America's day of reckoning is at hand

Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal
Tuesday November 27, 2007

Pat Buchanan is too patriotic to come right out and say it, but the message of his new book, Day of Reckoning, is that America as we have known her is finished. Moreover, Naomi Wolf agrees with him. These two writers of different political persuasions arrive at America's demise from different directions.

Buchanan explains how hubris, ideology, and greed have torn America apart. A neoconservative cabal with an alien agenda captured the Bush administration and committed American blood, energy, and money to aggression against Muslim countries in the Middle East, while permitting America's domestic borders to be overrun by immigrants and exporting the jobs that had made the US an opportunity society. War and offshoring have taken a savage economic toll while open borders and diversity have created social and political division.

In her new book, End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Wolf explains America's demise in terms of the erosion of freedoms. She writes that the 10 classic steps that are used to close open societies are currently being taken in the US. Martial law is only a declaration away.

The Bush administration responded to September 11 by initiating military aggression in the Middle East and by using fear and the "war on terror" to implement police state measures at home with legislation, presidential directives, and executive orders

Overnight the US became a tyranny in which people could be arrested and incarcerated on the basis of unsubstantiated accusation. Both US citizens and non-citizens were denied habeas corpus, due process, and access to attorneys and courts. Congress gave Bush legislation establishing military tribunals, the procedures of which permit people to be condemned to death on the basis of secret evidence, hearsay, and confessions extracted by torture. Nothing of the like has ever been seen before in the US.

The cancer might have metastasized if the Guantanamo detainees had actually been the dangerous terrorists and enemy combatants that the Bush regime declared them to be. Had the administration actually possessed evidence against the detainees, the Bush regime might have succeeded in dispensing with the Constitution. Conviction of the detainees could have led to what Wolf calls a "fascist expansion." Following the exercise of its new powers, the regime could have broadened the definition of terrorist to include the regime's critics, thus pulling citizens in general into tribunals devoid of civil liberty protections.

It could still turn out this way in the event of another 9/11 attack, whether real or orchestrated. But momentarily the drive toward tyranny has been blunted, because the vast majority of detainees turned out to be hapless individuals sold into American captivity by warlords responding to the bounty the US paid for "terrorists." Any unprotected individual was vulnerable to being captured by Afghan and Pakistani warlords and sold as a "terrorist." The Americans needed to show results, and the Bush regime needed "terrorists" in order to feed the fear its propaganda had generated.

In Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, the absence of evidence would not have mattered as the judicial system produced the results demanded by the tyrants. However, the US military had not been sufficiently corrupted for the Bush regime's Guantanamo agenda to succeed. Honorable officers, such as Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, were able to discern that the US government had no information on the detainees and used interrogations in order to rubber stamp the a priori determination that a detainee was a terrorist or enemy combatant. Military officers made these revelations known to real courts before the tribunal process could establish itself.

CounterPunch writer Andy Worthington's recently published book, The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 759 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison, proves that the regime's claim that it had hundreds of dangerous terrorists at Guantanamo was just another Bush administration lie.

Currently, support for Bush, Cheney, and the neoconservative agenda is low. However, Congress, the press, and elections have proven to be feeble opponents of the Bush regime's drive toward war and tyranny. It remains to be seen whether the regime has sufficient credibility or audacity to initiate war with Iran or a false flag attack that would revive the fascist expansion of which Naomi Wolf warns.

The Bush administration has been a catastrophe. Its failures are unprecedented. Energy prices are at all time highs. The US is deeply in debt and dependent on foreign creditors. The dollar has lost 60 per cent of its value against other tradable currencies, and its reserve currency status, the basis of American power, is in doubt. The US has lost millions of middle class jobs which have been replaced with low paid domestic service jobs. Except for the very rich, Americans have experienced no gains in real income in the 21st century. As the ladders of upward mobility are dismantled and the middle class struggles and fails, America is left with a few rich and many poor. America's reputation and credibility are damaged perhaps beyond repair. Congress and the press have enabled the executive branch's disregard of the Constitution and civil liberty. The US is mired in two lost wars which are pushing Lebanon and nuclear-armed Pakistan into deepening political crises.

As Buchanan concludes, "Our day of reckoning is at hand."

Don't look now: Here comes the recession

Colin Barr
CNN
Tuesday November 27, 2007

The cash registers were ringing on Black Friday, but make no mistake: American consumers are jittery, and seem all but certain to push the U.S. economy into recession.

