Freedom Scribe Blogging on issues of Constitutional freedom.

Who Really Wants To Destroy Israel?
There is much talk in the independent media right now about the power of the Israeli-owned major media in the United States.  One little word critical of Israel’s behavior – as a country – automatically seems to get anyone labeled as an anti-Semitic creep.  This fact is so well known by now that it is completely discounted by anyone with two brain cells to rub together.  Calling criticism of the actions of Israel’s government anti-Semitic makes just about as much sense as calling criticism of the treasonous actions of Clinton, Bush or Obama (criticisms which an awful lot of patriotic Americans have been making lately) anti-American.

All the same, let’s be very clear here and state a couple of things absolutely before I discuss the real danger of harm to Israel – and where it really comes from.

*  Whether or not Israel had a moral right to exist when it was created – and that is a debate for another day – the pragmatic fact is that at least two generations of native Israelis have now been born there, so it is just stupid to even question whether Israel has a right to exist now.  Those who argue that the Palestinians owned Israel before the Jews got there are correct, but it is equally correct to say that Israel owned Palestine before that.  I mean, how far back are you going to go to establish ownership?  That land has several thousands of years of history behind it, and such a debate could get very, very messy. The Israelis are about as likely to leave today as hundreds of years of native born American citizens are likely to pull up stakes and turn North America back over to the Native Americans.  It’s just a non-issue.

*  The Holocaust really happened.  I wasn’t born then, but I have known at least one genuine Holocaust survivor, and scores of American veterans who were haunted for the rest of their lives by what they saw when they liberated those all-too-real concentration camps.  What is horrifyingly and terribly true as well is that the German Holocaust was not limited to Jews.  Every American schoolchild knows that six million Jews were killed. Very few Americans know that at least 21 million human beings were killed – Poles, Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and pretty much any group that wasn’t good “clean” Aryan stock.  Hitler was out to “cleanse” the German (Aryan, in his view) race, an appallingly sick and evil goal.  My point is that the Jews, while certainly singled out, were most definitely not alone as victims.

*  I do not support the use of terror against non-combatants – ever.  Period.  End of story.  Violence is acceptable only in self-defense.

*  As a woman and a feminist, I am even less personally fond of Islam than I am of rabid, Protestant Christianity.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in common decency and any people’s absolute right to self-determination and worship in their own fashion.

So call me an anti-Semite if it makes you feel better.  I know what I am – and I know what I am most definitely not.

Since Israel was created in the late 1940s, it has been besieged and bitterly hated by the Islamic world, most of which would like nothing better than to push Israel into the sea.  That is a fact.  This constant state of fear has had terrible psychological consequences for the Israelis, causing them to develop a siege sort of mentality.  The most sickening part of this tragedy is that it has transformed many Israelis, who were themselves or their parents or grandparents survivors or victims of ethnic cleansing, into exactly the same sort of genocidaires they most rightly despise and fear.

If Israel as a nation is to have any hope of long term survival and/or peace, the Israelis must learn to move past that fear, and they must help the Palestinians do so as well.  The simple truth on the ground at this moment is that one country exists – and two peoples have (at least today) quite legitimate claims to that country.  The only possible solution is that they must somehow learn to live together, either side by side, or by dividing into two countries.  The Israelis have given lip service to doing so, but their siege of Gaza proves that they would actually prefer that the Palestinians die off and disappear.  One Israeli politician actually said quite recently that they were “putting the Palestinians on a diet.”  Well, it is a starvation diet, and it is killing Palestinian children.  As I have said, I don’t love Islam in any form, but I also know that if my own children were starving, I might be driven to lobbing a few rockets over the wall myself, as it would come under the heading of self-defense and absolute desperation.  That’s a no-brainer.  A people without hope will turn to horrible and violent solutions.

The sane answer is not to wipe said people out – the only decent and practical answer is to merely to allow them the same hope and social, educational and business opportunities that the Israelis enjoy.  The current problems would almost certainly begin to ease immediately, along with the hatred.  Jewish and Palestinian children growing up as friends – wow!  Difficult to imagine today, but with some effort on both sides, a quite practical and achievable goal.  Racial hatred can indeed be overcome – who would have believed 50 years ago that a black man would become President of the United States one day?  It’s even easier to overcome this sort of ethnic hatred when both peoples are Semitic and there is no outward, visible difference.

Sadly, none of Israel’s behavior should prove any great surprise today.  Israel’s savage behavior has always been a problem for the Palestinians and the rest of the world, right from the very beginning.  From the bulldozing of Palestinian villages in the 1940s to the deliberate sinking of the USS Liberty in the 1960s to Israel’s recent and unbelievably brutal treatment of a humanitarian flotilla aimed at breaking the Gaza siege, nothing has changed in the slightest degree.  Israel seems to want the whole world to believe that they are totally insane, out of control, and that they might do absolutely anything.  Fine.  They’re pretty convincing.  I believe it.

But there is a large fly in the ketchup, and that fly is approximately 200-400 nuclear warheads that Israel has only recently even admitted that they possess.  The Israeli government is deliberately alienating Israel’s friends so that the possibility of using those nukes can be used to threaten Iran in the very near future.  After all, a nation without friends has nothing to lose and might do absolutely anything.

The overwhelming danger is that Israel might really do it, forgetting that a nuclear war will affect every life on this planet.  And the whole “nothing to lose” thing is a complete fallacy.  A lack of friends is a very different issue from a world of active enemies, which such an action would create.

