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2012-03-24

Tolouse – Another Israeli False Flag Again?

Vatic Note:  We published many instances of Mossad, MI6, and CIA funding, organizing and supporting the terrorist groups they had listed as such.  Now its the same with Homeland Security who also has ADL (Mossad run) and SPLC sitting on their advisory board and ever since then, our Bill of Rights gutting, signing statements and executive orders by the President have dramatically increased above that of Bush Jr.  Now why is that?  Its that way because it worked in Iraq,  in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and now Syria.  Hello, I hate it when they treat us as if we were stupid.  So, if this is true, and more deception is being raised here in this country, then what does it make those politicians who kiss up to AIPAC who had been caught spying on America?  Does it make them viable candidates??  Who does AIPAC really represent in the Jewish community?  It appears they only represent the Zionists and not the real Jews who abhor what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, as we published on here several days or a week ago.

Tolouse – Another Israeli False Flag Again?
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/03/22/tolouse-another-israeli-false-flag-again/
March 22, 2012

Is it an Israeli False Flag Again?

By Gilad Atzmon

———————-

Editor’s note:  When we learned that initial news reports came from SITE Intelligence (always an indicator of “planted news”), and the disturbing background of the shooter, one of endless senseless contradictions, came to light, the question brought up by Gilad Atzmon became one of extreme legitimacy. 
Articles citing his time in Aghanistan, his capture by Americans who aided in his return to France where he was given special consideration re-entering the country though having been arrested as a “Taliban bomb maker” have been, during the last hours, taken off the internet. 

Israeli press reported this evening that French gunman Mohamed Merah had been on a trip to Israel in the past.
According to the report, Merah’s passport had Israeli stamps in it. The purpose of his visit is  unknown. Israeli analysts suspect he was either trying to visit the Palestinian territories or preparing for a terror attack.\

However, I won’t rule out the possibility that Merah was actually trained by Israeli forces. Marah may have conducted a false flag operation. By way of deception is,  after all, the Mossad’s motto.
Read the story of Naeim Giladi, an Israeli agent operating in Iraq in the late 1940’s.

Higher Tuition and Higher Education

http://humanraceandothersports.com/columns/608

By: Christopher Brauchli
Date: 2012-02-15

He who enters a university walks on hallowed ground.
—James Bryant Conant, Notes on the Harvard Tercentenary [1936]
The increasing cost of obtaining an education was highlighted when President Obama revealed his latest budget on February 13, 2012. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in recent years college tuition has gone up at roughly twice the rate of inflation. Addressing this issue in a speech at the University of Michigan on the Friday before he released his budget the President said: “You can’t assume you’ll just jack up tuition every single year. If you can’t stop tuition going up, your funding from taxpayers will go down.” Among other parts of his proposals vis a vis tuition issues, the President suggested tying the amount the federal government gives to universities to their tuition policies. Of course, tuition policies vary from institution to institution but it can be useful to examine how at least one state university has responded to the decreasing support from the state legislature and increasing tuition costs.

In the past four years in-state tuition at the University of Colorado has increased between 8.8 and 9.3 percent each year. For the upcoming year the university administration proposes a $1,203 increase of in-state full-time student tuition which would be an increase of almost 16% from the preceding academic year. The tuition increases are undoubtedly necessary given the increase in the decrease of support the university receives from the state legislature. Nonetheless, as a result of the tuition increases some students may be forced to leave the university because of their inability to pay the increased tuition costs. There is one group at the university who will not be forced to leave because of the university’s difficult financial circumstances-the Chancellor and a number of other top administrators.

The Secret Media War of 2012

Vatic Note:  I am a bit surprised this author did not mention the diebold election fraud proven solidly on a blog we published about a week ago.  I agree with everything he is saying on here, but until that issue is fully addressed legally and effectively, then the MSM won't matter, but Diebold will matter.  Without prosecuting these corporate executives for fraud, and trying them,  sentencing them and executing sentence, then nothing will change.  Its not just Ron Paul either, its the congressional seats.  We saw a press report aired by mistake showing Ron Paul losing the Illinois vote in the primary and who all the winners were..... the key was IT WAS PUBLISHED THE DAY BEFORE THE VOTE.  Its getting exposed on the alternative press, but again, not on the MSM so the sheep won't know about it.  Obama's so called Attorney General is a useless piece of fodder, so that is not an option in prosecuting these people.   We need citizen action under the law.  There was enough evidence on that blog to ensure a valid, solid prosecution and conviction if pursued.  Since the criminals control the government, that is unlikely to happen.  Just another thing we have to do as people.

http://thedailybell.com/3647/Ron-Holland-The-Secret-Media-War-of-2012

By: Ron Holland
Date: 2012-02-27

"See this room? Two-thirds of us laid off when Ron Paul is president." – A hot microphone picked up a reporter attacking Ron Paul recently before a Pentagon briefing began.

