qaeda” for details.) That the Democrats and the elite media are continually misleading and outright lying to the public on this, insidious as it may be, is hardly surprising. That the Bush boys refuse to forcefully utilize the overwhelming evidence they have to counter the Democrats and their shills in the elite media, well, this again is Wonderland territory.  Like I said, its almost as if they are trying to lose.  Note that 527 groups trying to get Saddam/Al Qaeda  commercials on television are being refused, even by Fox. Just what the hell is going on here?   

As for Kerry and Iraq… Are you fucking kidding me? He and Edwards have succeeded only in twisting themselves into a two-headed pretzel, while all the morons in Wonderland nod in agreement, as if they are actually making sense. Boatloads of wet whale shit have been successfully redefined as “nuance”. As late as January of 2003, just before the war in Iraq that Kerry voted for, he was out there saying that Saddam was on the verge of having nuclear weapons and that he must be stopped. Edwards went so far as to say what Bush did not, that the threat from Saddam was “imminent”. 

And now they say Bush is a liar, and it’s the wrong war, wrong place, wrong time. The Democrats and the elite media naturally, see no contradictions here.

Kerry has no plan for Iraq whatsoever, other than to do exactly what Bush is doing only "better".  How? By undercutting the morale of the troops day in and day out, only 12% of whom support him? By insulting our 30-nation coalition day in and day out? By insulting Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi, calling him a Bush puppet? What the fuck kind of diplomacy is this from the great monotone drone?     

One Kerry/Edwards ploy is to paint Bush as out of touch with reality in Iraq. Forty-three senators to date have been to Iraq. None of them have been Kerry or Edwards. Apparently watching C-BS News has them more in touch with reality on the ground in Iraq than actually touching down in Iraq would.

I do think the Bush boys are out of touch with reality, not on Iraq (at least not at this point) but on how to deal with a hostile national and global media. They pretend like it’s 1956 and the media is more or less fair. They know different of course, but they choose instead to play an exasperating prevent defense. Kerry ads wreaking of Michael Moore are ripping Bush to shreds, while Bush ads smell more like Mary Poppins in comparison.   

Instead of standing up for themselves and challenging the propagandists in the media, Rove and the Republicans more or less grin and bear it. They think it’s too risky, that they should stay above the fray. They don’t fully realize that the times they have a changed, and that most people understand how biased and willfully incompetent the elite media is, and therefore are extremely frustrated with any leader who refuses to take them to task. Bush has taken more unjust, skewed up abuse than any other leader in world history, and in this rabbit hole reality he has been made more broadly hated than Hitler or Stalin were then, or bin Laden is now. 

How could this be? What makes this madness possible? 

Iraq and the Armageddon Question

My theory on this irrational fear and hatred of Bush is that it’s rooted in what I call The Armageddon Complex.  Prophecies of the “end times” appear throughout world cultures and religions. They all seem to point to these times. Many “end time” hysterias have come and gone of course, but none have had all the necessary ingredients. These times just may. War in the Middle East, Islamic bombs in madcap Pakistan and perhaps soon in Iran and possibly already in the hands (in the form of missing Russian suitcase bombs) of Al Qaeda, not to mention that zany Kim Jong Il in North Korea, all lend credence to the psychology. There are other factors as well, scientific factors, including the earth being simultaneously inside reoccurring mass extinction and magnetic field reversal windows. 

Could this mass Bush hysteria be a visceral reaction to a not so subconscious fear of the apocalypse? Does the left not brand Bush a religious zealot, as a strict believer in Bible prophecy? Do they not fear Bush as a crusader moving towards The Rapture et al, whose unwise actions may facilitate a future of mass death and destruction?

I see it in their faces. I hear it in their voices. They are afraid and they are angry and they are irrational and the combination makes them extremely dangerous. On some level they seek to stop the march to Armageddon. But because they are irrational, because they do not see the Bush offensive as it is intended—which in effect is to preempt any kind of Armageddon scenario—they do not understand that it is their own ill conceived actions against Bush that are making such a scenario increasingly possible. Let us not forget that it was the Left’s shortsighted opposition to Vietnam that politicized it into a Johnson/McNamara disaster and eventually forced a withdrawal that resulted in the deaths of more than 1 million innocent Vietnamese, deaths that John Kerry's lack of wisdom played a role in.        

Not that Bush is by any means blameless. His biggest and most liberal mistake, which opened the door to hell in the Sunni Triangle, was in buying the “Happy Iraqi” scenario and not going in with overwhelming force. He tried to fight a politically correct war from the get-go, not fully appreciating that the iron fist must come before the velvet glove, or the glove gets ripped to shreds. We have seen the results of the “velvet fist” approach.  

That being said, Iraq is still salvageable. But is Bush? His wretched communication with the American public in every single aspect concerning the Middle East is precisely why this election is a toss-up heading into the final week.  He was not forthright with the true long-term strategy for Iraq and the region, and the complex rationale for it. He refuses to take the UN, France, Russia, Germany and China to task for their betrayal, for 'diplomatic' reasons. 

The world is at odds with the US over the UN and the above four nations. They opposed the war in Iraq not for any altruism whatsoever, but because they were in bed with Saddam, spooning no doubt, and up to their upturned noses in corruption. It is largely the weapons of these four nations, sold illegally to Saddam right up until the war began, that are killing coalition forces and innocent Iraqi’s today.  

And yet, because Bush and his administration are so woefully inept, even mysteriously inept at articulating their case—a case that if fully understood is compelling in the extreme—he has become the bad guy in the eyes of half of America and 70% of the world. South Koreans think he’s more dangerous than the megalomaniac to the North; Europeans think he’s more dangerous than the mad mullahs in Iran.

The Bush communications ineptitude aside, it is the willfully ignorant elite media fueled by a malevolent Mad Hatter ideology—more than the mistakes in Iraq—which has created the dangerous surreality in which we now find ourselves. Welcome to Malice in Wonderland. 

I’ve mentioned twice that the Bush team is playing the election almost as if they want to lose. I almost want them to. Perhaps only the unmitigated disaster of a Kerry presidency can wake the left the fuck up.  For as long as the left continues lost in its malevolent little sleepwalk, and the right continues to try and appease them, then we will continue on towards the realization of our own worst nightmare. It is not inconceivable to me that the Armageddon Complex may one day prove a self-fulfilling prophecy.   

Though I am very frustrated with the kid glove Bush campaign, I still think that they will end up pulling  it out by a few points. What wonderful sport it will be then to watch the depressed head-cases on the Left pulling their hair out to figure out why. Never have a more clueless clan of fools roamed the American political landscape.  

~Solomon Bell

TheArtichoke.org

Fahrenheist  9/11

7-11-04

For Michael Moore, the heist began even before the filming of Fahrenheit 9/11, when he ripped off Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, much to the consternation of Mr. Bradbury. From there the disrespect and dishonesty only got worse, resulting in a perversely cynical cinematic attempt to mind heist the misinformed and willfully malleable among us.       

I screened Moore’s class project for the Joseph Goebbles School of Propaganda recently, and ended up grading it a D, for dereliction of truth. I would have given it an F for flat out false, but it was rather clever at times in the way it spun selected facts with news footage in order to give the impression of truth. The editing is good sleight of hand, and Moore certainly deserves some cajone' points for his relentless, shameless audacity.   

