The Voice of the White House

            Washington, D.C., August 24, 2008: “What amounts to a terrible geo-political defeat for the United States as the direct result of the Russian/Georgian conflict, has caused much sturm und drang here. Cheney, who had no idea that Putin would react so quickly or that the Georgian army would totally collapse, is having a fit. Bush, who expected some kind of a blow to Tehran before he left office, is having one of his sulks and the propaganda organs are gearing up to try to smear Putin and disguise the fact that at the first sign of real trouble, our beloved CIA, the entire U.S. military machine in Georgia and almost all of our diplomats ran like Olympic track stars, leaving the crazy Georgian president to rage at his “betrayal.” It is known (because the Russians made it known through diplomatic and very private channels, that their troops had orders not to fire at the Americans but if the same Americans fired first at the Russian troops, fire would at once be returned. The same orders applied to units of the Russian Black Sea Fleet off the coast of Georgia. So far, everyone has been very correct. But it is becoming more and more evident that the very valuable Ukraine will be the next target of the emerging Russian empire. The Ukrainians initially tried to block the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s use of their rented base at Sebastopol but when informed that Russia would consider this an act of war and Kiev backed down with great speed. Although American military officials have loudly insisted they knew nothing of the fatal Georgian assault on South Ossetia, it is impossible to believe that with such a large American presence in Georgia and its close connections with the Georgian army, lack of American knowledge of the large-scale attacks is not possible to believe.

Death from the Skies

August 24, 2008

by Brian Harring

South Ossetian officials accused Georgia on Sunday of building up military forces along the edge of South Ossetia and claimed a Georgian unit fired sporadically at villages overnight. There were no reports of casualties, but South Ossetian spokeswoman Irina Gagloyeva said residents were asking to be evacuated.

Georgian Security Council chief Alexander Lomaia denied that Georgian forces had fired any shots but said Russian forces were obligated to leave positions in the area, which is in Georgia.

Lomaia also said Russian forces were still holding 12 of 22 Georgian servicemen taken prisoner in Poti last week, including two Yemini Jews, disguised as Arabs. On one of these, Russian military intelligence interrogators found a packet of reports, wrapped in plastic and taped to the man’s back.  This packet consisted of “the highest level security matters.”

This concerned the ongoing plan to base Israeli fighter-bombers at Marneuli military airbase, 20 kilometers south of Tbilisi and that these aircraft were intended for a special air raid on the Iranian capital city of Tehran.  It was originally felt that six aircraft were to be utilized, three attacking the city itself and three to attack targeted Iranian oil facilities.

The captured Israeli’s papers, all written in Hebrew, when translated by the Russian GRU turned out to be somewhat different in nature. While one flight was indeed intended to attack various Iranian oil facilities, the second flight was planned to drop chemical warfare bombs on Tehran. These bombs, which were designed to blow open at a set altitude, were filled with weapons-grade anthrax and this anthrax, kept in a specially sealed box at the U.S. diplomatic offices in Tiblisi, came from Fr. Detrick in Maryland and their shipment had the approval of the President himself.  Another twist to the bizarre plot was that the aircraft, made in the United States, were to have their Israeli marking masked with American markings and that these markings were to be applied in a water-based paint that could easily be hosed off when this flight returned to Georgia.

When the Russians learned of this, they immediately notified their Embassy in Tehran and subjected their Yemeni Israeli to what they called “intensive interrogation,” not unlike the CIA’s  Bush-mandated torture. In this case, the “subject expired” but not before revealing more of the joint Israeli-US activity.

In an abstract sense, the Russian counter attack on Georgia indirectly saved the lives of many thousands of Iranians.

The Americans, apparently, were totally unaware of the Israeli false flag portion of the operation. Had the BW attack been successful, the question arises as to whether the American military command would ever discuss any aspect of it. If any of the falsely-marked Israeli aircraft had been seen and wrongly identified as American, there would be heated denials and the matter would quickly be shoved under the carpet by the American media.

In central Georgia, an oil train exploded and caught fire, sending plumes of black smoke into the air. A Georgian official said the train hit a land mine and blamed the explosion on departing Russian forces. The Russian Defense Ministry declined to comment.

The director of Georgia's railways, Irakli Ezugbaia said the train that exploded on Sunday was carrying crude oil from Kazakhstan to a Georgian Black Sea port.

Georgia straddles a key westward route for oil from Azerbaijan and other Caspian Sea nations including Kazakhstan, giving it added strategic importance as the U.S. and the European Union seek to decrease Russia's dominance of oil and gas exports from the former Soviet Union.

There were 12 derailed tanker cars, some askew on the railway line and others flipped onto their sides. Firefighters hosed down the wreckage.

Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said the train hit a mine, as did the country's railway director. Utiashvili said there were no casualties, but the blast had also set off explosions at an abandoned munitions dump nearby.

Utiashvili blamed the explosion on the Russians. Georgian officials say Russian forces have sabotaged infrastructure to weaken Georgia, and accused them of blowing up a train bridge last week.

Ezugbaia said other mines were found on the tracks, and Georgian forces removed a large artillery shell that was jammed under the tracks and covered with stones.

A Really Bad Couple of Weeks for Pax Americana

August 23, 2008

by Jim Lobe

InterPressService

WASHINGTON  - Whatever hopes the George W. Bush administration may have had for using its post-9/11 “war on terror” to impose a new Pax Americana on Eurasia, and particularly in the unruly areas between the Caucasus and the Khyber Pass, appear to have gone up in flames — in some cases, literally — over the past two weeks.

 Not only has Russia reasserted its influence in the most emphatic way possible by invading and occupying substantial parts of Georgia after Washington’s favourite Caucasian, President Mikhail Saakashvili, launched an ill-fated offensive against secessionist South Ossetians. But bloody attacks in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, about 1,000 kms to the east also underlined the seriousness of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban insurgencies in both countries and the threats they pose to their increasingly beleaguered and befuddled U.S.-backed governments.

And while U.S. negotiators appear to have made progress in hammering out details of a bilateral military agreement that will permit U.S. combat forces to remain in Iraq at least for another year and a half, signs that the Shi’a-dominated government of President Nouri al-Maliki may be preparing to move forcefully against the U.S.-backed, predominantly Sunni ”Awakening” movement has raised the spectre of renewed sectarian civil war.

Meanwhile, any hope of concluding a framework for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority by the time Bush leaves office less than five months from now appears to have vanished, while efforts at mobilising greater international diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran to freeze its uranium enrichment programme — the administration’s top priority before the Georgia crisis — have stalled indefinitely, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of bad news from its neighbourhood.

