Month: January 2003

This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.

by Ted Rall

A Presidential Impostor Turns Political Assassin

NEW YORK–First he appointed himself President. Now George W. Bush has declared himself God.

As Americans begin their third year of Supreme Court-ordered political occupation, Bush has just signed an impressive new executive order. You may be surprised to learn that it grants him the right to order your execution. No judge, jury or lawyer. No chance to prove your innocence. One stroke of Bush’s pen, and bang–you’re dead.

Not even your American citizenship, according to Bush, will save your life if and when he decides to kill you. The only reason you’re reading this right now–instead of meeting the Entity Formerly Known as God–is that neither Bush nor one of his “high-level officials” has yet signed a piece of paper declaring you an “enemy combatant.” Once they do the paperwork, Administration officials assert, they have the right to murder you.

Bush’s secret assassination directive surfaced on Dec. 3, when reporters asked about the Nov. 3 Central Intelligence Agency (news – web sites) rub-out of alleged Al Qaeda operatives riding in a car in Yemen. Langley fired a Hellfire missile from a remote-controlled Predator drone into the vehicle, blowing up several men. The CIA (news – web sites) later discovered that an American citizen, Kamal Derwish, had inadvertently been killed in the inferno.

“No constitutional questions are raised here,” asserted National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice (news – web sites), stretching credulity more than usual. Officials claim that a loophole in Bush’s order authorizing the CIA to “covertly attack Al Qaeda all over the world” validates Derwish’s murder. Since this sneaky directive makes exception neither for Americans nor American soil, these guys say, you and I have no more rights than the now-deceased, not-presumed-innocent Kamal Derwish.

Your life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are now officially subject to George W. Bush’s personal judgement–or whim.

The war on terrorism isn’t a war, it’s a cheesy public service announcement, like the “war on poverty” and the “war on drugs.” Like those old un-won campaigns, it involves no declaration of war, no defined enemy, no front. And like them it will gradually fade into embarrassing irrelevance. “Can you believe it?” future citizens will marvel. “People actually took this stuff seriously!” In the meantime, America’s Gang of Four–Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft–have brilliantly exploited the nebulousness of nullity. Having no enemy means that anyone can be declared the enemy. Having no battleground means that the battleground is anywhere and everywhere. “The Bush Administration and Al Qaeda together have defined the entire world as a battlefield,” writes the Associated Press’ John J. Lumpkin.

While the CIA has targeted U.S. citizens in the past, those killings were officially sanctioned only when the person in question was considered an immediate threat to American lives. Scott L. Silliman, director of the Duke University Center on Law, Ethics and National Security asks: “Could you put a Hellfire missile into a car in Washington, D.C. under the same theory? The answer is yes, you could.”

Never mind that anyone driving on the Beltway could just as easily be pulled over by the cops. Like the medieval lords who wielded the right of life and death over their subjects, our Texan warlord now claims the droit du seigneur over the American people.

Under his legalized assassination mandate, Bush could theoretically declare the 2004 Democratic nominee an “enemy combatant,” Hellfire his campaign bus and coast to reelection unopposed. It would be a heck of a lot easier than preparing for debates.

Granted, it’s unlikely that CIA missiles will begin raining down on Berkeley or other liberal burgs anytime soon. Killing Muslims, even those with U.S. citizenship, is one thing; offing “ordinary” Americans is another. As has been the case with previous Bushie infringements on fundamental civil rights–electronic eavesdropping, jailing people without trial or a visit by a lawyer–most citizens believe themselves safe simply by virtue of their not being terrorists.

They may be right. They might be wrong. It’s all in the hands of the executioner-in-chief now.

Source: http://www.Rall.com

This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.

George W. Bush Military Record

And Recent Behavior (1980, 1990, and 2000) Pertaining To Military Records

In these days of guys who never fought in Vietnam advocating a tricky engagement in Iraq, it is interesting to see what George W. Bush did in the military, how he misrepresented it, and what’s been done recently to make sure no one notices. Mr. Bush, whose permission to fly was revoked by the military (he was suspended, assigned to a disciplinary unit and not allowed to fly military assignments again) liked to portray himself to voters as a “fighter pilot.” But his embellishments didn’t stop there:

Date: 08/19/88 Houston Chronicle article by R. G. Ratliffe

“Asked how he got into the Air National Guard, Bush said, ‘They could sense I was going to be one of the great pilots of all time.’”

Date: 1999 autobiography A Charge to Keep by George W. Bush

Among the questionable claims in Mr. Bush’s autobiography is that he tried to volunteer for service in Vietnam “to relieve active-duty pilots.” He did not volunteer for service in Vietnam; in fact, he failed to report for duty in his Air National Guard Unit and skipped off to Alabama to work on a political campaign.

In his book, Mr. Bush offers a lovely-sounding (but bald-faced) lie to describe his F-102 fighter pilot experience: “I continued flying with my unit for the next several years,” he writes, but in fact he was suspended from flight duty in August 1972 and didn’t fly at all for the last two years of his service. (He also didn’t show up for duty.)

Further along in his autobiography, Mr. Bush says his military service “gave me respect for the chain of command.” Well, that is an odd way to describe ignoring two direct orders to appear for duty. He was then assigned to a disciplinary unit in Denver, and he didn’t show up for that either.

During September 2002, CNN aired a prepared set of videotapes glorifying the elder George Bush’s military career. Well, they certainly couldn’t glorify anything about the younger Bush’s aborted military career. But were these tapes also embellishments? In one of the tapes, the elder George Bush describes being shot down, companions killed, floating in the ocean until a submarine luckily popped up next to him, and in a remarkable coincidence, it “just happened” to have a film crew on board. That’s why, the commentator explains without flinching, CNN is able to show the actual footage of George H.W. Bush’s rescue.

No one is claiming that the elder George Bush was not shot down, nor that he was not a hero. But…rescued in the middle of the ocean by a submarine that just coincidentally happened to be carrying a film crew? Like the military record for the younger George Bush, described below, (last name torn off, with only the “W” proclaiming that it is the record belonging to George W. Bush…or is that Mortimer W. Snerd?) one could wonder about the authenticity of the lucky film captured by the lucky submarine, which shows only a pilot in a helmet.

CNN (whose parent company, AOL Time Warner, had just learned that it was the target of a new SEC investigation) also spent an entire week running a series of “just discovered” Osama bin Laden tapes murkily explained to be from a trove of over 70 bin Laden tapes that a CNN reporter “found.” Both the Bush Senior military tapes and the hand-picked bin Laden tapes provided a Texas-sized helping of White-House-friendly sound bytes, repeated dozens of times a day. Happily for CNN, news of the SEC report quieted down, not just on CNN but everywhere. And, except for the Bush military and bin Laden tapes and the fanfare surrounding them, CNN’s news was balanced.

“What distinguishes the New Right from other American reactionary movements and what it shares with the early phase of German fascism, is its incorporation of conservative impulses into a system of representation consisting largely of media techniques and media images. — Philip Bishop: “The New Right and the Media”

But we digress: Below, you will find photocopies of documents (obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, which the Bush Administration is now busy gutting) showing that George W. Bush failed to report for Air National Guard duty, was disciplined, and was booted out as a pilot for refusing to take a drug test.

In fact, George W. Bush evaded military duties while thousands of Americans — more patriotic and less privileged than George W. Bush — were dying in Vietnam.

Senator Daniel Inouye: “‘During my service, if I missed training for two years, at the least, I would have been court-martialed.’ Senator Inouye (Hawaii) has demanded that George W. Bush account for missing two years of National Guard Service. (see transcript).

Senator Bob Kerrey: Governor Bush made a six-year commitment…Well, if he’s going to do what’s right, he ought to release his military records, as John McCain did and let us know where he was during that six year period of time…” (see transcript)

Where’s Waldo George?

News Release: Help George W. Bush find 1972, 1973

George Bush has lost a year of his youth and needs your help to find it. Between May 1972 and October 1974 George W. Bush seems to have lost:

1) A year of his service in the Air National Guard (ANG) 2) His eligibility to fly F-102 jet fighters (See photocopy, footnote 1) 3) The directions to his military doctor’s office 4) The means to travel to his punishment detail (2) to which he apparently never reported, although he claims to have served the final months of his enlistment there.

Lots of people didn’t see George Bush, including retired General William Turnipseed (3) to whom young 1st Lt. Bush was ordered to report, and the commanders of the Texas Air National Guard Unit (4) in which he was supposedly serving. You can imagine how disturbing this must be to our unelected Commander-in-Chief — to have so thoroughly lost a year of his own military service (5) when he plans to ask young Americans to stick to the terms of their military enlistments so he can send them to Iraq.

In October, 2000 two different Vietnam veterans groups put up a total of $2000 in rewards for anyone who could find George W. Bush’s missing year of National Guard service. (6) So far no one has claimed the reward.

But this was a long time ago. Any recent misbehavior?