In grading the film I tried to imagine myself in the goose-stepping shoes of Herr Goebbles himself. It was Goebbles who said, "Propaganda has only one object: to conquer the masses. Every means that furthers this aim is good; every means that hinders it is bad." In other words, the ends justify the means. Clearly Moore has taken this to heart: anything and everything, regardless of veracity, to get Bush out of office. Still I think Goebbles would be highly critical of his student’s work, not because he didn’t show great promise in executing his hit piece, but because he was so embarrassingly obvious in doing so. 

The old artist’s axiom of ‘less is more’ has never been Moore, in any way, shape manner or form.  Though our slovenly super hero of the maniacal left employs many of his Meister’s old tricks of vilification: ominous music; a languorous lingering on the ugliest and most embarrassing Bush visuals he could dig up; unceasing factual distortions done in “knowing” voice-over while misleading the viewer with numerous cherry-picked quotes, non contextual shots and stilted sequences; and finally, the propagandist’s coup de grace—the rank exploitation of raw emotion—in this case the anguish of a confused and overwrought mother looking to blame Bush for the death of her son in Iraq.       

The only people fooled by Fahrenheit 9/11 are fools going in. I sat in a theatre full of these mutant Maoists, ears peeled. With few exceptions, what I heard was the usual paranoid, factually vacuous, often hysterical mantra of the churlish left. If their willful ignorance weren’t so mind blowingly maddening and ultimately frightening—it would be rip snortin’, knee-slappin’, belly-ache hilarious.

What does it say when Fidel Castro shows the film on Cuban national television? When the terrorist Hezbollah steps forward to help with distribution in the Middle East? When communist China cuts its extra thick red tape and opens its arms to an expedited nationwide distribution?   Think about that, dear liberals.

I attended the film with my younger sister who—at 32, with no particular political leanings or expertise but a good head on her shoulders—was both angry (except for a couple of places where even Bush supporters couldn’t help but laugh) and incredulous all the way through. She was angry with Moore for his perverse disrespect, and incredulous at the audience who was lapping it up. Only misinformed cynics and card carrying Leftists could grant Moore a verisimilitude—normally implicit in an actual documentary—that is grossly unearned, it’s that over-the-top. I’d call Fahrenheit 9/11 a mockumentary, but that would be a disservice to serious mockumentarians everywhere. Perhaps a new word should be coined to describe Moore’s work, crockumentary perhaps, but then again ‘propaganda film’ or ‘character assassination piece’ works just fine. 

If Moore were to turn the tables and make a hit piece about Bill Clinton, we would be seeing Clinton portrayed as a congenital liar, fraud, extortionist, former cocaine abuser and grafter, serial philanderer, rapist, traitor, benefactor to dozens of highly suspicious death causing "accidents" and murders, and leader of the most corrupt administration in US history. Scary thing is, Moore’s Clinton film would be a whole lot closer to the truth than Fahrenheit 9/11. It would have to be.  

One of the most laughable of Moore’s sequences is where Iraq is portrayed as a bucolic playground of love and kite flying giggles just before Moore so artfully cuts to the spectacular destruction of “Shock and Awe”.  Apparently there was no footage available of Saddam having limbs hacked off, the desert fertilized by hundreds of thousands of human corpses, relatives forced to watch loved ones fed through wood chippers, or Dobermans eating one of Uday Hussein’s rape victims--alive!

Central to Moore’s celluloid delusion, is inferring time and time again, through the abuse of peripheral facts and outright falsehoods, that Bush, bin Laden and the Saudis were in cahoots over 9/11.  He presents exactly ZERO hard evidence to support his fantasy.  Instead he makes visual allusion after visual allusion of ordinary news footage voiced over with sweet conspiratorial nothings. He also lies outright, saying that Bush arranged for the bin Laden family to be secretly whisked out America while American air space was closed. Even leftist hero Richard Clarke has stepped forward to rebuke Moore, stating, just as he testified before the 9/11 Commission, that he alone gave them permission to leave the country, AFTER American airspace had been reopened.  

Moore also tries very hard to make sinister hay over Bush’s initial reaction to 9/11 while reading to schoolchildren. In Moore’s eyes the president’s deep look of concern, a.k.a. "deer in headlights" gaze, with his mind obviously churning away as he tries not to let on in front of the cameras and children, is a sure sign of evil foreknowledge, or at least gross incompetence. It never occurs to Moore that since Bush was in the public eye at the moment, and initial information was sketchy and confused, that he was buying time while his staff was working to get a clearer picture of what was going down in order to react as effectively as possible. Nor does it occur to Moore (or the Bill Mahr's of the world) that the machine---the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, NORAD et al---does not require a presidential decree to kick into gear. The wheels were already in very serious motion. (By the way, John Kerry said that at the time he sat down and couldn't even think for 40 minutes!). What should Bush have done, leapt up and "rushed to war", half-cocked? Nor does Moore mentioned that Bush was instructed--via handwritten message held up off camera--to stay put for the time being. Now look, I’ll admit that he could have calmly excused himself and consulted his team in private sooner, but to take his quite understandable and acceptable reaction under the circumstances and leap to hyperbolically negative conclusions is the height of willfully blind partisanship.  

Then there’s the weapons of mass destruction debacle. Here again Moore calls Bush a liar. He lied about WMD to justify the war! Never mind that Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, the United Nations and every major intelligence agency on the planet believed the same thing. None of that matters, Bush lied! And of course, once again, it makes perfect sense. What better strategy could the Bush team employ than to lie about WMD to start a war, knowing full well the lie would be exposed after they invaded, thereby giving the mad left its most exploitable argument for getting Bush out of office. It’s fooking brilliant!  Sheer fooking genius it is! Oh that Carl Rove really knows his shit!  

Then there's the Florida 2000 debacle. Here again Moore lies and misleads with reckless disregard for the truth. First he tells us that Bush's cousin worked for Fox News on election night and made the network's call that Bush won Florida. This much is true. What Moore fails to tell us is that Bush's cousin, along with the other networks, had earlier projected Gore the winner. Then he leads us to believe that once FOX made the call for Bush, that this somehow forced the other networks into changing their calls as well, thereby beginning a grand conspiratorial snowball that rolled right up the steps of the US Supreme Court. Just one little problem with that---it was NOT Fox News that first changed the call from Gore to Bush, it was both CNN and CBS!**  

The idiotic contortions the Michael Moore’s of the world must do in order to believe the kind of unadulterated horse-crap showcased in Fahrenheit 9/11 are disturbing enough. That the left dominated global media fuels this insanity, and has in recent years viciously vilified a good man with a few honest shortcomings in Bush and deified a corrupt to-the-bone sociopath like Clinton, is even more disturbing than it is disgusting. What it says to me, like ringing a bell off my skull, is that far too many of us have our damn fool necks stuck down the rabbit hole but good. The only question remaining is how long will we wait—and will it be too late—before we finally manage to pull our heads out and see the world right side up and outside out again.  

Perhaps Meister Goebbles wouldn’t be so critical of Mr. Moore after all. Though his de facto, post mortem protégé’s work may be obvious and provably false to any independent thinker with an IQ above that of a chimpanzee, his target audience—just like the Meister’s target audience of budding young Nazis leading into WWII—are little more than sheep herding to the canine incantations of an inbred whelp.       

