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By Len Hart (about the author) Page 2 of 5 page(s)
--Pakistan: Friend or Foe? The US shouldn't prop up President Musharraf's military regime, Selig S. Harrison Benazir Bhutto, A False Choice for PakistanSince 9/11, the Bush administration has been propping up Musharraf's military regime with $3.6 billion in economic aid from the US and a US-sponsored consortium, not to mention $900 million in military aid and the postponement of overdue debt repayments totaling $13.5 billion. But now the administration is debating whether Musharraf has become too dependent on Islamic extremist political parties in Pakistan to further US interests, and whether he should be pressured to permit the return of two exiled former prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who have formed an electoral alliance to challenge him in presidential elections scheduled for next year.
The late Benazir Bhutto revealed the truth before she was brutally gunned down in the streets of Karachi: US policy causes world terrorism. She died before she could tell the rest of the story. See also: Terrorism is worse under GOP regimes. When the United States aligns with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, it compromises the basic democratic principles of its foundation -- namely, life, liberty and justice for all. Dictatorships such as Musharraf's suppress individual rights and freedoms and empower the most extreme elements of society. Oppressed citizens, unable to represent themselves through other means, often turn to extremism and religious fundamentalism.
Quoted above was a paragraph from A Timeline of CIA Atrocities by Steve Kangas, whose death under questionable circumstances raises still more questions given his encyclopedic knowledge of the CIA and the antipathy he inspired from Richard Mellon Scaife --the spider at the center of a malicious, right wing web, perhaps the "great right wing conspiracy" referred to by Hilary Clinton at the height of the GOP blow job jihad and scandal. In 1984 Kangas moved to Germany where he was involved in electronic eavesdropping on Soviet military units in Eastern Europe, analyzing the transcripts and reporting back to NATO. It was at this time he began to question his conservative political beliefs.
Kangas left military intelligence in 1986 and became a student at the University of California in Santa Cruz. This experience moved him further to the left: "There, kindly professors pointed out to me the illogic of defending life by taking it, destroying the planet for a buck and shutting down schools to build more prisons. I am now thoroughly brainwashed to believe that kindness and human decency are positive traits to be emulated and encouraged."
--Spartacus International; See also: A Timeline of CIA AtrocitiesViolence against against America, often called 'blowback', is an inevitable reaction to CIA atrocities and interference. Concurrently, the US leads the world in the production of military hardware --tanks, missiles, nuclear weaponry, weapons of mass destruction. More recently, since the regime of Ronald Reagan specifically, the US has begun to trail the world in many other key industrial classification. Under GOP 'stewardship', the US is rapidly becoming a third world nation on steroids. As long as this is the case, no one living in the US, no citizen of the US abroad, is truly free. We are all reduced to mere units in a bigger, evil machine. Bush and his servile ilk serve Moloch willingly and visibly at Bohemian Grove. Slavery, however, is forced upon the rest of us, a process assisted ably by a corporate media.
The most extreme example of this, of course, is Fox News, best described as political porn. If the Fox outfit did not deflect attention from more insidious designs, it would be laughable, even indulge for the low-class, beer drinking' entertainment that it might bring to certain demographics. In practice, however, it might as well be a state run organization reduced to merely dramatizing officially sanctioned news.After World War II, these psywar techniques continued. C.D. Jackson, a major figure in US psywar efforts before and after the war, was simultaneously a top executive at Time-Life. Psywar was also used with success during the 1950s by Edward Lansdale, first in the Philippines and then in South Vietnam. In Guatemala, the Dulles brothers worked with their friends at United Fruit, in particular the "father of public relations," Edward Bernays, who for years had been lobbying the press on behalf of United. When CIA puppets finally took over in 1954, only applause was heard from the media, commencing forty years of CIA-approved horrors in that unlucky country.[2] Bernays' achievement apparently impressed Allen Dulles, who immediately began using US public relations experts and front groups to promote the image of Ngo Dinh Diem as South Vietnam's savior.[3] The combined forces of unaccountable covert operations and corporate public relations, each able to tap massive resources, are sufficient to make the concept of "democracy" obsolete. Fortunately for the rest of us, unchallenged power can lose perspective. With research and analysis -- the capacity to see and understand the world around them -- entrenched power must constantly anticipate and contain potential threats. But even as power seems more secure, this capacity can be blinded by hubris and isolation.So it naturally follows that the robber barons and their fourth estate business partners should indeed benefit from the puppet they all worked so vigorously to enthrone.--Daniel Brandt, NameBase NewsLine, Journalism And The CIA
The corporate interests of America are now almost entirely at one with the political interests of America. The people are either relegated to the outskirts as unimportant bystanders or are caught in the cross-fire as casualties of a hostile corporate takeover by American and even foreign corporations. We "the people" do not matter in a country where corporate profits are tied to state policy, which then uses those same corporations to tell us what is real and what is fabricated, what is true and what is false.The CIA is symptomatic of a militarized society, in which the CIA and the military play important roles in a circular self-justification. Much is made of the fact that the military provides opportunities for high school dropouts, the disadvantaged who might not otherwise get an education or a job. What is to be said of a society for which the export of death and destruction becomes essential to its economic well-being? As Gore Vidal argued persuavesively in his "The Decline and Fall of the American Empire", the military/industrial complex is a drag on the economy. The Pentagon budget, he argues, is an economic black hole. He sites, as an example, the construction of a 'tank'! Once built, the economic life of the tank if finished! From that point on, the tank becomes a net drag on the economy. It produces nothing, adds noting! Moreover, the Pentagon soaks up monies that might have been budgeted for truly productive programs like education and training. What is to be said about a society that finds it necessary to send young people off to die in immoral wars in order to get them employed and off the streets?--Laura Alexandrovna, Our Cold Civil War
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