After years of living happily beyond their means, Americans are finally facing financial reality. A persistent rise in energy prices will mean bigger heating bills this winter and heftier tabs at the gas pump. Job growth is slowing and wage gains have been anemic. House prices are sliding, diminishing the value of the asset that's the biggest factor in Americans' personal wealth. Even the stock market, which has been resilient for so long in the face of eroding consumer sentiment, has begun pulling back amid signs of deep distress in the financial sector.

The latest evidence of the long-awaited consumer retrenchment: Chic discounter Target (Charts, Fortune 500) last week reported a weaker-than-expected third quarter, as sales of higher-margin apparel and home goods slowed. Starbucks (Charts, Fortune 500) reported for the first time that customer traffic in its stores declined in its latest quarter compared to a year earlier. Wal-Mart (Charts, Fortune 500) shares hit a six-year low in September after the retail giant posted another wan sales increase.

With consumer spending accounting for about three-quarters of U.S. economic activity, some economists say it is inevitable that the economy will stop growing at some point in the coming year, for the first time since the mild recession of 2001. "Right now, the question is how bad it's going to get," said David Rosenberg, chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch. "The question is one of magnitude."

Not everyone agrees. Many economists believe the Federal Reserve will steer the economy into a period of slow growth but avoid a recession, which is typically defined as two or more consecutive quarters of economic contraction. Indeed, the Fed already has twice cut its overnight interest-rate target, and options markets show investors expect the Fed to cut by another quarter-point at its Dec. 11 meeting, taking the Fed funds bank-lending rate down to 4.25%.

Government officials have steered well clear of recession talk, with recent Fed documents citing instead the risk of "an unexpectedly severe weakening in economic activity." But Rosenberg and others are skeptical of the Fed's influence on an economy staggering under a mountain of personal, corporate and government debt. The economic recovery underway in 2002 was driven by low interest rates and abundant credit availability -- helped along by then-Fed chief Alan Greenspan's decision to cut interest rates as low as 1% in 2003.

Full article here.

Denying the North American Union

Kurt Nimmo TruthNews November 26, 2007

Now that Alex Jones, Jerome Corsi, and others have exposed the plot to establish a “North American community,” that is to say eradicate the national sovereignty of the United States, Canada, and Mexico in favor of a “United Nations of America” based on the European Union, the corporate media and globalist apologists have kicked into over-drive with a propaganda effort to deny reality.

“Nobody is proposing a North American Union,” declared Robert Pastor, correctly identified as the father of the NAU and author of “Towards a North American Community: Lessons from the Old World for the New,” a book published by the Council on Foreign Relations Press in association with the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales. Pastor may insist the elite of the three countries, at the behest of transnational corporations, are not interested in a merged superstate, but his argument betrays the fact the former national security advisor dreams of an American version of the European Union.

Pastor is an advocate of NAFTA on steroids, or “NAFTA Plus.” According to Miguel Pickard, in “the early 1990s, when NAFTA negotiators were still wrangling over arcane language, Pastor was proposing ways to ‘improve’ the treaty. According to Pastor, NAFTA was off to a bad start, since negotiators were mostly seeking to dismantle trade tariffs. For Pastor it was crucial to find ways of integrating the three countries, similarly (but with important differences) to what the Europeans had done since the 50s. Years later, Pastor would bemoan that NAFTA’s promise had gone unfulfilled, since it lacked a ‘grand vision’ for the three countries, i.e., a much richer perspective than the emphasis put on trade.” In other words, NAFTA was simply a trade treaty minus the “grand vision” of global integration.

But there is a problem with Pastor’s “grand vision,” namely the people of the United States, Canada, and Mexico are reluctant to give up their national sovereignty.

Pastor, in a conversation with Jerome R. Corsi, “was careful to distinguish that his proposals were designed to create a North American Community and that he never has proposed to create a North American Union as an EU-style regional government,” thus Pastor’s insistence “nobody is “proposing a North American Union.”

But this is, to say the least, deceptive. “The idea seems to be to put new structures in place that change the look of the landscape,” writes Corsi. “[WorldNetDaily] pointed out to Pastor that this step-by-step approach is the same approach taken to create the European Union. The memoirs of Jean Monnet, regarded as the architect of European unity, finally disclosed he had used a strategy of deceit, knowing his plan to form a European Union would never succeed if it were openly disclosed.”