 ~Solomon Bell

Rails from the Radical Middle

TheArtichoke.org   

**The lies and deceits in election section of the film are especially pronounced, so beware. For an excellent, in depth vetting of Moore's film, please read Dave Kopel's "59 Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11", in which he soberly and factually breaks it all down, deceit by lie by lie by deceit. If you can handle the truth, dear liberals, go to: www.davekopel.com/Terror/Fiftysix-Deceits-in-Fahrenheit-911.htm

UNSCAM: Why the United Nations, France, Russia and the Global Media Scammed the World over Iraq

By Solomon Bell

7-1-04

The left dominated global media that was so fervent in its thinly veiled support for the French/Russian led opposition to the Iraq war, never reported the true motivation for it—which was to keep the covers on the bed of greed they shared so intimately with Saddam Hussein. Underneath those covers lay the single largest case of graft and corruption the world has ever seen—the UN sponsored Oil-for-Food Program, affectionately known as “UNSCAM”.

As it turns out, the nations on the UN Security Council that most stridently opposed the war—France, Russia, China—were the nations with the most to lose should the war take place. They were the nations most beholding to Saddam, the nations atop the genocidal megalomaniac’s bribes list; atop his armaments suppliers list—and hear this, dear  Liberals—atop its oil exploration and development contracts list. (No blood for oil was righter than you knew!)  All told, the four-poster bed these nations shared with Uncle Saddam was worth some $200 billion in fluffy anti-war pillows, satin sheets and goose down comforters.   

At the time of the UN Security Council debate over the war, the Mad Media—Euro and American alike—refused to investigate or report the then brewing Oil-for-Food scandal and how it was poisoning any chance of honest debate. They also failed to report that France and Russia were selling illegal arms and providing other forms of aid and comfort to the enemy. Not only did they ignore the truth, they trumpeted the lie—that the French led opposition to the war was legitimate, even altruistic.  

Russia was altruistic for 330 million barrels of oil in outright bribes and untold more millions of black market barrels purchased well below market prices. Russia had further multi-year oil deals in Iraq totaling more than $50 billion. In addition, Russia was the number one supplier of weaponry to Iraq; even selling them thousands of pairs of night vision goggles right up until the war began. Worse, they provided Saddam with radar jamming electronic equipment, with Russian technicians on the ground helping to fix the equipment after US warplanes bombed them. Only a direct call from Bush to Putin sent the Russians packing before the ground war began.

Former French ambassador to the UN Bernard Merimee; former French minister of the interior Charles Pasqua (who now works closely for/with Russian president Vladimir Putin); and the founder of the French-Iraqi Export Club, Michel Grimard, were altruistic for 32.1 million barrels of oil.  Notorious oil trafficker Patrick Maugein, a “cousin” to French president Jacques Chirac who introduced Maugein to Saddam specifically to broker oil, was altruistic for 25 million barrels. (Please note that the French High Court has recently preemptively granted president Chirac immunity from prosecution until after he leaves office). The French connection gets even more disgusting, not only with illegal arms sales, arms now killing American troops, but with French passports being provided to some of Saddam's high level thugs who used them to escape to Jordan, and possibly even to France.  

China, in addition to being the number two arms seller to Iraq, (China also sold weapons to the Taliban and provided training to Taliban forces in Afghanistan), was altruistic for their 22-year, multi-billion dollar oil exploration and development deal.  

UN Director of Oil-for Food, Benon Sevan, had his altruism secured for 7.3 million barrels of Iraqi crude, with millions more left unexecuted as coalition troops pushed into Iraq.

The UN under Secretary General Kofi Annan was altruistic for its 3% commission, which became the number one source of funding for the ten UN agencies involved in Oil-for-Food.

* * *

Oil-for-Food was originally designed to provide targeted relief for Iraqis suffering under UN sanctions. Under it, Saddam would be allowed to sell certain amounts of oil on the world market in exchange for food, medicines, hospital equipment, and to build water and sewage treatment facilities. 

What it became, with UN complicity and control provided by Kofi Annan and Benon Sevan, was a gigantic funding and money laundering operation for Saddam, who took some $67 billion into his coffers under Oil-for-Food. Some of it was legitimate. At least 21 billion of it went to fatten bank accounts, build palaces, and purchase massive amounts of illegal armaments from the aforementioned France, Russia and China. 

Let us not forget that it was Kofi Annan who personally negotiated Oil-for-Food with Saddam, and continually pushed to increase the scale of the program, even after he knew full well that it was rife with corruption. (Hopelessly outdated medicines and spoiled food shipments—shipments inspected unilaterally by a Swiss company with shady money ties to Annan’s son Kojo—from Europe and Russia were routine, with bribes paid to UN officials to look the other way).

The sick and tragic irony is that tens of thousands of Iraqi children targeted to be saved by Oil-for-Food, were in effect killed by it—knowingly.    

And still the plot thickens…

Did Saddam Fund Terror via Oil-for-Food?

There are at least two links already documented that the mainstream media and the Democrats refuse to recognize. Both involve oil traffickers hand picked by Saddam and approved by the U.N. under Oil-for-Food. One was a firm tied to a Liechtenstein trust that has since been designated by the U.N. itself as "belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda." The other was a Swiss-registered subsidiary of a Saudi oil firm that helped to fund the Taliban and quite likely Al Qaeda.  

I guess it’s just not newsworthy that Saddam may well have funded global terrorism under the cover of the UN and its supposed humanitarian relief program. This is yet another link between Saddam, terrorism and Al Qaeda, yet another link (see "Quagmire of Spin") that blowhard ideological fools like Ted Kennedy and Al Gore will deny and subvert--with the media mainstream shilling for them all along the way.   

All this, all the above and oh so much more, and still the cat called UNSCAM is  having trouble getting its head out of the bag. Why? Because the very same Mad Media that “unilaterally” opposed the war is doing all it can to push that nasty feline of truth back in the sack. The Oil-for-Food scam, again—the biggest in the history of the world—is being massively under-reported, so much so that most people are not even aware of it, let alone the gravity of it. Further, sad to say, it appears the US may itself be hindering the investigation—leveraging it—to get France, Russia et al to support US efforts in the UN and Iraq. 

This is a mistake. Chirac is rabidly anti-American, not to mention immune from prosecution, and will take his chances. Bush needs to stand up and call him out, call France out, call the UN, Russia and China out, and lay them bare before the world. But he won't, because that's not how the game is played, and to change the rules to his advantage takes a greatness he simply does not possess.   

* * * 

In light of UNSCAM it is no longer deniable that UN opposition to the Iraq war was based on lies and distortions designed to cover the collective sorry ass of the UN, Kofi Annan, France, Russia, China, et al. The current hysteria and hatred against Bush and America therefore, is rooted in the lies and distortions that girded the false opposition to the war forwarded at the UN and willfully spread round the world by the largely anti-American anti-Bush mainstream media.   

Now remember, this is the very same media, along with leftist politicians everywhere—speaking broadly now—that said if the UN Security Council gave final approval for the war, making it a “legal” war, then they would approve it as well. In other words, to cut to the nut—if Kofi Annan, Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin weren't sharing the bed of greed and corruption with Saddam that made opposing the war in Iraq compulsory, then George W. Bush would NOT be an evil, lying Hitlerian swine.    

It's a crock of shit folks, and many Americans, along with most Europeans, fell for it.  It's not George W. Bush who poses the greatest danger to the world, it's the useful idiots who've been brainwashed into believing it.          

~Solomon Bell

TheArtichoke.org

QUAGMIRE OF SPIN: SADDAM’S LINKS TO AL QAEDA

by Solomon Bell 

11/1/03

What we have here…is a failure to communicate!

