Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Who Has the Crystal Ball? - by Paul Craig Roberts

Article @ global research

A good companion piece to Chris Hedges article posted previously ~jg

My conservative and Republican acquaintances believe that the “liberal media” is destroying America.  When I ask them to identify the liberal media, the usual reply is,  “all of it!”  I ask them about Fox “News,” CNN, and point out that the TV networks are no longer independent but parts of large corporate conglomerates and that all of the “liberal” news anchors have been fired or died off.






At that point my acquaintances fall back on the New York Times and the Washington Post.I remind them that the invasion of Iraq would not have been possible without the New York Times leading the way.  Judith Miller filled that newspaper with the neoconservative/Bush regime propaganda that was orchestrated to make the public accept US aggression toward Iraq. The Times later sort of apologized and Miller departed the paper.


That left the Washington Post, apparently long a CIA asset, as the “liberal media” that is destroying America, until on October 31 the paper’s long-time pundit, David Broder, wrote that Obama should spend the next two years disarming the Republicans and renewing the economy by orchestrating a showdown with Iran. Going to war with Iran, “the greatest threat to the world,” would simultaneously unite Republicans with Obama and restore the economy. By following Broder’s prescription, Obama “will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.”


Here we have the “liberal” Broder at the “liberal” Washington Post advocating the neoconservative’s desired war with Iran.


The irony deepens.  My acquaintances regard Obama as a Marxist and a Muslim. It does not occur to my acquaintances that the military/security complex and Wall Street would not put a Marxist in the White House, or that AIPAC would not put a Muslim in the White House, or that a Muslim would not have chosen a dual Israeli citizen as his chief of staff and staffed up his government with Jews friendly to Israel, or that a Muslim would not have renewed the war in Afghanistan and started new ones in Pakistan and Yeman, or that, if a Muslim, Obama would be averse to slaughtering Muslims in behalf of the neocons’ world hegemony agenda.


Chris Hedges writes in Truthdig:



“The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators. It keeps the world neatly divided into a left and a right. The phantom left functions as a convenient scapegoat. The right wing blames it for moral degeneration and fiscal chaos. The liberal class uses it to call for ‘moderation.’



The corporations that control mass communications conjure up the phantom of a left. They blame the phantom for our debacle. And they get us to speak in absurdities.”

But that’s America.  The people simply cannot put two and two together.  Thinking is not an activity of the American public.


Indeed, Americans are incapable of thought on any subject.


Consider the latest bomb scare initially blamed on a young pro-American female student in Yemen who luckily was released before she was tortured and raped.  Allegedly, bombs disguised as printer ink modules passed through lax cargo security and were on their way to blow up something. Everyone immediately endorsed the story. UPS pilots urged US officials to tighten cargo screening worldwide. The US has sent a team into Yemen to take over security.


Somehow the security services that were unable to foil the 9/11 plot were able to penetrate this plot before it succeeded.


Consider the timeliness of the foiled plot. British Airways Chairman Martin Broughton and other European officials recently accused the US of making inane demands on airline passengers, such as removing their shoes and separate examinations of laptop computers.  Broughton even declared: “Europe should not have to kowtow to the Americans every time they want something done to beef up security on US bound flights.”


The owner of London’s Heathrow Airport agreed. The European Union has challenged the US requirement for European passengers to have online checks before boarding flights bound for the US, declaring the requirement a “burdensome measure.”


Miraculously, a plot is exposed that brands British Airways, London’s Heathrow, and the EU as “soft on terrorism security.”


Or what about this motive? The Obama regime wants to send CIA hunter-killer teams into Yemen to murder people suspected of hostility to America. CIA drones would be used to blow up suspects despite the proven fact that the CIA drones used in Afghanistan and in violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty mainly kill innocent people.


