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Being a democracy doesn’t stop the CIA
Journal of a Futurist - 30 October 2003
How to rescue the future
Uncle Sam is a junkie. His heroin is oil. The liquid bliss is corrupting his soul, holding the UN to ransom and despoiling the nations of Earth. Like all addicts high on the hog, Uncle Sam is whistling Dixie, imagining himself to be king of the world. But to his friends and former admirers, Sam has become a figure of derision. A self deceiving lunatic deserving of our pity, if he wasn’t so dangerous.
The White House is his injecting room, run by an oil cartel. The President inserts the tangle of Texan pipelines deep into Sam’s veins, while he trashes anti pollution laws, accelerates global warming and sends the boys to Kabul and Baghdad to slaughter thousands of innocent bystanders. The payback for a crime they did not commit. The shrugged-off cost of securing control of oil, the word’s most dangerous drug of addiction. To fatten the coffers of Halliburton & Co, the cash cows to a junked out elite. This is a White House whose National Security advisor is also an oil tanker.
When Junkies Rule the World
It didn’t happen overnight, this toxic befoulment of Uncle Sam. He’s long been a selfish old bugger, a rev head and a bully, prone to bouts of hysteria, as in the eras of McCarthy & Vietnam. The 60’s counterculture was a daring attempt to bring him to his senses. Remember the My Lai massacre? That was the one that couldn’t be covered up, despite the best efforts of Colin Powell, who drafted the army’s first official response to mounting rumours that US troops had run amok. His “denial of this event”, reported Newsweek (11 Sept/1995), “in which up to 400 Vietnamese civilians died at the hands of U. S. soldiers, is part of what investigators concluded was a cover-up." That Colin Powell is now promoted as a beacon of probity, merely goes to show how dark is our abyss. This week’s Four Corners (ABC TV, Australia) makes it clear that in his pivotal address to the UN, the Secretary of State knowingly falsified evidence of Iraq’s nuclear capabilities.
Colin Powell's claims that aluminium tubes bound for Iraq were designed to enrich uranium was contrary to the advice of his own department and his own knowledge of the facts. My Lai was his first lie, and this nuclear lie won't be his last. It's all part of junkie culture.
Drunk on His Own Petty Mindedness
According to the handbooks, the telltale signs of drug addiction are “compulsive lying, along with manipulative behaviour and constant justifications and rationalisations”. Washington and Canberra down to a tee. A fearful symmetry was achieved last week when the two corrupted cultures met face to face in a Parliament from which citizens had been banished beyond the outskirts, their voices silenced, their posters confiscated. The mild interjections of two Green politicians were greeted with a wry comment by President Bush: “I love free speech”. That is, so long as he didn’t have to hear it. The Greens were gagged. In occupied zones, such as Kabul & Baghdad, the maverick voices are banned, bullied and bombed, as in the case of Al Jazeera. Anyone who still regards Western mass media as “fiercely independent” is a fool.
A sign of addiction is the belief that the poison is doing them good. Immediately after 9/11, President Bush told the nation “Go Shopping”. Keep the oil pumping – it’s the lifeblood of the nation, although it is becoming the death knell of the planet. Americans consoled themselves in malls while pilots zonked on methedrine flew to impoverished lands to blow the limbs off women and children. As Bush told the nation and CNN repeated to the world: “We are good people”.
When Most of the Media Go Home
John Pilger’s recent documentary, Breaking the Silence, (downloadable from the web) pointed our that the families of bomb victims are treated like dirt. One Afghani woman, Orica, who lost a husband and 8 children in a botched attack, sought assistance from the US embassy in Kabul. She was told: “go away, you’re a beggar”. The $10 billion collected for “rebuilding” has been spent on weapons. The US cluster bombs (illegal under international law) still litter the landscape & destroy lives. Both the Taliban and opium poppies are starting to bloom. That indominatable association of Afghani feminists (RAWA) states that the situation for women has not improved. But George Bush will tell you otherwise, because, he operates in a state of fantasy and self deception. Contrary to popular belief, Afghanistan turns out to possess significant oil deposits and the pre-war pipeline dreams have not evaporated. An Israeli newspaper columnist notes: "If one looks at the map of the big American bases created [in the Afghan war], one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean. Osama bin Laden did not comprehend that his actions serve American interests... If I were a believer in conspiracy theory, I would think that bin Laden is an American agent. Not being one I can only wonder at the coincidence." [Chicago Tribune, 3/18/02, also www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/AAoil.html
Junkies break the law. Both in the declaring of wars, their prosecution and during the occupation. No need to repeat what’s been said in previous journals. Camp X ray is merely the tip of an illegal gulag network, operated in secrecy by the self proclaimed defenders of freedom. All the inmates are “bad people”, says the truth-challenged Bush, although those released after two years of continuous torture (“stress & duress”) turn out to be the baffled cab drivers of Kabul who actually opposed the Taliban.
Junkies in the advanced stages become transparent to all but themselves. After the bombing of Baghdad’s Red Cross, Bush remarked “The enemy is getting desperate because we are winning” . But it is Bush who is sounding desperate. The world is watching the mask of sanity slip from Uncle Sam, revealing him to be junkie and a psychopath. Although Bush keeps referring to the suicide bombers as “killers”, most of the murders in Iraq are committed by his own soldiers.
There must be Some Way Outta Here
As Robert Fisk reports, “ US forces in Iraq are shooting down the innocent, kicking and brutalising prisoners, trashing homes and--eyewitness testimony is coming from hundreds of Iraqis--stealing money from houses they are raiding … Human-rights monitors, civilian occupation officials and journalists--not to mention Iraqis themselves--are increasingly appalled at the behaviour of the American military occupiers”. Since the start of the invasion there have been hundreds of cases of Iraqi civilians “gunned down with abandon”. If a military enquiry is held, the result is never one of admission or even apology. www.counterpunch.org/fisk10282003.html Notes Human Rights Watch's Joe Stork: "It is a tragedy that US soldiers have killed so many civilians in Baghdad, but it is really incredible that the US military does not even count these deaths." Why not?
Because anything that gets in the way of a junky and the drug is expendable. As George Bush senior made clear on the eve of the 1992 Earth Summit, “The American way of life is not negotiable”. The name of the game is cheap oil forever, whatever the costs to the planet and its people. Both Australian and America dumped Kyoto, both our current governments are vicious, sadistic, deceitful and pumped up with self-glorification and empire building, edging toward fascism. And yet, they are deluded; imprisoned in the past. Both are standing on the wrong side of history.
A true leader will find a way out this mess in a flash. It is not so hard. John F. Kennedy’s vision of putting astronauts on the moon by the end of the sixties, helped to unite the nation and accelerate its capacity to learn, innovate and to dream. A president who is truly of the 21st century, as opposed to a sleepwalking oil rig, might say today to the people, that by the year 2015 the land will be fully self sufficient in supplies of clean, cheap renewable energy. Wouldn’t that be something? And that the technology would be made widely available. Then our two nations could go back to help solving the world’s problems instead of magnifying them.
Ends.
Feel free to copy and email to a friend.
Sorry for the delay between updates. This site is being re-engineered, to make it user friendly, and I wish the same could be done for Canberra. Australia’s PM is turning into a monster beyond our darkest forebodings. The faintly civilised streak he displayed in the first few weeks of office has long since vanished. The corruptions of power are writ large across his tenure, although he still imagines he’s the same dull pudding he always was. A boring mind, yes, an indefatigable liar, yes, a shrewd manipulator of the electorate’s worst instincts. His drug is power.
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