It is an unfortunate truth of the information age that as the amount of information increases and becomes more and more available, the veracity of that information becomes less and less reliable. It is an axiom of war that the first casualty is truth. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Propaganda Wars of the early 21st century, and amongst its many battlefronts, perhaps none offers a more telling and intriguing anatomy than Saddam Hussein’s connection to Al Qaeda. 

Polling in late 2003 showed that 82% of Americans thought Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda, and that upwards of 70% thought it “likely” that he had a hand in 9-11.  The former percentage makes Liberals wince; the latter throws them into paroxysms of disdain and disbelief.  In one spasm of superiority they point to Bush as having lied about Saddam and 9-11, and in the next they mock the stupidity of the American citizenry. But just who is lying and who is stupid here, dear Liberals?  

When pressed, talking head Liberals admit that there is no record of Bush or anyone in his administration making a specific statement connecting Saddam with 9-11. In fact just the opposite has been repeated repeatedly. They will then say that although this may be technically true, that nevertheless the administration has made the allusion that Saddam was involved in 9-11, otherwise why would 70% of Americans think he was?  It is true that the allusion has been made, and the waters purposely muddied. But the reasons for it are not what the talking heads would have us think.  

Clearly the answer to the question of why so many of us think Saddam was in on 9-11 is a mixed bag.  Some Americans are indeed, fantastically stupid. Most however are merely ignorant, feeding exclusively and/or sporadically as they do from the Mainstream Media trough. But since the Left dominates the content of this trough, leftists get apoplectic when the majority of the country doesn’t “get” what they're slopping up. They simply cannot comprehend that there is a clear, cogent, legitimate and compelling worldview opposite their own, or that there are many millions of intelligent citizens who hold it. And there is something to be said for street smarts and a collective intuition that sees right through the fog of the Propaganda Wars, and senses truth where smoking gun proof may not be possible.    

Rather than take the Left’s stance of automatically assuming that the 70% of Americans who connect Saddam, bin Laden and 9-11 are either complete morons or hapless victims of White House spin, this Rail will consider the evidence and the possibility, just the possibility, that they may be neither, and further—that they just may be right. 

As you will see below, links between the Evil Duo--by the mainstream news as well as both political parties--have been systematically underplayed, denied, spun, discredited or willfully ignored. This is indeed a mysterious case, because media and government forces alike, both for and against the Iraq war, are in effect conspiring (for different reasons) to keep the full truth of the matter under wraps. The Left denies the links outright, while the the White House underplays them. But why? What sense does it make? Before I offer my theory, and a damn intriguing one at that, let's first establish the connection.  

Below is a list of just some of the information publicly available on the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, a connection that goes back more than a decade.   

1992: Vice presidential candidate Al Gore admonishes president George H. W. Bush

for not doing anything about Iraq's support of Muslim terrorists intent on attacking the United States.

1992: Khartoum, Sudan: The first of numerous known meetings between Iraq and Al Qaeda in Sudan involve deputy director of Iraqi intelligence Faruq Hijazi, and al Qaeda’s then soon to be #2 man, Ayman al Zawahiri. (Zawahiri had years earlier founded Islamic Jihad in Egypt. After being released from prison by Anwar Sadat, Zawahiri expressed his gratitude with a complimentary assassination). Subsequent meetings with Iraqi agents would include bin Laden.

The CIA has confirmed two additional meetings between Zawahiri and Iraqi intelligence, in 1992 and 1998, not in Khartoum, but BAGHDAD. 

In 1995 the Sudanese began offering extensive intelligence reports on bin Laden’s activities inside Sudan to the Clinton Administration.  Clinton would deny each and every offer because Sudan was on the terrorist nations list. Never mind that they were trying to begin the process of getting off the list by offering the intelligence. Later the Sudanese took it a step further, offering to turn over bin Laden himself. They were refused on three separate occasions. After leaving office Clinton would explain his refusal to take bin Laden by citing “legal reasons”. It wasn’t until August of 2001, a month before 9-11, that the Bush Administration would ask for and receive the Sudanese files on bin Laden, which included his dealings with Iraqi intelligence.   

1993: The first World Trade Center bombing occurs. The FBI strongly suspected Iraq was behind the plot, concealing its involvement behind Islamic dupes. We know this to be true because the FBI’s own lead investigator on the case, deputy director James Fox, told us so. We also know that Clinton did not want the case against Iraq made, shown by the immediate suspension of Fox when he spoke out to the press. Clinton also shut the CIA completely out of the investigation, making it a matter for law enforcement only. The administration was quick—too quick—to dub the terrorists “a loose network”, veering sharply from decades of proven and presumed state sponsorship of Arab/Islamic terrorists. We now know that “loose network” affectionately as Al Qaeda.  We also know Al Qaeda had always, at least in part, been state sponsored.  

What else do we know? We know that Ramzi Yousef, the convicted ringleader and bombmaker was---despite his nebulous Pakistani origins---known by his fellow conspirators as “Rashid the Iraqi”. We know that the other known bombmaker, Abdul Rachman Yasin, was an Iraqi living in Baghdad just before the bombing and that he was harbored back in Iraq soon afterwards. We know that Yasin is an expert in a notorious Iraqi specialty—souping up the post-blast killing power of bombs by lacing them with hydrogen-cyanide gas—which is exactly what he did with the World Trade Center bomb. Only a miscalculation in the force of the blast, which resulted in most of the gas being incinerated upon detonation, saved untold lives when smoke filled the tower.

We know what ABC News knew in 1994 when it reported that Yasin was living in Baghdad and was on Iraq’s government payroll.  A few months after taking Baghdad in 2003 the ABC report was confirmed when the FBI discovered documents in Tikrit showing that Saddam had ordered regular monthly payments and housing for Yasin. 

1995: Al Qaeda begins training at Salman Pak, a terrorist training center outside of Baghdad.  According to CIA Director George Tenet, as testified before a 2003 Senate Intelligence Committee, Al Qaeda members were trained by Iraq in advanced bomb-making, (possibly with help from Yasin and infamous terrorist and master bomb-maker Abu Nidal, a Baghdad resident also on the government payroll), the use of poisons, gases, and document forgery.  

Most notable of all about Salman Pak was the Boeing 707 parked on site, which was being used for skyjack training by 1997.  Al Qaeda soldiers were taught how to takeover commercial aircraft using bare hands or small knives only.  This and more is corroborated by multiple sources, including five Iraqi defectors who worked at Salman Pak, and two UNSCOM inspectors who saw the aircraft and were told that it was used for COUNTER-terrorist training. (A claim only Janine Garofalo, Sean Penn et al, would believe). Final and irrefutable confirmation came when US forces arrived at Salman Pak. What they found were mass graves, large weapons caches, terrorist training manuals, detailed instructions on how to hide WMD from UN inspectors, and yes, the Boeing 707.      

One Iraqi defector, a former colonel with Iraqi intelligence, reported to the London Observer that there was a special “foreigners camp” within Salman Pak that was controlled directly by Saddam Hussein.  “It was a nightmare! A very strange experience," the Iraqi agent said. "These guys would stop and insist on praying to Allah five times a day when we had training to do. The instructors wouldn't get home till late at night, just because of all this praying."  (So much for the continuing media myth about secular Saddamites and fundamentalist Al Qaeda hating each other too much to cooperate. Beware of Talking Heads that are still forwarding the myth and know that they are shills, fools or both.)  He also corroborated the use of small knives in skyjack training, as well as working in groups of four and five, the very same modus operandi used on 9-11.