Yemen’s President, Ali Abdullah Saleh said that he opposes America’s violation of his country’s sovereignty, but, alas, it was the Yemeni President’s lax air cargo security that let the bombs through.  So his protests, too, are discredited by the lax security that enabled the printer ink plot. Unless US forces are in Yemen eliminating terrorists, the world is not safe.


Americans never ask the old Roman question, “who benefits?”


Consider, for example, the “underwear bomber.” How likely is it that Al Qaeda, allegedly having successfully outwitted all 16 US intelligence agencies, the National Security Council, NORAD, airport security, the Pentagon, and the security agencies of all US allies including Israel and brought down the World Trade towers and successfully attacked the Pentagon itself, would choose as a sequel blowing up a mere airliner with an underwear bomb, a shoe bomb, and a shampoo/toothpaste/underarm deodorant bomb?  Having acquired the stature associated with 9/11, blowing up an airliner is a big comedown in prestige. It conveys the image of a washed-up Al Qaeda.


Again, who benefits?  The most obvious beneficiary of the underwear bomber is the corporation that manufactures the full body scanners that show people as if they are naked.  Obviously, the machines were already produced and awaiting a contract.  Without the underwear bomber and the hype and fear the media generated over the new threat, it is unlikely the government could have succeeded with such massive violation of personal privacy.


It would be interesting to know what company manufactures the body scanners and what its relationship is to the US and Israeli governments.  But these questions never occur to Americans or to the “liberal media.”


As a member of the Congressional staff during the 1970s, both House and Senate and committee and member staffs, I learned that except for rare occurrences, the legislation that Congress passes and the President signs is written either by executive agencies or by lobbyists. Congress did not write the PATRIOT Act. It was written in advance of 9/11 awaiting its opportunity. President Bush’s National Security Advisor, Condi Rice, is on record saying that no one ever suspected such an event as 9/11 with terrorists using hijacked airliners as missiles against the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Why then was the voluminous PATRIOT Act sitting waiting?


Whose crystal ball read the future and had the PATRIOT Act drafted in advance?


Whose crystal ball foresaw the underwear bomber and had the full body scanners ready to be deployed?


Are these amazing coincidences or orchestrated events?

20 comments:

  1. He makes the same point that I did yesterday about Amerikans being naive and gullible enough to believe the fairytale of 9/11 and yet believing those same creative "terrorists" would be so uncreative as to plant explosives in ink cartridges to be loaded onto planes.

    Thanks to utterly brainwashed people like that, we are doomed.

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  2. The Newest False Flag Event:

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/yemen-the-new-crucible-of-global-terrorism-2121364.html

    Yemen, the new crucible of global terrorism

    Al-Qa'ida has taken firm root in the poverty-stricken nation

    By David Randall and Andrew Johnson

    The axis of terror got bigger yesterday. After the presence of explosives in two packages bound for the US was confirmed – and a suspected 24 more discovered – their place of origin entered the big league as a crucible of deadly and disruptive terrorism. As Magnus Ranstorp, one of the world's leading experts on the issue, told The Independent on Sunday: "Yemen has become the new Afghanistan."

    Disturbingly, there also came news that, while Yemen may be the most desolate and poorest part of the Middle East – a place, until last year, more associated with tribal warfare than global menace – the devices intercepted in Dubai and Britain were viable bombs, and of a technical complexity not hitherto seen. Dr Sally Leivesley, a former Home Office security adviser, said: "In terms of creating a significant bomb, in terms of an attack on the West, this is pretty sophisticated."

    And so this bullshit goes on unabated while the TVZombies shiver on their couches eating ice cream~ww
    _____________________________>>

    http://www.yemenpost.net/Detail123456789.aspx?ID=3&SubID=2705

    Suspicious Package to U.S. not from Yemen; Yemenia Air Cargo Director

    Yemen Post Staff
    Mohammed al-Shaibah, Air Cargo Director for Yemenia Airways said to Yemen Post, "No UPS cargo plane left Yemeni lands over the land 48 hours. These accusations are false and baseless."
    He added, "No UPS or DHL cargo packages heading to Chicago through Yemen took place in the last 48 hours as well."