“Pastor in an article entitled ‘NAFTA is Not Enough,’ argued for an incremental process that could head toward the creation of the NAU, all the while providing cover for participating politicians and governments to deny that creating the NAU was their goal,” Corsi argues in a News with Views editorial. In the article, Pastor provides key details on how this stealth process works:

While the three governments of North America are unlikely to step into the debate on long-term goals at the current time, nongovernmental organizations, research institutes, and universities should fill the void with new ideas and old-fashioned cross-border dialogue.

Short of this sort of shadowy incrementalism, the NAU project may be dropped on the fast track by other means, according to Corsi. “Dr. Pastor seems to prescribe that a fear formula is all that is needed for the American people need to begin begging SPP to produce the NAU right now. Pastor openly writes as if the next 9/11 terrorist attack or a future outbreak of some health epidemic such as the avian flu could be just what the NAU doctor ordered as the prescription for the American people to abandon sovereignty in favor of super-regional government control, all in the interest of ’security’ leading to ‘prosperity.’ Or, is it ‘prosperity’ which necessitates more ’security’ via surrender to Big Brother government?”

In predictable fashion, the corporate media is tasked with characterizing those who document the emerging NAU as tinfoil hatters, nut cases, mental patients, conspiracy theorists, etc.

For instance, neocon Charles Krauthammer told Fox News: “I love this stuff because if you ever doubt your own sanity, all you have to do is read this stuff and realize that you’re okay” (see video), while “conservative” Michael Medved lamented what he calls the “paranoid and groundless frenzy… fomented and promoted by a shameless collection of lunatics and losers; crooks, cranks, demagogues and opportunists, who claim the existence of a top secret master plan to join the U.S., Canada and Mexico in one big super-state,” never mind the above, well-documented. “I’m sorry to sound cynical and intolerant about this stupidity, but I’m furious, actually – ashamed to be part of a proud medium (conservative talk radio) that increasingly encourages this paralyzing, puerile paranoia,” apparently a reference to Alex Jones and others who continue to flesh out the “incremental” conspiracy Medved refuses to acknowledge.

Drake Bennett writes for the Boston Globe:

Government officials say a continental union is out of the question, and economists and political analysts overwhelmingly agree that there will not be a North American Union in our lifetimes. But belief in the NAU — that the plans are very real, and that the nation is poised to lose its independence — has been spreading from its origins in the conservative fringe, coloring political press conferences and candidate question-and-answer sessions, and reaching a kind of critical mass on the campaign trail. Republican presidential candidate and Texas congressman Ron Paul has made the North American Union one of his central issues.

Government officials of the sort, no doubt, that told us Saddam Hussein was about use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or that the air at Ground Zero in New York was safe to breathe.

Finally, it is no mistake the Boston Globe has rolled Ron Paul into its diatribe of transparent denial, as Paul must be roundly discredited and characterized as a kook, primarily because a Paul presidency would most certainly put an end to Robert Pastor’s dream of an American version of the European Union once and for all.

US defense chief urges greater use of 'soft power'

AFP
Tuesday November 27, 2007

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates called Monday for a dramatic increase in spending on civilian efforts to project US "soft power" globally through diplomacy, foreign aid and public relations.

"We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen," Gates said in a speech at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.

Gates said greater civilian participation was needed for the success of military operations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan but also to head off problems before they turn into conflicts.

He said the 36 billion dollars a year the United States budgets for foreign policy programs is "disproportionately small" when compared to a military budget that is now close to a trillion dollars a year.

"What is clear to me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on civilian instruments of national security -- diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development," he said.

Noting the irony of a defense secretary advocating spending on diplomacy, Gates said "I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use 'soft power' and for better integrating it with 'hard power.'"

He was particularly scathing about Washington's failure at "communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture."

Full article here.

Alleged Trainer Of 9/11 Hijackers a CIA Informant

Sakka attempts to plug holes in 9/11 official story, claims Hanjour did not pilot Flight 77

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The man who claims to have trained six of the 9/11 hijackers is a paid CIA informant according to Turkish intelligence specialists, who also assert that Al-Qaeda is merely the name of a secret service operation designed to foment a strategy of tension around the world.

In a London Times report, Louai al-Sakka, now incarcerated in a high-security Turkish prison 60 miles east of Istanbul, claims that he trained six of the 9/11 hijackers at a camp in the mountains near Istanbul from 1999-2000.