Another high ranking, name-protected defector told the Observer that hijacker-trainees at Salman Pak were from several Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco. "We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States. The Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were repeatedly told this."

Finally, in an October 2001 interview with PBS, a former Iraq army captain named Sabah Khodada, who was stationed at the terrorist training center, said he was sure the 9-11 attacks were carried out by “graduates of Salman Pak”.  

1995: The Oklahoma City bombing.  Seven weeks prior to the bombing the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare issued an official warning to government agencies that an Islamic terrorist attack in the American heartland may be imminent. Not included in the official warning but part of the Task Force record, is information from Israeli intelligence that Iraq may be involved, and that “lily whites” may be used as dupes to carry out the attack.

Despite this, and despite eye witness reports (later to become signed affidavits) placing a Middle Eastern man (the infamous John Doe #2) with Timothy McVeigh riding shotgun in the Ryder truck the morning of the attack, Clinton/Reno, suddenly and without explanation, ordered the FBI to cancel its All Points Bulletin on John Doe #2.    

A subsequent investigation by Oklahoma City television reporter Jayna Davis identifies John Doe #2 as Hussain Hashem Al-Hussaini. Al-Hussaini bears a tattoo marking him as a member of the Estikhabarat, unit 999 of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. Unit 999, dear friends, was based at Salman Pak.  Davis’ investigation has gathered 22-signed affidavits and more than 2,000 pages of documents making the case for Iraq’s involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing. Many have praised her work, including former Clinton CIA director James Woolsey and senator Arlen Specter. Specter met with Davis and after reviewing the evidence told her he’d look into launching a senate investigation. Not surprisingly, this Warren Commission co-conspirator then saw to it that no such investigation would occur. (See jaynadavis.com for news story links).

And as for an Al Qaeda connection…

Terry Nichols, a man with little if any bomb-making expertise, took several trips to the Philippines in the months leading up to the attack. He went to Cebu where, lo and behold, fugitive bomb-maker Ramzi Yousef and Al Qaeda #3 man Khalid Sheik Mohammed were hiding out. Philippine police document at least one meeting between Nichols and Mohammed.           

Let’s not forget that the indictment against McVeigh and Nichols included a conspiracy with “others unknown”. When sentencing Nichols, U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch said, “It would be disappointing to me if the law enforcement agencies of the United States government have quit looking for answers.”  Well, they have, and Nichols new trial will soon prove it. Once a cover-up, always a cover-up.    

1998: President Clinton delivered a speech from the Pentagon in which he pointed to Iraq’s involvement with “an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals." He went on to say that “We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century…they will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein.”

The day after Clinton’s speech, Iraqi intelligence issued a memo laying out a plan to step up cooperation with bin Laden. The memo, dated February 19, 1998, was recently unearthed in Baghdad by Mitch Potter and Inigo Gilmore of The Toronto Star. Each reference to bin Laden had been covered over with liquid paper.   

In May Saddam warned the United States of “dire consequences” if UNSCOM weapons inspectors are not called off and UN sanctions not lifted. Bin Laden issued several contemporaneous warnings to the US himself, all of them citing and supporting Iraq.  It was shortly after this that Saddam paid $300,000 to Ayman al Zawahiri. 

In August, just two days after Saddam forced the evacuation of UNSCOM, Al Qaeda bombed US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing hundreds and wounding thousands.  The day was August 7, the eighth anniversary of Bush 41 announcing the deployment of US troops to Saudi Arabia—to protect the kingdom from Iraq.       

In December, first reported in Europe by Rome’s Corriere della Sera, Saddam sent Farouk Hijazi (later named Iraqi ambassador to Turkey; now in US custody) into Afghanistan to formally offer asylum to bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar in Iraq. The report describes Hijazi as “the person who has been responsible for nurturing Iraq's ties with the fundamentalist warriors since at least 1994.”

1999: Newsweek, who now generally denies any serious connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, ran an article titled “Saddam + Bin Laden” with the subhead, “America's Two Enemies are Courting." Christopher Dickey and three others wrote the article.  Dickey now calls the connection, as little put forward by the Bush team as it has been, an “egregious smokescreen.”  What’s egregious Christopher, is your little masquerade through life as an 'unbiased' journalist.  

2000: January, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. An Iraqi airport employee named Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, placed in the job by operatives at the Iraqi embassy, escorted two of the  9-11 hijackers, Khalid al Midhar and Nawaq al Hamzi, through Malaysian customs in Kuala Lumpur. Shakir then took the Al Qaeda men to the Kuala Lumpur Hotel where they held a three-day meeting with Ramzi bin al Shibh, one of the major Al Qaeda planners in the 9-11 plot.   

2000: Salah Suleiman, an Iraqi intelligence officer, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities. Jane's Foreign Report, a well respected international newsletter, reported that Suleiman was the go-between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, the brains behind bin Laden.

2000: In May a weapons smuggler hired by Iraq to make deliveries of arms to bin Laden in Afghanistan, Mohamed Mansour Shahab, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces. He confessed his smuggling role to American intelligence and later to the New Yorker magazine.

2000-2001: The often-refuted meetings in Prague in June 2000 and in April of 2001 between 9-11 hijack captain Mohammed Atta and Iraqi “diplomat” Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, did indeed take place.  Czech interior minister Stanislas Gross made the Czech position on the matter official on October 26, 2001 when he said the disputed meeting between Atta and al Ani did occur. Gross was later corroborated by prime minister Milos Zeman. The controversy stems from a front page article by the New York Times which claims president Vaclav Havel "quietly" told president Bush "the information is  false".  Within hours of the story's publication, Havel issued a denial through his spokesman Ladislav Spacek, calling the New York Time's claim "a fabrication". As far as I've been able to determine,The Times has never explained Havel's rather strident and accusatory denial.    

The last public statement on the Atta meeting to date was made on October 26th, 2002 by former Czech deputy Foreign Minister Hynek Kmonicek who flatly told the Prague Post "the meeting took place...the Czech government collected detailed evidence of the al-Ani/Atta meeting."

Despite all this, the mainstream news and the Left are still out there claiming the meeting never happened, repeatedly ripping Dick Cheney for even mentioning it.  And the Right, media feeble as ever, by and large lets them get away with it.

The Czechs it should be noted, spurred by the last Atta meeting with al-Ani, finally expelled the Iraqi agent. He was strongly suspected of being involved in a plot to bomb Radio Free Europe, an entity and icon of the United States of America.

2001: Ansar al Islam is organized in Northern Iraq by Mullah Melan Krekar, for the expressed purpose of conducting suicide attacks on Americans.  The terrorist group had strong links to both Saddam and bin Laden. Mullah Krekar, now in custody in the Netherlands, has admitted to meetings with bin Laden going back to 1989. He told Newsday that shortly after setting up Ansar, "...three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of $300,000 'to undertake jihad." Talking Head claims that Ansar al Islam was hostile to Saddam are bogus. Ansar was located in a region not controlled by Saddam, this much is true, but most of it was loyal to the regime. Several Ansar attacks against independent Kurdish groups who were hostile to Saddam help to illustrate this. UPI quotes a spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan: "...Krekar [Ansar al Islam] was funded by Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad."  Hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have found sanctuary with Ansar al Islam in Iraq after US forces drove them from Afghanistan in 2001. US air strikes destroyed the Ansar base in 2003. Many of the terrorists, including the extremely dangerous Abu al-Zarqawi, survived the strikes and are thought to have found refuge in Falluja.    