Why does Obama seem to be aiding and abetting them in this behavior?  None of us can really know, but I have a strong suspicion.  Since the earliest days of organized intelligence activities, blackmail has been a tool of the intelligence services.  The Mossad are masters of the art.  The “birther” controversy is, I am sure, a disinformation campaign meant to distract from the real issue, which will almost certainly turn out to be Barry Soetoro’s passports and travel history.  Remember the theft of passport info and the resulting controversy awhile back?  That had Mossad fingerprints all over it, at least in my view.  And, while it would be spectacular news to learn that Obama was not born in the United States, I am actually fairly certain that he was, indeed, born in Hawaii.  Legal issues aside, however, he had no control over his birth.  The citizenships that he claimed as an adult – whether as cover for his alleged CIA activities or not – are a much more serious issue and deserve far more of our attention.  This is the sword that I believe the Mossad is holding over Obama’s head, and it is a very effective sword indeed.  I believe that Obama already sees the handwriting on the wall.

The excrement is about to contact the rotating blades, and if Israel believes that Obama can control the millions of outraged Americans that would besiege the White House in the event of American support, tacit or otherwise, for a nuclear war that threatens the existence of all life, they are simply dreaming.  Americans are very slow to wake up, but the majority of us have slowly awakened to the truth.  We know that Islamists did not carry out 9/11, or at least not alone.  We know that we have been lied to and manipulated since long before the fictional Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the loss of 50,000 American lives.  We know that the largest chunk of foreign aid we send goes to Israel, mostly in the form of weapons, at a time when our economy is bleeding out.  The vast majority of us are growing seriously angry.  This pot is approaching a boil, and anyone who doesn’t want to get splashed needs to get out of the way with all due haste.

So the idiots that are forcing Israel onto an utterly suicidal course, idiots like Benyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, with Barry Obama blackmailed into helping them – they are the ones who really threaten Israel’s existence as a nation.  And the Israelis themselves need to wake up and do something about that pretty damned quickly if they hope to survive the next 20 years.  I don’t believe I have ever met a native Israeli, but the American Jews I have known in a lifetime in and around the entertainment industry are some of the finest, most decent and courageous human beings on the planet.  If they can’t do this, no one can.  And that is something that we, as a nation, would benefit ourselves by helping them accomplish.  With the possible exception of China, America has the most to gain of any major country from a stable and peaceful Middle East.  It just doesn’t make sense that we are acting almost daily against our own national interest.

The worst failing of my countrymen, and one cause for our own brutal and senseless wars, is that we all too often mistake hate talk for tough talk.  We need to elect strong leaders who cannot be influenced and cannot be blackmailed, but who also cannot be stampeded into stupid wars for no reason.  We need to learn that a soft-spoken man can be a strong man, too.

Most of all, we need to stop supporting genocide.

We have such a leader in Washington right now.  His name is Ron Paul.  Maybe it is finally time to listen to him.

Posted under Freedom, Injustice, Politics

Obama is Scared, He is on the Run . . .

I recently read the above headline in an email from Newsmax.  Yes, I do sometimes read that rag, although it leaves me needing to wash my hands every single time.  I actually get news from dozens of sources, domestic and foreign, leaning left, right and even toward the Twilight Zone.  I attempt to compare and contrast them and boil them down to something resembling truth, which is frequently found by noticing what is not even mentioned in the MSM (mainstream media, for the uninitiated).  Of course, I do have my most valuable news sources, the very best of which is the Wayne Madsen Report.  Mr. Madsen is one of the very last of a dying breed – an honest-to-goddess investigative journalist.  So is Greg Palast.  So what if both tend to lean a little left?  It doesn’t make the facts they turn up any less real or valid.  As John Galt said in Atlas Shrugged, “A equals A.”  Facts are still facts, even when we don’t like them.  I have been capable of distinguishing fact from opinion since I was ten years old.  These two journalists have excellent sources and excellent brains, and they dig up real facts with unrelenting excellence.  Their personal politics couldn’t interest me less.

Obama is indeed scared, as is the entire federal government, and they very definitely should be scared.  The level of rage I am sensing from my fellow Americans has reached new heights in the last few months, between Obama mortgaging our great grandchildren with the trillion dollar gift he delivered to the Federal Reserve and his attempts to federalize our health care system.  I caught a brilliant quote on the latter – and I am ashamed I cannot remember the source – but whoever it was said that this would result in “DMV service at Pentagon prices.”  I couldn’t have said it better myself, which is a shameful thing for any writer to admit.  While I freely admit that our health care system is badly broken, government meddling is NOT the answer!  On the contrary, government meddling caused the current problems, and more government meddling will only make matters worse than they already are.

Yes, our federal government is terrified, and the planning for countering “civil unrest” (media speak for shootin’ revolution) are becoming more and more transparent.  One of the ways our frightened federal government is trying to hit back is by lumping all dissatisfied and unhappy Americans into one big group – right wing fanatics, militias, domestic terrorists – many different names, all with negative connotations to the sane.  Negative connotations even to me, frankly, as I despise both racism and Christian fanaticism.

All media confusion aside, even at the most basic level, we are two different groups.

The first group – Group A, for convenience – are right wing conservatives.  Most are Christian fanatics, who would prefer that evolution not be taught in public schools (they’ve forgotten the A equals A lesson).  Many believe in conversion by the sword – i.e., those who are not Christians and who are unwilling to convert to the one true faith should all be killed.  Many truly believe in Armageddon and the Rapture and honestly do believe these things are almost upon us (yes, some of these folks need medication to cope with reality at all).  Many are very racist and are either KKK or would have been KKK in past decades.  They can be spotted fairly simply by pretty much any one of the following methods:

1.  Excessive Bible quoting (out of context, of course).
2.  “Praying about” everything from what car to buy to when to go to the bathroom.
3.  Serious discussion of creative design as if it were a scientific principle.
4.  An insistence that all of the U.S. founders were devout Christians (historically untrue).
5.  Racial hatred against both blacks and hispanics.
6.  Vocal defense of torture as an interrogation method and aggressively informing the rest of us that we should be grateful for the men and women who have and do use it, supposedly on our behalf.
7.  Loud and irrational defense of our Middle Eastern wars, stating that they are “keeping America safe for democracy” – as if America was a democracy, which it isn’t, and democracy was a desirable political form, which it isn’t (being two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner).
8.  Loud and irrational defense of the cruel behavior of INS in incarcerating and deporting illegal aliens, even when they are being deported to starvation or even far worse.