— In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mr. Bush leaned on his self-described experience as a fighter pilot to get himself elected governor of Texas. See archives for Austin Statesman and Houston Chronicle to read his embellishments about his service as a fighter pilot.

— In 1999, just prior to Mr. Bush’s announcement that he planned to run for president, a record-scrubbing detail was dispatched to Camp Mabry to make sure records in the archives matched those in the autobiography published in 1999. ([synopsis: record scrubbing]

— In 1999, during his presidential campaign, Mr. Bush produced an autobiography (7) containing several untruths about his military service. He bragged about volunteering to go to Vietnam (not true), tried to impress voters saying he was a fighter pilot and “continued to fly for several years” after training (not true), and asserted that his military training taught him to respect the chain of command (if so, he had a peculiar way of showing it).

— In 2000, reporters unearthed the facts and published them in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, AP wire service and other print media outlets — to howls from Bush’s people that it was unfair and “unethical” to reveal facts just before the election. No television news programs covered the story until nearly a year after the election.

— In October 2000, when the document photocopies were posted on this web site, the site was hacked out and the documents were made inaccessible to the public (and the press) until after the election news cycle ended, the weekend before Election Day.

(“How dare you bring these documents up in a time of war?”) Hmmm. If this web site hadn’t been hacked out to block media access to documents before the election, voters would have known about this; if George W. Bush had then been elected it would have been with full disclosure and there would be no point in bringing it up now. But then, that would be protecting free speech.

— In November 2000, during the vote counting (or more accurately, vote not-counting), an unauthorized monitoring system started gathering data on Bush military document photocopies posted at this web site. Using an automated program, a “visitor” cycled from military document to document on a prescribed schedule, every few minutes for two weeks. The “visitor” never disengaged until a technician from our web hosting company manually dislodged it, at our request. The technician said he’d never seen anything like it before.

— In December 2000, after dislodging the first “visitor,” another unauthorized monitor appeared. This lurker cycled from Bush document to document at regular intervals, then broke the connection. After 60 seconds it would reconnect and repeat the process. This continued for a week, when Talion.com dislodged it by changing all the page addresses for Bush photocopy documents.

It’s frustrating: At least when you’re looking for Waldo, you know he’ll be somewhere in the picture. George Bush didn’t seem to have been anywhere during his military years, but he seemed to be everywhere when photocopies of his military record appeared around election time. We must ask:

Is his a stealth military program? Does he fly below the radar?

Of course, this could be all wrong. Although there’s no proof that President Bush showed up for military duties between May 1972 and May 1973 (8), there’s a simple way for him to clear this up before he asks young Americans to step into the line of fire in Iraq. Simply release the records, as John McCain did.

Private military records can only be released with permission, but they contain the most essential information about how he served — the records of commendations, comments by superiors about the quality of service and the records of any disciplinary actions or boards of inquiry. Public military records, which have been released under a FOIA request (9) indicate that George W. Bush did not satisfactorily complete his duties, was suspended and assigned to disciplinary duty, which he also did not show up for.

= = = = = =

“As the State Plans Officer for the Texas National Guard, I was on full-time duty at Camp Mabry when Dan Bartlett was cleansing the George W Bush file prior to GW’s Presidential announcement. For most soldiers at Camp Mabry, this was a generally known event.

The archives were closely scrutinized to make sure that the Bush autobiography plans and the record did not directly contradict each other. In essence it was the script of the autobiography which Dan Bartlett and his small team used to scrub a file to be released. This effort was further involved by General Daniel James and Chief of Staff William W. Goodwin at Camp Mabry.

— Bill Burkett — contact: (915-673-0429) [Transcript of Bill Burkett interview]

= = = = = =

The facts about George W. Bush military record:

1) On September 29, 1972 Air National Guard orders “suspending 1st Lt. George W. Bush from flying status are confirmed…Reason for Suspension: Failure to accomplish annual medical exam.” (10)

2) Bush’s initial temporary transfer to Alabama was denied because “An obligated Reservist can be assigned to a specific Ready Reserve position only. (11) Therefore, he is ineligible for assignment to an Air Reserve Squadron”. Nonetheless, Bush reapplied, was accepted by the commander of the mail unit in Alabama, and moved to Alabama to work on a Senate campaign, instead of completing his military duties. He claims no one exerted any influence.

3) According to a Boston Globe Story on May 23, 2000. “In his final 18 months of military service in 1972 and 1973, Bush did not fly at all. And for much of that time, Bush was all but unaccounted for (12) For a full year, there is no record that he showed up for the periodic drills required of part-time guardsmen…From May to November 1972, Bush was in Alabama working in a US Senate campaign, and was required to attend drills at an Air National Guard unit in Montgomery. But there is no evidence in his record that he did so. And William Turnipseed, the retired general who commanded the Alabama unit back then, said in an interview last week that Bush never appeared for duty there.”

4) The tattered piece of attendance record (which lists no months, years, or last name) which the Bush campaign presented as evidence of attending Air National Guard training is not even from the Air National Guard. This incomplete scrap of paper is from the Air Force Reserve punishment unit, not the Air National Guard. (13) Note the ARF (Air Reserve Force) listing at the top, rather than the ANG designator, which would indicate it was from the Air National Guard.

5) In the fall of 1973, as an automatic disciplinary action, Bush was reassigned to the Obligated Reserve Section in Denver, because he disobeyed orders to show up for a mandatory flight physical and therefore was unable to fulfill the last two years of his six-year obligation as an Air National Guard jet fighter pilot.

Boston Globe 11/5/2000 — “APPARENTLY, BUSH BELIEVES THE RULES DON’T APPLY TO HIM” By Thomas Oliphant:

“WASHINGTON — IMAGINE YOU WANTED to be George W. Bush’s running mate back in July — One of the very first questions on the disclosure form presidential campaigns supply is always a simple, “Have you ever been arrested?” And another demands from those with military records the places and dates of every chunk of that service. In fact, an accounting for every month of your life (as with any job carrying a Top Secret clearance) would be required.

“— you tell Bush that you and your advisers had made a conscious decision to withhold the fact of a drunken-driving conviction when you were 30 from the public. You say you had only acknowledged a heavy drinking problem in the past, and that while continuing to booze for a decade after the arrest you had quit completely 14 years ago. You add that you had decided to dodge all details because you didn’t want your twins to do what you did.

“Now imagine further…the relentless Bush lawyers had picked apart your military record (in the National Guard) like crows on road kill, exposing white lies and big gaps like whether you did a lick of anything for the last year-and-a-half of your obligation. As for the untruths and gaps in your National Guard record and even your resume and autobiography, you tell Bush that you’ve said all you’re going to say before the election on this subject, that the records and your memory are hazy, but that you’re certain your obligation had been fulfilled properly.”

Sunday Times London (11/05/2000): “The Bush camp was equally dismissive of a claim by Bill Burkett, a former lieutenant colonel in the Texas National Guard, that the governor’s aides had doctored his military record.

“Burkett said Bush aides had visited the National Guard headquarters at Camp Mabry ‘on numerous occasions’ to make sure that records available to the public about his military service would tally with his autobiography’s version of his time as a reserve pilot during the Vietnam war.”

Air National Guard Commanding Officer Alleges Bush Military Records Cleansing

SUBJ: Military Records of George W. Bush — Clarification Bill L. Burkett LTC (ret)

Within the morning press reports in the London Sunday Times and other publications, I am stated to have alleged that the staff of George W. Bush doctored [the key term] the military files of George W. Bush in whatever attempt to cover his military record.

Let me answer questions about my responses within a chronological pattern:

Was this politically motivated and coordinated with the Gore Campaign?

No. Not whatsoever. In no way did any member of the Gore Campaign or any election official, Republican or Democrat know my comments. My observations were responses to questions of how the file was developed; disseminated under the Freedom of information Act (FOIA) and what was missing within the files which would resolve the question of satisfactory participation. These were my personal responses to the asked questions that were not sanctioned by anyone, nor shared with anyone. They were made on the basis of my 28 year career, my working experience within the senior staff at the Texas National Guard headquarters and my knowledge of the operational procedures of the US military including the subject of personnel files of retired or discharged soldiers and airmen.

Why, do you believe, you were contacted?

Question 3 will background how this occurred which should be self-explanatory. The context of the DUI story indicated the mishandling or failure to fully disclose a past criminal record of Governor Bush. I believe that the military record and the irregularities that point to a possible extended period of nonperformance and early release may have also indicated a pattern of lack of full disclosure by the Governor and his campaign. This issue of military records had been highly visible on at least two previous occasions within the campaign, however, Senator Kerrey as an honored and decorated SEAL most recently focused on this issue within the last ten days I would guess that within the eleventh hour and following the revelation of the DUI story, the media and voters were waiting for the next shoe to drop. This issue may have been viewed as the next shoe.