2001: In August, less than a month away from the 9-11 attacks, the CIA and FBI met with Israeli intelligence services and were reportedly told of an impending large-scale terrorist attack against America on American soil.  A senior Israeli official later told the Sunday Telegraph “there were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement.”  News of this meeting has been virtually blacked out by the American media.

2002:  Babil, the official Iraqi state run newspaper controlled by Uday Hussain, in its November 16 edition, identifies Iraq’s ambassador to Pakistan, Abd-al-Karim Muhammad Aswad, as an "intelligence officer…in charge of the regime's contacts with Osama bin Laden's group…”  Oops!

2002: A December 12 report by the Washington Post based on information pulled from the CIA threat matrix, says that Iraq successfully smuggled out VX nerve gas to Al Qaeda through Turkey. The intelligence comes from a “sensitive and credible source” according the CIA. But this was not the first time such smuggling had occurred. Secretary of State Colin Powell has stated that al Qaeda operative Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi was sent to Iraq by bin Laden and was successful in purchasing poison gases several times between 1997 and 2000.

2003: A month after a terror bombing in the Philippines that killed an American Special Forces officer and two Filipinos, the Al Qaeda linked Abu Sayyaf leader who planned the attack was shown on television bragging about conducting joint operations with Iraq. His claims were initially met with pointed skepticism, but an ongoing investigation by Philippine intelligence later revealed phone records supporting the claim. Frequent calls between Hisham al Hussein, the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, and two Abu Sayyaf leaders immediately before and after the bombing, led to Hussein’s February 13 expulsion.

2003: Here’s a little blockbuster you probably haven’t heard—on Wednesday, April 2 a United States district court in Manhattan ruled that Salman Pak played a material role in the attacks of 9-11.   Judge Harold Baer’s $104 million dollar judgment against Saddam Hussain and Usama bin Laden is the first legal decision tying the evil duo to 9-11. 

Now, wouldn’t you think this court decision would be plastered all over the news? The New York Times and the Washington Post didn’t just bury the story as you might expect. Their April 3 editions didn’t report it at all!  And the television networks, including Fox News, if they reported it at all just glossed over it. It was a non-story after the first day. Of all the major newspapers and wire services, only the Philadelphia Enquirer and the Chinese news service Xinhua bothered to mention Salman Pak by name. Can you say "censorship by omission?" If not, you had better learn.

* * *

So there you have it: a brief overview of the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, including a recent court decision linking them to 9-11.  Now how stupid is the 70 % of the American public who think Saddam was somehow involved?  

The Left would have us believe the Bush Administration has mislead the public into thinking Saddam was involved in 9-11 when they know he wasn’t. I submit that the Bush Administration has ‘mislead’ the public into thinking Saddam was involved in 9-11 because they know he was.   

That the mainstream news and the Democrats refuse to admit or even honestly investigate the strength of the evidence concerning the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection comes as little surprise. The surprise is that Bush is playing rope-a-dope with the Democrats and allowing them to hammer away when clearly, if he chose to fight back, he could knock them out with a quick flurry and a thunderous overhand right.  The strategy, that the Democrats will eventually punch themselves out, is risky in an election year. For now Bush has enough of the American public behind him to keep pushing forward. If that support should begin to crumble however, look for the Bush team to leak just enough  “new” information out the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection to shore things up.      

But why “just enough?” Why wasn’t the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection put front and center from the beginning, when it would have given Bush nearly universal support for the war on Iraq?

Clearly there must have been vital and compelling reasons.  And thus we arrive at the heart of the matter:   

Imagine if you will, that you have become president of the United States and inherited federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies in turmoil and disrepair.  Imagine discovering that your predecessor was largely responsible for this, and that among other things had subverted the system and successfully covered up the state sponsorship of a major terrorist attack on American soil.  And when other attacks involving the same state sponsor ensued over the years, the inertia of previous cover-ups (CYA) forced new cover-ups.  Imagine in the midst of discovering all this your nation is hit with a 9-11 magnitude terrorist strike, a strike likely sponsored by that very same state entity.

You know what you must do. You also know that you must bite the bullet of your inheritance and move forward because if the previous administration’s cover-ups were exposed it would create a political and media firestorm that would virtually eviscerate the various law enforcement and intelligence agencies involved—the very agencies you now so urgently need to defend the nation.

Vital and compelling reasons indeed. 

I am confident that this is exactly what GW Bush is dealing with. He and his cabinet and a fair chunk of Capitol Hill know full well that Saddam and Al Qaeda have worked together in committing terrorism against the US. (Which makes the phony partisan vitriol of the Democrats all the more reprehensible.)  There may be of course, additional reasons for the Bush team’s reticence. They may be waiting until all their ducks are in a row, for a smoking gun, and then to spring it before the 2004 election. Then again they may be covering their own collective ass concerning what they knew before 9-11. Clearly there was warning, as stated above, from Israeli intelligence in August ’01. We do not know how detailed that warning was.  We do know that they played dumb about it after 9-11. 

In any event, I think the Bush thinking is that if a full fledged case connecting Saddam and bin Laden and even 9-11 were made, the mainstream news might actually be forced to investigate, likely opening a titanic can of worms that would slither right back to the original Clinton cover-ups. The resulting mega-scandal would send enough Washington ass scurrying for cover to virtually paralyze the FBI, CIA, DOJ et al, just when they’re needed the most.  Bush as we have seen, has been very protective of these agencies failures. 

President Bush has with commendable courage risked his presidency over Iraq because he believed it was the right and necessary action to take.  Further, he has chosen to endure the virulent onslaught of misplaced hatred from the Left rather than further endanger the nation by exposing the true legacy of his predecessor, a legacy so violently thrust upon us that clear September morning of the year two thousand and one.         

~Solomon Bell

Rails from the Radical Middle  

TheArtichoke.org 

 ------------------------------------------------------------

Saddam’s Bombs: Exploding the Media Myths of the ‘Dove’ Left and Iraq’s Role in Global Terrorism

By Solomon Bell

1-11-03

We are at war with Iraq. Have been since 1991, in case you haven’t noticed. Saddam himself has maintained his “at war” position all along, never wavering, repeatedly vowing revenge against America, ceasefire be damned. There have been thousands of volleys fired over the last twelve years, many of them heard round the world. How deafening the truth can be to some.  A dozen years of shooting later, the deaf among us are up in arms and shouting about a “preemptive” war, and that “containment” is the answer. What a load of wet, dove shit.    

A refresher course seems in order.

1993: The first World Trade Center bombing blows a six story hole in the parking garage. The explosion is designed to topple one tower into the other, destroying both and killing tens of thousands. Instead, six people in the vicinity of the blast are killed and more than a thousand injured. Evidence that Iraqi Intelligence may have commissioned the attack through a fledgling Al Qaeda led on the ground by Ramzi Yousef—a.k.a. “Rashid the Iraqi”, nephew of Al Qaeda #3 man Khalid Sheik Mohammed—is present and credible.  The bomb includes hydrogen-cyanide gas, an Iraqi specialty designed to be spread by the explosion, but was instead burned up by its miscalculated intensity. Saddam harbored one of the indicted bomb-makers in the plot, an Iraqi citizen named Abdul Rachman Yasin, both before and immediately after the bombing.  ABC News reported in 1994 that Yasin had been put on the Iraqi government payroll. Yasin remains at large to this day, probably still in Baghdad.    