Despite calling themselves gentle and loving Christians, this right wing group can be characterized at the most basic level by a sociopathic lack of compassion or empathy for anyone outside their select group – and a fundamental desire to control others.  When these people talk about “freedom,” freedom is most definitely not what they mean.  “Freedom” is about doing what they believe you should be doing, and if you don’t agree with what they believe you should be doing, you become an outsider and therefore fair game.

By contrast, libertarians and other genuine freedom lovers – Group B, for convenience – are a homogeneous group of all races and all religions.  At the most fundamental level, their philosophy is to live and let live.  They don’t even want to mess with the right wing wackos beyond the extent necessary for self defense.  Everybody should be allowed to live and pursue happiness in their own way, without interference from others or from government – even nutcases, so long as they harm no one.  Some libertarians are certainly Christians, but they aren’t trying to cram their beliefs down anyone’s throat.  Some are Pagans.  Some are atheists.  All will defend to the death your right to believe anything you choose.

How these two groups can be confused is honestly beyond my understanding.  Libertarians are the political and philosophical descendants of Thomas Jefferson, and their most cherished ethic is never to initiate force to achieve political or social goals.  Initiation of force, however, is not the same thing as response to force.  Libertarians tend to be soft spoken pacifists carrying very large .45s – but they don’t start trouble, ever.  They are merely willing to finish trouble if someone else sends it to visit.

So if there is ever “civil unrest” started or led by libertarians, you can count on it being a real question of self defense.  Frankly, I’m not so sure about that other bunch.

Posted under Civil Rights, Freedom, Injustice, Politics

Please note that my copyright notice is null and void for this post.  Anyone who wishes to borrow the text of this letter to use on behalf of Cele Castillo is welcome – and even urged – to do so.

The whole story, in Cele’s own words.

Please sign our petition here.

The Honorable Eric Holder

United States Attorney General

U.S. Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

Re: Prosecutorial Misconduct

USA vs. Celerino Castillo, III

SA: 08-CR-00193 (1) – WRF

No. 08- 51144 USA vs. CASTILLO

Dear Attorney General Holder:

I have recently read in the news media about your unprecedented reversal of conviction in the corruption case concerning Senator Ted Stevens, and I applaud your action.  It was very apparent that there was prosecutorial misconduct that did indeed take place in that case.

However, I have recently become cognizant of a similar – and quite possibly even a far worse – example of prosecutorial misconduct, and as an American citizen, I am urgently requesting your assistance in getting to the bottom of this ugly situation.

Mr. Celerino “Cele” Castillo, III, a resident of my own state of Texas, is best remembered for being a whistleblower during the Iran-Contra investigation.  Mr. Castillo submitted his testimony to the House Select Committee for Intelligence and went before a federal grand jury in Washington D.C, to testify to CIA involvement in murder, torture, drug trafficking, and arms smuggling.

After his retirement from the DEA, Mr. Castillo became an educator and an activist for several civil rights organizations, such as People for Peace and Justice, Veterans for Peace, and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

On March 06, 2008, Mr. Castillo was arrested by ATF agents in San Antonio, Texas.  The charges were filed by U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton for the Western District of Texas.  After eight months, Mr. Castillo’s charges were dismissed under Poke v. U.S.

However, prior to Mr. Castillo’s charges being dismissed, he was told that he was required to plead guilty to new charges of “Selling Guns without a License and Aiding and Abetting.”  ATF agents telephoned Mr. Castillo’s elderly mother on literally a daily basis, threatening this elderly lady with never seeing her son again, until Mr. Castillo pled guilty and was sentenced to 37 months of incarceration.  Such tactics on the parts of the ATF agents in question were at best, disgusting – and at worst, even criminal.  That is, said tactics certainly appear to be felony extortion in my personal view, and I cannot see any other interpretation at this time.

Mr. Castillo was initially ordered to surrender for his term of incarceration on March 05, 2009, but he discovered soon after his sentencing that his attorney, Robert “Eddie” de la Garza, had been under investigation by the state bar throughout his case – and Mr. de la Garza had failed to advise the court that he was in the process of being suspended.  There was a massive issue of conflict of interest on the part of Mr. de la Garza also, because the same agents involved in Mr. Castillo’s case were also involved with another case involving Mr. de la Garza’s son, Andrew de la Garza, who had been arrested by ATF a short time prior on quite similar charges to Mr. Castillo’s.

The judge in Mr. Castillo’s case has extended Mr. Castillo’s required surrender date until July 20, 2009, so that he may have ample time to prepare this case with his new public defender.

On April 10, 2009, Mr. Castillo and his new public defender filed nine counts of Prosecutorial Misconduct and Outrageous Government Conduct related to his case.  The complaints were filed with the Office of the Inspector General and the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, and therefore should be readily available for your review.

