Pull the Plug on Armageddon

Thus says the Lord God:
Cry out full-throated and unsparingly,
lift up your voice like a trumpet blast;
Tell my people their wickedness,
and the house of Jacob their sins.
They seek me day after day,
and desire to know my ways,
Like a nation that has done what is just
and not abandoned the law of their God

Isaiah 58: 1-2

Pull the Plug on Armageddon::: Millions of Lives on the Line

B.Z. Botani March 6, 2003

...It appears the invasion of Iraq grows imminent, with the mobilizing of hundreds of thousands more U.S. troops to the Gulf, and the latest Pentagon briefings boasting how they will "stun the Iraqis into submission" with their largest missile campaign yet. I implore everyone in the world to burn this moment into their memories, and register that this is a pre-meditated, wholesale industrial act of annihilation, against an inferior force and Iraqi civilians. Consider the reality of what we are talking about: cruise missiles slamming into neighborhoods and buildings in the middle of the night, incinerating and wounding indiscriminately. This isn't warfare. This is mass destruction, holocaust, aggressive and murderous imperialism.

If George Bush and his regime refuse to stop Ariel Sharon and his army in their ethnic cleansing and genocidal aggression, how can they be trusted as an occupying force in an industrialized Arab nation? A small reminder here that Sharon is armed with 40 nuclear weapons and is willing to use them. Where is the outcry from the White House? Rather, the Pentagon is sending more aid and support to the far-right extremists in Israel. Any wonder that Islamists call the Bush regime the "Crusaders?" (Not to be confused with Crusader missiles?)

And Tony Blair's claim that "it's not about the oil" is completely ludicrous. The CIA and British Petroleum agents assuring Iraqis that they're not after the oil, just the Iraqi government and economy! It's always been about the oil, people. For the last century, the American and British oil companies have been plotting how to get back in Iraq, where they once ruled an oil empire. Can anyone imagine an American military government in Baghdad that doesn't have it's hands on the flow of oil? This is madness and more! Even more disturbing is that large numbers of American citizens actually believe it, with a glaze-eyed smile repeating: "I love my country. I support my troops. We love our freedom." Here's a wake-up call for those folks: I love my country too, but the people currently occupying the White House don't represent my country, they represent war criminals, drug and oil companies, arms manufacturers, assorted secret agencies and elitist societies, and billionaires.

Ask yourself what this so-called "war" is really about. Saddam Hussein hasn't changed his policies for several years, and what weapons he has left are being dealt with by the inspectors. He isn't now threatening Israel, and the idea that he can strike the U.S. is a complete fabrication, according to former weapons inspectors like Scott Ritter. What is the urgency? Could it be the same urgency that caused Bush's father to invade Panama? To improve White House ratings, cover the sundry CIA covert ops in Central America (like drugs), and silence Noriega (another CIA creation, like Saddam)? Will the Iraq invasion once again result in hidden mass graves (see the film "Panama Deception") for the sake of a President's popularity? I've got news for Bush 43: you're going down in history as a war criminal with all of your cronies, including Dick Cheney and Mr. Kissinger, regardless of how ruthlessly you try to squirm out of it. The people always prevail in the end, and the people of the world for the most part despise you.

And speaking of war criminals, I make this challenge to George Bush: Send Rumsfeld back to Baghdad! We all know it was Bush's Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who met with Saddam back when the CIA was arming him with anthrax and various weapons systems, smiling and shaking hands. Well, Mr. Rumsfeld, I hereby challenge you as a man and as an American to show your courage and go back to Baghdad to get the weapons back. Make another deal with Saddam, demand regime change, give Saddam a smallpox vaccination, whatever. Just take your sorry criminal hide back to Baghdad to solve the problem YOU created, and send our sons and daughter back home! Donald Rumsfeld, you are a coward, and so are all of your generals! I say that as a veteran, as an American, and as a world citizen. There is no honor in blasting a developing nation with cruise missiles, and this aggressive invasion of Iraq will be placed on the docket as a premeditated war crime!

To the people of the world: I ask your forgiveness as an American for letting these war criminals take power, destroying our democracy in the process. They are not elected-- they seized the White House by coercion, criminal fraud and conspiracy, and no longer represent the American people. I encourage you to resist this government just as you resisted the Botha regime in apartheid South Africa. Help us stop this group of homicidal madmen and corporate raiders before they unleash Armageddon. Demand regime change in the U.S.A.! Stop the spreading "Mad Cowboy" disease!