   Clinton decides to steer the case away from any Iraqi connection early on, and begins by designating the bombing a law enforcement matter only, placing the investigation under complete FBI control, which in turn completely shuts out the CIA.   Even though the FBI is effectively prevented from pursuing evidence of an Iraqi connection, the lead investigator in the case, assistant FBI director James Fox, sees enough to convince him that Iraq is behind the plot. When he refuses to toe the company line and speaks out to the media, he is immediately taken off the case and suspended.  Before his death in 1997 Fox again speaks out, this time with investigative journalist Laurie Mylroie. Amongst other things, he tells Mylroie that the FBI did not pursue the connection because it was clear to him and others that “The [Clinton/Reno] Justice Department did not want state sponsorship addressed.”  I leave the reasons, which lie somewhere in the political machinations and exigencies of Clinton’s self-obsession, to you.

   Clinton’s handling of the first World Trade Center bombing is to set a precedent of cover-up, negligence and missed opportunity that is to repeat itself again and again during his presidency—and pave a clear path for the events of 9-11-01.           

Later in 1993… In June, Clinton launches a Tomahawk missile attack on the Iraqi Intelligence building in Baghdad. The cover story is retaliation for the assassination attempt on Bush 41 in Kuwait. More than that, it is a person-to-person response to the World Trade Center Attack, Clinton ‘punishing’ Saddam and attempting to assuage the concerns of a certain restless faction of the New York FBI. The missiles strike an empty Mukhabarat headquarters just after midnight, timed by Clinton to lessen any risk of civilian casualties. No doubt Saddam, so caring of civilians, got a good chuckle out of this girlish, politically correct missile strike. Clinton’s laughable retaliation only serves to embolden Saddam and terrorists all over the Middle East, not the least of whom I will venture, is Usama bin Laden himself.     

1995: The Oklahoma City bombing rocks the nation. The case is awash in evidence of Iraq’s intimate involvement. Again the FBI, under arcane orders from Clinton/Reno, drops the Iraqi ball immediately. Thankfully, Oklahoma City television reporter Jayna Davis, despite being pressured and eventually fired for following leads leading to Iraq, refuses to give up her investigation. And what she finds, little reported in the Mainstream Media Complex (MMC), is damning in the extreme.   

   Some of the evidence included in 22-signed affidavits and more than 2,000 pages of documents gathered by Davis, includes the witnessing of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in the company of several Middle Eastern men on multiple occasions leading up to the bombing. Most of these men turn out to be ex-Iraqi military that are among the 12,000 Iraqi’s allowed into the US after the Gulf War.  Among them is a dead ringer for the FBI’s John Doe #2, Hussain Hashem Al-Hussaini. Al-Hussaini bears a tattoo marking him as a member of the Estikhabarat, unit 999 of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. Unit 999 is based at Salman Pak, southeast of Baghdad, and is well known as an advanced terrorist training center.

  Yossef Bodansky is the executive director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. He confirmed to Jayna Davis that on February 27, 1995, seven weeks before the bombing, the task force issued a warning to government agencies of an impending Islamic sponsored terrorist attack.  On March 3, an update was issued stating that the attack would likely occur in the American heartland. The list of potential targets includes Oklahoma City.

   Also according to Bodansky, a month prior to the bombing an independent warning was received from Israeli intelligence indicating that an Islamic terrorist attack, possibly tied to Iraq, was impending. They also warned that “lily whites” had been activated to carry out the attack. “Lily Whites” are non-Arabic persons without police records or terrorist backgrounds who could not be linked back to their Arab masterminders.

   Here let me add the numerous trips Terry Nichols, a man with little if any bomb-making expertise, took to the Philippines in the months leading up to the attack. Is it just coincidence that fugitive bomb-maker Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheik Mohammed are hiding out in the same area (Cebu) in the Philippines during this same period? Hardly. Philippine police document at least one meeting between Nichols and Mohammed.           

   Let’s not forget that the indictment against McVeigh and Nichols included a conspiracy with “others unknown”. When sentencing Nichols, U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch said, "It would be disappointing to me if the law enforcement agencies of the United States government have quit looking for answers."

     The Smoking Truck…  Tim McVeigh is seen several times in the company of the previously mentioned Iraqi’s, some of whom work at the Samara Motel (owned and frequented by Iraqi’s) in Oklahoma City. On the morning of the bombing, at 7:40am—one hour and twenty-two minutes before the explosion—the Samara’s owner and a maintenance worker come within a few feet of a Ryder truck parked on the motel lot. They notice that the truck smells heavily of diesel fuel (a key component of the bomb) coming from the rear carriage. Several minutes later McVeigh delivers the room key to the front desk and checks out. He then gets into the Ryder truck and drives off the motel lot. Riding next to him in the passenger seat, as stated in the owner’s sworn affidavit, is none other than Mr. Al-Hussaini, the dead ringer for the FBI’s John Doe #2. 

   Where’s Inspector Fucking Clouseau when you need him?   

These are just a few highlights of a mountain of evidence gathered by Davis and others. Senator Arlen Specter has seen the evidence and told Miss Davis that he will look into the possibility of a senate investigation. Knowing Mr. Specter’s dubious past however, not to mention the powerful forces on both sides of the aisle with powerful motive to keep their asses covered, I suspect he is only patronizing Miss Davis and that no such investigation will ever get off the ground. And as long as Washington continues to drag its feet on this—especially with Terry Nichols still around—you can bet your ass the MMC will go along and continue to either ignore and/or marginalize it.   

    That Iraq was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing is a virtual certainty. Again, the FBI and the Clinton Administration refused to openly follow the leads that would prove what they suspected/knew. The APB for John Doe #2 was suddenly and without explanation, cancelled. Clinton had covered up the likely first state sponsored attack by Iraq, and so was compelled to cover up the second as well. CYA rules the day—everyday—in Washington.

   The Bush Administration, who stands to gain great public support for the war on Iraq if this connection were publicly shown, has steered clear of it. There are still legions of officials from the Clinton era now involved in the Bush era, and there’s a veritable coward’s mountain of covered ass in the way. As much as the Bush Administration might like to make the truth of Clinton’s real legacy be known, they simply cannot risk unleashing a scandal of this size and scope. The resulting cataclysm would virtually emasculate the CIA, FBI and the Justice Department just at a time when they’re needed the most. The administration has plenty enough support to go into Iraq as it stands now, and so will not make any case for Iraq sponsored terrorism that could lead to scandal, even if it be Clinton’s. The barrage of largely dishonest dissent from the Left, as annoying and problematic as it may be, has zero chance of preventing them from doing what they know they must. (For more detailed information and news story links on Iraq and Oklahoma City, see jaynadavis.com). 