We are currently in the middle of the long war of the Internet Reformation, although the press will never mention this. Effectively, there has been an ongoing war between the non-controlled alternative media and the establishment media since the inception of LewRockwell.com in 1999. Since then many quality alternative media websites have been added to the competition while the elite media's credibility, reach and ability to manipulate debate and public opinion has been declining. The Internet Reformation is slowly winning and to date, this has been shown most clearly with the 2012 Ron Paul presidential campaign.

The GOP neocon puppet-masters are terrified, especially when Republican crowds at televised debates cheer Ron Paul's non-interventionist foreign policy remarks because this threatens their control over US foreign policy in what was formerly their secure home turf. Try as they might the media has not been able to destroy the Ron Paul Campaign.

2012-03-23

Jewish Man Exposes Israel's Lies

Vatic Note:  This was most interesting because of who this man is and who his father was and their long history in his family of being part of the Zionist movement.   His father was a General during the War in Israel of 1967.  His son below moved into a different path toward peace, but to do this he must set the record straight and he calls it exposing the three myths of Israel.   He actually surprised me with a lot of what he exposed.  I am surprised he is still alive.  This is very interesting and deserves a full airing.  If you have to come back and do it again,  its worth it.

Jewish Man Exposes Israel's Lies
Uploaded by  on Jun 24, 2011
This author born in Israel condems Israeli policies and lies and reveals the truth about the zionist state. NEW!! 14.01.12 Latest update from Miko - click "show more" on this panel for his Blog report.
Equal Rights ~ by @mikopeled

January 14, 2012 by occupiedpalestine0




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCKWDarNdGw&feature=email


The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.

How Empires Fall (Including the American One)

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175510/tomgram%3A_andy_kroll%2C_the_unlikely_oracle_of_occupy_wall_street/

By: Andy Kroll
Date: 2012-03-01

When Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World, a meditation on the history and power of nonviolent action, was published in 2003, the timing could not have been worse. Americans were at war -- and success was in the air. U.S. troops had invaded Iraq and taken Baghdad (“mission accomplished”) only months earlier, and had already spent more than a year fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Schell's book earned a handful of glowing reviews, and then vanished from the public debate as the bombs scorched Iraq and the body count began to mount.

Now, The Unconquerable World's animating message -- that, in the age of nuclear weaponry, nonviolent action is the mightiest of forces, one capable of toppling even the greatest of empires -- has undergone a renaissance of sorts. In December 2010, the self-immolation of a young Tunisian street vendor triggered a wave of popular and, in many cases, nonviolent uprisings across the Middle East, felling such autocrats as Tunisia's Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak in mere weeks. Occupations, marches, and protests of all sorts spread like brushfire across Europe, from England to Spain to Greece, and later Moscow, and even as far as Madison, Wisconsin. And then, of course, there were the artists, students, and activists who, last September, heard the call to "occupy Wall Street" and ignited a national movement with little more than tents, signs, and voices on a strip of stone and earth in lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park.
You might say that Schell, a former New Yorker staff writer renowned for his work on nuclear weapons and disarmament (his 1981 book The Fate of the Earth was a best-seller and instant classic), prophesied Occupy and the Arab Spring -- without even knowing it. He admits to being as surprised as anyone about the wave of nonviolent action that swept the world in 2011, but those who had read Unconquerable World would have found themselves uncannily well prepared for the birth of a planet of protest whenever it happened.

That book remains the ideal companion volume for the Occupiers and Egyptian revolutionaries, as well as their Spanish, Russian, Chilean, and other counterparts. Schell traces the birth of nonviolent action to Gandhi's sit-in at Johannesburg's Empire Theater in 1906, and continues through the twentieth century, all the while forcing you to rethink everything you thought you knew about what he calls “the war system” and its limits, as well as protests and rebellions of every sort, and the course of empire.

