INTERNET 10 - WARMONGERS 0

www.willthomas.net

 

by William Thomas

Commentary
Lifeboatnews.com

Feb. 10, 2003

I couldn't make this up. Five days ago, the man who covered up the
MyLai massacre was on a roll. Addressing the UN Security Council and a
worried wired world, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell repeatedly
remonstrated, "Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources.
These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions
based on solid intelligence."

Hot stuff! The globally-televised 75 minute briefing put forward
Washington's best case for massacring a defenseless population, still
reeling from the last big American bombardment, and 11 years of
strangulating sanctions that followed.

"Here is the evidence," ranted a righteous Powell at tight-lipped
representatives from 15 nations, who may also have been listening to
the ghostly chorus of 38 million Europeans killed during World War II.

"Ignore it and become irrelevant as a world body whose strongest
resolutions have been consistently ignored by Israel throughout our
ally's 35 year illegal occupation of the West Bank," Powell puffed. "Or join
our unprovoked aggression against the people of Iraq and become irrelevant
for violating international laws -- just like Americans do all the time in
places like Nicaragua, Guatemala, Cuba, Colombia, Cambodia, Vietnam,
Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Bosnia and Afghanistan."

I'm paraphrasing here...

Powell called Blair's intelligence scoop "a fine paper" of "exceptional
quality" that detailed "Iraq's deceptions." The U.S. Secretary of State
went on to praise a pompous Prime Minister for supplying what Blair
boasted was an "up to the minute" assessment of Saddam's sadistic arsenal.

The latest information on Iraq's elusive weapons programs came from
Britain's vaunted intelligence services, MI5 and MI6. Anyone on the Net
could punch in Downing Street's official website and check out all 19
pages of intelligence available to London concerning "Iraq's Infrastructure
of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation". [BBC Feb. 5, 2003]

OOPS!

Within hours of Powell's pronouncements, TV crews descended on the
"chemical weapons sites" featured in his presentation -- only to find old dust atop ancient rubble. The reason was revealed the following  morning, when the BBC's Channel 4 reported, "Downing St. Dossier Plagiarized".

Plagiarism is a form of theft. It turns out that Powell's "top
intelligence" briefing to the UN had been lifted verbatim from a
woefully
outdated student thesis! [BBC Feb. 6, 2003]

CLIP

GOING NUCLEAR IN BAGHDAD

They're just getting started.

Cancer rates across Iraq -- particularly among children -- are already
12 to 15 times higher than pre-war levels. For the people of Iraq, as well
as any occupier, constant exposure to uranium dust from hundreds of tons
of Depleted Uranium munitions fired during Desert Storm (and hundreds of
tons more from any new invasion) carries lethal risks. DU is 60% as
radioactive as the uranium used in nuclear bombs. It enters human lungs, wombs and
DNA as easily as it does open wounds and the food chain. And exploded DU
rounds remain lethal for millions -- some experts say billions -- of years.
[Bringing The War Home]

Now the boys around Bush are keen to try out their new "Robust Earth
Penetrators" by gang-raping Iraq. (You're right, it's obscene.) These
cosseted men, who have never been near a battlefield or seen the dazed
expressions of maimed children, figure their "little" nuclear bombs
will burrow far enough into their mother planet to stop radiation from
leaking out and freaking out the entire world. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sept.
29, 2002]

But common sense and many experts warn that a more likely scenario
would see "dirty" detonations raining a radioactive dust storm downwind,
killing plenty of people in mosques and souks in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Iran
-- depending on whether the Shamal is blowing. Entire regions would be
rendered uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years.

But hey, say Rumsfeld and others who pushed for the "baby nukes", we
won't know till we try it.

Just like Hiroshima.

GEORGE, DICK, DONALD AND PAUL MEET THE "INFORMATION AGE"

To everyone following this global cliffhanger, it looks like we're
coming quickly down to a tripwire that could capsize the global applecart.
Within weeks, a conscienceless Frankenstein armed with wicked weapons of mass
destruction may be once again loose in our midst.

Or maybe not.

For all their firepower and media mesmerization techniques, the Bush
junta never reckoned on running head on into an uncontrollable source of
constantly updated, augmented and corroborated information available
24/7 to anyone who can log online.

No one did.

For the first time in known human history, power-crazed bureaucrats are
finding it difficult to get away with almost anything. In this truth-telling time of personal camcorders and computers, exposure of official deceptions can be embarrassingly swift -- posted on the web  for a whole wide wired world to see.

If you can type it, you can probably find it online: Flight 800,  Oklahoma
City
, Gulf War Illness, Operation Northwoods, the "sober drunk"  syndrome. The real stories behind official mythology can be found in leaked documents, declassified papers, eyewitness accounts, expert commentary, fully referenced mainstream and alternate news stories, magazines and e-books, news photos, video footage and recorded interviews. All are available in an instantly accessible, exponentially expanding,  electronic
 ibrary called the Internet.

HOW IT WORKS

Forget B-52s. Real power comes from networked hominids tapping  keyboards.
As a Secretary of State discovered, all it takes to verify an official "story" is to go online and type in a few key search words. Try "powell presentation" or "bush cocaine" -- then hit the key appropriately  labelled "Enter".

The results can be spectacular. Thanks to a Cambridge professor's
recollection and online retrieval, Bush's only buddy willing to send
reluctant soldiers into the irradiated ruins of Baghdad could face a
humiliating non-confidence vote within days.