Sakka was imprisoned in 2005 after being caught making bombs that he planned to use to blow up Israeli vessels.

Sakka asserts that he is a leading Al-Qaeda operative, having directed insurgency attacks in Iraq and also the beheading of Briton Kenneth Bigley in October 2004.

Some of Sakka’s account is corroborated by the US government’s 9/11 Commission. It found evidence that four of the hijackers – whom Sakka says he trained – had initially intended to go to Chechnya from Turkey but the border into Georgia was closed. Sakka had prepared fake visas for the group’s travel to Pakistan and arranged their flights from Istanbul’s Ataturk airport. The group of four went to the al-Farouq camp near Kandahar and the other two to Khaldan, near Kabul, an elite camp for Al-Qaeda fighters.

When Moqed and Suqami returned to Turkey, Sakka employed his skills as a forger to scrub out the Pakistani visa stamps from their passports. This would help the Arab men enter the United States without attracting suspicion that they had been to a training camp.

"But, as with many things in the world of Al-Qaeda, there might be smoke and mirrors," reports the Times. "Some experts believe that Sakka could be overstating his importance to the group, possibly to lay a false track for western agencies investigating his terrorist colleagues."

However, when one considers what other experts have said about Sakka, it appears that his intentions towards "western agencies" are anything but deceptive - since Turkish intelligence analysts concluded that Sakka has been a CIA asset all along.

Prominent Turkish newspaper Zaman reported that Sakka was hired as a CIA informant in 2000, after receiving a large sum of money from the agency. This would explain why he was "captured" but then released on two separate occasions by the CIA during the course of 2000.

Sakka was later captured by Turkish intelligence but again ordered to be released after which he moved to Germany to assist the alleged 9/11 hijackers.

Shortly before 9/11, Sakka was allegedly hired by Syrian intelligence - to whom he gave a warning that the attacks were coming on September 10th, 2001.

In his book At the Center of the Storm, former CIA director George Tenet writes, that “a source we were jointly running with a Middle Eastern country went to see his foreign handler and basically told him something big was about to go down.”

"This is very likely a reference to Sakra, since no one else comes close to matching the description of telling a Middle Eastern government about the 9/11 attacks one day in advance, not to mention working as an informant for the CIA at the same time. Tenet’s revelation strongly supports the notion that Sakra in fact accepted the CIA’s offers in 2000 and had been working with the CIA and other intelligence agencies at least through 9/11 ," writes 9/11 researcher Paul Thompson, who was also interviewed for the London Times article.

Were the alleged "interrogations" of Sakka on behalf of the CIA merely a smokescreen to enable instructions to be passed on? This is certainly the view of Turkish intelligence experts, who go further and conclude that "Al-Qaeda" as a whole is merely a front group for western intelligence agencies used to foment a "strategy of tension" around the world.

Is Sakka still in the employ of western intelligence agencies? His apparent effort to plug the holes in the official 9/11 story is fascinating.

According to Sakka, Nawaf al-Hazmi was a veteran operative who went on to pilot the plane that hit the Pentagon. Although this is at odds with the official account, which says the plane was flown by another hijacker, it is plausible and might answer one of the mysteries of 9/11.

The Pentagon plane performed a complex spiral dive into its target. Yet the pilot attributed with flying the plane (Hani Hanjour) “could not fly at all” according to his flight instructors in America. Hazmi, on the other hand, had mixed reviews from his instructors but they did remark on how “adept” he was on his first flight.

Exactly how "adept" one has to be to pull off maneuvers that would be impossible for veteran crack fighter pilots is not explored in the Times report.

Congress, Courts Examine 'State Secrets'

By PAMELA HESS – 17 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — In federal courts and on Capitol Hill, challenges are brewing to a key legal strategy President Bush is using to protect a secret surveillance program that monitors phone calls and e-mails inside the United States.

Under grilling from lawmakers and attack by lawsuits alleging Bush authorized the illegal wiretapping of Americans, the White House has invoked a legal defense known as the "state secrets" doctrine — a claim that the president has inherent and unchecked power to shield national security information from disclosure, either to plaintiffs in court or to congressional overseers.