The Kill Switch Comes to the PC

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-17/the-kill-switch-comes-to-the-pc

By:
Date: 2012-02-16

Janne Kytömäki, a Finnish software developer, was cruising Google’s (GOOG) Android Market for smartphone apps last year when he noticed something strange. Dozens of best-selling applications suddenly listed the same wrong publisher. It was as if Stephen King’s name had vanished from the covers of his books, replaced by an unknown author. Kytömäki realized the culprit was a piece of malware that was spreading quickly, and he posted his findings online.

Google responded swiftly. It flipped a little-known kill switch, reaching into more than 250,000 infected Android smartphones and forcibly removing the malicious code. “It was sort of unreal, watching something like that unfold,” says Kytömäki, who makes dice simulator apps. Kill switches are a standard part of most smartphones, tablets, and e-readers. Google, Apple (AAPL), and Amazon (AMZN) all have the ability to reach into devices to delete illicit content or edit code without users’ permission. It’s a powerful way to stop threats that spread quickly, but it’s also a privacy and security land mine.

With the rollout of the Windows 8 operating system expected later this year, millions of desktop and laptop PCs will get kill switches for the first time. Microsoft (MSFT) hasn’t spoken publicly about its reasons for including this capability in Windows 8 beyond a cryptic warning that it might be compelled to use it for legal or security reasons. The feature was publicized in a widely cited Computerworld article in December when Microsoft posted the terms of use for its new application store, a feature in Windows 8 that will allow users to download software from a Microsoft-controlled portal. Windows smartphones, like those of its competitors, have included kill switches for several years, though software deletion “is a last resort, and it’s uncommon,” says Todd Biggs, director of product management for Windows Phone Marketplace.

2012-03-22

OBAMA'S GIVEAWAY: OIL-RICH ISLANDS TO RUSSIA

Vatic Note: Obama, you messed up, these are our designated WW III enemies.... what are you doing giving our islands away to our enemy??? There is a recent update at the end of the article showing this is still an issue.  I explain below who Joseph Farrah is and how closely if not intimately he is tied into Israel.  However, he has an agenda with this article that fully directs you away from the real truth of what this gift is all about.  If you accept that Obama is run by the Goldman Sachs Zionist international Rothschild bankers,  as has every President since Woodrow Wilson, then you have to accept, it was not Obama that gave them away, it was his handlers for goldman sucks that makes all those decisions as they come down from their bosses.

Now, the New world powers are designated to be China and Russia and they are controlled just like we have been, by the Goldman Sachs bankers.  So who is the so called US Government really giving these islands to???  Putin is owned by the bankers, so Obama Goldman Sachs, is giving Russian Putins Goldman sachs those islands and who owns Goldman sachs?  Rothschild and the Queen of England.  Gee, what a coincidence.  A sneaky way for the Queen to take her colonies back or should I say her "empire"?  lol

Now the trick is to keep an eye out and see if BP, owned in part by the Queen through Goldman sachs,  gets all the drilling rights to those oil rich lands both on the islands and around them in the sea.  BP has the expertise to drill under water more so than any of the other oil companies. Then you will know the Russians are as tied into the Rothschild bankers as we are.