In June of 1998 and with the full and personal knowledge of Dan Bartlett and the Governor, I reported problems of force structure, readiness operational efficiency personnel and procedures within the Texas National Guard. At that time, and periodically thereafter, I have been in contact with various

news writers and publishers. In 1998, I provided sufficient detailed information including documentation of severe irregularities within the Governors own chain of command in an effort to correct those deficiencies which I believe undermined the Texas National Guard and in some cases broke the law.

How did your reference in this story develop?

I contacted a website that outlined the Governor’s personal military career irregularities and suggested that there were two official documents that would resolve the issue of satisfactory and honorable service. Suddenly on Friday afternoon, my telephone became barraged with media calls and messages including those who had known of my previous whistleblowing but had failed report it. I explained my background and personal observations to each of them in minute detail, often repeating the entire process for clarity. I was extremely careful not to point an accusing finger, but rather shape a question which could resolve this allegation of integrity that had clouded the Bush campaign since June of 1999 — the issue of his personal military service.

Did you allege that the governor’s staff doctored the records?

No, instead I stated that the way this had been handled by the Bush staff including knowledgeable military officials at the Texas national guard, that it left the implication that the Bush staff had first incompetently provided an incomplete military file for the Governor which was consistent with his autobiography. I further observed that they probably did not anticipate that the file would be scrutinized to the level that it was. Whenever someone determined holes is service big enough to drive a Mack truck through additional information [all of which was unofficial and some in pencil notations] were then submitted to the press to answer questions. I further observed this “Trust me, I’m the Governor” approach had worked throughout Texas for George W. Bush within his tenure and the media had give the Governor a free pass without the same scrutiny as the Vice President until the eleventh hour revelation of the DUI. But this still left the basic question — Why didn’t Governor Bush simply release his military pay files and retirement points accounting records, which are the only OFFICIAL records that will show that he satisfactorily and honorably completed his service commitment?

Were there other issues that you discussed?

Yes. In each call, I, in essence scolded media representatives for not doing their homework and reviewing this information before the eleventh hour. When asked if I would go on record, I said, yes, I have nothing to hide even though I knew that the mention of my name with the Bush campaign would immediately strike a personal response because of my whistleblowing in 1998.

Again, was this a Democratic ploy as stated by Karen Hughes of the Bush staff?

No. Absolutely not.

Karen Hughes has again skirted the real issue and question. Dan Bartlett and the Governor have also refused to answer the basic question and furnish the OFFICIAL files that will resolve this issue. I am in no way linked to the Democratic Party. I am simply an energized citizen and retired soldier who would like to have the issues of each possible commander-in-chief resolved prior to the election, in order that we can escape holding another American Presidency hostage to actions and allegations by the opposing party in Congress. We have suffered from this partisanship for the past eight years. George W. Bush says that he is the only candidate who can bridge this impasse. This is his opportunity to start that process. This is what I believe other Americans share with me — a sincere belief that they have the right and capacity to make educated decisions; but that candidates have the responsibility for full and complete disclosure.

If you would like to speak with me personally — on the record — I can be reached at (915) 673-0429 in Abilene, Texas.

Please call in order to verify my signature.

Bill L. Burkett LTC (Ret)

For Interviews

More source information and interviews: For a remarkable show or news story, interview former Air National Guard pilot Robert A. Rogers and researcher Marty Heldt as they lead you through the 160 pages of documents uncovered in their Freedom of Information inquiries into bush’s official military records. Find out why they think it is imperative that Bush gives permission for the release of his personal military records before the election. Both Rogers and Heldt say their research shows such huge holes in his National Guard record Bush should release his personal military records before he commits young Americans to wartime conditions.

Go to http://users.cis.net/coldfeet/document.htm to view Bush military documents released under the Freedom of Information Act which show the conflicting information that produced requests to release his private military records. Voluntary release of personal military records for the period of his enlistment from 1968 through 1974 will provide information to assess the following events:

1. A September 29, 1972 Air National Guard confirming orders “suspending 1st Lt. George W. Bush from flying status are confirmed…Reason for Suspension: Failure to accomplish annual medical exam.”

2. Bush’s initial temporary transfer to Alabama was denied because “An obligated Reservist can be assigned to a specific Ready Reserve position only. Therefore, he is ineligible for assignment to an Air Reserve Squadron”. Nonetheless, Bush reapplied, was accepted by the commander of the mail unit in Alabama, and moved to Alabama where, instead of fulfilling his military duties, he worked on a Senate campaign. http://users.cis.net/coldfeet/doc5.gif

3. According to a Boston Globe Story on May 23, 2000: “In his final 18 months of military service in 1972 and 1973, Bush did not fly at all. And for much of that time, Bush was all but unaccounted for: For a full year, there is no record that he showed up for the periodic drills required of part-time guardsmen.

“Bush, who declined to be interviewed on the issue, said through a spokesman that he has ”some recollection” of attending drills that year, but maybe not consistently.

“From May to November 1972, Bush was in Alabama working in a US Senate campaign, and was required to attend drills at an Air National Guard unit in Montgomery. But there is no evidence in his record that he did so. And William Turnipseed, the retired general who commanded the Alabama unit back then, said in an interview last week that Bush never appeared for duty there.”

4. In Fall 1973, as an automatic disciplinary action, Bush was reassigned to the Obligated Reserve Section in Denver, because he disobeyed orders to show up for a mandatory flight physical and therefore was unable to fulfill the last two years of his six-year obligation as an Air National Guard jet fighter pilot.

View Document photocopies:

First: Document about George W. Bush, redacted for “administrative reasons”

Second: Document: Agreement signed by George W. Bush to accept military flying assignments after training (reneged on after disobeying orders)

Third: Document: Order to suspend George Bush from flying for failing to obey an order

Fourth: Document: Evidence that George W. Bush was allowed to substitute civilian duties (working on a senate campaign) for flying duties following his refusal to take physical and drug test

Fifth: Document: Statement specifying disciplinary measures, signed by George W. Bush

Sixth: Document: Assignment of George W. Bush to disciplinary unit in Denver

Footnotes 1 George W. Bush suspended by military order. Official document

2 Enlistment papers specifying punishments for not fulfilling Air National Guard obligations

3 Boston Globe Article Oct 31 2000

4 Two Texas Commanders statements: they never saw him during the 5/72-5/73 period. He was assigned, perhaps through political influence, to a civilian unit (during the war; his civilian duties consisted of helping with a political campaign) after disobeying an order.

5 May 2000 Boston Globe article One Year Gap In Bush’s Guard Duty

6 Vets Want Proof of Bush Service, Birmingham News October 2000 [article has been archived or removed from web]

7 New York Observer: George W.’s Troubling Flights of Fancy

8 Bush’s Service Record, go to archives for Oct. 24, 2000 in the Arizona Daily Star

9 Lots more document photocopies: To look at 30 pages of Bush’s FOIA records go here

10 Order suspending Bush from flying.

11 Order Bush was not eligible for transfer, tried again, perhaps with political influence, and left for civilian duties before his term was completed.

12 Another Boston Globe article Oct 30 2000

13 Purported proof of Bush’s military service for 1972-73. Document is nearly blank and does not identify who it belongs to. Note that most of the dates and Bush’s name (except for the “W”) have been torn off.

Other sites with information, some more partisan than others…

Washington Post article, Nov 3, 2000

“The Bush campaign points to a torn piece of paper in his Guard records, a statement of points Bush apparently earned in 1972-73, although most of the dates and Bush’s name except for the “W” have been torn off…” The article goes on to say that the torn sheet of paper is shown as evidence by the Bush people that he satisfied his requirements, but that is contradicted by a written report signed by two superiors.

Martin Heldt’s Home Page on Bush’s Missing Years

Martin Heldt’s Chronology

Background

Veterans that have requested proof of Governor Bush’s service during the years of 1972 to 1973 include the Alabama Vietnam Veterans and Viet Vets for the Real Truth, and Senators Inouye and Kerrey. In addition the Arizona Daily Star, TomPaine.com and The New York Observer have questioned whether Bush actually served his required time during the last half of 1972 and into late May 1973.

More Background: George W. Bush served five years of his six-year Air National Guard obligation between 1968 and 1973. However, 1972-1973 records were redacted “for administrative reasons” and have not been released. After undergoing two years of expensive jet fighter training at taxpayer expense, in April 1972, during the Viet Nam War, George Bush simply quit flying. He did not show up to take his required annual flight physical, and the penalty he received was automatic suspension of his right to fly and a final 15 months of disciplinary action, for which he was demoted to the Obligated Reserve Section in Denver.

Connecting the dots:

— In April 1972, random drug testing was implemented in the military.

— Bush has previously stated that he had not used drugs “since 1974.”

— Official verbal answer from Bush campaign: Governor Bush “decided to not fly any longer” so he did not take the required military flight physical. However, as anyone in the military knows, one does not simply “decide” to give up a military assignment.