”The list of foreign policy failures this week is breathtaking,” noted a statement released Friday by the National Security Network (NSN), a mainstream group of former high-ranking officials critical of the Bush administration’s more-aggressive policies. And a prominent New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, argued that the Russian move on Georgia, in particular, signaled ”the end of the Pax Americana — the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force.”

Indeed, Russia’s intervention in what it used to call its ”near abroad” was clearly the most spectacular of the fortnight’s developments, both because of its unprecedented use of overwhelming military force against a U.S. ally heavily promoted by Washington for membership in NATO and because of the geo-strategic implications of its move for the increasingly-troubled Atlantic alliance and U.S. hopes that Caspian and Central Asian energy resources could be safely transported to the West without transiting either Russia or Iran.

While Russia did not seize control of the Baku-Tbili-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline or approach the area proposed for the Nabucco pipeline further south, its intervention made it abundantly clear that it could have done so if it had wished, a message that is certain to reverberate across gas-hungry Europe. Indeed, investors now may prove considerably less enthusiastic about financing the Nabucco project than before, dealing yet another blow to Washington’s regional ambitions.

Russia’s move also raised new questions about its willingness to tolerate the continued use by the U.S. and other NATO countries of key air bases and other military facilities in the southern part of the former Soviet Union, notably Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, over which Moscow maintains substantial influence.

As with Georgia, where the U.S. significantly escalated its military presence by sending, over Russian protests, 200 Special Forces troops in early 2002, Washington first acquired access to these bases under the pretext of its post-9/11 ”global war on terrorism”. But, while clearly important to its subsequent operations on Afghanistan, they were also seen as key building blocks — or ”lily pads” — in the construction of a permanent military infrastructure that could both contain a resurgent Russia or an emergent China and help establish U.S. hegemony over the energy resources of Central Asia and the Caspian region in what its architects hoped would be a ”New American Century.”

As suggested by former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani this week, Washington and, to some extent, NATO behind it, ”has intruded into the geopolitical spaces of other dormant countries. They are no longer dormant…”

Indeed, still badly bogged down in Iraq where, despite the much-reduced level of sectarian violence, political reconciliation remains elusive, to say the least, the U.S. and its overly deferential NATO allies now face unprecedented challenges in Afghanistan not entirely unfamiliar to the Soviets 20 years ago.

”The news out of Afghanistan is truly alarming,” warned Thursday’s lead editorial in the New York Times, which noted the killings of 10 French paratroopers near Kabul in an ambush earlier in the week — the single worst combat death toll for NATO forces in the war there — as well as the coordinated assault by suicide bombers on one of the biggest U.S. military bases there as indications of an increasingly dire situation. In the last three months, more U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

”Afghanistan badly needs reinforcements. Badly,” wrote ret. Col. Pat Lang, a former top Middle East and South Asia expert at the Defence Intelligence Agency on his blog this week. ”Afghanistan badly needs a serious infrastructure and economic development programme. Badly.”

Of course, the Taliban’s resurgence has in no small part been due to the safe haven it has been provided next door in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) where Pakistan’s own Taliban, which also hosts a rejuvenating al Qaeda, has not only tightened its hold on the region in recent months but extended it into the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).

Last week, it retaliated in spectacular fashion to airborne attacks on its forces by the U.S.-backed military in Bajaur close to the Khyber Pass — the most important supply route for NATO forces in Afghanistan — by carrying out suicide bombings at a heavily guarded munitions factory that killed nearly 70 people near Islamabad.

Analysts here are especially worried that, having achieved the resignation last week of U.S.-backed former President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the new civilian government will likely tear itself apart over the succession and the growing economic crisis and thus prove completely ineffective in dealing with Washington’s top priority — confronting and defeating the Taliban in a major counter-insurgency effort for which the army, long focused on the conventional threat posed by India, has shown no interest at all.

Indeed, the current leadership vacuum in Islamabad has greatly compounded concern here that the army’s intelligence service ISI, which Washington believes played a role in last month’s deadly Taliban attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, could broaden its anti-Indian efforts. This is especially so now that Indian Kashmir is once again hotting up, ensuring a sharp escalation in the two nuclear-armed countries’ decades-long rivalry and threatening in yet another way the post-Cold War Pax Americana.

August 23, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

Protecting US Citizens from George W. Bush

by Christopher Brauchli

All persons born . . . in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States. . . . - Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

August 2008 was a banner month for passports. They played a significant role in world events that garnered them rare publicity. Two of the events demonstrated how easy a government can make it to get passports and one demonstrated how difficult it can be.

In August, Russia and Georgia got into an argument over whether Abkhazia and South Ossetia should be allowed to leave Georgia and become independent or should remain part of Georgia. For the last several years Russia has been issuing passports to residents of South Ossetia, thus bestowing Russian citizenship on the holders. Thus, when invading South Ossetia, Russia was simply going to the aid of its citizens, albeit many of them Russian-come-lately. (If George Bush were clever he would have issued passports to Iraqis prior to invading their country and then announced he was simply acting to protect United States citizens.)

China, too, issued passports in furtherance of national objectives. In November 2007 an associated press release described the success of a young girl gymnast, He Kexin. He was one of the stars at China’s Cities Games in November 2007. Xinhua, the Chinese Government’s news agency reported on her success in those games and said she was 13 years of age. Olympic rules require that for a gymnast to compete in Olympic games the gymnast must attain age 16 in the year in which the games take place. For He to leap over the years that separate 13 from 16 in a mere 9 months was something that not even a gymnast as accomplished as she could hope to accomplish. It was accomplished instead by issuing a passport. In 9 months He aged 3 years and her team became the first Chinese women’s team to win a gold medal in gymnastics. Passports can, of course, be withheld in furtherance of a country’s foreign policy, as the United States showed.

A law that goes into effect next year requires anyone crossing between the United States and Canada or Mexico to present a passport instead of a birth certificate or driver’s license. As a result the thousands who cross borders daily because of employment must now obtain passports. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that many United States citizens who were born in South Texas are having difficulty obtaining passports.

Ordinarily a passport can be obtained by furnishing the issuing authority a certified copy of a birth certificate, acceptable identification and the appropriate fee. Whereas Russia made it easy for people in South Ossetia to get passports, the State Department has made it difficult for people in South Texas to get theirs. A birth certificate is not always accepted because the State Department has learned that some people in South Texas have fake birth certificates. Those people were delivered by mid-wives and some of the mid-wives were convicted of forging birth certificates for children born not in South Texas but in Mexico. The forgeries may have affected as many as 15,000 people. Although people in South Texas can vote, become border-patrol agents or president of the United States, they may not obtain passports without additional proof that they were born in the U.S.A. Here are some of the things these presumptively non-citizens can do to satisfy the State Department. They can obtain affidavits or testimony from the mid-wives who delivered them, assuming the midwives can be found and can remember whom they delivered dozens of years after the birth. They can produce newspaper announcements of their births or they can produce hospital records going back dozens of years to show they were treated in the hospital if, indeed, they were. Juan Aranda is someone who has been unable to get a passport and here is what he has done.