I do strongly believe that the prosecutorial misconduct involved in Mr. Castillo’s case was even more severe than that which was involved in Senator Ted Stevens’ case, as I do very strongly suspect that Mr. de la Garza’s son’s predicament was actually used by the ATF agents involved in both cases to blackmail Mr. de la Garza, Mr. Castillo’s defense attorney, into giving Mr. Castillo the worst possible legal advice – in other words, pressuring Mr. Castillo’s attorney to advise him in the strongest terms to plead guilty even though it was never in Mr. Castillo’s best interest to do so.  Put still another way, this situation certainly does make it appear that this was felony extortion again, which I am sure you will agree is never acceptable conduct for anyone, let alone someone in the legal or law enforcement professions.

In light of these facts, I am respectfully requesting an immediate, thorough and very urgent inquiry into the manner in which Mr. Castillo’s case was prosecuted, and I also feel that time is of extremely crucial importance in this matter.  Cele Castillo is one of the last surviving credible witnesses to the government agency abuses that took place during the Iran Contra years, and as a former deep cover DEA agent, the very unfortunate reality is that he will be placed in extremely grave personal danger from the moment he enters the U.S. prison system on July 20th, 2009.

I hope to hear from you concerning this matter at your very earliest convenience.

Respectfully yours,

Kathryn A. Graham

Hooks, Texas

Please sign our petition here.

Posted under Civil Rights, Freedom, Injustice, Politics, Uncategorized

A recent article I spied on the CNN news site made me start thinking, very hard, about the state of religion in the United States.  According to a recent poll:

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Even though I am not personally a Christian, and I have not been since I was a child, I found those figures extremely shocking – until I began to think about my own experiences with American Protestant Christianity, especially during a recent and particularly difficult year I spent in southeastern Kansas.

Like anyone who lives in the United States, I cannot avoid having some friends who are of the Protestant Christian persuasion, and of those friends that I know very well, there are several that I do respect highly on the grounds of morality, kindness, compassion and charity – including, but not limited to, a specific couple living in southeastern Kansas and at least one man living and caring for his mother in Kansas City, Missouri – right in the heart of the American Midwest.  However, in my experience, such individuals are sadly the exception and not at all the rule for Christians, and this does seem especially true of a particular type of self-styled Christian living in the American Midwest.

The overwhelmingly vocal majority of American Protestant Christians seem to be xenophobic to an absurd degree.  In case you don’t speak English very well, xenophobic is a term that encompasses, among other traits, racism.  If it doesn’t look like you, and if it doesn’t talk like you, it really isn’t fully human and doesn’t deserve the compassion or kindness we would show to one of “our own.”

The term xenophobic doesn’t only refer to race, however.  It literally translates more or less as fear of difference, fear of outsiders or fear of that which is foreign or alien.  Xenophobes are the folks who would love to see illegal immigrants – most of them starving and desperately looking for work – very badly treated or even killed.  Sadly, they are mostly getting their wish these days.

My own personal experience has mostly been with those self-styled Christians who honestly believe that Pagans and/or Witches are devil-worshippers and would like to see all of us dead.  My life and property have been threatened by this sort of Christian on numerous occasions over the last 35 years – and even the lives of my innocent pets.  Knowing what I do know of the purported teachings of Jesus of Nazareth – and my childhood education certainly did not neglect Sunday School – it is more than clear to me that these self-styled Christians have absolutely no idea at all what their faith is even about.

In fact, the only sane response to their behavior toward me over the years can be summed up very succinctly in three one-syllable words, “Lock and load.”

Christianity, because it teaches that life is just a temporary phase on the way to eternal reward or punishment, has always been a faith that lends itself all too easily to cults.  Christians take up monetary collections during their services – shaming even the very poor into giving what they cannot afford – and if you think that isn’t a lucrative practice, just visit your nearest Baptist church on Sunday morning and do the math.  Christian leaders have extremely lucrative reasons to try to control every facet of their followers’ lives from bank accounts to sex lives – and that is the very definition of a cult.  Yet because they call themselves Christian, we dare not say so.

The unfortunate truth is that Christian fanatics have been committing crimes (on this continent) in the name of their faith since the murdered women of Salem, Massachusetts, in the late 17th Century, and even before – they like to call these murdered Salem women Witches, and that somehow makes it all right.  The women involved could not possibly have been modern Witches, as what we called Wicca or Witchcraft today did not even exist at the time.  The play/movie, The Crucible, appears to show that a jealous wife used a slave’s Caribbean Voodoo and the town’s witchcraft hysteria to bring about the multiple murders of her perceived rivals – all in the name of devout Christianity.  I don’t know how accurate the story is, but it certainly rings true.

Today, the Christian cults’ modus operandi seems to be more along the lines of blowing up abortion clinics and threatening President Obama because he is black and – oh, horrors – has the middle name of “Hussein.”

I don’t happen to think Obama is the new messiah as some American folks seem to think.  In fact, I have some very serious issues with the man.  My issues with our current president, however, are political in nature and have zero to do with Obama personally or with his race.

When a religion forfeits its moral compass – as any advocate of torture has surely done, whether the victim of torture is to be Muslim or not, even terrorist or not – and when said religion teaches fear and cruelty instead of faith and love, it no longer deserves the label – or the constitutional protections – of religion.

The Taliban do not deserve the label of Muslim, and neither do the hate-mongers of Al Qaeda.  Why should these sick sects of Christians infesting our Midwest be any different?  I have no more desire to live under a Christian Taliban than under a Muslim one, and in either case, I will defend my life and freedom with my blood.  Nor will I ever allow torture to be done in my name.  If it takes the rest of my life, I will not cease from advocating the trial and punishment of those who ordered, those who justified, and those who carried out torture in the last administration.  If we do not punish them, it may happen again, and that is unthinkable.

I suspect that most Americans would still agree with me.