What difference does it make? Depending on the nature of what’s in those records, significant problems could result if certain kinds of information surface, including congressional investigations of misconduct or influence peddling, or problems enforcing disciplinary measures with soldiers who commit infractions that may surface in the records. But maybe there is nothing there. The only way to find out is for Governor Bush to voluntarily authorize the release of his private military records.

What kind of records and procedures can be released? Under ordinary military circumstances, the suspension of a pilot is directed through a military board of inquiry. In Bush’s case, if such a body was convened, the records of its findings are not in the public record. However, Governor Bush’s private records, which include disciplinary actions and other relevant commentary, would provide clear answers to the persistent questions.

Source: http://www.talion.com/georgebush.html

This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.

His Gift To Us

by Bill Hangley Jr.

So when the President was here on July 4, I had the opportunity to shake his hand. I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea or not but I did it anyway, and said to him, “Mr President, I hope you only serve four years. I’m very disappointed in your work so far.”

He kept smiling and shaking my hand but answered, “who cares what you think?” His face stayed photo-op perfect but his eyes gave me a look that said, if we’d been drinking in some frathouse in Texas, he’d’ve happily answered, “let’s take it outside.” A nasty little gleam. But he was (fortunately) constrained by Presidential propriety.

But that was the end of it, until I turned away and started scribbling the quote down in my notepad, so as to remember The Gift forever. When he saw me do that he got excited and craned his neck over the rubberneckers to shout at me, “who are you with? Who are you with?” People started looking so he made a joke: “make sure you get it right.” But he kept at it: “Who do you write for?”

I told him I wasn’t “with” anybody and pointed to one of his staff people, who knows me a little, and said, “ask him, he’ll tell you.” Then I split.

Half an hour later, my boss (who had helped organize the event we were at) came up to me and said, “did you really tell the President that he was doing a ‘lousy fucking job’?” No way, I said, I was very polite, I just told him what I thought.

Fortunately, he believed me. He wasn’t happy with me, but he believed me.

But anyway, if you ever wondered if the Prez really was kind of a jerk, I’m here to tell you, he is, and I got The Gift to prove it.

I’m thinking of making up t-shirts so we can share The Gift with everyone:

“Who cares what you think?” – President George W. Bush

Bill Hangley is a Philadelphia writer who writes for Philly Tonite, the Weekly Press, City Paper, and many others. This is his original post, apparently to a newsgroup.

[email protected]

This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.

Presidential IQ’s

In a report published Monday, the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pennsylvania detailed its findings of a four month study of the intelligence quotient of President George W. Bush.

Since 1973, the Lovenstein Institute has published it’s research to the education community on each new president, which includes the famous “IQ” report among others.

According to statements in the report, there have been twelve presidents over the past 50 years, from F. D. Roosevelt to G. W. Bush who were all rated based on scholarly achievements, writings that they alone produced without aid of staff, their ability to speak with clarity, and several other psychological factors which were then scored in the Swanson/Crain system of intelligence ranking.

The study determined the following IQs of each president as accurate to within five percentage points:

147 Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) 132 Harry Truman (D) 122 Dwight D. Eisenhower (R) 174 John F. Kennedy (D) 126 Lyndon B. Johnson (D) 155 Richard M. Nixon (R) 121 Gerald Ford (R) 175 James E. Carter (D) 105 Ronald Reagan (R) 098 George HW Bush (R) 182 William J. Clinton (D) 091 George W. Bush (R)

The study determined the following IQs of each president as accurate to within five percentage points:

The six Republican presidents of the past 50 years had an average IQ of 115.5, with President Nixon having the highest IQ, at 155.

President G. W. Bush was rated the lowest of all the Republicans with an IQ of 91. The six Democrat presidents had IQs with an average of 156, with President Clinton having the highest IQ, at 182. President Lyndon B. Johnson was rated the lowest of all the Democrats with an IQ of 126. No president other than Carter (D) has released his actual IQ, 176.

Among comments made concerning the specific testing of President GW Bush, his low ratings were due to his apparent difficulty to command the

English language in public statements, his limited use of vocabulary (6,500 words for Bush versus an average of 11,000 words for other presidents), his lack of scholarly achievements other than a basic MBA, and an absence of any body of work which could be studied on an intellectual basis.

The complete report documents the methods and procedures used to arrive at these ratings, including depth of sentence structure and voice stress confidence analysis.

“All the Presidents prior to George W. Bush had a least one book under their belt, and most had written several white papers during their education or early careers. Not so with President Bush,” Dr. Lovenstein said. “He has no published works or writings, so in many ways that made it more difficult to arrive at an assessment. We had to rely more heavily on transcripts of his unscripted public speaking.”

The Lovenstein Institute of Scranton Pennsylvania think tank includes high caliber historians, psychiatrists, sociologists, scientists in human behavior, and psychologists. Among their ranks are Dr. Werner R. Lovenstein, world-renowned sociologist, and Professor Patricia F. Dilliams, a world-respected psychiatrist.

This study was commissioned on February 13, 2001 and released on July 9, 2001 to subscribing member universities and organizations within the education community.

*This story is a hoax! http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/lovenstein.html

This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.

Bush Isn’t A Moron, He’s A Cunning Sociopath

by Bev Conover, Online Journal Editor And Publisher, December 5, 2002

If any of us are to have a future worth having, the world’s leaders, the members of Congress, the US corporate media and people of all political persuasions who value freedom and democracy had better start seeing George W. Bush for what he is: a sociopath and a passive serial killer.

Psychiatrists tell us that all serial killers lack the emotions that make us human; that they have to learn to emulate those emotions in order to get by in society. Hence, a charming, well educated fellow like Ted Bundy who is known to have murdered 15 women and may have killed 36 before he was caught.

While Bush is no Bundy, when it comes Bundy’s education and acquired charm, and to our knowledge has never personally murdered anyone, it has been evident to us that there is something missing in George W. in terms of his lack of compassion and empathy. As governor of Texas, he set a record in signing death warrants-154 in five years. He even made fun of the way convicted killer Karla Faye Tucker begged for her life.

If we believe the psychiatrists, a sign of a future serial killer is a child who delights in torturing and killing animals. George W., as a child, did exactly that. In a May 21, 2000, New York Times’ puff piece about the values Bush gained growing up in Midland, Texas, Nicholas D. Kristof quoted Bush’s childhood friend Terry Throckmorton: “‘We were terrible to animals,’ recalled Mr. Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush home turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. ‘Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,’ Mr. Throckmorton said. ‘Or we’d put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.'”

On Sept. 12, 2000, Baltimore Sun reporter Miriam Miedzian wrote, “So when he was a kid, George W. enjoyed putting firecrackers into frogs, throwing them in the air, and then watching them blow up. Should this be cause for alarm? How relevant is a man’s childhood behavior to what he is like as an adult? And in this case, to what he would be like as president of the United States.”

We’re finding out, aren’t we? While we, in two articles before the 2000 election-Sept. 21 and Oct. 23-noted Bush’s penchant for blowing up frogs, the corporate media blew it off, just as it had no interest in what he was trying to hide by obtaining a new Texas driver license and his 1976 drunk driving conviction, or the fact he was AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. Instead, they bought into his nonsensical claim of being a “compassionate conservative” and “a uniter not a divider” who was going to “restore honor and dignity to the White House.”

All through the 2000 campaign and up to Sept. 11, 2001, the corporate media depicted Bush as an affable, tongue-tied bumbler-the kind of guy Joe Six-pack would like to have a beer with-turning a blind eye to his dark underside. It mattered not that he stocked his illicit administration with the worst of the worst: John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Gale Norton, Paul O’Neill, Harvey Pitt, Thomas White, John Negroponte, Otto Reich and convicted Iran-contra felon Elliot Abrams who received a 1992 Christmas Eve pardon from George W.’s father.

Then, despite his peculiar behavior on Sept. 11, the corporate media and his handlers transformed him into a leader extraordinaire in the mold of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rolled into one.

And as Bush had Afghanistan bombed back beyond the Stone Age to rid the world of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, then switched to claiming it was the Taliban that had to go, then declared there was an “axis of evil” and it was really Saddam Hussein who was the “mother of all evil” and that war with Iraq was in the offing to get rid of Saddam, the corporate media cheered him on and to this day continues to beat the war drum. They have yet to consider that the passive serial killer needs to feed his lust for blood by sending others to put their lives on the line and do the killing for him.

In his Sept. 12 article, White House insiders say Bush is “out of control,” Mike Hersh wrote, “Some among Bush’s trusted White House staff fear what they are seeing and where Bush is taking us. His state of mind hauntingly reminds them of Richard Nixon’s Final Days. They fear Bush is becoming Nixonesque . . . or worse. Although Bush lacks Nixon’s paranoia, he may entertain even more dangerous notions.”

But their desperate late night phone calls to trusted reporters has not seen the light of day in the corporate media. Yet, some of us outside the Beltway have long had an inkling of what we are dealing with.