Former Labour minister Glenda Jackson told BBC Radio 4, "If that was presented to Parliament and the country as being up-to-date  intelligence and in fact as we now know they simply lifted it from a university  thesis, it is another example of how the Government is attempting to mislead  the country and Parliament on the issue of a possible war with Iraq."

Another former Labour minister, Peter Kilfoyle, said he was "shocked"  at the way the dossier had been doctored. "It just adds to the general impression that what we have been treated to is a farrago of  half-truths, assertions and over-the-top spin. I am shocked that on such thin  evidence-- a Californian postgraduate thesis -- that we should be trying to convince the British people that this is a war worth fighting."
[Telegraph Feb. 8, 2003]

The implications for Washington's war plans are serious. If Tony Blair
loses a vote brought against him by his own party, the present Prime Minister of England will find himself suddenly unemployed. And Bush  will be bereft of major backers.

BLACKOUT

Back in the USA, if "news managers" chose to expose the mass marketed "threat" of a shattered country they know to be bogus, outraged  Americans would not take such betrayal lightly. And a blueprint drawn up long  before Sept. 11 allowed its architects to kick it into high government gear  could quickly come unraveled. [BBC Feb. 6, 2003]

But extensive U.S. televised coverage of Powell's prevarications and a story taking the rest of the world by storm never occurred.

The spookiest episode in this story came 24 hours after the BBC exposed empty excuses for mass murder in Iraq. By then, TV-watching, newspaper reading Americans interviewed by Lifeboatnews in Florida and California had yet to learn of a gaffe that has punctured Powell's pretensions and  blown Bush's credibility abroad.

As Iran accelerates its nuclear weapons program to defend against an American attack they know is coming, and France moves this morning to block NATO from initiating plans to involve Turkey, mainstream media in  Canada, Britain and across the USA continue to ignore revelations that shared  U.S. and British "intelligence" on Iraq is years out of date. And cribbed  from public sources. [Global TV Feb. 10]

Commenting on the media's self-censoring stories that trash all retenses for war, Lifeboatnews editor Paul Grignon gripes, "It's as fixed as wrestling."

WHITE HOUSE WATCHERS

The American media's big snooze is good news for pretenders who remain  in
power only as long as they continue to hoodwink the people they seek to rule. By waving flags, suppressing contrary information, and pointing  to successive "threats" of their own devising, the Bushwhackers depend on  the zombie-like behavior of sedated and distracted masses, and a military as robotic as their weaponry. In their mutual rush to parrot empty slogans  and do the bidding of "authorities" bent on conquest and murder, few  question the consequences, veracity or legitimacy of their actions.

But deep questions are being raised, in an intense international forum called the Internet. Immune to cruise missiles and faked intelligence briefings, the power of the ever-wakeful web is to network the global village outside the filters of controlled information -- exposing  official lies almost as fast as they can be floated.

No wonder the day after Sept. 11 a President-select announced that one of
his first objectives was to get control over the Internet. Since then, his lavishly funded Department of Cyber Security is working to force all servers to submit to federal surveillance. [CBC Sept. 12, 2001]

But it may already be too late.

When critical mass is reached and the hundredth monkey logs on, it's all
over for the Bush regime and their successors. Even now, with more than 620
million people logged on worldwide, incessant Internet revelations are illuminating a gang who:

1. Stole an election by rigging votes in Florida

2. Blocked investigations and interceptors that could have foiled 9/11

3.
Experimented with mailing an army-designed strain of anthrax to
Americans to boost sales of a vaccine jointly controlled by the Bushes
and bin Ladens

4.
Paved the way for a police state with freedom-canceling proclamations
copied almost verbatim from laws issued by someone named Adolf Hitler.

[NUA Internet Trends 2002; All Fall Down: The Politics of Terror and Mass
Persuasion]

All this with nary a murmur from a cushy, compliant and culpable press
owned by the same corporations who manufacture costly armaments for the
conflicts their news networks "sell".

It's all documented online for anyone who cares to look. But
information is
only as powerful as the actions it prompts. Next weekend, organizers
say
that worldwide protests coordinated through the worldwide web could
outnumber the massive anti-war demonstrations that ended years of
unprovoked aggression against the people of Vietnam.

BAGHDAD OR BUST

Despite the ballyhoo over a bogus briefing that appears to have
hardened Russia's resolve to stick with China, France and Germany in opposing a
war they cannot justify, the Gang of Four still intends to crush Iraq. [BBC
Feb. 9, 2003]

It only makes sense when they admit that their long-standing agenda is not
really concerned about Baghdad's bogeyman. "Project for the New American
Century" notes that while Saddam Hussein poses no threat to the United
States, the dictator can be "used as an excuse" to further aims that are all about oil. Whoever controls the world's last big oil fields, also controls a world running on empty. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sept.
29,
2002
]

What happens next is anybody's guess. Intended as an indelible lesson to
the world, we could be weeks away from unprecedented "live fire" demonstrations over Baghdad, Basra and Tikrit.
Or maybe not.

Type "peace protests" and hit Enter.

---

William Thomas served as a member of a three-man Gulf Environmental
Emergency Response Team in Kuwait during and immediately after Desert
Storm. Producer of the award-winning documentary, "Eco War", he is the
author of Bringing The War Home, Chemtrails Confirmed, Alt. Health and
All Fall Down: The Politics of Terror and Mass Persuasion.