Posted under Civil Rights, Freedom, Injustice, Politics

I, as promised, have kept silent during the first days of our new President’s administration.  I hoped, along with most of the rest of America, that we would see substantive change, even though I knew it would be far more socialist change that I personally would be able to stomach.  Nevertheless, there were even deeper American issues that I really believed that President Obama would wish to address.

Of course, looting the American treasury and mortgaging the future of our grandchildren was not exactly a good start, but I still hoped that our new president would want to address issues in blatant violation of our Constitution and our national values – issues like torture and warrantless wiretapping.

Instead, President Obama chose to keep and expand the warrantless wiretapping program, which has led to my recent work on a book soon to be released, intended to teach the average computer and cell phone user how to avoid said wiretapping.  Watch for Naked in the Cyber Winds: A Survival Guide for the Surveillance Age.

As reprehensible as I find said wiretapping, particularly after learning of the tap on Senator Harman (although I do believe the lady should be jailed for treason – as I am sure there is ample other evidence that could be found in more traditional and acceptable ways), I find torture even more morally repugnant, as I think would any sane human being.

I was all in favor of President Obama’s declassification and release of the torture memos, and I believe there are many more still to be released.  I was, however, stunned and disgusted by his initial stance that there would be no torture prosecutions, even though torture clearly violates both U.S. and international law.  After considerable pressure from Congress, he seems to have modified his stance to the extent that those at the top who may have ordered torture might be prosecuted if his Attorney General chooses to move forward.  After all, it isn’t up to him.  He is only the President of the United States.  This is actually quite true, but most presidents seem to honor it only when it serves their purposes.

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney is trying to twist the debate by calling for the release of still classified material that supposedly proves what incredibly valuable information was gained from torture.  This disgusting and creepy excuse for a human being just won’t go away.

To begin with, I believe that no information of value is ever gained from torture, as the victim will simply admit to anything whatsoever to get the torture to stop.  You would, and I would, and any ordinary human being would.  The only persons throughout history who have even attempted to resist torture were extreme idealogues, both good and bad – and guess what our so-called “high value” detainees were?

Second, in several of these “high value” cases, torture was the desperate attempt of a madman to justify an illegal war.  According to reports this very morning, enormous pressure was put on interrogators to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.  Can you spell obsession?

Furthermore, in trying to shield the foot soldiers who actually carried out such interrogations, President Obama has aligned himself with every disgusting tyrant throughout history.  “Just following orders” is not an excuse for torture.  It never has been, and it never will be.  I would be interested in seeing an actual count of how many times that defense was used during the Nazi trials at Nuremberg.

So let me be very clear here.  Dick Cheney says the point was the high value information obtained, but that is missing the point altogether.  These men and women may well have believed that they were using torture to protect me, the American citizen, from death at the hands of terrorists, but I vehemently reject that relationship.  Not in my name!  Not ever!

I believe that I am an average citizen of my country, perfectly normal in every way, not unusually brave at all, but let me put this in words of one syllable so that I cannot possibly be misunderstood:  I would rather die horribly at the hands of terrorists than have torture and abuse committed in my name! How hard is that to understand?

How can anyone tolerate this type of moral degenerate?  How can their wives share their beds?  How can husbands even look at their wives?  How can their children ever respect them?  How can their neighbors live near them?  Frankly, I’d rather have Jeffrey Dahmer for a neighbor than anyone who has committed this sort of crime.  And I don’t give a tinker’s damn who ordered it in the first place.  All are equally guilty.

Those who committed, and those who ordered, the crime of torture should be unemployable, even to scrub toilets and clean sewers.  They should be shunned by every decent human being on the planet.  By their actions, they have seceded from the human race.  They are not welcome in my home, my city, my state or in my country.  They should be tried at once for the nastiest and ugliest crime one human being can ever commit against another, and if convicted in a court of law, they should be imprisoned for the rest of their miserable lives – not in Club Fed type prisons, but in maximum security prisons that have guards with nasty attitudes.  They should immediately be assigned large and sexually active cellmates.

And when, as will inevitably happen, they find their new circumstances too horrible to endure, we should be more merciful than they were to their victims – and allow them to take their own lives.

You can call me naive.  I will wear that badge with pride.  But I do believe that nothing less will cleanse this stain upon the honor and the decency of the American people.

Posted under Civil Rights, Freedom, Injustice, Politics

Is this the same country that I grew up in?

When I was twelve years old, my father gave me a battered paperback copy of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and told me to read it.  Please don’t confuse Heinlein’s original book with the dreadful movie made from it decades later – there is simply no comparison, and apart from a character name or two, almost no resemblance.  When I returned the book to my father, I told him I was going to enlist in the U.S. military on my 18th birthday.  Dad, who was a lifelong patriot and the Major who had been in charge of all the A/V material sent back to the U.S. from the European theater in World War II, laughed very heartily at the daughter he loved – but he was not at all displeased.

I had the last laugh.  The only change in my plan was from the U.S. Army to the U.S. Air Force.  I raised my right hand and took the enlistment oath on my 18th birthday.  It might be a good idea to review that oath once in awhile:

“I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”

I was proud to serve my country, and I humbly submit that I understood one portion of that oath as completely as any adolescent can only because I was well taught during Basic Training.  “…according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice” is not in the least ambiguous.  No military member has an obligation to obey an unlawful order, and no military member should ever do so.  Many classroom and lecture hours were spent on teaching us what to do about an unlawful order, and sure enough, I had reason to exercise that training in my first year of service when my NCOIC gave me an instruction that clearly stepped over that very intangible line between appropriate military leadership and fraternizing with a subordinate.  A simple and civil request for said instruction to be presented in writing resulted in an instant about-face – and in the long term, a much better relationship with said supervisor, a professional one based upon respect.  It was an important lesson.