More proof lies in Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary, Journeys with George. Pelosi, the daughter of incoming House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, was a producer for NBC when she wangled the assignment to spend 18 months as part of Bush’s campaign press corps.

>From the surface, Pelosi’s “home movie,” as she calls it, seems to be nothing more than a love fest as George W. works to charm the pants off her and the rest of the press corps. The striking thing about this George, even though Karen Hughes is often seen hovering at his elbow, is that he isn’t tongue-tied when he is pumping up his ego, dishing out digs and being sarcastic and crude.

Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon and professor of media studies at New York University, who also sees the darker Bush, said in a Nov. 28 interview with the Toronto Star, “”Bush is not an imbecile. He’s not a puppet. I think that Bush is a sociopathic personality. I think he’s incapable of empathy. He has an inordinate sense of his own entitlement, and he’s a very skilled manipulator. And in all the snickering about his alleged idiocy, this is what a lot of people miss.”

Miller said he did intend The Bush Dyslexicon to be a funny book, but that was before he read all the transcripts, which revealed, according to reporter Murray Whyte, “a disquieting truth about what lurks behind the cock-eyed leer of the leader of the free world. He’s not a moron at all on that point, Miller and Prime Minister Jean Chretien agree.”

“He has no trouble speaking off the cuff when he’s speaking punitively, when he’s talking about violence, when he’s talking about revenge,” Miller told Whyte. “When he struts and thumps his chest, his syntax and grammar are fine. It’s only when he leaps into the wild blue yonder of compassion, or idealism, or altruism, that he makes these hilarious mistakes.”

In a speech last Sept. in Nashville, trying to strengthen his case against Saddam, Bush’s script called for him to say, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” But the words that came out of his mouth were, “”Fool me once, shame . . . shame on . . . you,” followed by a long pause, then, “Fool me-can’t get fooled again!”

Said Miller, “What’s revealing about this is that Bush could not say, ‘Shame on me’ to save his life. That’s a completely alien idea to him. This is a guy who is absolutely proud of his own inflexibility and rectitude.”

Another example, Miller said, occurred early in Bush’s White House tenure when he said, “I know how hard it is to put food on your family.”

According to Miller, “That wasn’t because he’s so stupid that he doesn’t know how to say, ‘Put food on your family’s table’ — it’s because he doesn’t care about people who can’t put food on the table.”

Miller told Whyte, “”When he tries to talk about what this country stands for, or about democracy, he can’t do it.”

“This, then, is why he’s so closely watched by his handlers, Miller says not because he’ll say something stupid, but because he’ll overindulge in the language of violence and punishment at which he excels,” Whyte wrote.

“He’s a very angry guy, a hostile guy. He’s much like Nixon. So they’re very, very careful to choreograph every move he makes. They don’t want him anywhere near protestors, because he would lose his temper,” Miller said.

“I call him the feel bad president, because he’s all about punishment and death,” Miller told Whyte. “It would be a grave mistake to just play him for laughs.”

A grave mistake, indeed.

If all that has happened since Bush was first mentioned as a possible GOP presidential candidate hasn’t set off alarms, his naming of war criminal, mass murderer and international fugitive Henry Kissinger last week to head up the 9/11 investigation should have. And this week another alarm should have gone off when Bush promoted Elliot Abrams to lead the National Security Council’s office for Near East and North African affairs, which oversees Arab-Israeli relations.

Bush must be stopped now, before he sets the world aflame. And set it aflame is what he intends to do, even if Iraq has no “weapons of mass destruction” or Saddam stands on his head, naked, on the White House lawn.

Source: http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/Conover120502/conover120502.html

This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.

The Corpocracy Uncovered

Bush family supported Third Reich

The GW Bush Gang, IG Farben 2001 by Robert Lederman

 “What my cabinet shows is that I am not afraid to surround myself with strong and competent people…a good executive is one that understands how to recruit people and how to delegate authority and responsibility.” GW Bush 1/2/2001

 As promised GW Bush has recruited competent and experienced advisors. Despite their seeming diversity however they have a common denominator. The America they reflect is the oil, pharmaceutical, armament, Wall Street and eugenics interests long associated with the Bush family.

 Seventy years ago a similar configuration of oil, pharmaceutical, chemical, military supply and eugenics interests were organized by Wall Street into IG Farben/Standard Oil-Hitler’s industrial powerhouse. To grasp the real significance of what GW Bush’s cabinet has been brought together to accomplish it is essential to understand the history of IG Farben, its relationship with American corporations and how together they applied modern technology to the task of eugenics or scientific racism.

 According to former US Justice Dept. Nazi War Crimes prosecutor John Loftus -who is today the director of the Florida Holocaust Museum- “The Bush family fortune came from the Third Reich,”
-Sarasota Herald-Tribune 11/11/2000

http://www.newscoast.com/headlinesstory2.cfm?ID=35115

 Along with the Rockefellers (Standard Oil, Chase Manhattan Bank), Mellons (Gulf Oil, Alcoa Aluminum), DuPonts (DuPont Chemicals), General Motors and Henry Ford, banks and shipping companies operated by the Bush family were crucial players in setting up the industrial power behind the Third Reich. These companies poured hundreds of millions of dollars into IG Farben and provided it with technology for tactically-essential synthetic materials while withholding the same materials and patents from the US government.

 The Rockefeller family, long aligned with the Bushes, owned Standard Oil. Through a stock transfer they became half owners of Germany’s IG Farben with Farben likewise owning almost half of Standard Oil. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, IG Farben built and operated more than 40 concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, including Auschwitz.

 At their slave labor/factory/death camps chemicals, weapons, drugs, synthetic fuels and other materials vital to the Nazi war effort were manufactured. In addition, eugenicists like Dr. Josef Mengele used the human subjects in the camps for experiments the data from which are today the basis for many drugs marketed by the pharmaceutical industry-not too surprising in light of the fact that more Americans die from prescription drugs than from any other single cause.

 At the end of WWII the allies split up IG Farben into companies that are now the top pharmaceutical concerns on earth among them Bayer, Hoescht, BASF, the Agfa-Gevaert Group and Cassella AG. Many of Wall Streets favorite pharmaceutical/chemical companies behind the proliferation of genetically-altered foods, transgenic animals, human cloning, dangerous psychiatric drugs, deadly vaccines and pesticides-such as Aventis-are subsidiaries of these same companies.

 War provides the necessary medium in which this witches brew of oil, eugenics, pharmaceuticals, munitions and Wall Street investing can reach maximum growth. Likewise, war is also the essential frame of reference for the newly formed GW Bush administration.

 The high-profile minorities who are working as Bush advisors have been hand-picked, funded and carefully cultivated by right wing think tanks and conservative foundations with a white supremacist philosophy in order to provide cover for their anti-poor, anti-minority eugenics agenda.

 For those who scoff at the validity of comparing the Bush administration to the Nazis and IG Farben please note the following. I’m not suggesting that GW Bush is a literal Nazi nor am I implying that everyone who is an oil or pharmaceutical company executive automatically deserves to be linked to IG Farben. That the Bush wealth and prominence in American politics is derived from Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker’s support of Hitler is a historical fact. If the connection ended in 1945 with the destruction of Nazi Germany that might have been the end of it-it didn’t end there however.

 Not only has the eugenics agenda continued but many of the top Nazis who were advancing it during WWII were brought to the US after the war and installed in academia, the media, government research institutions and the CIA-by the same American officials who worked with the Bush family to build up Nazi Germany in the first place. Their ideas formed the basis for much of the agenda promoted by this nation’s most influential right-wing think tanks-the same think tanks that are the sponsors of GW Bush and virtually every one of his appointees.

 Why is it significant that many of Bush’s staff and cabinet appointees are former pharmaceutical company executives as was GW’s father, former President George Bush? These corporations are voraciously patenting the earth’s life forms-its plants, bacteria, viruses, animals and even human genetic lineages. Reproduction of plants, animals and humans may eventually be totally controlled by these corporations, genetically-altered, recombined into chimeric life forms and exploited for profit.

 The Human Genome Project, as it admits on the very first page of its website – http://vector.cshl.org/eugenics.html, is derived from the eugenics movement in the US and Nazi Germany during the first half of the 20th century. The Eugenics Records Office at Cold Springs Harbor NY-where American eugenics started-was built by the Harriman family-the Bushes’ Wall Street business partners in funding Hitler. This is the new frontier of colonialism in the 21st century-the total domination and exploitation of the earth and everything on it-the New World Order both former President Bush and Adolf Hitler so frequently called for.

 While my writings focus on the Republican aspect of this agenda there is no question that many Democrats are participants and that none of these things could be accomplished without the full “bipartisan support” we hear about each and every day.