B.Z. Botani

Planetary Rescue Corps

Occupied Hawaiian Nation

planetary@wildmail.com

http://metamagic.org/worldnews

"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini

Please have a look at a book entitled "HISTORY WILL NOT ABSOLVE US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy." A number of people have found it very useful in the context of 9/11 and its aftermath ... martin-and-sy

Click here to send a letter of support to the countries currently opposing a war in Iraq (France, Germany, Russia, China, and Syria):

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Click here to send a letter of opposition to the countries currently supporting a war in Iraq (US, UK, Spain and Bulgaria):

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Click here to send a letter to the "middle six" countries currently being lobbied by each side (Mexico, Cameroon, Guinea, Angola, Chile, and Pakistan):

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Join the Massive Fax Campaign
Flex your patriotic muscle and let your representatives know there is overwhelming opposition to a unilateral U.S. attack on Iraq.

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Pope to Bush: Go into Iraq and You Go Without God
Capitol Hill Blue

Wednesday 5 March 2003

Pope John Paul II has a strong message for President George W. Bush: God is not on your side if you invade Iraq.
But the President told the pope's envoy the leader of the world's Catholics is wrong.

Pleading for peace, an emissary from Pope John Paul II questioned Bush Wednesday on whether he was doing all he could to avert what the envoy called an "unjust" war with Iraq.

Bush said removing Saddam Hussein would make the world more peaceful.

The president met with Cardinal Pio Laghi, a former Vatican ambassador to the United States and a Bush family friend, on Ash Wednesday, the start of the Christian Lenten season of penance and spiritual renewal leading up to Easter.

Bush told the envoy in a 40-minute meeting that "if it comes to the use of force, he believes it will make the world better," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who attended the private meeting. "Removing the threat to the region will lead to a better, more peaceful world in which innocent Iraqis will have a better life."

Laghi came bearing the pope's message: A war would be a "defeat for humanity" and would be neither morally nor legally justified.

The Pope also questioned the President's statements invoking God's name as justification for the invasion.

"God is a neutral observer in the affairs of man," the Pope said. "Man cannot march into war and assume God will be at his side."

In Rome, the pope called for "common efforts to spare humanity another dramatic conflict."

The Vatican stands by its view that a pre-emptive strike on Iraq is immoral unless backed by the United Nations, Laghi said.
"It's illegal, it's unjust," Laghi told reporters after the session with Bush.

"There are still peaceful avenues within the context of the vast patrimony of international law and institutions which exist for that purpose," Laghi said. "There is great unity on this grave matter on the part of the Holy See, the bishops in the United States, and the church throughout the world," he said.

Out of the wreckage

By tearing up the global rulebook, the US is in fact undermining its own imperial rule

George Monbiot
Tuesday February 25, 2003
The Guardian

The men who run the world are democrats at home and dictators abroad. They came to power by means of national elections which possess, at least, the potential to represent the will of their people. Their citizens can dismiss them without bloodshed, and challenge their policies in the expectation that, if enough people join in, they will be obliged to listen.

Internationally, they rule by brute force. They and the global institutions they run exercise greater economic and political control over the people of the poor world than its own governments do. But those people can no sooner challenge or replace them than the citizens of the Soviet Union could vote Stalin out of office. Their global governance is, by all the classic political definitions, tyrannical.

But while citizens' means of overthrowing this tyranny are limited, it seems to be creating some of the conditions for its own destruction.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,902274,00.html

Shock and Yawn Plan could kill millions in 48 hours -- why don't Americans care?

Geov Parrish
02.24.03

Exactly a month ago Pentagon planner Harlan Ullman, in a CBS-TV interview, publicly revealed for the first time the Pentagon's "Shock and Awe" plan for its assault upon Iraq, should (or when) George W. Bush orders it.

Ullman's information was subsequently confirmed by a number of sources; it's for real. Here is what I wrote about it in my column of January 30:

"The plan includes simultaneous ground invasions from north and south... It also includes a sudden decimation of Baghdad by raining down on its people, in two days, over 800 cruise missiles -- more than were used in the entire Gulf War. Ullman... characterized the Baghdad assault thusly: `You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons of Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes.'

It would be a firestorm, a Dresden or Tokyo with 60 years of new technology. It would be a war crime of quick and staggering proportions.

"Such a plan, of course, makes a mockery of Donald Rumsfeld's ritual insistence that the Pentagon takes enormous care to avoid civilian casualties; the plan apparently is to kill a staggering percentage of Baghdad's civilian population in the first day alone. ... The name refers to the demoralizing effect such an attack would have on Iraqis, an effect, presumably, similar to the instant (although already planned) surrender of Japan after the gratuitous bombing of Hiroshima (and even more gratuitous bombing of Nagasaki. But those were, both military and diplomatically, demonstration attacks -- suggesting what could be done to the imperial rulers themselves and to Tokyo, a city far more valuable and populous than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

"In Iraq, Baghdad is the capitol."