Juan submitted all the required documentation and when he was turned down sent in school records going back 38 years showing that his kindergarten records recited that his birthplace was Weslaco, Texas. He sent in a picture of his kindergarten class that included him. He sent in a baptismal certificate with a church seal reciting he was born in that town. He explained that pre-natal medical history was unavailable because his mother was too poor to have pre-natal care. The State Department told Mr. Aranda that he hadn’t “fully complied with the request for additional information” and he should start the process to become a naturalized citizen. Instead, Mr. Aranda hired a lawyer. If his lawyer is successful it may soon be as easy for an American citizen to get an American passport as it is for a Georgian citizen to get a Russian passport. Mr. Aranda’s success would be remembered as another example of the courts being invoked to protect the citizens of the United States from the administration of George W. Bush.

Brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu

Christopher Brauchli

US falters on NATO's failure
August 21, 2008

by Kaveh L Afrasiabi

                United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is supposedly a specialist on Russia, yet one would not know that by looking at her triumphal statement that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will defeat Russian aims in Georgia.

                Rice proclaimed boldly that Russia "is becoming more and more the outlaw in this conflict", referring to the Russian offensive into Georgia following Georgia's attack on the rebel region of South Ossetia. "They intend and probably still do intend to strangle Georgia and its economy," Rice said in reference to the Russian forces that remain in Georgia.

                However, at an emergency summit of NATO's foreign ministers in Brussels, European countries agreed to suspend formal contacts with Moscow until its troops pulled out, but refused to bow to American pressure for more severe penalties. NATO is "considering seriously the implications of Russia's actions for the NATO-Russia relationship", said a statement of the 26-member alliance.

                The fact is, Russia has finally drawn a line in the sand and, for all practical purposes, the buck stops in the South Caucasus. Short of destabilizing Europe, there is practically nothing the US can do about it, except fire more verbal volleys, as Rice has been doing relentlessly since the outbreak of Russia-Georgia hostilities on August 7-8. And even the rhetoric has fallen on deaf ears in Moscow,

                Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has labeled Russians as "barbarians", but the former New York attorney should have taken a course in global geopolitics before foolishly taking on the Russian bear.

                There are four interrelated causes of the present crisis: irredentism in Georgia, NATO's expansion, the US's plan to station an anti-missile system in Eastern Europe, considered a first-strike capability by Moscow, and the geo-economics of energy security.

                Russia's military has now entered into the calculus of energy security and, in light of Europe's heavy energy dependency on Russia, the crisis will certainly impact the future of pipeline politics in Europe.

                On the US's part, instead of applying the arithmetic of political realism and coming to terms with the sources of Russian anger, that is, at NATO's unwelcome, intrusive and threatening expansion near Russian territory, the US is now seeking to augment Russia's insecurity by pushing more aggressively for NATO's role and influence in the region and beyond. The US is taking advantage of Ukraine and other neighboring countries' fear of Russian power, put on full display inside Georgia these past few days.

                Such bellicose US reactions are neither fully in sync with Europe's needs and interests, nor that of US's own interest - such as in engaging Russia in the NATO-Russia Council. Whereas Moscow's legitimate national security worries have been completely side-stepped and ignored in Washington (and to a lesser extent in London), other Western leaders, such as those in Paris and Berlin, have been more cautious and one may even say considerate of the Russian point of view.

Henceforth, a new trans-Atlantic rift between the US and some of its European allies who are members of NATO may be in the offing.

                For its part, the European Union's failure to offer Russia an adequate framework for strategic partnership, reflected in its inability to provide a new cooperation agreement with Moscow, is also a source of the present crisis.

                But, with Russia consistently painting its relations with the EU as a fundamental pillar of its foreign policy, the EU today has no choice but to reframe its security calculus partly under the shade of Russia. For Russia's neighbors such as Ukraine and Georgia, still harboring the notion of joining NATO, the war in Georgia has all but cemented Moscow's veto power, unless these countries are ready to embrace worse outcomes.

                With respect to China, which has limited itself to a studied reaction to the fast-paced developments, the chances are that Beijing's real sympathy rests with Russia and in this post-September 11, 2001, international milieu, Beijing and Moscow have a greater common cause with regard to US unilateralism and NATO expansion than they have disagreements over specific tactics and sub-strategies. In a word, we may expect closer Russia-China security cooperation via the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in the near future, due to the two powers' perceived threat of the US and NATO.

                Given the long-term damage to US-Russia relations as a result of this crisis and the US's insistence that it has done nothing wrong and that Moscow shoulders all the blame, a new era of frosty relations reminiscent of the Cold War has now set in that will carry over to the next US administration, no matter who wins the US presidency this November.

                Although on the surface Republican Senator John McCain's "get tough on Russia" attitude may seem to have benefited from this crisis, propelling US voters toward more national-security focused elections in November, it is clear a smart US policy will have to blend in more elements of diplomacy toward Moscow to be successful. This means paying more attention to the Russian state of mind, political psychology and perceived national-security threats, instead of dismissing them as "nonsense" as Rice did not too long ago.

                The crisis is also a litmus test for "smart power" US policy-making, a premise that has remained in potential despite official pretensions to the otherwise. It is simply not wise to corner the Russian bear and provoke it into aggression by taking blatant initiatives that threaten Russian national-security interests

                Such a narrow approach to global affairs is certainly a recipe for disaster and, perhaps, Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama and his motto of change is the right alternative to set troubled US-Russian relations back on a healthy track.

                This he could do by reversing what former president Bill Clinton did, that is, renege on the elder George Herbert Bush's pledge to the Russians regarding NATO's expansion.

                All that Rice and her aides need to do is to put themselves in Moscow's shoes and try to digest what it would mean if it was not the Warsaw Pact but rather NATO that had been disbanded and now was actively procuring several new members while, simultaneously, threatening the national security of the former adversary.

                Not hard to do, yet no one in Washington seems capable of this elementary exercise.

                Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.

Marching Through Georgia

August 21, 2008

by  Colonel Alexander McCreedy

                When the North Caucasus slid into war Thursday night, it presented John McCain and Barack Obama with a true “3 a.m. moment,” and their responses to the crisis suggested dramatic differences in how each candidate, as president, would lead America in moments of international crisis.

                While Obama offered a response largely in line with statements issued by democratically elected world leaders, including President Bush, first calling on both sides to negotiate, John McCain took a remarkably — and uniquely — more aggressive stance, siding clearly with Georgia’s pro-Western leaders and placing the blame for the conflict entirely on Russia.