    "All packages are checked very carefully in Yemen, and there is no evidence to prove that this package came through Yemen."
    CNN reported the suspicious package, which contained a "manipulated" toner cartridge, tested negative for explosive material, the source said, but it led to heightened inspection of arriving cargo flights in Newark, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a UPS truck in New York.

    Yemen Post Staff
    -__________________________________NOW

    Just who would you believe in this instance? Yemen Post Staff, or the Hysteria Mob?

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  3. “Just another day in our collapsing American Empire!"~Tom Burghardt

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  4. Funny how the brits said the cartridges were harmless and then the Big O gets on the horn and declares them explosives planted by Al CIAda.

    Drones over Yemen anyone?

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  5. , but it led to heightened inspection of arriving cargo flights in Newark, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a UPS truck in New York.

    Hmm makes me wonder if Philly is the next target.........uhoh

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  6. Yea...the Brits weren't on script, they were beginning to balk at all the new expensive airport toys.

    This is so ridiculous...like a Kilgore Trout sci fi farce.

    I hear Alice shouting from the rabbit hole, something about some great hooch in the hooka.

    I think I'll go take a tote.

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  7. What's the publicized "terror" attack line-up now? We've had tennis shoes, underwear, now print cartridges, and some other goofy stunts. Don't you get the feeling the guys behind these terror "gems" must just laugh their asses off planning the next limp bizkit?

    Sure, they've got a Whopper in the works, yet they use these BS ruses to confuse and terrorize the sheep with little "flash bangs".

    It is all very sick and pathetic. I look forward to this "game" being exposed, and the players names and faces coming out on Made-in-America playing cards.

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  8. .." look forward to this “game” being exposed, and the players names and faces coming out on Made-in-America playing cards."~Boom

    Wow...can you imagine the size of THAT deck???

    Ever play 60 card draw? Every card a Joker...{grin}

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  9. FED GLOATATHON:

    http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2010/11/fed-at-jekyll-island-theyre-baaack.html

    The Fed at Jekyll Island: 100 Years Later, They're Baaack!

    Well isn't this cute?

    Just days after the Federal Reserve will announce it has launched QE2, the Fed will hold a major conference at Jekyll Island, celebrating the secret meeting held 100 years ago that resulted in the creation of the Fed.

    In November 1910, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department A.P. Andrews, and other top financiers,arrived at the Jekyll Island Club to discuss monetary policy and the banking system. The secret meetings led to the creation of the Federal Reserve.

    The island is off the coast of the U.S. state of Georgia.

    ______________Don't you see this as a celebration of making the goal?

    The goal: crushing the republic--the 100 year goal line..........yup.

    I know where I'd place my nuke, had I a nuke to place........mutherfukkers

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  10. "Celebrating" the biggest counterfeit CON of civilization EVER through-out history. Yeah, nuke THAT! Call yourself a financier, hand people paper, take their gold, silver, homes, assets, sheep, whatever, and charge them usurious interest until they croak.

    And the sheep fell into this pit...?!

    PUSHERS is what they are, and credit addicts is what they create. Preying upon the desperate and naive.

    We've got a very large extended deck of cameo cards for ALL the shylocks out there. Soon I imagine, a reward of real money -- gold or silver -- will be paid for the elimination of each of these bastards from humanity.

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  11. Hmmmm...I think I have a few old printer cartridges around here that we could use :)

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  12. Cute JG.

    There should be an asteroid the size of the Capital Buliding flying through the dark of space right now...with the name of Mr, Hyde glowing in radiant lava on its side, like a logo drawn by God. Heavenly Rock'n'Roll....so to speak.