 Some of the men and women who do the thinking for GW Bush:

 – Vice President, Dick Cheney, arguably the real President-elect, was one of papa Bush’s top advisors. His company, Haliburton, is one of the nation’s largest recipients of government contracts, supplying military equipment, oil services and infrastructure. Cheney epitomizes corporate-welfare and like most of Bush’s appointees is a multi-millionaire who will receive huge financial benefits from the administrations’ policies and any wars it manages to get the US into.

 – Secretary of Labor Linda Chavez (NOTE: she was forced a couple days ago to withdraw her nomination) -who is outspokenly anti-union-was a research fellow at the CIA’s Manhattan Institute during 1993 and 1994 and has received almost $200,000 in grants from the John M. Olin Foundation, a notorious right-wing fund derived from a family business in munitions and chemicals with roots in white supremacy. Despite her Hispanic surname she is an outspoken advocate for the English First Movement. Chavez is president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, based in Washington, D.C. an organization dedicated to eliminating affirmative action. On their website Chavez quotes Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a classic of modern racial eugenics which has become the “bible” for the anti-welfare anti-affirmative action movement.

 – Secretary of Health and Human Services, Wisconsin Gov. Tommy G. Thompson, is known for his controversial welfare reforms-based in large part on two books by Charles Murray, Losing Ground and The Bell Curve. Murray was a consultant for the Wisconsin welfare reform program. Thompson’s protege, Jason Turner, was later brought to NYC where he has run Mayor Giuliani’s characteristically brutal welfare elimination program. Turner became notorious for quoting the motto on the gates over Auschwitz- “Arbeit Macht Frei-work shall make you free”. He is frequently a guest with Charles Murray in panel discussions at the CIA’s Manhattan Institute and other Bush-connected think tanks. Murray wrote the Bell Curve while a fellow at the Manhattan Institute where his pseudo-scientific research on the genetic inferiority of African Americans was primarily financed by the Pioneer Fund. Since 1937 the Pioneer Fund has promoted eugenics and the ideology of white racial superiority.

 – Secretary of Energy, Spencer Abraham, who served as Vice President Dan Quale’s chief of staff, spent years trying to abolish the very agency he will now head. His legislative positions include being against higher fuel efficiency standards for cars, being against government regulations for industry and support for opening up national parklands to oil drilling. He is a recipient of oil company contributions totaling more than $221,000 according to the NY Times. The American Petroleum Institute has said it looks forward to working with Abraham. Abraham helped found the conservative law group the Federalist Society which specializes in eliminating social programs, affirmative action, welfare and bilingual education. The society is funded by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the Lilly Endowment-America’s leading far right think tanks. Among its most prominent members are Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Thomas whose questionable election ruling gave Bush his illegitimate Presidency. Spokespersons for the Federalist Society include Bell Curve author Charles Murray, Manhattan Institute fellow Abigail Thernstrom, and Dinesh d’Souza of the American Enterprise Institute.

 – Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, the latest African American Bush appointee, is a conservative public schools administrator in Texas and decades-long crony of the Bush family who supports vouchers, tying teacher pay directly to test scores and school privatization-all of which will negatively impact African American students by destroying public education.

 – Secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense under President Ford. Rumsfeld like Powell, Cheney, Rice and numerous other Bush administration officials is a salesman for the Star Wars Missile Defense Shield. He served four terms in the US Congress where he voted against Medicare, anti-poverty programs like Headstart, food stamps and various healthcare proposals. Rumsfeld, who formerly headed Searle Pharmaceuticals, is part of the drug company axis within the Bush administration. Former President Bush was director of Eli Lilly, OMB head Mitchell E. Daniels was also senior executive of Eli Lilly and AG John Ashcroft is known as a lobbyist for pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Gail R. Wilensky-one of numerous John M. Olin grant recipients attached to Bush-is the principal author of GW’s Medicare plan. Wilensky serves on the boards of eight health care companies in which she owns more than $12 million in stock.

 – Secretary of State, Colin Powell is a lifelong operative of the CIA/military-industrial complex. While working for the Pentagon he earned his present stature by helping cover up the Mai Lai massacre, the contra/arms-cocaine deal and Gulf War Syndrome. Powell’s reputation as a hero derives from presiding over a war in which US troops were used as guinea pigs for drug companies’ experimental vaccines so that they could “safely” fight George Bush’s friend Sadamn Hussein-who had been supplied with chemical and biological weapons by the Bush administration. Unlike most of GW’s appointees of color, Powell proudly admits he owes his career to affirmative action yet willingly joins an administration that considers ending affirmative action a top priority.

 – Secretary of the Treasury, Paul H. O’Neill is the chairman of Alcoa Aluminum, one of the world’s worst polluters and a leading corporate supporter of Nazi Germany and eugenics. O’Neill owns 1.6 million shares of Alcoa, worth more than $50 million. During WWII Alcoa negotiated a deal with the Nazis and IG Farben to supply Germany’s war machine rather than the US military with aluminum. “If America loses this war,” said then Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes on June 26, 1941, “it can thank the Aluminum Corporation of America [ALCOA].” Alcoa produces hundreds of millions of tons of fluoride. This highly toxic waste byproduct of aluminum has been linked in thousands of medical studies to cancer and other degenerative diseases. In the 1950’s Alcoa arranged to have it added to our nation’s drinking water rather than disposed of as toxic waste. During WWII in IG Farben’s slave labor camps Nazis scientists discovered that by adding fluoride to the drinking water they could make prisoners more submissive to authority. O’Neill is a fellow at the RAND Corporation and American Enterprise Institute, two more extreme right-wing think tanks.

 – Attorney General John Ashcroft (NOTE: His nomination is strongly opposed – see the Confirmation Hearings process at http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/US/Bush_Administration/ ) is a self-styled moral crusader as strongly anti-abortion as he is enthusiastic about the death penalty. Last year, Ashcroft received an honorary degree from Bob Jones University. He is closely aligned with the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson and Southern heritage groups which admire the Confederacy and defend the institution of slavery as practiced in the South. He is known among lobbyists as an advocate for drug companies and the automotive industry and for preventing consumers from suing HMO’s. The furor over Ashcroft’s anti-abortion views is being played out exactly as planned by Team Bush. Not only will the Bush administration never make abortions illegal, if anything the eugenics agenda that underlies the Bush family history guarantees that abortion, sterilization and other technologies intended to limit population-including war, chemical exposure, pesticide use in urban areas, genetically-altered foods and vaccines-will proceed at an unprecedented level. The Bush gang are delighted to see Democrats, women’s rights advocates and the left focusing on Ashcroft while virtually ignoring the other Bush appointees.

 – Secretary of Commerce Donald L. Evans is an insider in the Texas “oil mafia” and is GW’s closest friend and confidant. He’s also friend, confidant and contributor to one of America’s biggest recipients of government contacts, Halliburton’s Dick Cheney.

 – Office of Management and Budget Director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., was senior executive of the Eli Lilly drug company and was previously the president of the arch-conservative Hudson Institute. Daniels, who advocates strict enforcement of laws against casual drug users, was busted for drugs in 1970.

Bush and Eugenics links
http://www.padrak.com/alt/BUSHBOOK_INDEX
html http://www.geocities.com/alanjpakula/triplecrown.html http://www.shorejournal.com/elkhorn/
http://www.bartcop.com/nazigop.htm

This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.

by Jerry Russell, Ph.D.

Steel frame towers are built very strongly. They need to withstand the pressure of gale-force winds, the violent rocking motion of earthquakes, and the ravages of time. For this reason, they are almost impossible to destroy.

Airplane strikes do not destroy skyscrapers. A bomber strike to the Empire State Building during World War II did not harm that building. The World Trade Center towers were designed to survive a strike by a Boeing 707. The 767 is more massive, so the building was stressed near its design limits. But if a failure had occurred at that moment, it would have been at the point of highest levered stress, near the base of the tower, and the tower would have fallen over like a giant tree in a forest windstorm. That, of course, did not happen.

Fires do not destroy skyscrapers. Never in the history of steel frame structures has a single one been destroyed by fire.

How to destroy a skyscraper. So, how do you destroy a skyscraper? Suppose you need the vacant land to build another one, for example.

A nuclear bomb is very effective, but it can be difficult to get permits from the city.

An early invention was the wrecking ball. A huge lump of steel and lead is swung from a massive chain at high speed. With the benefit of momentum, it is able to bend or break a few girders at a time. But it would be a hopeless task to destroy a tower the size of the World Trade Center, using a wrecking ball.

The most effective, cleanest, safest way to destroy a skyscraper is known as controlled demolition. The trick is to distribute explosives at key points throughout the structure. The explosives are detonated simultaneously, destroying the integrity of the steel frame at key points, such that no part of the building is supported against the force of gravity. The entire mass is pulled swiftly to earth, where gravity does the work of pounding the structure into tiny fragments of steel and concrete. The gravitational potential energy of the structure is converted smoothly and uniformly into kinetic energy, and then is available very efficiently to pulverize the fragments of the building as they impact against the unyielding earth. Controlled demolitions have a striking and characteristic appearance of smooth, flowing collapse.