That nightmare moment, several years ago now, when I first saw the disgusting torture and abuse photographs released from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, I knew that the training I had received was no longer a part of basic military training.  I believed, and still believe, that the decision to remove that training was dangerous, and I predict that in the long term, it will do far more harm to this country than good.

The problem is that this segment of our training did not produce the sort of little robots that our Decider-in-Chief has decided we need in this modern world.

I am sorry to say that I did not fully understand that portion of that oath where I swore to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” until many years after I took the oath.  Nor could I have imagined in September of 1972 that the worst domestic enemies our Constitution would ever face would one day inhabit Capitol Hill and the White House, not even with the example of Richard Nixon staring me right in the face.

I do understand it now, with absolutely chilling clarity.  And like many of my contemporaries who also served their country, I do know that my discharge did not absolve me of that oath.  Nothing this side of death can do that.  I am no longer in the United States military, but I took that oath freely and without coercion, and I remain obligated to its terms until I take up residence six feet below ground.

This morning, I woke up to read in the Washington Post that the CIA, after receiving orders to torture suspects soon after September 11, 2001, had some very understandable concerns about the legality of these orders.  It isn’t my intention to disparage the service of the few remaining decent men and women in the intelligence services, but I do want to stress how weird and unusual it is for the CIA to have concerns about anything at all short of what would gag any self-respecting maggot.

There were several meetings held at the White House over these concerns.  Please imagine this, if you can.  The Director of Central Intelligence – George Tenet, by the way, at the time – is concerned about the torture of suspects.  Condi Rice is there, and I am sure that Dick Cheney and President Bush were there.  Who was it that actually said it was okay?

And how could anyone in the room agree with them?

What shocks me is not that the United States has used torture.  We’ve done that for years.  We taught half of South America how to do it even better at a certain infamous school in Georgia.

What stuns me is that we are no longer ashamed of it.  In the past, any time even a hint of this found the light of day, we backpedaled like crazy.

Not this time.  This time, when George Tenet asked for a memo to cover his patootie . . .

Someone actually wrote the memo.  Someone actually said that torture was okay, and put it into writing.  35 years ago, my first NCOIC wouldn’t even commit to writing his mildly excessive pressure in asking me for a date.  But waterboarding is okay, and that’s in black and white on a piece of White House stationery.

John McCain, the man who publicly fought against torture, later quietly voted for it.  He is one of the two nominees for President we must vote on in about three weeks.  How could this have happened?

Can we come back from this?  Can we ever again be the country that I loved and served with pride and honor?

I don’t know.  You tell me.

I am sick at heart tonight.

Posted under Civil Rights, Freedom, Injustice

I owe Mike Ruppert of From The Wilderness and Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari everything for my understanding of what follows.  Both are geniuses.  Many years ago, Fitts began to use something she called the Solari Index to measure the health of our society.  Put simply, the Solari Index is the percentage of ordinary people in our cities who actually believe that a child can walk from his/her home to the nearest place to buy a popsicle and come home alone, unharmed and unmolested.  When Fitts first started using the Solari Index, the Dow Jones was at about 500 and the Solari was 100.  Before this current economic crisis occurred, the Dow was at 14,000+ and the Solari was effectively zero.  They have an obvious inverse relationship.

If you think about it, this doesn’t really make sense.  Wouldn’t you expect that the more prosperous a society becomes, the lower the crime rate falls?   Shouldn’t the Dow Jones and the Solari Index be friends?  Indeed, yes!

We all know that it hasn’t happened that way, but most of us do not fully understand why.

We’ve read for years about the Central Intelligence Agency importing drugs into the United States, everything from heroin at the time of the Viet Nam war to cocaine, crack and meth in subsequent years.  Mike Ruppert has been telling us about this since the 1970s.  Most Americans do not believe the stories they have heard because they have – as I once did – a small problem with motive.  Profit is always a good motive, but when you are talking about a significant portion of a major governmental entity, most of us feel we need just a little more motive than straight profit.

How about misguided patriotism?  How about concern for the value of your 401K and those of millions of other Americans?  Is that motive enough?  Regardless of their actual motive, the CIA is importing illegal drugs into the United States of America – at least a portion of the Agency is – and there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind about that  today.

Let’s say you are a South American drug lord and you have $1 billion in drug money.  You earned this money in a fairly traditional way – by producing a scarce and dangerous commodity and selling it on the open market.  Of course, this commodity is only worth so much because it is illegal and the rest of the world is paying you a premium for the risks you took.  Now you need to look at another risk.  You can’t let anyone know you have this money.  You can’t just put it in a bank, not without the U.S. Army special forces using you for target practice and the U.S. Government seizing your funds.  If you try to hide the money, there is always the chance that it will be found – $1 billion in cash takes up a lot of space, too, so forget burying it in mason jars.  Besides, you need the funds – the liquidity – to keep operating your agricultural, processing and smuggling businesses.

Please make no mistake, no matter what you think of their morals, these drug lords are – first, last and always – very clever businessmen.  And as Mike Ruppert told us years ago – and proved beyond question if anyone was smart enough to check – 90 percent of the CIA leadership over the last 50 years has been drawn from Wall Street lawyers and bankers.  That is the final piece of the puzzle.

So if you are that drug lord, what you must do to gain access to your $1 billion is launder it.  In other words, you need to provide the rest of the world with an innocent explanation for how you acquired this money.  So what do you do?