This is exactly why this negates any bogus false flag World War III since all parties to any war are owned, funded, supported and controlled by the bankers who are controlled by the illums.  If there is to be a world war, well then, fine, let it be only against those bankers who have gotten away with murder, literally, to advance their greed,  control, power and repression agenda.  Below I have included VN's because this article was just too close to the propoganda the MSM use and I felt an obligation to give the other point of view and then let you decide.  I believe his call to stop this is legit, but either he doesn't know the underlying deceptions going on or he is aware of them and his "Rothschild can do no wrong" philosophy prevents him from exposing what is real.
OBAMA'S GIVEAWAY: OIL-RICH ISLANDS TO RUSSIA
http://www.wnd.com/2012/02/obamas-giveaway-oil-rich-islands-to-russia/ 
Exclusive: Joe Miller sounds alarm over deal to put land in hands of Putin's Kremlin
By Joe Miller
The Obama administration, despite the nation’s economic woes, effectively killed the job-producing Keystone Pipeline last month. The Arab Spring is turning the oil production of Libya and other Arab nations over to the Muslim Brotherhood. (VN:  I find this little ditty very interesting....these khazars are working overtime to get us mad at the muslims.  No matter how hard they try and set it up, it keeps failing, so now this....Remember Farah is a very special friend to the Khazar leaders in Israel and even has a reporter on site there, and he bans anyone who criticizes Israel, whether legit criticism or not, so what does that tell you big time? Right, he is a pawn. That doesn't mean he isn't telling the truth about most of it, except  that little ditty about the Muslim brotherhood when its really run by the CIA and Mossad and finger pointing at the muslims, its worked in the past, but hopefully not this time.) Iraq is distancing itself from the U.S. (VN:  See what I mean?  Now how is Iraq going to distance themselves with the largest US embassy ever built, and 14 permanent bases on Iraq soil.   The US left all the mercenaries there to keep Iraq in line and even mossad is keeping an eye out for their interests too, so don't take this one seriously)  And everyone recognizes that Iran, whose crude supplies are critical to the European economy, will do anything it can to frustrate America’s strategic interests. In the face of all of this, Obama insists on cutting back U.S. oil potential with outrageous restrictions. (VN:  Obama's handlers realize with their control of energy is at risk, so they will keep oil as the main source of energy and this is then one way to control all the supplies on the planet, but new energy technologies are emerging, and will continue to do so at the grassroots level, its why they don't want us educated.)

The World War Three files

Vatic Note:  Remember, they always have to tell us in advance what their plans are for destroying us so we have a choice in either accepting it or resisting it.  I believe that is what this murdock owned publication is suppose to be telling us.  If this wasn't planned, then ask yourselves,  "Why did they build the Seed Bank with seeds from every single plant on the planet?  Why did they and are still collecting DNA from everyone they can.  I think total annihilation was the only way to get rid of the RH negs.  The DNA then allows the PTB to create individuals who are positive only.  They have the DNA of every animal on the planet.  They can recreate this world once they destroy it.  Not saying that is the case, but a whistleblower did tell us this in his 1969 expose he gave and here it is below.  We have inserted our other comments throughout the story, so look for our VN.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2106247/The-World-War-Three-files-For-30-years-papers-kept-secret-Now-extraordinary-story-Whitehall-drew-terrifyingly-detailed-plans-nuclear-armageddon-finally-revealed.htm

The World War Three files: For 30 years the papers have been kept secret. Now, the extraordinary story of how Whitehall drew up terrifyingly detailed plans for nuclear armageddon can finally be revealed
Date: 2012-02-25

                                                               
March 1981, and inside 10 Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher is confronting the most terrible dilemma any British Prime Minister has ever faced.

The news could hardly be worse. Across Britain, tens of thousands of terrified people are streaming out of the major cities. Looting is widespread, while every day brings bomb attacks at railway stations and RAF bases.

Abroad, the Red Army has sliced through the West’s defences, using chemical weapons to punch through Nato’s front lines. Yugoslavia has fallen, and West Germany and Norway are on the verge of succumbing.
After four days of Russian air raids, killing hundreds of people in Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Southampton, Mrs Thatcher faces the ultimate decision. On her desk is a message from the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, asking for authorisation to launch a nuclear attack across the Iron Curtain.
She tells her colleagues that never before has a British Cabinet faced ‘such a grim choice’.

But there is no alternative — and with the world staring into the nuclear abyss, Mrs Thatcher gives the go-ahead.

This may sound like the stuff of fantasy. We all know that there was no World War III in March 1981. But, in fact, this scenario is chillingly realistic.  (VN:  And chillingly resembles a game plan for the future, wouldn't you say?  Maybe that is why its so familiar) 

The War on Freedom/Democracy


Vatic Note:   This below is excellent.  Jim Marrs gives us a John Pilger drawn picture of the horrors we have visited on other nations and on the most  vulnerable countries and their people, over these many many years.  I knew  about most recent actions of such depravity, but I had no idea it was this deep and this long that it had been going on.  This below is the bottom of the pit of inhumanity and now I know its the foreign occupiers of our nation who have directed this for a very long time,  basically since Woodrow Wilson and probably even before him.  If you want to know who we are dealing with, then listen to this video before reading this below.  They are the foreign occupiers that have made us into the nazi's of this planet.  As you read this below, you will also see the criminals that the British had been as well.  Another clear example of their complicity in the horrors visited on this planet everywhere.  