                The abrupt crisis in an obscure hotspot had the features of the real foreign policy situations presidents face — not the clean hypotheticals of candidates’ white papers and debating points.

                Russia has long attempted to reclaim now-sovereign parts of the former Soviet Union, stoking conflicts in the enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which are universally recognized to be Georgian soil. Russia has also used the ensuing military tensions to set back Georgia’s bid to enter NATO.

                But Georgia appears to have sparked the conflict by marching on the South Ossetian capital as Russia’s powerful Prime Minister Vladimir Putin headed to Beijing for the Olympic Games. Russia, in turn, welcomed the conflict, launching a large-scale attack on its smaller neighbor and sending tanks across its border.

                Both American candidates back Georgia’s sovereignty and its turn toward the West. But their first statements on the crisis revealed differences of substance and style. 

                Obama’s statement put him in line with the White House, the European Union, NATO and a series of European powers, while McCain’s initial statement — which he delivered in Iowa and ran on a blog on his Web site under the title “McCain Statement on Russian Invasion of Georgia” — put him more closely in line with the moral clarity and American exceptionalism projected by President Bush’s first term.

                A McCain adviser suggested that Obama’s statement constituted appeasement, while Obama’s camp suggested that McCain was being needlessly belligerent and dangerously quick to judge a complicated situation.

                “I strongly condemn the outbreak of violence in Georgia, and urge an immediate end to armed conflict,” Obama said in a written statement. “Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint and to avoid an escalation to full-scale war. Georgia’s territorial integrity must be respected.”

                Obama added briefly that the international community should get involved. More than an hour later, as more details of Russia’s incursion into Georgia emerged, he cited Russia more directly: “What is clear is that Russia has invaded Georgia’s sovereign — has encroached on Georgia’s sovereignty,” he told reporters in Sacramento.

                McCain’s statement was longer, more detailed and more confrontational.

                "[T]he news reports indicate that Russian military forces crossed an internationally recognized border into the sovereign territory of Georgia. Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory.

                “The government of Georgia has called for a ceasefire and for a resumption of direct talks on South Ossetia with international mediators. The U.S. should immediately work with the EU and the OSCE to put diplomatic pressure on Russia to reverse this perilous course that it has chosen.”

                John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, defended McCain’s direct criticism of Russia in the early hours of the crisis.

                "Sen. McCain is clearly willing to note who he thinks is the aggressor here,” he said, dismissing the notion that Georgia’s move into its renegade province had precipitated the crisis. "I don't think you can excuse, defend, explain or make allowance for Russian behavior because of what is going on in Georgia.”

                He also criticized Obama for calling on both sides to show “restraint,” and suggested the Democrat was putting too much blame on the conflict’s clear victim.

                “That's kind of like saying after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, that Kuwait and Iraq need to show restraint, or like saying in 1968 [when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia] ... that the Czechoslovaks should show restraint,” he said.

                A foreign policy adviser for Obama, Ben Rhodes, said Obama was deliberately measured in response to the conflict, balancing his disapproval of Russia’s “troubling behavior in its near-abroad region” with “the fact that we have to deal with Russia to deal with our most important national security challenges.”

                Rhodes declined to discuss McCain’s statement directly, but did indirectly criticize it.

                "The temperature of your rhetoric isn't a measure of your commitment to Georgian sovereignty,” he said, noting that the two candidates’ statements shared a substantive commitment to Georgia’s borders. “You don't want to get so far in front of a situation that you're feeding the momentum of an escalation.”

                Critics of McCain’s stance said he’d imposed ideology on a complicated situation in which both sides bear some blame.

                “McCain took an inflexible approach to addressing this issue by focusing heavily on one side, without a pragmatic assessment of the situation,” said Mark Brzezinski, a former Clinton White House official and an informal adviser to Obama.

                “It’s both sides’ fault — both have been somewhat provocative with each other,” he said.

                A fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, Ariel Cohen, praised McCain’s statement as “robust and tough.”

                The candidates’ stances also reflected their broader goals in the region. Obama, Rhodes noted, has argued that the American interest in controlling nuclear material in the former Soviet Union and in other national security concerns means that the country should maintain a constructive relationship with Russia, even when Russia mistreats its population and threatens its neighbors.

                McCain, meanwhile, has offered more sticks than carrots, and suggested that Russia will respond primarily to American toughness and resolve. He’s also called for Russia to be expelled from the Group of Eight industrial nations, a move unlikely to be supported by its other members, but one that makes his disapproval of Russia’s conduct very clear. Friday, as the crisis unfolded, he reiterated that stance.

                The conflict in Georgia also brought attention to another complicating feature of McCain’s campaign: His ties to Republican operatives with extensive lobbying practices. Scheunemann was, until earlier this year, registered to lobby for the government of Georgia.

                A public relations firm working for the Russian Federation pointed out Scheunemann’s lobbying past to reporters — a sign that McCain’s stance is not, for better or worse, being welcomed in Moscow — as did Obama’s campaign.

                “John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser lobbied for, and has a vested interest in, the Republic of Georgia and McCain has mirrored the position advocated by the government,” said Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan, noting that the “appearance of a conflict of interest” was a consequence of McCain’s too-close ties to lobbyists.

                Scheunemann dismissed the criticism, saying he severed his ties to his firm and to his client on March 1 and noting that McCain has been a firm supporter of Georgia’s move toward the West, and away from Russia, since the Arizona senator’s first visit there in 1997.

Comment: When a campaigning McCain was told by a aide that “the Russians have invaded Georgia!” He stared blankly for a few minutes and finally said,”Jesus, I hope they don’t burn Atlanta again!” He meant it. John McCain is an increasingly confused individual and his aides are terrified of some lapsus linguae even worse than this one. BH

And None Dare Call It Treason

August 22, 2008

by Patrick J. Buchanan

AntiWar.com

                Who is Randy Scheunemann?

                He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.

                But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.

                He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.

                From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 – pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.

                What were Mikheil's marching orders to Tbilisi's man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.

                Scheunemann came close to succeeding.

                Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann's client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.

                U.S. backing for his campaign to retrieve his lost provinces is what Saakashvili paid Scheunemann to produce. But why should Americans fight Russians to force 70,000 South Ossetians back into the custody of a regime they detest? Why not let the South Ossetians decide their own future in free elections?

                Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.

                Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have sought for 45 years to stay out of a shooting war with Russia and we are not going to get into one now. President Bush assured us there will be no U.S. military response to the Russian move into Georgia.