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  13. funny, Ijust walked past the TV where my pops is watching the Military Channel that is going on about Osama. I said Osama bin dead. He ignored me.

    best to believe TV

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  14. I just read the following long piece, which was very good -- there are some quality quotes and meat and potatoes. If you are not a wealthy crat from Pluto you'll know what I mean.

    http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/02-2

    Shades of Howard Zinn: It's Okay If It's Impossible
    by Bill Moyers

    The following remarks were prepared for delivery on October 29, 2010 as part of the Howard Zinn Lecture Series at Boston University:

    Read the piece, though it is lengthy

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  15. That Whirlpool refrigerator factory in Evansville, Indiana, is just about 15 minute drive up the highway from the little town I am in.

    The closure was in the works around the time I arrived here. People I know, people I have met here were effected by it. That was a big fish that died in the pond here, but many other smaller ones go belly up every day.

    I've got Zinn's Peoples History, have read great swaths of it but not all of it...it is great, everyone should be famiar with it--the perspective is the whole thing...the "great man" theory of history is squashed by this version and that is what makes it real, genuine.

    I really liked this:

    "...acting on what we feel and think, here, now, for human flesh and sense, against the abstractions of duty and obedience."~Howard Zinn

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  16. "You would think the rich might care, if not from empathy, then from reading history. Ultimately gross inequality can be fatal to civilization. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Jared Diamond writes about how governing elites throughout history isolate and delude themselves until it is too late. He reminds us that the change people inflict on their environment is one of the main factors in the decline of earlier societies. For example: the Mayan natives on the Yucatan peninsula who suffered as their forest disappeared, their soil eroded, and their water supply deteriorated. Chronic warfare further exhausted dwindling resources. Although Mayan kings could see their forests vanishing and their hills eroding, they were able to insulate themselves from the rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well-fed while everyone else was slowly starving. Realizing too late that they could not reverse their deteriorating environment, they became casualties of their own privilege. Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, Diamond warns, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their decisions, separated from the common life of the country."

    ~From the Zinn article

    Ahh...that Zardoz treatment doesn't take centuries to arrive, it is within a generation of the crashing.

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  17. PCR says,
    "Whose crystal ball foresaw the underwear bomber and had the full body scanners ready to be deployed?"
    That's easy, the Obama White House knew of their own plan--they claimed in Congressional testimony (that MSM ignored) putting hotpants on the plane with no visa and filming him throughout the flight was a legitimate terror test and intel operation. As the well dressed man in Schiphol said, "We do this all the time". It's surprising how uninformed the average American is because television never tells bubba the government was doing this intel exercise, blamed on Al Quaeda.
    Now dopey Obama mentored by "Frank" and "Rahmbo" was meeting about this very op the week prior, check it out. ;Now Herr Chertoff, hmmm....I think PCR knows very well the answers and he is stimulating investigation before a widening audience, by cracking jokes.

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  18. You have to leave these people behind. Iran has been the place from the biblical code for where we enter this phase.

    No matter how ridiculously obvious it may seem to us, the masses cannot and never will get it. Death for billions will not be as tragic as those who will remain and be forever imprisoned in their own minds.

    Yemen, Egypt, Saudi, Israel, (DC-US) London, Vatican makes no difference, the burial plot lies in Iran and the evidence is scattered in these GPS sites for future GPS committee sponsored terror locations.

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  19. "Are these amazing coincidences or orchestrated events?"

    Gee... d'ya think?

    Now it's all about repealing "obamacare..." but not one peep about the PATRIOT act.

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  20. "Now it’s all about repealing “obamacare…” but not one peep about the PATRIOT act."~Waldo

    Yea, and all of these Teabrains are warmongering christianoidal fools--it'll be back to the stomping out abortion, gay marriage, stripping social services, and privatiaztion again, right out in the open, rather than rhetorical cover for the same things. That is the whole Repug side of the agenda.

    So the police state hardens, the screw turns another ratchet point, the infrastucture continues to crumble...

    Something is going to go POP real soon. Something weird is floating just off the screen...peripheral like a squirming shaddow.


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