Now, those plans, and sentiments of horror similar to mine, have been echoing around the Internet for a month; they've been featured extensively in alternative publications that have come out during that time. Which is precisely the problem.

The United States is planning to suck all the oxygen out of the air with a fireball over the heads of the five million residents of Baghdad -- so that, as another Pentagon interviewee said, "nobody in Baghdad will be safe," whether above ground or below.

This has been well-documented public knowledge for a month, widely reported in the rest of the world. But in America it has been roundly ignored, confined to the fringes of the media landscape and probably, by many Americans, dismissed as a result as conspiracist nonsense.

This raises two questions:

1) Are Americans -- politicians, media executives, and ordinary citizens -- so numb, or oblivious, or callous to the horrors of war that we cannot raise ourselves to be bothered by what would be, if it works as planned, one of the greatest massacres, one of the greatest war crimes, in the history of the world, committed in our name and with our money?

2) Forgetting for a moment those apparently irrelevant concerns about millions of innocent lives, war crime tribunals, and the like, do America's war planners seriously think such an action would decrease the motivation or effectiveness of terrorists, who are presumably the target of the "War on Terror" and who will most certainly not be in Baghdad? (More, in fact, are likely to be huddled in any major American city. Perhaps we should preemptively bomb Philadelphia or Houston.)

To take the last question first, whether it is ever implemented or not, even the publicizing of this plan does incalculable damage to the already-abysmal reputation of the United States in the Islamic world and beyond. Any country that would even seriously consider such a monstrous act certainly isn't going to be shown mercy when war is brought to its civilian population. That's you and me.

According to captured Al-Qaeda documents, planners of the 9/11 massacre had originally considered flying jets into American nuclear facilities, but decided not do so to on "humanitarian" grounds. Does anyone think that, after our amphetamine-soaked pilots casually incinerate a major world city and its inhabitants, that they'll show such restraint next time?

You know the answer.

Muslims, who, like the rest of the world, seem to have a longer memory than we do, will also recall that a massive famine, killing up to six or seven million Afghans, was only narrowly averted in fall 2001, even though the U.S. bombing campaign cut off badly needed supplies almost until it was too late - - and would have continued to do so had the Taliban not retreated.

Shock and Awe, then, is the second serious brush with genocidal civilian death from the Bush crew in only 15 months. And we genuinely wonder why anyone hates us? Who wouldn't?

It is as if Bush and his sociopathic advisors want stronger terrorist groups -- want further attacks on Americans -- so as to justify their lust for global military dominance. Regardless, they're certainly doing their best to provoke it.

And this brings us to the initial question: why don't Americans seem to care? Again, setting aside niggling questions of morality, plans like this, whether executed -- or, carried out -- or not, put every single person living in this country in far greater danger.

Forget duct tape; we need protecting from the Bush White House, and from the record levels of new and deepening anti- American sentiment it is generating daily.

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=14544&CFID=5420517&CFTOKEN=63376510

Charley Reese Wednesday, March 5, 2003

Still think you are not being flimflammed by the Bush administration?

Take heed of this:
Newsweek has reported that Hussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect and Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, told the United Nations, the CIA and Britain's MI-6 in 1995 that Iraq destroyed all of its chemical and biological stocks, as well as the missiles to deliver them, in 1991.

Yet the U.N. arms inspectors, the CIA and MI-6 chose to keep that secret. If it's true -- and there's no reason to believe it isn't -- then it's pretty hard evidence that the Bush administration is lying through its teeth when it keeps insisting that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

It also bolsters the credibility of former chief arms inspector Scott Ritter, who has likewise insisted that Iraq's weapons were destroyed. For that matter, it bolsters the credibility of the Iraqi government, which insists it no longer has any weapons of mass destruction.

You might recall that Kamel defected to Jordan and about six months later made the mistake of returning to Iraq, where he was killed. This coming war with Iraq gets murkier and murkier.

Let's see if we can sort it out.

First, we have a chief executive so naive about the world outside of Texas, he probably couldn't find a lot of countries on a map. Second, he has surrounded himself with American Likudniks -- supporters of Israel's right-wing government. Even The Washington Post reported recently what I've been saying for months: that Bush's policy is identical to that of Ariel Sharon's, the Israeli prime minister.

I've said that Bush has been acting like Sharon's puppet; The Washington Post story quoted a U.S. official as saying Sharon has "played Bush like a violin."

The Israelis have long feared Iraq, Iran and North Korea (because they fear it will sell missiles to Iran). What a coincidence that those three countries are Bush's "axis of evil."