The principle was established a half-century ago when, ruling in a wrongful-death case brought by the widows of civilians killed in a military plane crash, the Supreme Court upheld the Air Force's refusal to provide an accident report to the plaintiffs. The government contended releasing the document would compromise information about a secret mission and intelligence equipment.

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Judiciary Committee's senior Republican, believes the White House has gone too far in invoking state secrets to halt civil lawsuits.

"We have the authority to define the state secrets doctrine," Specter says. "I don't think that the simple assertion of state secrets ought to be the end of the matter."

Specter, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and others are working on legislation that would direct federal judges to review the president's state secrets claims and allow cases with merit to go forward.

Practices among judges vary. Some accept state secrets claims outright, dismissing cases on the government's word. Others read the privileged information and decide for themselves, but almost invariably side with the government, according to legal scholars.

The draft legislation is modeled on procedures used in criminal cases that involve classified information. The Classified Information Protection Act lets judges review classified information a criminal defendant wants to use in his defense, but which could compromise national security if it were released publicly. The law allows the court to delete classified passages, substitute summaries of the information, or substitute a statement of facts that the classified information would prove.

The measure could become part of the Senate's new eavesdropping law, expected to be voted on in early December, the aides said.

In another challenge to Bush's position on classified material, a federal judge in Virginia last week ordered the government to give trial prosecutors, defense lawyers and her clerk security clearances to review classified material in a terrorism case. Defense lawyers say the material will show the government failed to turn over evidence obtained by illegally monitoring their client's communications, and they want a new trial. The government says the information is protected by the state secrets privilege.

And in an Oregon case, a U.S. district court judge is set to decide whether the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act trumps presidential claims of secrecy.

Adopted after the Watergate scandal, FISA dictates when the government must get permission from a secret court to monitor electronic communications inside the United States. It also allows people who believe they were spied on illegally to sue the government for damages and to request materials that would prove the surveillance. If the attorney general says disclosure would harm national security, a district court may review the classified materials privately to determine if the surveillance was illegal.

That civil liability provision of FISA, however, comes up hard against the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush secretly authorized the spy agency to intercept international communications coming in and out of the United States that were believed to involve foreign terrorist organizations, according to the White House. It did so without going through the FISA court, claiming the Constitution and Congress' authorization to use military force after the terrorist attacks were all the authority the president needed to undertake the program.

Privacy and civil liberties groups say the warrantless surveillance violates FISA's prohibition on domestic surveillance without court orders. But for someone to sue the government for FISA violations, they must prove they were directly injured by the government's action. That is nearly impossible because the government will not disclose its targets or methods.

One organization, however, believes it can demonstrate it has standing to sue because of an accidental document release in 2004. That February, the Bush administration froze the assets of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Muslim charity the United Nations Security Council alleges is associated with al-Qaida. In preparation for a legal proceeding on the terrorist designation in August, the Treasury Department inadvertently gave the foundation's lawyers and directors a top secret document dated May 24, 2004.

The document appeared to be a government summary of phone conversations it monitored between foundation lawyers and directors, according to a Washington Post reporter who received a copy from the foundation.

The FBI took the document from the Washington Post and Al Haramain in October 2004.

Fourteen months later, The New York Times revealed the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. That is when the foundation's lawyers realized what the top secret document was: proof the organization had been targeted for warrantless electronic surveillance under TSP. They believe that proves standing, unique among plaintiffs in dozens of surveillance cases filed across the country.

The government, however, asserts the states secrets privilege and refuses to release the document or confirm its contents. In its first crack at the case in 2006, the federal court in Oregon partially agreed. It said the document was rightfully protected by state secrets, but the foundation's lawyers could describe what they remembered about it to establish standing in their lawsuit.

The government appealed that decision to the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco, which last week upheld its state secrets claim. But it did not dismiss the case. Instead, it directed the lower court to tackle one question it had sidestepped: whether FISA overrides the common law state secrets privilege. While on appeal to the 9th Circuit Court, the case was transferred, so it will be decided by United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

Whatever the lower court decides, its decision will almost certainly be appealed to the Supreme Court, say legal experts and attorneys on the case. The high court is unlikely to be friendly to a challenge to the state secrets doctrine. In October it unanimously declined to hear a CIA torture allegation case that the Bush administration wanted dismissed on secrecy grounds. And in 2005, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the state secrets doctrine in an espionage contract case.

(This version CORRECTS which district court the case was remanded to. It had been transferred to another district court while the appeals ruling was pending.)