Waging Fear

The U.S. State department now claims it was kept "out of the loop" on Cheney's torture policy. This is the torture regime that U.N. officials contend amount to a war crime for which members of the Bush administration should be indicted.

"U.S. prosecutors have failed to use the laws on the books to investigate and prosecute (contractors) and civilian agents for wrongful deaths, including, in some cases, deaths credibly alleged to have resulted from torture and abuse."-Philip Alston, U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions.

But how credible are the State department denials. Surely a former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the then Secretary of State, Colin Powell) must have suspected much was "rotten" about the "War on Terror" from the very start. It is not as if great military deceits are without notable precedent.

Declassified U.S. government documents have long confirmed that the Chairman and U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff planned and approved a 1962 “false flag operation” under which aircraft painted with the insignia of the Cuban air force would bomb a U.S. ship. The plan was to have "violent acts" unleashed in major U.S. cities (including Miami and other Florida cities, and Washington, D.C.) by U.S. department of defense agents posing as “Cuban terrorists”, killing potentially hundreds if not thousands of innocent American civilians going about their daily lives. The purpose of this false flag operation, designated Operation Northwoods, was to provide a legal pretext and mobilize the media and public opinion for an illegal invasion of the island of Cuba by the U.S. military.

The conspiracy would have gone as planned were it not for the bravery and (as it turned out mortal sacrifice) of President Kennedy who vetoed the Pentagon's secret plan to launch "false-flag" attacks on innocents citizens on American soil.

"You want the truth?-- You can't handle the truth" --Colonel Jessup, from "A Few Good Men"



That is the fix Obama is in. Aspiring to the U.S. presidency is a Faustian bargain. It will take far more Courage than Truth to defeat the deadly contagions of our government's immorality.

"This Is No Small Thing"

The Bush administration was very clever at distorting the debate about what constitutes torture. From Nancy Pelosi's explosive interview aired last night on the Rachel Maddow Show it appears that she and other ranking Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee were presented with the government's "theoretical" use of sleep deprivation and "simulated" waterboarding merely as a ruse to blur the lines of what was legal. In fact, as we know from several disturbing reports between 2004 and 2008, far worse was already being done to Iraqi prisoners and Guantanamo detainees in our name.

Despite President Obama's clear reluctance to seek indictments at least two Senators in Congress are not so willing to overlook obvious war crimes. This is indeed "no small thing". Let the hearings begin.