                That is a recognition of, and a bowing to, reality – namely, that Russia's control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and occupation of a strip of Georgia cannot be a casus belli for the United States. We may deplore it, but it cannot justify war with Russia.

                If that be true, and it transparently is, what are McCain, Barack Obama, Bush, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel doing committing the United States and Germany to bringing Georgia into NATO? For that would commit us to war for a cause we have already conceded, by our paralysis, does not justify a war.

                Not only did Scheunemann's two-man lobbying firm receive $730,000 since 2001 to get Georgia a NATO war guarantee, he was paid by Romania and Latvia to do the same. And he succeeded.

                Latvia, a tiny Baltic republic annexed by Joseph Stalin in June 1940 during his pact with Adolf Hitler, was set free at the end of the Cold War. Yet hundreds of thousands of Russians had been moved into Latvia by Stalin, and as Riga served as a base of the Baltic Sea fleet, many Russian naval officers retired there.

                The children and grandchildren of these Russians are Latvian citizens. They are a cause of constant tension with ethnic Letts and of strife with Moscow, which has assumed the role of protector of Russians left behind in the "near abroad" when the Soviet Union broke apart.

                Thanks to the lobbying of Scheunemann and friends, Latvia has been brought into NATO and given a U.S. war guarantee. If Russia intervenes to halt some nasty ethnic violence in Riga, the United States is committed to come in and drive the Russians out.

                This is the situation in which the interventionists have placed our country: committed to go to war for countries and causes that do not justify war, against a Russia that is re-emerging as a great power only to find NATO squatting on her doorstep.

                Scheunemann's resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He signed the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) letter to President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9/11. He signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9/11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq. He was executive director of the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq," a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi and his pack of liars who deceived us into war.

                Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain's camp.

                The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.

                Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?

                Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George Bush?

                "Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence ... a free people ought to be constantly awake," Washington warned in his Farewell Address. Our Founding Father was warning against the Randy Scheunemanns among us, agents hired by foreign powers to deceive Americans into fighting their wars. And none dare call it treason.

The Potocki Reports

by Brian Harring

After the collapse of the Polish government and the occupation of the capital of Warsaw in September and October of 1939, the Germans located the secret archives of the Polish Foreign Ministry hidden in a bunker. A number of the documents were hastily translated and published by the German government as a “White Book” in 1940. A larger selection of these documents are now in the German Bundesarchiv

The Polish Ambassador to the United States, Count Jerzy Potocki, scion of a famous Polish family, wrote a number of important reports to the Polish Foreign Minister that gave a very clear picture of an educated European’s view of American politics and the forces that shaped US foreign policy.

                Count Jerzy Potocki, Poland’s Ambassador to the United States, was a man of strong opinions, but was also very observant and very well connected in the Washington diplomatic circles. He wrote many reports to the Foreign Minister in Warsaw and four of them are reproduced here because they show a European diplomat’s view of Roosevelt’s foreign policy, or rather his lack of a rational and coherent one.

The  report here is under date of January 12, 1939 and is a discussion of Potocki’s view of Jewish influence on Roosevelt and its impact on his policies.

To The Foreign Minister in Warsaw:

                Public opinion in America nowadays expresses itself in an increasing hatred of Fascism, Chancellor Hitler and everything connected with National Socialism. Above all, propaganda here is entirely in the hands of the Jews who control almost 100 percent of the radio, the films and the daily and periodical press. Although this propaganda is extremely coarse and is designed to present Germany as blackly as possible, when bearing American public ignorance in mind, their propaganda is so effective that people here have no real knowledge of the true state of affairs in Europe.

                At the present time, most Americans are taught to believe that Chancellor Hitler and National Socialism are the greatest evil and the greatest peril threatening the world. The situation here provides an excellent program for public speakers of all kinds, among whom are many refugees from Germany and Czechoslovakia who with much effort and many patently false accounts, incite the American public. These speakers praise American liberty which they repeatedly contrast with totalitarian states.

                It is interesting to observe that in this carefully thought-out campaign, which is primarily conducted against National Socialism, no reference at all is made to Soviet Russia. If that country is mentioned, it is referred to in a friendly manner and people are given the impression that Soviet Russia is part of the democratic group of nations. Thanks to astute propaganda, public sympathy in the United States is entirely on the side of Communist Spain. Side by side with this pro-Communist propaganda, an artificial war panic is created, The American people are told that peace in Europe is hanging only by a slim thread and that war is inevitable. No effort is spared to impress upon the American mind that in the event of a world war, the United States must take an active part in a struggle for “freedom and democracy.” President Roosevelt was the first in the field to give expression to this hatred of Fascism. He had a two-fold purpose in mind: firstly, he wanted to divert American public opinion from difficult and complicated domestic problems, especially the problem of the struggle between capital and labor. Secondly, by creating a war-panic and inventing rumors about threats to Europe, he wanted to induce Americans to endorse his huge program of armaments, a program which far exceeds the United States defense requirements.

                Regarding the first point, it must be said that the internal situation here on the labor front is growing steadily worse. The unemployed today already number twelve million. Federal and state expenditures are increasing daily. Only these huge sums, running into billions, which the US treasury expends for emergency labor projects, are keeping a certain amount of peace in the country. Thus far only the usual strikes and local unrest have taken place. As to how long this artificial governmental aid can be kept up is difficult to predict at present. The unhappiness and growing indignation of public opinion coupled with the serious conflict between private enterprise and the enormous trusts on one hand and with a radicalized labor movement on the other, have made many enemies for Roosevelt and are no doubt causing him many sleepless nights.

                As to the second point, I can only say that President Roosevelt is a skillful expert in domestic politics and a connoisseur of the American mentality and he has effectively turned public attention away from internal domestic problems and focused it on foreign policy. His means of achieving this effective distraction was simple. He needed, on the one hand, to highlight a fictional war menace threatening the world because of Chancellor Hitler, and on the other hand, to create a specter of war and invasion by speaking ominously about an attack of the totalitarian states on the United States. The Munich pact came to President Roosevelt as a godsend. He described it as the capitulation of France and England to growing and aggressive German militarism. As was said here: Hitler compelled Chamberlain at pistol point. Hence, France and England had no choice, but to back down and were compelled to conclude a shameful peace.