Jim Marrs Note:    KILL FOR PEACE DEPT.
No one wants to think of their country as a fascist Fourth Reich, but then, hiding from the truth has never accomplished anything either. Americans today, so anesthetized by TV and videos, should really give some thought to this piece by John Pilger, the Australian journalist and documentary maker who has twice won Britain’s Journalist of the Year Award as well as academy awards in both Britain and the US. Pilger might not be entirely right in his views but he is not entirely wrong either.         Jim
The war on democracy
Presented by Jim Marrs, February 19, 2012
http://www.jimmarrs.com/news_events/news/the-war-on-democracy/
By John Pilger
NewStatesman, 
January 19, 2012


From the Chagos Islands to Pakistan, innocent civilians are pawns to America, backed by Britain. In our compliant political culture, this deadly game seldom speaks its name.
Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos Islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in phenomenal natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling, girls!”
Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said: “I didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving, [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs.”


In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be “swept” and “sanitised” of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lisette. “When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear them crying.”
Lisette, her family and hundreds of the other islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a journey of a thousand miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser – bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two of the women on board miscarried.
Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lisette’s youngest children, Jollice and Regis, died within a week of each other. “They died of sadness,” she said. “They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home for ever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness.”
This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading “Maintaining the Fiction”, the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by “reclassifying” the population as “floating” and to “make up the rules as we go along”. Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court says the “deportation or forcible transfer of population” is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime – in exchange for a $14m discount off a US Polaris nuclear submarine – was not on the agenda of a group of British “defence” correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed. “There is nothing in our files,” said the MoD, “about inhabitants or an evacuation.”
Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America’s and Britain’s war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders’ abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the “bunker-busting” bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets on two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its “rendition” victims and called it Camp Justice.
Wipe-out
What was done to Lisette’s paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole political culture behind its democratic façade, and the scale of our own indoctrination in its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis”. Longer and bloodier than any other war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, “It never happened . . . Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening.” Last July, the American historian William Blum published his updated “summary of the charming record of US foreign policy”. Since the Second World War, the United States has:
1) Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically elected.
2) Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
3) Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
4) Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
5) Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The “enemy” changes in name – from communism to Islamism – but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power, or a society occupying strategically useful territory and deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.
The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to the 11 September 2001 attacks, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy (in “Operation Cyclone”) is known to specialists, but otherwise suppressed.
While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed “our man” by Margaret Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered in what the CIA described as “the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century”. This estimate does not include the third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine-guns.
These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of uncoercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of advertising to soundbites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.
It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. “For almost the first time in two centuries,” wrote Terry Eagleton, “there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.” No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that “disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue”. And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in “American Football”:
Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things . . .
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust . . .
Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama’s drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers sitting in front of their computer-game screens type in “Bugsplat”. Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Pre­dator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.
Remember the tear-stained headlines as Brand Obama was elected: “Momentous, spine-tingling” (the Guardian). “The American future,” Simon Schama wrote, “is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed with anticipation.” The San Francisco Chronicle saw a spiritual “Lightworker . . . who can . . . usher in a new way of being on the planet“. Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America’s corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America’s largest creditor and the new “enemy” in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia, Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long-planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama’s permission to steal more Palestinian land.
Surveillance state
Obama’s most “historic” achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year’s Eve, he signed the National Defence Authorisation Act, a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens secretly and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only “associate” with those “belligerent” to the US. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeas corpus (the right to due process of law) and, in effect, repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.
On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to “secure territory and populations” overseas but to fight in the “homeland” and “support [the] civil authorities”. In other words, US troops are to be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inev­itable civil unrest takes hold.
America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons – the consequence of a “market” extremism that, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14trn in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young, jobless, homeless, incarcerated African Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will feature “a clash of phil­osophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy”. This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.
The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe, where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron’s “big society”, the theft of £84bn in jobs and services exceeds even the amount of tax “legally” avoided by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but with a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen and which, as Hywel Williams wrote following the 9/11 attacks, “can itself be a form of self-righteous fanaticism”. Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claimed to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain in order to “protect the intelligence agencies” – the torturers.
This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos Islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets of Port Louis and London. “Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed,” Lisette said. “And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others.” Such is the eloquent answer to those who still ask, “What can I do?”
I last saw Lisette’s tiny figure standing in driving rain next to her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow


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