Before Bush's election, Dick Cheney (now vice president), John Bolton (now undersecretary of state for arms control), Douglas Feith (now third-highest-ranking official in the Defense Department), Richard Perle (now chairman of the Defense Policy Board) and James Woolsey (former CIA director) all had one thing in common: They served as advisers to the pro-Israeli Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. This is according to an article that appeared in the magazine The Nation. Bush recently appointed as director of Middle Eastern affairs for the National Security Council Elliott Abrams, a protÃ©gÃ© of Perle and a man convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair.

In 1996, according to an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Perle, Feith and David Wurmser, now an assistant to Bolton, wrote a policy proposal for Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel's prime minister. Included in their advice were tips on how to manipulate the American government (OK, even the Haaretz reporter says the report comes "dangerously close" to dual loyalty) and advice to drop the peace plan, drop the idea of land for peace and concentrate on toppling Saddam Hussein and eventually replacing other Middle Eastern governments in order to create a safe environment for Israel.

There's your explanation for the war.

When sons and daughters come home in body bags or maimed, those are the people you can blame. Others in this group -- who formed an outfit called the Project for the New American Century in 1997 that also called for toppling Saddam -- include, in addition to most of those named above, Donald Rumsfeld; William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard; Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's No. 2 guy; William Bennett, the best the neocons can do for an intellectual; Richard Armitage, now Colin Powell's deputy; Zalmay Khalilzad, now ambassador to Afghanistan; and others.

If you watch the silly cable-news shows, you will recognize many of these names as part of the parade of "experts" in favor of war with Iraq. The American people are being played for suckers. Their sons and daughters will be cannon fodder in a war that might benefit a foreign country but will greatly damage the interests of our own.

"Our task consists of preparing the Israeli army for the new war approaching
in order to achieve our ultimate goal, the creation of an Israeli empire."
-- Moshe Dayan 1952

http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20030305/index.php

The Israeli Holocaust Against the Palestinians

by Michael A. Hoffman II and Moshe Lieberman

Compiled by two elite scholars with impeccable credentials -- Hoffman, a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press, and Moshe Lieberman, a former Hebrew University researcher -- the authors combine their sleuthing skills and erudition to bring the reader an irrefutable dossier of Israeli war crimes in Palestine, profusely illustrated with harrowing photos of the death and destruction which the Zionist war machine has administered as collective punishment upon the entire Palestinian nation. The authors marshal a dossier of massive evidence and stunning documentary photographs, proving conclusively that the Israelis themselves are guilty of a holocaust.

Hoffman and Lieberman make a devastating case for Israeli criminality, while exposing the ferocious Talmudic racism that fuels the Israeli identification of the Palestinian people as "Amalek," and targets them for the final solution of "total eradication." The authors argue that to pretend that Zionist atrocities have not been systematically perpetrated in Palestine as part of a coherent dogma of eliminationism, constitutes nothing less than "holocaust denial." 6 x 9 paperbackÂ· 110 pages Â· illustrated. $12.95

http://www.hoffman-info.com/cgi-bin/store/commerce.cgi?item=125

Bush and America's willing executioners would be guilty at Nuremberg
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
March 2, 2003

If he launches an attack on Iraq without the approval of the United Nations Security Council, George W. Bush will be guilty of crimes on par with those committed by the infamous Nazi leaders who were tried at Nuremberg in 1948, after World War II.

The law is clear. At Nuremberg, American, British, French and Soviet jurists used international conventions, legal precedent and a global moral consensus to establish a code of conduct deemed the standard for all nations.

Key was the "crimes against humanity" prohibition stemming from the conscious slaughter of six million Jews, leftists, gypsies and others by the Nazi fanatics.

But also crucial was the ban on unprovoked attack by one nation against another. The explosive fuse that set off World War II was the September 1,1939 Nazi attack on Poland, which was unprovoked by any stretch of the military imagination. By all accounts it was an act of aggression and conquest, which led ultimately to as many as 50 million deaths over the next six years.

Article VI of the Nuremberg Charter defines "Crimes Against Peace" as "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties . . . or participation in a common plan or conspiracy . . . to wage an aggressive war.

A week before the unprovoked Nazi assault on Poland, Hitler promised his generals he would provide "a propagandistic reason for starting the war. Â He then justified a "preemptive" strike based on lies about a non-existent Polish Army attack against Germany.

The Nazi attack date had been set for more than a year. "The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not," Hitler told his generals. "In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory."

After Hitler's deceptions were revealed at Nuremberg, the surviving Nazis based their defense on the claim of "preventative war," claiming a need to protect Germany from a pending Polish attack. They were the last, until Bush, to use that rationale.