                Furthermore, the brutal treatment meted out to the Jews in Germany, as well as the problem of the large number of Jewish and anti-German refugees flooding this country are both factors which intensify the existing hatred of everything connected with German National Socialism. In this campaign of hatred, individual Jewish intellectuals such as Bernard Baruch, Lehman, the Governor of New York State, Felix Frankfurter, the newly appointed Supreme Court Judge, Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury and other well-known personal friends have taken a prominent part in this campaign of hatred. All of them want the President to become the protagonist of human liberty, religious freedom and the right of free speech and be the man who, in the future, will punish trouble-mongers, especially those who are not liked by Jews. This particular group of people, who are all in highly placed official American positions and who are desirous of being representatives of “true Americanism” and seen as “Champions of Democracy” are, in point of fact, linked with international Jewry by ties incapable of being torn asunder. For this Jewish international, so intimately concerned with the interests of its own race, President Roosevelt’s “ideal” role as a champion of human rights was indeed a godsend, In this way they are not only able to establish a dangerous center of hatred and enmity in this hemisphere, but name also succeeded in dividing the world into two warlike camps. The whole problem is being worked out in a most mysterious manner. Roosevelt has been given the power to enable him to energize American foreign policy and at the same time create huge reserves in armaments for a future war which the Jews are deliberately heading for. With regards to domestic policy, it is extremely convenient to divert public attention from anti-Semitism which is on the increase in the United States, by talking about the necessity of defending religious faith and individual liberty against the assault of Fascism.

/s/ Jerzy Potocki,

                Ambassador of the Republic of Poland

Comment: It is interesting how things repeat themselves, isn’t it? BH

Conversations with the Crow: Part 26

Editor’s note: When we ran the first conversation  in this series, there was the question of reader interest and acceptability. It is pleasant to report that our server was jammed with viewers and the only other tbrnews story that has had more viewers was our Forward Base Falcon story that had a half a million viewers in less that two days. We are now going to reprint all of the Crowley conversations, including a very interesting one on John McCain,  in chronological sequence. It is also pleasant to note that two publishers and three reporters have all expressed concrete interest in the Crowley conversations. It is even more pleasurable to note that a number of people inside the Beltway and in McLean, Virginia, have been screaming with rage!

                On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA's Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer's Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley's widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley's CIA files.

                Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

                After Corson's death, Trento and a well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson's bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled 'Zipper.' This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

                The  small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento's house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

                When published material concerning the CIA's actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA's horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA's activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious 'Regional Interrogation Centers' in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

                A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid "historians" and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

                The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley's survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of  highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by  DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton  conspired to  secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files our of the agency. Crowley did the same thing  right before his own retirement , secretly removing thousands of pages  of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

                Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in military intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

                One of Crowley’s first major assignments within the agency was to assist in the recruitment and management of prominent World War II Nazis, especially those with advanced intelligence experience. One of the CIA’s major recruitment coups was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler’s Gestapo who had fled to Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich and worked as an anti-Communist expert for Masson of Swiss counterintelligence. Mueller was initially hired by Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA,  who was running the Gehlen Organization out of Pullach in southern Germany. Crowley eventually came to despise Critchfield but the colonel was totally unaware of this, to his later dismay.

                Crowley’s real expertise within the agency was the Soviet KGB. One of his main jobs throughout his career was acting as the agency liaison with corporations like ITT, which the CIA often used as fronts for moving large amounts of cash off their books. He was deeply involved in the efforts by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, which eventually got him into legal problems with regard to investigations of the U.S. government’s grand jury where he has perjured himself in an agency cover-up

After his retirement, Crowley began to search for someone who might be able to write a competent history of his career. His first choice fell on British author John Costello (author of Ten Days to Destiny, The Pacific War and other works) but, discovering that Costello was a very aggressive homosexual, he dropped him and tentatively turned to Joseph Trento who had assisted Crowley and William Corson in writing a book on the KGB. When Crowley discovered that Trento had an ambiguous and probably cooperative relationship with the CIA, he began to distrust him and continued his search for an author.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas  in 1993  when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. . In 1996, Crowley , Crowley told Douglas  that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

In 1998, when Crowley was slated to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery,  he had his son, Greg, ship two large foot lockers of documents to Douglas with the caveat that they were not to be opened until after Crowley’s death. These documents, totaled  an astonishing 15,000 pages of CIA classified files involving many covert operations, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War.

After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

                All of this furor eventually came to the attention of Dr. Peter Janney, a Massachusetts clinical psychologist and son of Wistar Janney, another career senior CIA official, colleague of not only Bob Crowley but Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Jim Angleton and others. Janney was working on a book concerning the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official, and later the mistress of President John F. Kennedy.  Douglas had authored a book, ‘Regicide’ which dealt with Crowley’s part in the Kennedy assassination and he obviously had access to at least some of Crowley’s papers. Janney was very well connected inside the CIA’s higher levels and when he discovered that Douglas had indeed known, and had often spoken with, Crowley and that after Crowley’s death, the FBI had descended on Crowley’s widow and son, warning them to never speak with Douglas about anything, he contacted Douglas and finally obtained from him a number of original documents, including the originals of the transcribed conversations with Robert Crowley.

                In spite of the burn bags, the top secret safes and the vigilance of the CIA to keep its own secrets, the truth has an embarrassing and often very fatal habit of emerging, albeit decades later.

                While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this.

            These many transcribed conversations are relatively short because Crowley was a man who tired easily but they make excellent reading. There is an interesting admixture of shocking revelations on the part of the retired CIA official and often rampant anti-social (and very entertaining) activities on the part of Douglas but readers of this new and on-going series are gently reminded to always look for the truth in the jest!

Date: Wednesday, November 20, 1996

Commenced: 1:50 PM CST

Concluded: 2:22 PM CST

GD: Good afternoon, Robert. Am I being inconvenient?

RTC: No, Gregory. I’ve finished lunch, done a bit with the Switzers, read the papers and the rest of the day is free. How are you doing? Getting ready for Thanksgiving?

GD: Oh yes. I was reading a Sheldon Furry Freaks cartoon that showed a bunch of hippies at Thanksgiving. One of them was making a terrible face and he said to the girlfriend, who had obviously cooked the bird, ‘This stuffing is really terrible. What is it?’ And she replied that it came already stuffed from the organic foods shop. It obviously had not been emptied of its innards and I was wondering how much of it they ate.

RTC: Typical long-hair stupidity. I take it your turkey is not from an organic turkey farm?

GD: Free range turkeys? No, they stuff them in little pens, fatten them and then into the eye with the icepick and into the defeathering machine. As Cromwell was supposed to have said about Charles I, ‘Cruel necessity.’ But it tastes fine if you aren’t socially conscious.

RTC: It smacks of the concentration camp soap stories.

GD: And don’t forget the shrunken heads and the lampshades while you’re at it, Robert. We mustn’t be callous and forget the crime of the century. Of course, it’s interesting that the Turkish murders of a million unarmed Armenians some years ago seems to be strangely forgotten.

RTC: Well, the Israelis are friends with Turkey and since they run the media here, they have an understanding about that. There can’t be stories that would eclipse their very own big money maker and which at the same time would offend one of their only allies.