You can do any one of countless things.  You can contact an auto manufacturer, order several thousand cars and open the newest answer to CarMax in Bogota.  You can contact a computer manufacturer and buy thousands of computers to open Lima’s newest answer to Comp USA.  And so on.  The profit that you earn on the sale of the products you purchase becomes clean money.  You can tell anyone where this money came from.  The same is true for a stock or a derivatives purchase that becomes profitable.  Once you have that innocent explanation to give the rest of the world, and it’s good enough to fly, you have access to your money and your murderous business can go on.  Murderous?  Yes, indeed!  If a street thug is willing to kill for the $20 bill in someone’s wallet, what will these men do to protect their billions?

Current estimates run anywhere from $500 billion to $1.5 trillion in drug money laundered through Wall Street each year.  I believe the larger estimate is the more accurate one, and it may be even larger.  Remember that the whole intent behind this enterprise is to keep the source of the money a secret.  There is no doubt at all that Wall Street, and our current banking system, are utterly addicted to drug profits.

Horrible?  Yes, it most certainly is.  Unfortunately, millions of 401K savings plans losing 3/4 of their value overnight is also a nightmare scenario, which is literally what would have happened if we had really decided to get serious about the drug trade and shut it down.

The result is where we have been sitting since the early 1980s and Reagan’s escalation of The Drug War.  Billions of dollars spent on drug enforcement through the DEA, and those few DEA agents who are good enough to figure out what is really happening find themselves investigating the CIA – and soon thereafter, they either find themselves dead, or ruined like Celerino Castillo.  Despite all of this money and sacrifice, the only things our streets have less of are safety and freedom.  Nobody, but nobody, wants to admit that the only way to take the cartels down once and for always is to legalize their product – which will also flush the life savings of millions of Americans.  After all, what is the real value of a few plants?  It certainly isn’t what the streets are paying for these products today!  That is the only way you can end the drug trade.  You never need to spend another dime on enforcement – just remove the profit from the transaction.  It is all about the money.  A few kids might still get stupid, but nobody will be pushing the stuff at your local Junior High.  Why would they do that if there were no real profit in it?

Now we come back to the basic problem.  Years ago, Catherine Austin Fitts asked an audience what they would do if there was a big red button, and pressing it would end the drug trade (and cause Wall Street to collapse).  She asked for anyone willing to press that button to raise their hands.  No one did.

We now have a golden opportunity.  Our financial system is already collapsing, and that nightmare 401K scenario I talked about earlier is already taking place.  The painful part has already happened, or most of it has.  This is a once in a lifetime priceless opportunity to rebuild our system in such a way that the Dow Jones and Solari indices can actually be friends.  We’re past the worst pain of breaking an addiction – now the only question is will we go back to the drug profits?  Or will we end those profits forever?

A few hundred points of recovery on the Dow at this point will only mean more of the same. You might get some of your retirement savings back in the short term, but it means we have learned nothing at all, and this stupidly criminal system will continue just as before.  The only change will be that the federal government will assist even more than before in laundering these drug funds because the government will own large chunks of the banks that do it.

Is that what you really want, America?

Posted under Freedom, Injustice, Politics

Most commonly, the period of history that we call the Dark Ages refers to the years between 476 AD (when the Roman Empire fell) and the year 1000 AD, or about 95 years before The First Crusade. Some writers, including myself, prefer to carry the “Dark Ages” forward to the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th Century, viewing the Crusades and the various witch hunts of the intervening centuries as an extension of the Dark Ages. Although there were certainly witch hunts after the Renaissance began, there is no doubt that the beginning of the Renaissance marks the beginning of a return to reason.

The one overwelming characteristic of the Dark Ages was intolerance. The Roman church and Protestantism were intolerant of each other and later of Islam. Most of all, they were extremely intolerant of science – particularly where it appeared to conflict with their narrowly religious view of the Universe – and therefore progress was brought almost completely to a standstill for hundreds of years. Oddly, during its earliest centuries, Islam was very tolerant of science. Later, that pendulum would swing the other way. Now, it is swinging back again – just listen to the creationism / evolution debate if you doubt that. Nothing is forever.

Of course, for an extremely religious person, perhaps the historical (or coming) Dark Ages do not seem so dark after all, but most of us would have found such a life, or will find it – in the words Thomas Hobbes originally used to describe anarchy – nasty, brutish and short. This is because no religious fanatic ever meets anyone appearing to them to be as perfectly religious as said fanatic knows he/she is, and it is unfortunately true that fanatical religious groups often teach conversion by the sword. Which, if you think about it, leads to a lot of swordplay – and also a lot of blood.

Religion – all religion, and I am not an atheist myself – is rooted in fear, usually fear of the unknown. We are conscious, self-aware creatures, and we simply cannot imagine an eternity of nothing after this life. Answering that question of what comes after death has been a preoccupation of human beings since the dawn of thought and spoken language.

But how can you tell the difference between genuine belief and an ugly – and dangerous – cult? It really isn’t all that difficult. A person with genuine faith is no longer afraid. True or not, their religion is working for them as it was meant to work, and it has taken away their fear. Such individuals can face life, and even death, with happy serenity, and they feel no baseless ill will toward anyone.

On the other hand, the hate-filled fanatics that are coming out of the woodwork everywhere we look today, even in politics, are all afraid. They are terrified. That is why they are desperate to at least appear more religious than their neighbors. Somehow they have to claw and fight their way into this Heaven that folks talk about, because the alternative is not even to be contemplated. This drives them to hate. They hate Obama because he’s black and has an Arabic middle name. Meanwhile, the Catholics hate the Protestants, and the Protestants hate the Catholics, and the Apocalyptic cults hate both, and everybody hates the Muslims – and let’s don’t even mention Pagans and Witches and those dreadful, dreadful folk. It seems like that is all we are hearing out of everybody these days. Hate, hate, hate. This isn’t religion at all. It’s mental illness, exacerbated by the need to find a scapegoat you can blame for difficult times.

