5 American Karma & The River of Tears
http://216.247.92.101/pub/american_karma.htm
by Bill Morgan prema@prahlad.org

One shudders to think of the terrible karma America is reaping throughout
the world as a result of its actions. "Karma" is a sanskrit word which
simply means "action," but it carries with it the the implications of the
Biblical phrase, "As you sow, so shall you reap." In other words: the
consequences of your actions will come back to haunt you.

The "new" America is now a rogue nation, considered by increasing numbers
of people around the world to be one of the greatest threats to world
peace. It is gradually taking over the place once held by the former Soviet
Union as the world's greatest "Evil Empire." It destroys lives all around
the world, destroys what people had built up, their homes, their
institutions, the infrastructure on which they depend. It kills the sons of
mothers whose grief shall know no end.

Said one Iraqi mother whose son was recently murdered by the Americans:
"Those soldiers have turned everything America has ever stood for into one
big lie." This is the reaping of what America has sown, and it is the just
result of America's actions. Her 19 year old son, Zaydun Al-Samarrai, was
murdered by American soldiers on January 3, 2004.

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Yow! Do We Have a Lifesyle Yet?
amazing essay!!!:

18 From Paranoia to 'Loyal Resistance'
http://onlinejournal.com/Commentary/011004Hasty/011004hasty.html
Michael Hasty writes

"Perhaps the biggest hidden reason people don't make the paranoid shift is
that knowledge brings responsibility. If we acknowledge that an inner
circle of ruling elites controls the world's most powerful military and
intelligence system; controls the international banking system; controls
the most effective and far-reaching propaganda network in history; controls
all three branches of government in the world's only superpower; and
controls the technology that counts the people's votes, we might be then
forced to conclude that we don't live in a particularly democratic system.
And then voting and making contributions and trying to stay informed
wouldn't be enough. Because then the duty of citizenship would go beyond
serving as a loyal opposition, to serving as a 'loyal resistance' - like
the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, except that in this case the
resistance to fascism would be on the side of the national ideals, rather
than the government.

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23 The Lies for War Unravel By William Rivers Pitt (COMPLETE)
t r u t h o u t | Perspective Monday 12 January 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/011204A.shtml

Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski wore the uniform of the United
States military for most of her adult life. In the last few years, until
her retirement last April after 20 years of service, she has watched the
infrastructure of American foreign policy creation rot from the inside out.
Her view was not from the cheap seats, from some faraway vantage point, but
from the hallways where the cancer walked and talked. Lt. Colonel
Kwiatkowski worked in the same Defense Department offices where the cadre
of hawkish neoconservatives that came in with George W. Bush trashed
America's reputation, denigrated her fellow soldiers, and recreated the
processes of government into a contra-constitutional laughingstock.

"My personal experience leaning precariously toward the
neoconservative maw showed me that their philosophy remains remarkably
untouched by respect for real liberty, justice, and American values,"
Kwiatkowski writes in the January 19 edition of The American Conservative
magazine. "I was present at a staff meeting when Deputy Undersecretary Bill
Luti called General Zinni a traitor. At another time, I discussed with a
political appointee the service being rendered by Colin Powell in the early
winter and was told the best service he could offer would be to quit. I
heard in another staff meeting a derogatory story about a little Tommy
Fargo who was acting up. Little Tommy was, of course, Commander, Pacific
Forces, Admiral Fargo."

Kwiatkowski saw these people, and their work within the Office of
Special Plans, up close and personal, and has been raising alarms about it
for nearly a year. The Office of Special Plans, or OSP, was a Pentagon
planning group directed by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas
Feith, who was the department's No. 3 official. The OSP was staffed by the
hawkish neoconservatives Kwiatkowski describes in her American Conservative
editorial, men who had advocated using the American military to overthrow
Saddam long before they came to work for Feith. The day-to-day boss of OSP
was William Luti, a former Navy officer who worked for Vice President Dick
Cheney before joining the Pentagon. The work of the OSP was, at bottom, to
cherry-pick data from intelligence reports to justify an attack on Iraq.

Back in August of 2003, Kwiatkowski wrote, "What I saw was aberrant,
pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline. If one is seeking the
answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a
presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam (Hussein) occupation (in Iraq)
has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no
further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense."
She described the work of the OSP in particular as, "a subversion of
constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit
of a large segment of the Congress". Kwiatkowski claims, in short, that a
decision to go to war had been made long before, and that these men at the
OSP were fashioning justifications for that decision on the fly, and
despite overwhelming evidence to suggest that war was not necessary.

Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski was not the only one watching the immediate
desire for war in Iraq within the ranks of the Bush administration. Former
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who lost his job because he dared question
the efficacy of giving massive tax cuts to rich people, has stepped forward
with some truly remarkable revelations about the way business is done at
1600 Pennsylvania.

O'Neill describes the process of decision-making between Bush and his
people as being "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people." This is not
a comforting image when one imagines the deliberations of the most powerful
people in the world. Yet the blind and the deaf, according to O'Neill and
the 19,000 pages of memos, documents and private National Security
briefings he has in his possession, were also adept liars.

Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Ron Suskind has captured O'Neill's
views in a new book titled 'The Price of Loyalty.' "From the very first
instance, it was about Iraq," says Suskind about his interviews with
O'Neill and his review of the documentary evidence. "It was about what we
can do to change this regime. Day one, these things were laid and sealed."
Suskind got his hands on one Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001. The
document was titled 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts,' and
included a map of potential areas for exploration. "It talks about
contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries," says
Suskind, "and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq."

O'Neill was afforded a position on the National Security Council
because of his job as Treasury Secretary, and sat in on the Iraq invasion
planning sessions. "It was all about finding a way to do it," says O'Neill.
"That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do
this.'" This perspective is backed up by former Director of State
Department Policy Planning, Richard Haass. Haass has quoted National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as saying, about pursuing UN cooperation
on the Iraq invasion, "Save your breath. The president has already decided
what he's going to do on this," in June of 2003.