It didn't work. For this attack, ranking Nazi commandants, starting with Hermann Goering, Hitler's Number Two, were convicted and sentenced to death. That charge and that alone was deemed sufficient to warrant hanging.

Unless Saddam Hussein launches an attack on the United States very soon, any American attack on Iraq without UN approval would be on a legal par with the Nazi attack on Poland.

A key US argument, that Iraq was somehow linked to the September 11 terror attacks, has been definitively dismissed. In the eighteen months since, all credible evidence points to intense hostility rather than cooperation between Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein. Colin Powell, arguing in front of the UN, failed to prove any cooperative connection.

Iraq has been ordered to disarm by the United Nations, whose legal legitimacy was essential to the 1991 campaign that drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

Thus far, there is no United Nations consensus that the Iraqis have definitively failed to comply with the terms of that defeat to an extent that would justify a renewed military attack, one that would inevitably involve civilian casualties.

With no claim to having been attacked, George W. Bush has instead argued that his war on Iraq would be "preemptive," meant to prevent Saddam from launching a future war. But Iraq has not attacked anyone in more than 12 years and two-thirds of the country is under a no-fly zone. Thus Bush is merely resurrecting the preventative war doctrine invoked by the Nazis before their Nuremberg hanging.

In 1953 President Dwight Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander, dismissed the idea of a preventative war against the Soviet Union. "All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler," he said. "I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."

George W. Bush has now added to the list of pre-war demands a "regime change" by which Saddam Hussein would give up power. Bush then proposes rebuilding Iraq along democratic lines.

But Nazi functionaries at Nuremberg also received stiff sentences for approving essentially the same totalitarian statutes that now appear in the Homeland Security, Patriot I and Patriot II Acts authorizing secret arrest, detention and "disappearances" of American citizens without legal recourse or public notification. At Nuremberg, such laws were recognized as a form of state terror.

The embrace of such laws in America casts serious doubt on the Bush Administration's real willingness to install democracy anywhere else.

When the Nazis attacked Poland in 1939, no one envisioned that just eight years later Germany would be leveled and its all-powerful reichmarshalls would be tried and sentenced under international law.

Such a vision seems less far fetched today. America's current military might has prompted the Bush Administration to frame its proposed war in terms of a "crusade" against "evil." But military action against Iraq is guaranteed to inflame the passions of 1.2 billion Muslims. The proposed war is explicitly opposed by the Pope. International support is extremely limited. The US itself is deeply divided, with its economy in serious trouble.

The diplomatic campaign for this attack has been handled with all the wisdom and foresight of madmen lighting matches in a room full of gasoline. There is no reason to expect a military campaign would be handled any better.

It is clear from the precedents at Nuremberg that any American attack on Iraq without United Nations approval would be illegal under international law. It is also clear that the inevitable civilian casualties resulting from such an attack would qualify as crimes against humanity.

And sooner or later, the American perpetrators of such an attack and related crimes might well find themselves standing trial before some sort of Nuremberg-style international tribunal.

Given such circumstances, the guilt of George W. Bush will not be in doubt. But the guilt of subordinates giving supporting orders, and of soldiers and functionaries carrying them out, will also be a given.

The Nuremberg court, including its American judges, repeatedly ruled that those who "only followed orders" in committing atrocities were guilty of crimes against humanity.

Those willing Americans executioners who "only follow orders" in perpetrating this illegal attack on Iraq should understand that they stand to be found just as guilty as the ones giving those orders.

And that one way or another, sooner or later, that guilt will demand payment.

Bob Fitrakis is publisher of www.freepress.org and author of THE FITRAKIS FILES: SPOOKS, NUKES & NAZIS. .

Harvey Wasserman is senior editor of www.freepress.org and author of THE LAST ENERGY WAR (Seven Stories Press).

http://freepress.org

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"Once a government resorts to terror against its own population to get what it wants, it must keep using terror against its own population to get what it wants. A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop. If such a government ever lets the fear subside and rational thought return to the populace, that government is finished."
--Michael Rivero

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ."
-- General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

"I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running
from the wounded.I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed.
I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war."
--Franklin. D. Roosevelt
Address at Chautauqua, NY, August 14, 1936

"The High Office of President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the
American's freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight."
-- John F. Kennedy, at Columbia University, 12th Nov. 1963 - 10 days before
his murder on November 22, 1963

"If man will only realize that it is unmanly to obey laws that are unjust, no man's
tyranny will enslave him."
--Mahatma Gandhi

"Human salvation lies in the hands
of the creatively maladjusted"
--Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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