Fear of death is natural and human. It is man’s earliest fear, even if not a thinking man’s deepest fear. However, any reasoning being knows that fear of death does us no good at all. We are all dying from the moment of our individual births, and nothing and no one can ever change that in even the smallest way. Only when we can finally accept the fact that death is natural and comes to all of us without preference can we begin to grow spiritually and find a belief system that actually works for us. That’s all it takes – just that tiny bit of courage needed to say that death is unavoidable, and therefore wasting fear on it is pointless. On the day you can say that – and believe it – life changes forever. Until then, however, every moment of every day is filled with fear. And fear breeds hatred.

The crowds surrounding John McCain and Sarah Palin lately have been vicious in their hatred – which means they are truly terrified. Real leaders, ready and able to lead our nation, would calm the fears of those who follow them – and in fairness to Senator McCain, he has recently begun to try. Unfortunately, he cannot get past his own fears, and the stink of his fear infects the crowds that surround him.

Sarah Palin, who frequently accuses Obama of terrorism, and who loves to refer to his multi-racial heritage and name, is a daughter of an Apocalyptic cult that makes David Koresh look like a mainstream Baptist. The hilarious irony is that Palin recently allowed a Kenyan witch hunter to bless her in a way that was designed to protect her from witches. The video is all over YouTube, so I’ll paste it here.

Since Obama is half Kenyan himself – a heritage that Palin herself says makes him unfit to lead – the video afforded me some much needed laughter. Poor Sarah! If you only knew, honey – we Witches, the real thing, always were the least of your worries.

Sarah is a soldier in Joel’s Army – and I’ve been reading about them a lot recently. These folks don’t just hate. They intend to fight for their God in a real and physical sense, driving those of us who don’t believe “rightly” either into their twisted idea of righteous faith or into our graves. Well, at least they plan to give us that much of a choice. Joel’s Army are taught from childhood that every time they stop praying for even a few moments, they are subject to demonic possession. Charming bunch of folks, without a doubt. I suspect that most of them need medication to function in the real world.

What triggered the early medieval period known as the Dark Ages? The fall of Rome. Are we headed into another Dark Ages triggered by the fall of another empire? I don’t know, although I am growing uneasy about the possibility. I do know, however, that I don’t want frightened people for leaders, and especially not now.

McCain and Palin need psychiatric help, not votes.

Posted under Civil Rights, Freedom, Injustice, Politics

The Screwing of an American Hero

In these troubled times, in one of our southern states, there lives a man.  Male human beings are common.  Men are not.  Wherever we find testosterone undiluted by cowardice or dishonor, we should value that for the rare and incredibly precious treasure that it is.

Celerino Castillo III is such a man. Descendant of Emiliano Zapata, he comes from a tradition of heroic and quixotic idealism.  His father was a disabled veteran of World War II.  Celerino himself served in Viet Nam, earning the Bronze Star – although decades later, at a more enlightened age, he returned it in opposition to that failed and utterly stupid war.

While in Viet Nam, Celerino watched many friends and comrades destroyed by that scourge of the Far East, heroin, and he learned to despise the drug trade.  After his return to the United States, he earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Criminal Justice from Pan American University (now the University of Texas at Pan Am), and went on to become an investigator for a Texas police department.

In 1979, he went to work for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

I have always believed strongly that the Drug War was the first crucial step in destroying the freedom of American citizens.  Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that Celerino Castillo was not busting kids with a joint or two and trying to destroy their lives – he was going after the Central and South American cartels, which should rightly be called “Murder, Inc.”  It was also the most difficult, dangerous and lonely job that any of us could possibly imagine.  Most of us, no matter how courageous or tough we believe ourselves to be, would not last a week in such a profession, let alone a decade.

Celerino did have one terrible disadvantage down there, one not shared by most of his associates.  He was – and remains – an honest and honorable man.  So when he learned, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the Central Intelligence Agency was importing drugs into the United States, he did not and has not remained silent, up to and including testifying before Congress.

Contracts have been issued on his life.  He has lost his family, everything he owned, and very nearly his sanity in the years since he was forced out of the DEA – expressed as “early” retirement.  He has appeared in numerous documentaries and books that covered this very touchy subject, and he has been brutalized and threatened as a result.  Nothing has shut him up.  In words taken directly from his web site, he says that “a long time ago he took an oath to protect The Constitution of the United States and its citizens. He has thought about quitting but there was no time limit on that oath.”

For these reasons and others, I do not believe it is a coincidence that Celerino was targeted on April 8th of this year by agents of BATF.  He stands accused of doing what he does not even deny he has done, buying and selling guns at gun shows as a hobby and to supplement his very meager income as a teacher.

Excuse me?  Isn’t that what gun shows are for??? Since when has buying or selling a gun at a gun show become illegal?

Cele has a hearing next week, his arraignment.  He has fired his public defender because said slimy “defender” would consider nothing but a plea bargain arrangement.  He cannot afford a private attorney.  If Cele does not get some help, and very quickly too, he is going to go to prison – which amounts to a death sentence for anyone ever involved in law enforcement.

Please help this man.  Go to his web site at Powderburns.  Read about his current situation at Tekgnosis.  Please send money for his legal defense fund, but don’t let it stop there!  Spread the word about this far and wide.  If this sort of thing can be done to someone as public as Celerino Castillo, you had better believe that it can be done to any one of us! This isn’t only about a hero who does not deserve what is happening to him.  This is about each and every one of us – and our continued survival in this increasingly fascist state.

Besides, there is a moral question here.  Doing this to a warrior and a hero, a brave and honorable man who has worked for his country all of his life, is and should always remain . . .

Unacceptable!

Posted under Civil Rights, Freedom, Injustice