GD: Oh, the bitter realities of realpolitik. You recall talking about the Pedophile Academy you people run?

RTC: I do. You aren’t interested in joining, are you?

GD: No, actually, I lust after sheep. Just think of it as Farah Fawcett in a fur coat and all will come out in the end.

RTC: A pun is the lowest form of humor, Gregory.

GD: I know and I am so ashamed but they do look so cute in lacy panties.

RTC: I am certain you’re joking, Gregory. Do you have lamb at Easter?

GD: Sir, think you I am so callous? Months of true love to be followed by sordid death and the roasting pan? Terrible, Robert, terrible. Oh well, I suppose there in our imperial city things are really pure and noble.

RTC: Hardly. You mentioned the kiddie’s club. There’s a lot worse than that in our fair city, believe me.

GD: Oh, I am sure of that. Prominent Evangelical leaders meeting in a basement dungeon while someone like Pat Robertson, dressed in mesh stockings and a feather boa whipping teen-aged acolytes with a cat of nine tails. I’ve heard Washington is famous for things like that.

RTC: Actually, yes it is. For example, one of the less appetizing aspects of our little Company has been the fairy club.

GD: You mean you hire all those nasty florist types?

RTC: No, I mean we have an entire subsection devoted to the care and feeding of queers. Its under the Science and Technology people and consists of raging homos whose job it is to infiltrate groups of prominent Beltway queers, get the information on them so we can blackmail them into doing what we want. We’ve set up male whorehouses around here, all equipped with special mikes and cameras so we can get the evidence on the creeps and then twist their arms. They staff these places with young military personnel…mostly Marines but quite a few Army people, and naturally sailors. We have a lot of Congressmen in the basket and one hell of a lot of senior military people around to do what we want, not to forget foreign diplomats, important business people and, as you say, some impressive religious leaders. It’s mostly the military that we bag and a large number of the far right and the very fanatical religious types.

GD: That’s not surprising. Most of those people are drawn to strength and a well-muscled Marine with a leather belt is a pretty good illustration of what they consider strength. Far right types like leather boots and domination. I suppose the marks pay for sex?

RTC: Oh yes, and pay very well. First they pay cash and then they pay later in services. You would be astounded the number of fairies in high places here and most of them are in our little bags. And they do perform for us. A proper vote on yearly cash allotments, no questions asked, shutting off people who don’t like us, promoting or assisting those who are known to be on our good list. We have one Supreme Court justice, at least five appellate court judges, God knows how many senior FBI people, quite a few NSA personnel and, who would be shocked, enough State Department queers to stock a good hotel. I, personally, have nothing to do with this but my friend Ed is involved in the administration of this and he has mentioned governors, senior senators and so on that he can jerk around at leisure. Of course we set up the male whorehouses but never, never have any of our people on the premises. We have surveillance monitors all over the neighborhood and perhaps next door listening to the tapes and turning on the TV cameras but we don’t want one of our straight people bagged if the local cops raid a place.  The DC cops are stupid and corrupt beyond belief but one never knows if they’ll get a wild hair up their ass and pull a raid. If they did, of course, we could quiet it down in the court system here but it’s better to be safe than sorry. It does pay off, Gregory, and I can assure you that I, personally, have nothing to do with it.

GD: I don’t question that, Robert. Anyone I might know about?

RTC: Oh, God, it would be wonderful if you put all of this into your books but if you did, don’t talk about it in front or you would have many problems. Faggotry is a fact of life, Gregory, but none of these assholes want to be exposed. Nixon had his times with Bebe Rebozo too but of course never in one of our DC peg houses. That never went anywhere but I know it’s true. There are tapes. We bug all kinds of rendezvous places like certain motels, beach houses and so on. For example, we couldn’t bug Nixon’s place in Florida but we certainly could bug Rebozo. It’s quite an area of exploitation, Gregory. Once we nailed a very senior Israeli diplomat who liked to be whipped by muscular young blacks and when we wanted some information, Jim just casually showed him some stills from a surveillance tape and you would be amazed how much instant cooperation we got on a certain Arab matter. And speaking of diplomatics, the Saudis are absolutely the worst. They’ll fuck anything in sight if it’s warm, and my, they do have lots of money.

GD: I recall an old Persian poem I once read out loud in Lit class that goes, ’Across the river there is a boy with an ass like a peach but alas, I cannot swim.’ I had to go home for two days for that but the class had quite a laugh.

RTC: You must indeed have been quite a scholar.

GD: No, I was quite a trouble-maker. One of my teachers once told me, in front of the class, that I was an idiot’s delight. I told her right back that I was pleased to make her so happy. This time, I went on leave for a week.

RTC: Well, she had it coming.

GD: Oh yes, she did. They never liked me in high school, Robert and the feeling was mutual. Once, I entered a national patriotic essay contest and, by God, I won a big prize. I wrote about the joys of being a patriot and the usual drivel. Anyway, I got the letter at home and I assume the school was told at the same time. Wonderful responses from them. They had planned for a special assembly to honor the gifted one but no way would they do this for me. Do you know, they actually called me in and suggested, very firmly, that I step aside and let little Robbie the Pig get the prize? This was the son of the local Methodist minister and a real toad. Chubby, whining, self-righteous and a born stool pigeon. Learned the art from dad, no doubt. Anyway, I flatly refused to yield. Then they called my mother and went to work on her. Of course she didn’t need any leaning and for two weeks, I got nothing but stereophonic yammering from both parents. I just wasn’t a good advertisement for the school and a real gentleman would let them have a grand ceremony for Robbie the Pig. I still wouldn’t budge so they sent the award and the check to me at home and I had a hell of a time getting the check away from my father who tried to keep it. Lovely.

RTC: Not very civilized behavior, Gregory. I think you did the right thing then.

GD: Oh yes, Robert, and I certainly did the right thing about two weeks later.