CBS News reported on September 4, 2002 that notes taken by an aide to
Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld clearly state that the process towards war
on Iraq was begun five hours after the attacks of September 11 unfolded.
There was no evidence linking Hussein or Iraq to the attacks, and there is
still none; George W. Bush was forced recently to publicly admit as much,
and Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted on Friday that no evidence
exists to connect Iraq to al Qaeda.

A report released in 2000 titled 'Rebuilding America's Defenses'
issued by the neoconservative think tank The Project for the New American
Century states, "The United States has for decades sought to play a more
permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict
with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial
American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of
Saddam Hussein." In other words, whatever threat may be posed by Hussein is
far less important than the need for the United States to establish a
massive, permanent military presence in the Gulf region.

'Rebuilding America's Defenses,' and the think tank which published
it, are important for two reasons: The Project for the New American Century
had Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and most of the architects of this Iraq war
on its membership role in 2000; the desire and decision to attack Iraq
existed in print from the hands of these men before they came to power with
George W. Bush. In other words, September 11 had nothing specifically to do
with it. "Go find me a way to do this," said Bush well before 9/11 about an
attack on Iraq. Rumsfeld, surveying the hole blasted into the side of the
Pentagon, had found that way.

The American people were let in on none of this. The scale of the
deception is massive.

The American people were told that Iraq posed a direct threat to the
United States because of its massive stores of chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons. Those stores included, according to the White House,
26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 1,000,000
pounds of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agents, 30,000 munitions to deliver
them, and a production line that would rapidly deliver nuclear weapons
enriched with African uranium. Because of the "sinister nexus between Iraq
and al Qaeda," as stated by Colin Powell before the United Nations on
February 5, war was required immediately because those weapons could be
delivered to terrorists for use against us.

Still, we were told, George W. Bush would work with the international
community on the matter. We were told that war would be the choice of last
resort. Reasonable people are running the show in Washington, we were
assured, and no one is going to barnstorm into battle unless it is
absolutely necessary. The Bush administration drafted Resolution 1441 on
the matter of invading Iraq for the United Nations, and put the words
"weapons inspectors" into the document. Those two words were the reason
1441 received unanimous consent from the Security Council.

Now, ten months and 500 dead American soldiers later, we have the
truth.

The decision to attack Iraq was made within days of Bush's occupation
of the White House. When the weapons inspectors failed to find any of the
arms promised by the Bush administration, that administration attacked and
undermined the inspection process and piled hundreds of thousands of combat
troops onto the Iraqi border.

"Save your breath," said Condoleezza Rice. "The president has already
decided what he's going to do on this."

The Washington Post reported on January 7, "In public statements and
unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on
former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new
designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S.
scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The
investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and
Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn
to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear
weapons program, described as a 'grave and gathering danger' by President
Bush and a 'mortal threat' by Vice President Cheney, in much the same
shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s."

Days later, a report by experts on weapons proliferation from the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace titled 'WMD in Iraq: Evidence
and Implications,' stated that Iraq's weapons programs did not, "Pose an
immediate threat to the United States, to the region, or to global
security. With respect to nuclear and chemical weapons, the extent of the
threat was largely knowable at the time. Iraq's nuclear program had been
dismantled and there was no convincing evidence of its reconstitution.

Regarding chemical weapons, UNSCOM discovered that Iraqi nerve agents
had lost most of their lethality as early as 1991. Operations Desert Storm
and Desert Fox, and UN inspections and sanctions effectively destroyed
Iraq's large-scale chemical weapon production capabilities. It is unlikely
that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden, or sent out of the country the
hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, dozens of Scud
missiles and facilities engaged in the ongoing production of chemical and
biological weapons that officials claimed were present without the United
States detecting some sign of this activity before, during, or after the
major combat period of the war."

The report continued by stating, "The dramatic shift between prior
intelligence assessments and the October 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE), together with the creation of an independent intelligence
entity at the Pentagon and other steps, suggest that the intelligence
community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in
2002. There was and is no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship
between Saddam's government and Al Qaeda. There was no evidence to support
the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD to Al Qaeda and much
evidence to counter it. The notion that any government would give its
principal security assets to people it could not control in order to
achieve its own political aims is highly dubious."

George W. Bush and his people in the White House and Defense
Department wanted a war with Iraq. They began seeking a premise for that
war as soon as they arrived in Washington. They created the Office of
Special Plans to fashion justification out of whole cloth. They browbeat
analysts at the CIA and State Department to manufacture frightening
portraits of an Iraqi threat that did not wed to reality. They used the
terror created by September 11 against the American people to get that war,
and lied time and again about the threat posed by that nation. All stated
rationales for war - weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda connections, the
likelihood of another 9/11-style attack by Hussein or his agents - have
been decisively disproven.

Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski knew it all along. "War is generally
crafted and pursued for political reasons," she says in her American
Conservative editorial, "but the reasons given to Congress and the American
people for this one were so inaccurate and misleading as to be false.
Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the
country on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq - more bases from which
to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran, better positioning for the
inevitable fall of the regional sheikdoms, maintaining OPEC on a dollar
track, and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision. These more accurate
reasons could have been argued on their merits, and the American people
might indeed have supported the war. But we never got a chance to debate
it."
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William Rivers Pitt is the Managing Editor of truthout.org. He is a New
York Times and international best-selling author of three books - "War On
Iraq," available from Context Books, "The Greatest Sedition is Silence,"
available from Pluto Press, and "Our Flag, Too: The Paradox of Patriotism,"
available in August from Context Books.
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