1995-2000: Iraq begins and continues training Al Qaeda fighters at the terrorist training complex at Salman Pak, just outside of Baghdad.  Training includes the use of poisons and gases, bomb making, and document forgery, as testified to by Director Tenet before a Senate Intelligence Committee.  The crown jewel of this training (tellingly ignored by Tenet but confirmed by UNSCOM inspectors and numerous others) centers around a Boeing 707 parked on the site. Here eager students board the airliner to learn the fine art of skyjacking, using only small knives! (Knives under 4 inches were then legal to bring aboard aircraft.) Sound familiar? Just a charming little coincidence to the ‘Dove’ Left, I’m sure. And just never mind—as of course you will—longtime former Salman Pak employee and recent defector to the US Sabah Khodada, who told PBS in October 2001 that he believed the 9-11 attacks were carried out by "graduates of Salman Pak.”   

1995-96: On no less than three occasions during this period, Sudan, who is hosting bin Laden and his merry band of mass murderers, offers to turn him over (as well as reams of intelligence on Al Qaeda) to the United States. (Iraqi intelligence had a strong presence in Khartoum during this period as well, and there are multiple documented meetings between them and bin Laden beginning in 1994.) Arrangements for the arrest and extradition of bin Laden are made each time. And each time, Clinton backs out. When recently asked about this by the press Clinton responds sharply and defensively, saying that he couldn’t accept the offer for bin Laden for “legal reasons”.  Clinton, in a rare moment of truthful introspection, is quoted in the award winning 2002 Sunday Times series, “The Road to Ground Zero”, saying that failing to act on the Sudanese offers for bin Laden “was the greatest mistake of my presidency.”  Bet you haven’t heard that in the MMC, have you? Hmmm…

1996: In direct defiance of president Clinton, Saddam sends three tank divisions and 30,000 troops to capture Irbil, a Kurdish city in Northern Iraq. Clinton responds with 44 cruise missiles in a two-day strike on military targets, not in the north where the Kurds are under assault, but in the south! This is seen in the Arab world as a victory for Saddam over the paper lion US under Clinton.   

1998—August:  US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are bombed by Al Qaeda, bin Laden and…?  Saddam had warned in May of “dire consequences” if UNSCOM weapons inspectors were not called off and UN sanctions not lifted. Bin Laden issues several similar warnings to the US in the months leading up to the bombings, all of them citing and supporting Iraq.  Two days after Saddam forces the removal of UNSCOM, the embassies are attacked, killing hundreds and wounding thousands.                                                                   

   Clinton responds as usual with cruise missile attacks on bin Laden camps in Afghanistan and the duly dubbed “aspirin factory” in the Sudan. The Sudan attack is a blunder born of clear negligence and/or dog wagging that kills dozens of innocent workers.  It is important to note however, that the intelligence Clinton used to authorize the attack, that the facility was at one time manufacturing VX gas, was intelligence that named Iraq as a facilitator.

   The Afghanistan attack fails miserably as Clinton, in a spasm of unbelievable stupidity, alerts Pakistan of the attack once the missiles enter Pakistani airspace. He might as well have phoned bin Laden himself, because the arch-terrorist is quickly tipped off and manages to escape with 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed just minutes before his camp is annihilated. To add insult to injury, two of the cruise missiles fail to explode and are gathered up by the Taliban who later sell them, guidance systems and all, to the Chinese. Nice work, Bill.     

Later in 1998… Clinton announces a new US foreign policy: Regime change in Iraq.  Less than four months after the embassy bombings in Africa, Operation Desert Fox is launched and Iraq is again under direct bombing attack. There are no cries heard from the ‘Dove’ Left about preemption.                                                                      

   In December, as reported in a 1999 article by Britain’s Guardian Weekly, Saddam sends his deputy head of military intelligence Farouk Hijazi (later named Iraqi ambassador to Turkey) into Afghanistan to formally offer asylum to bin Laden in Iraq.

2001: The attacks of 9-11 shatter the Great American Sleepwalk.  All warnings are either ignored (As in the Oklahoma City case, Israeli intelligence warned both the FBI and CIA in August 2001 of an imminent large-scale terrorist attack with possible ties to Iraq) are fumbled in both intra and inter-agency infighting.  Strong and documented evidence of meetings between Iraqi Intelligence and Al Qaeda lead up to the tragedies of 9-11.

    The often-refuted meetings in Prague in 2000 and in April of 2001 between 9-11 hijack captain Mohammed Atta and Iraqi diplomat Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, did indeed take place. The August 2, 2002 edition of the Los Angeles Times quotes an unnamed high official in the Bush Administration as saying that evidence of the Prague meetings “holds up.”  No matter what the MMC repeatedly says, since Czech interior minister Stanislas Gross made it official on October 26, 2001 and was later corroborated by prime minister Milos Zeman, the Czechs have NEVER wavered on the matter. (And yet Left wing pundits go unchallenged in the MMC when they repeatedly deny that the meetings ever took place. They cling to a CIA report that says there is no record of Atta leaving the country during April 2001, ignoring the 2000 meeting, ignoring the Czech government’s official corroboration, and completely “forgetting” that Atta routinely traveled on false passports.) The Czechs expelled the Iraqi "diplomat"  not long after the last Atta meeting for his suspected involvement in a plot to bomb Radio Free Europe, a United States entity.

2002: A December 12, 2002 report by the Washington Post based on information pulled from the CIA threat matrix says that Iraq successfully smuggled out VX nerve gas to Al Qaeda through Turkey. The intelligence comes from a “sensitive and credible source” according the CIA. 

* * *

The above incidents do not reflect the thousands of anti-aircraft firings on US and British jets over the No-Fly zones over the years, the hundreds of US and British retaliatory strikes, or the repeated vows of revenge and assertions by Saddam that the war against America was far from over.

Preemption? Containment? 

Wake the fuck up!         

The Dark Side of ‘Containment’

It is sadly ironic that the Dove Left in America and Europe are cooing for containment. Even if they choose to deny that the above list of terror attacks has anything to do with Iraq, they cannot deny what their own beloved organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented to be true: that horrific, systemic human rights abuses are ongoing under Saddam and his mentally mutant madmen. 

If you will recall, Clinton, under NATO guise, bombed Serbia for 78 days, killing more than 2,000 innocent civilians. The reason: Milosevic and his ongoing war crimes and human rights abuses. Where was the cry from the Dove Left then?  Why was attacking Serbia over Slobodan OK then and attacking Iraq over a more dangerous Saddam not OK now?  Could it be as simple as a reviled Republican in the oval office? Why yes, I think it could.

What Saddam Hussain has done to Muslims during his 23-year reign of terror makes Slobodan Milosevic and his gang of genocidal rapists look like Barney Fife and the gang down at Floyd’s Barber Shop.         

A little illustration for the morally selective, hemp can-save-the world, Dove Left…

Saddam has professional rapists in his employ, charged to extract information from political prisoners. They don’t get paid much, but being “people persons” enjoy a high level of job satisfaction drawn from the close-knit relationships forged through the raping of wives and daughters in front of husbands and fathers. Other favored means of extracting information include the usually reliable hanging of children upside down by their ankles to be beaten senseless in front of their parents. High voltage electricity to zap political prisoners and their requisite genitalia across dungeons is also a popular technique.  For those especially pesky and reluctant to speak prisoners, well, they get the special treatment—slow immersion into vats of flesh eating acid. I wonder how Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and Tim Robbins would feel about this impending “illegal preemptive strike” with THEIR NARDS burning in acid?  A quicker and more high-pitched metamorphosis from dove to hawk I cannot imagine. 

Not to be outdone for sheer creativity, Saddam’s son Uday has his own colorful forms of sadistic entertainment. Since he is in charge of Iraq’s Olympic athletes he has ta