As your eyes will tell you, the World Trade Center collapses looked like controlled demolitions. Here’s the proof.

The proof. According to the law of gravity, it is possible to calculate the time it takes for an object to fall a given distance. The equation is H=(1/2)at2, where H is the height, a is the acceleration of gravity (10 meters per second squared) and t is time in seconds. Plug in the height of the building at 1350 feet (411 meters) and we get 9 seconds. That is just about the length of time it took for the very top of the World Trade Center to fall to the street below. According to all reports, the whole thing was over in just about ten seconds.

It is as if the entire building were falling straight down through thin air. As if the entire solid structure below, the strong part which had not been burned or sliced or harmed in any significant way, just disappeared into nothingness. Yet this (within a small tolerance) is what we would expect to find if there had been a controlled demolition, because the explosions below really do leave the upper stories completely unsupported. Like the Road Runner after he runs off the edge of the cliff, the entire building pauses a moment, then goes straight down.

Any kind of viscous process or friction process should have slowed the whole thing down. Like dropping a lead ball into a vat of molasses, or dropping a feather into the air, gravitational acceleration cannot achieve its full effect if it is fighting any opposing force. In the case of the World Trade Center, the intact building below should have at least braked the fall of the upper stories. This did not happen. There was no measurable friction at all.

This proves controlled demolition.

We have been lied to. We have been lied to about this, at multiple levels. The first lie was that the load of fuel from the aircraft was the cause of structural failure. No kerosene fire can burn hot enough to melt steel. In point of fact, most of the fuel in the jets was contained in their wing tanks. The thin aluminum of the tanks was pierced or stripped as the airplanes penetrated the walls of the towers, and the result was the huge fireball which was seen on national TV, where most of this fuel was burned.

A hot, vigorous fire would have blown out many windows in the building and would have burned a red or white color. This was not what happened. The fire in the World Trade Center was an ordinary smoldering office fire.

But let’s suppose that the fire was hot enough to melt steel. What would have happened in that case? Before it breaks, hot steel begins to bend. This redistributes the forces in the structure and puts elastic stress on those parts that are still cool. The process is asymmetric, so that the structure should visibly bend before breaking. But of course, no steel skyscraper has even bent over in a fire.

Let’s suppose the structure were sufficiently weakened that it did fail catastrophically near the point of the airplane strike. In this case, the intact structure below would exert an upward force on the base of the upper story portion of the building (the part that has been broken loose), while any asymmetry would allow the force of gravity to work uninhibited on the tip of the skyscraper. Thus, the top section of the skyscraper would tip and fall sideways.

If it did not tip, it would have ground straight down through the building below. The gravitational potential energy of the upper stories would be coupled into the frame below, beginning to destroy it. The frame below would deflect elastically, absorbing energy in the process of deflecting. At weak points, the metal structure would break, but the elastic energy absorbed into the entire frame would not be available to do more destruction. Instead, it would be dissipated in vibration, acoustic noise and heat. Eventually this process would grind to a halt, because the gravitational potential energy of a skyscraper is nowhere near sufficient to destroy its own frame.

If the World Trade Center towers had been built entirely out of concrete, they might have stood for awhile before toppling in the wind. But in that case, if they had collapsed straight downwards, the energy required to pulverize the concrete would have slowed the downward progress of the upward stories. The gravitational potential energy of the World Trade Center was barely sufficient to convert its concrete into powder, and for that to happen in an accidental collapse would have been impossible, but would have taken a lot longer than 10 seconds in any case.

How it was done. The World Trade Center was leased by Westfield America and Larry Silverstein, on April 26th, 2001. Zim Israeli Shipping moved out of the buildings around that time. With a certain amount of shuffling of tenants from floor to floor, it should have been easy (with all the commotion and noise of remodeling) to plant explosives on several floors; enough for at least a sloppy kind of controlled demolition.

There was more “magic” at work on 9/11, to produce the effects that were seen on the TeeVee.

The events of 9/11, summarized. Taken all together, the evidence suggests very strongly that the attacks of 9/11 were fake terror, and quite possibly were a collaborative venture of the Israeli and US governments.

Student pilots from Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations were enrolled in flight schools in Venice, Florida and other locations. The flight school in Venice is linked to CIA drug running operations, according to one researcher.

A recently leaked document from the US Drug Enforcement Agency indicates that a number of Israeli intelligence operatives describing themselves as art students took up residences in close physical proximity to the Arabs as they moved about the country.

The Arab flight students boarded the flights on 9/11. Did they intend to hijack the airliners, and if so, for what purpose? Had the Israelis played in any way the role of agent provocateur in organizing whatever was planned? It seems reasonable to conjecture that the goals of these Arabs were opposed in some way to some US Middle Eastern policy. It would be very interesting to question the Israelis regarding their knowledge of the Arab flight students.

At any rate, if the Arab flight students had been ordinary hijackers, they might have taken the controls of the airplane, but their plot should have quickly been foiled for two reasons.

First of all, the Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft are probably equipped with remote-controlled flight computers for purposes of hijack recovery. This was stated by a British intelligence operative and was also suggested by a former German secretary of defense. The technology needed for such systems is well known, and its utility is obvious. If these systems had been operative on 9/11, then they should have been used to take control from the hijackers.

Secondly, the US air force has standard operating procedure to send jet fighters to intercept hijacked aircraft within minutes after they are reported. These fighters may be armed and are certainly very maneuverable, and an airliner cannot hope to match them.

For these reasons, the Arab hijackers’ mission should have been an ignominious failure. These measures (as well as pre-9/11 airport security measures) have been effective enough that hijacking has rarely been a problem for many years now.

But on 9/11, the remote control systems were not used to bring the planes home, nor did fighters scramble to escort. Instead, the airplanes executed highly skilled aerobatic maneuvers (well beyond any known educational background of the Arab student pilots) and crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. If the remote controls were used, who was operating them?

The World Trade Center towers are designed to withstand aircraft impact, which they did for about an hour. Then they collapsed directly to the ground, with remarkably little collateral damage to surrounding buildings, in a manner strikingly resembling the appearance of controlled demolitions. The US government claims that fire was responsible for the collapse, and this is certainly possible, but many reports have overstated the likely heat of the fire and the amount of fuel from the airplanes which was not consumed in the fireballs outside the towers.

If explosives had been planted in the World Trade Center towers, they could have been used to trigger the collapse of the towers. Building 7 was destroyed later in the afternoon. It was never hit by any airplane, so there is no known reason (besides explosives) for it to have collapsed into rubble. However, a cloud of dust was seen in the area of building 7 immediately before the collapse of the south tower, which has not been explained.

While the whole attack was going on (a period well over an hour) George W. Bush sat in a classroom and listened to a story about goats, and the US military did not respond to the first three attacks. A fourth flight was also “hijacked” that day, but it was apparently struck down by some sort of missile or bomb before crashing in Pennsylvania.

Within hours, a massive media campaign to blame the attacks on Arabs and specifically on Osama Bin Laden was begun, and this campaign has continued to the present day. Our traditional American form of government, unfortunately, may not survive — the Patriot Act appears poised to supersede the Bill of Rights.

Given the many uncertainties about these events, it certainly seems that there should be more questions, more investigations, and more thoughtfulness about the responsibilities of the various parties involved. A little bit of logic will reveal that the Arabs alone could not have been solely responsible for the entire chain of events. It is equally unlikely that the Israelis could have pulled it off alone. Yet instead the US government is gathering up support for war against Middle Eastern nations, a tragic response to the enigmatic events of that day.

The author has a master’s degree in Engineering from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Oregon.

Here are links:

Justin Raimondo http://www.antiwar.com
Michael Rivero http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
Eric Hufschmid http://geocities.com/erichufschmid/
Jared Israel http://emperors-clothes.com/news/albu.htm

This is an archived article preserved as a guest op-ed and does not represent the opinions of namedat.com staff.

All Along The Watchtower

911 Lawsuit Says They Let It Happen On Purpose

by William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Opinion, June 20, 2002

Stanley Hilton, a San Francisco attorney and former aide to Senator Bob Dole, filed a $7 billion lawsuit in U.S. District Court on June 3rd. The class-action suit names ten defendants, among whom are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Norman Mineta.

Hilton’s suit charges Bush and his administration with allowing the September 11th attacks to take place so as to reap political benefits from the catastrophe. Hilton alleges that Osama bin Laden is being used as a scapegoat by an administration that ignored pressing warnings of the attack and refused to round up suspected terrorists beforehand. Hilton alleges the ultimate motivation behind these acts was achieved when the Taliban were replaced by American military forces with a regime friendly to America and its oil interests in the region.

Hilton’s plaintiffs in this case are the families of 14 victims of 9/11, numbering 400 people nationwide. These are the same families that rallied in Washington recently to advocate for an independent investigation into the attacks. The current 9/11 hearings are being conducted by Congress behind closed doors, a situation these families find unacceptable.