RTC: I am almost afraid to ask. No more detergent in the school soup pot?
GD: No, this came before that. I felt I had been dishonored and as Mueller once said to me, I have a fine fourteenth century mind. One cannot permit that sort of thing. My revenge was fairly simple and direct. Of course no one suspected me, which is a little of a letdown, but the uproar was worth it. In the main hall of the school, right by the front office, was a large, bronze medallion with a depiction of the school symbol on it. It was let into the floor right in front of another bronze piece that listed all the former students of the high school who died in the Second World War. On both sides were flags, and during school hours, two members of the Honor Patrol stood on both sides of the sacred lares and panares to prevent careless or evil students from trampling on the school crest or not saluting, hand on chest, the plaque. My, my, what an inviting and sacred target. I broke into the school one Saturday night, very easy considering the very pickable locks and the better reality that there was no watchman. Now, I suppose, they would have surveillance cameras every ten feet but we were not so advanced then. I got into the chemistry lab, stole two bottles of concentrated nitric acid and a pair of acid-proof lab gloves, went down the hall and poured one bottle all over the floor relic. Much hissing and bubbling and clouds of stinking smoke. The second bottle I uncorked and poured the contents all down the wall piece. Much hissing, smoking and so on. Then, I tossed the bottles into a convenient trash bin and left by the front door. Outside they had the imperial flag pole in the courtyard. Every morning, the royal honor guard attended the morning flag raising while someone played some raucous piece, off key of course, on a bugle. As a sort of afterthought, I took out my Swiss Army knife and cut the halyards on the pole and pulled down the lines. The pole was about sixty feet tall and set in concrete so replacing the lines would be a major task. My, my, and I felt so good all the way home.

RTC: Your honor had been avenged?

GD: Yes, and the next day, it was even more pleasurable. I had so little to really enjoy in those days, I treasured every moment, believe me. Came into the school and saw no one. Halls empty. For a hopeful moment, I thought that there was no school but it was not to be. Walking around, I came to the main hall which was packed with very emotional fellow students. Weeping girls and outraged boys. I managed to work my up towards the front of the mourners and saw my handiwork, full in the face as it were. It looked like the sacred relics had been made of brown sugar and melted in great gullies. I didn’t obliterate them but you could only see a few letters on the wall plaque and the mess on the floor looked like it had been at the bottom of the sea for a thousand years. Police all over the place, taking pictures, very angry honor students, people in a state of anger and grief. And all over a few crummy pieces of bronze. Oh, yes, and a scene outside where a fat janitor was risking his life on a ladder that kept slipping, to replace the flagpole ropes. They had to get a local fire truck out later on to do the job. Oh, my and the police, who made Mongoloid idiots look like Harvard graduates, running all over the place with note books, interviewing everyone that would hold still. Massive grief and anger. A special assembly, mandatory attendance, in which the principal and other lesser lights offered a small reward to any snitches listening. You’d have thought someone took the Shroud of Turin and used it for toilet paper. Ah well, these rare and beautiful moments are ones to be treasured.

RTC: Simple but effective, Gregory.

GD: Always smile at a man when you kick him in the balls, Robert. Oh, that thing played out for about a month and then we were all asked to contribute to a replacement venture. When the collection cup came around in my math class, I spit into it. Another moment of perverse happiness. The soaping of the stock pot was a real, transcendent joy for me but the curtain raiser was almost as much fun. The thought, and the sight, of most of the student body soiling their clothes, and the floors, was good enough to keep me warm for months but the wailing and cursing of my fellow stoats at the scene of the great sacrilege in the upper hall was not to be denigrated.

RTC: Did you ever tell your friend Heinrich Mueller about this?

GD: No. I don’t think he would have approved of it and I admired him. Listen, do you think you might get a list of your limp-wristed victims? Of course, I assure you that I will publish it, know that in front.

RTC: Not while I’m alive, but yes, I think I can accommodate you. Too bad I wouldn’t be around to read about all the suicides or flights from Congress.

(Concluded at 2:22 PM CST)

Scientist Predicts Ice Age Within 10 Years

University of Mexico expert says lack of solar activity to cause significant cooling that will last over half a century
August 19, 2008

by  Paul Joseph Watson

As evidence builds of the earth entering a dramatic cooling trend, another scientist has gone public with his conviction that we are about to enter a new ice age, rendering warnings about global warming fraudulent and irrelevant.

                 Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera of the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Mexico states that “In about ten years the Earth will enter a “little ice age” which will last from 60 to 80 years and may be caused by the decrease in solar activity,” according to a report in the major Mexican newspaper Milenio Diario.

                Herrera slammed the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) stance on global warming as “erroneous” because of their failure to factor in the impact of solar activity.

                The models and forecasts of the IPCC “is incorrect because only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity,” said Herrera.

                Herrera states that the earth is entering a natural phase of climate transition during which solar activity will diminish considerably, “so that in two years or so, there will be a small ice age that lasts from 60 to 80 years.”

                Herrera cited the growth in glaciers observed at the Andes, Perito Moreno, Logan, the highest mountain in Canada, and Franz-Josef Glacier, New Zealand.

                A dramatic cooling trend is being observed across the planet even as people like Al Gore continue to claim that the threat of global warming mandates the poor and middle class be hit with CO2 taxes in order to prevent climate change.

                Both anecdotal evidence and hard data indicates that the planet is in the beginning stages of a significant downturn in global temperatures.

                Following the end of the Sun’s most active period in over 11,000 years, the last 10 years have displayed a clear cooling trend as temperatures post-1998 leveled out and are now plummeting.

                China recently experienced its coldest winter in 100 years while northeast America was hit by record snow levels and Britain suffered its coldest April in decades as late-blooming daffodils were pounded with hail and snow on an almost daily basis. The British summer has also left many yearning for global warming, with temperatures in June and July rarely struggling to get over 16 degrees and on one occasion even dropping as low as 9 degrees in the middle of the afternoon.

                “Summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century’s opening decade,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That’s by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930.”

                The reason? Sunspot activity has dwindled. There have only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar cycle.

                “The sun’s surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun’s 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century,” reports one science blog.

                Since the sun, and not carbon dioxide, is the principle driver of climate change, a dearth of sunspot activity would herald a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715, when sunspots became exceedingly rare and contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age during which Europe and North America were hit by bitterly cold winters and the Thames river in London completely froze.

                Long-time man-made global warming advocates NASA assure us that significant sunspot activity will return in 2012, but a recent a paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, predicts that sunspots will all but vanish after 2015.

                As we reported last week, the Armagh observatory, which has been measuring sun cycles for over 200 years. predicts that global temperatures will drop by two degrees over the next 20 years as solar activity grinds to a halt and the planet drastically cools down, potentially heralding the onset of a new ice age.

                “Based on the past Armagh measurements, this suggests that over the next two decades, global temperatures may fall by about 2 degrees C — that is, to a level lower than any we have seen in the last 100 years….”Temperatures have already fallen by about 0.5 degrees C over the past 12 months and, if this is only the start of it, it would be a serious concern,” concludes David Watt.

Comment: The Global Warming freaks caper about bellowing like demented Luddites but it is Global Cooling we are facing, not Global Warming. And no, Emily, it is not the evil old cars packing our highways, or even farting cows that will raise the Earth’s temperature to 200 Fahrenheit by next June 15. The absence of sunspots is a certain harbinger of extensive and very serious global cooling. We could all ride bicycles and plug up all the cows’ bungholes with cement and we will still have a small ice age..BH