Mr. Hilton, by filing his lawsuit, has joined the ranks of an ever-increasing body of Americans who subscribe to what they call the LIHOP Theory. LIHOP stands for Let It Happen On Purpose. The LIHOP Theory puts forward the accusation that Bush and his people allowed the September 11th attacks to take place, despite the fact that they had been repeatedly warned of an impending strike.

The LIHOP Theory is straightforward: In the months before 9/11, American intelligence agencies received ominous warnings from the intelligence services of nations like Israel, Russia, Egypt and Germany. These warnings were pointed – an attack involving hijacked aircraft and prominent American landmarks was imminent, our security forces were told. Bush himself was briefed of these warnings weeks before they happened. Instead of responding vigorously to these warnings, the Bush administration and its security apparatus did nothing.

LIHOP is, of course, the purest breed of conspiracy theory, involving high-ranking members of government from both parties, as well as the CIA, FBI and NSA. Like all good conspiracy theories, LIHOP is surrounded by disturbing facts and bits of evidence that are difficult to ignore.

The warnings from all those foreign intelligence services, after all, are quite real. Egypt, Germany, Russia and the Israelis were vociferous in their concerns. The German intelligence service BND told US and Israeli intelligence that Middle East terrorists were “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.” The BND’s information came through Echelon, the American-controlled network of 120 satellites that monitors all worldwide electronic communications.

Egypt voiced similar warnings that same month regarding aircraft attacks. Delivered just before the G-8 summit in Genoa, Egypt’s alert carried such weight that anti-aircraft batteries were placed around Columbus Airport in Italy. The Russians warned the US that same summer of 25 pilots who had been trained for suicide missions, and Putin himself delivered the warning “in the strongest possible terms” to the US government. The Israeli intelligence service Mossad delivered a warning to both the FBI and the CIA detailing “a major assault on the United States” against “a large-scale target” that was “very vulnerable.”

The Washington Post has reported that the NSA intercepted two messages on September 10, 2001, warning that something was going to happen the next day. “Tomorrow is zero hour,” was one of the messages. The NSA’s charter is to intercept, translate and pass on to FBI and CIA operatives important electronic signals from all across the globe. The Echelon satellite network which provided the German BND with their 9/11 information last June is part of that system.

According to the NSA, the September 10th data was not translated until September 12th, but it stands to reason that they were privy to the same electronic data the other foreign services were using as the basis for their warnings. One US intelligence source claims the data provided “no actionable intelligence,” a fair claim given the vagueness of the messages and the volume of material NSA must deal with. Yet in combination with the strident foreign intelligence warnings, the words intercepted by our large electronic ears on September 10th add to the growing questions.

Then, there are the threads. A FEMA official told Dan Rather that the disaster agency had been at the World Trade Center on September 10th. Why? Governor Jeb Bush of Florida signed executive order #01-261 on September 7th, putting his state’s National Guard on heightened alert status, essentially placing Florida under martial law for no demonstrable reason. Why? Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial aircraft in the weeks before 9/11, something he had commonly done since his entry into the administration. Why?

At the core of the LIHOP Theory lies motivation – what possible purpose could be served by the Bush administration allowing a terrorist attack to take place on American soil? It is flatly inconceivable to most Americans that Bush and his people could demonstrate such callous disregard for American lives, and accusations that they allowed an attack to happen reek of the worst kind of poisonous partisan politics.

LIHOP Theory, however, is not so easily dismissed. Two French intelligence analysts, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, have published an extensively-researched book entitled “Osama bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth.” In it, they allege that the Bush administration put energy policy before national security concerns. According to Brisard and Dasquie, a foundering pipeline project aimed at exploiting natural gas reserves along the Caspian Sea in Turkmenistan was revived by the Bush administration when it arrived in Washington in January of 2001.

The pipeline project, which sought to bring oil and natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to a warm water port, had been the brainchild of American petroleum giant Unocal for much of the 1990s. After the destruction of two American embassies in Africa in 1998 by Osama bin Laden, the Clinton administration forbade any American companies from doing business with the Taliban, which had been sheltering bin Laden in Afghanistan. Unocal’s pipeline project was frozen.

After the Bush administration came to power, Brisard and Dasquie allege that reinvigorating the pipeline project became a high-priority matter of policy. Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca was dispatched to Pakistan to discuss the pipeline with Taliban officials in August of 2001. Rocca, a career officer with the CIA, had been deeply involved in Agency activities within Afghanistan. According to documents Brisard and Dasquie claim to hold, the main subject of their discussion was oil. A Pakistani foreign minister was also present at the meeting, and witnessed the exchange.

How does this pipeline relate to September 11th? According to Brisard and Dasquie, the main obstacle to the completion of the pipeline was the fact that it had to pass through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The project would receive no international support unless the Afghan government somehow became legitimized. In bargaining for the pipeline, the Bush administration demanded that the Taliban reinstate deposed King Mohammad Zahir Shah as ruler of Afghanistan, and demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden for arrest. In return, the Taliban would reap untold billions in profit from the pipeline. According to Brisard and Dasquie, part of the Bush administration’s bargaining tactics involved threats of war if these conditions for the legitimization of Afghanistan were not met.

The BBC of London reported on September 18th, 2001 of the existence of war plans on Bush’s desk aimed at Afghanistan. Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, stated that the war plans were slated for October of 2001. Conditions set by the Bush administration to avoid war involved the Taliban’s handing over of bin Laden and the acceptance of King Zahir Shah. Naik went so far as to doubt that America would hold off on war even if these conditions were met.

The result, according to the French analysts, was total disaster. The Bush administration fundamentally misunderstood the Taliban regime – to bring back the King and hand bin Laden over to the West would have been tantamount to suicide for the Taliban. Instead of acquiescing to the hard-sell tactics of the Bush administration, the Taliban unleashed their pet attack dog, Osama, upon America. They were going to lose everything, and chose to attack first in the hope that all-out war would break out in Central Asia and rally other Muslim nations to their cause.

Motive suddenly becomes far more clear. The Bush administration very much wanted the Unocal pipeline to go through, and put intense pressure on the Taliban to see it happen. As this was happening, American intelligence services were flooded with warnings of an impending attack upon American targets by bin Laden and Al Qaida. The decision was made -let the attack come, and in the ensuing outrage American forces can carve out the guts of the Taliban government like a ripe gourd, replacing them with a ‘legitimate’ regime more receptive to the pipeline plan.

Did the Bush administration have an inkling of the massive death and destruction that would come on September 11th? Those who espouse the LIHOP Theory disagree on this point. Some believe that FEMAs presence at Ground Zero on the day before the attack, coupled with specific language within the international intelligence warnings pertaining to aircraft and high-profile targets, are prima facie evidence of specific prior knowledge. Others believe that the Bush administration only knew vaguely that an attack would come, but not where or when. They did not foresee the level of destruction, and were caught flat-footed when those planes appeared along the New York skyline.

In the end, LIHOP Theory can encompass either view. Whether they had specific knowledge beforehand, or merely decided to let some attack happen somewhere, the final results were the same. The Taliban were routed and replaced by an interim government headed by a man named Harmid Karzai. Karzai was recently elected President of Afghanistan in his own right, legitimizing the Afghanistan government. Soon after this, Karzai announced the impending construction of a pipeline that would exploit Turkmenistan’s natural gas reserves He named Unocal as the lead company for the project. Before becoming President, Karzai was an advisor to Unocal.

For LIHOP Theorists, the evidence is clear. The Bush administration got the pipeline it wanted. Along the way, they used the horrors of 9/11 to place themselves above reproach. In the patriotic fervor that resulted from the attacks, both the press and the Democratic opposition were bracketed by the administration-espoused idea that any questions or criticism were tantamount to treason.

The passage of the PATRIOT Anti-Terror Act has given the US government sweeping abilities to snuff dissent by defining it as terrorism, thanks to the loosely-defined wording of the bill. Bush enjoyed stratospheric approval ratings that persist to this day, and American citizens were given new enemies to hate. The Defense Department, and the weapons contractors who cater to them, received billions from the federal budget to do with as they pleased in order to address the objects of that hate.

Even the most hardened political observer must admit the dismal truth -September 11th was the greatest thing ever to happen to the Bush administration. Attorney Stanley Hilton has brought LIHOP Theory into the federal court system with his class-action suit, and with the families of 9/11 victims he represents. It will be interesting to see what transpires when these two facts collide in an American courtroom. Given the current climate, it does not seem likely that much will come of it. After all, these conspiracy theorists are just a bunch of nuts.

Right?

William Rivers Pitt is a teacher from Boston, MA. His new book, ‘The Greatest Sedition is Silence,’ will be published soon by Pluto Press.

Source: http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/06.21A.pitt.watchtower.htm