The Rag Blog

An Orwellian “anti-Hillary” video, posted on YouTube, a remix of Ridley Scott’s “Big Brother” Super Bowl commercial for Apple, supposedly represents “a watershed moment in 21st century media and political advertising,” according to Greg Mitchell, writing for Editor and Publisher. “It’s all there—the blank faces of the mind-controlled citizens; the ominous soldiers chasing the woman athlete; the ‘big brother’ spouting double-speak,” adds USA Today. “And after the woman athlete throws her sledge hammer through the huge screen where Clinton’s face is being shown, the commercial fades to the words ‘BarackObama.com.’”

In other words, for the Obama supporter who remixed this admittedly creative video, Hillary is the visage of “Big Sister,” while Obama represents… well, apparently, not Big Brother.

Obama, a Harvard graduate billed as the “rising star of the Democratic Party,” will not save us from Big Brother. In fact, Obama represents the new, freshly scrubbed face of Big Brother, as he is a Democratic Leadership Council favorite—he made the DLC “100 to Watch” list in 2003—and last November sojourned to the Council on Foreign Relations to pay homage.

A lot of people, politicians and pundits and “regular” people, take the attitude that “we” just can’t leave Iraq, because we’ll be abandoning the Iraqi people to chaos, and the occupation is the only thing preventing that from happening. This is something you hear from people who supported the war but now say they realize it was a bad idea (but they still don’t think we can actually leave) as well as from people who were opposed to the war from the start. This line is said with absolute authority – the speaker knows this is what will happen if U.S. forces leave Iraq.

Even if this conventional wisdom were true, it wouldn’t justify an illegal occupation. But there’s one more little problem though – by a 2-1 margin, the Iraqi people, who are in a lot better position to know than American politicians and pundits, don’t think it’s true! This is what I think is the key result of a new poll (pdf link) that the media are writing and talking about. The question was, “do you believe that the security situation in Iraq will get better or worse in the immediate weeks following a withdrawal of Multi National Forces?” 29% said it would get “a great deal better,” 24% said “a little better,” and 6% said “stay the same.” Only 26% thought it would get a little or a lot worse. So that’s three out of five Iraqis, a clear majority, who think that the security situation in Iraq will not get worse, and only one in four who think it will get worse.

Tyrants have always collected as much information as possible on their civilians (or serfs or slaves). The more information they have the easier it is to exert control. The control comes in many forms – from the elimination of dissidents to appeasement politics – but in all cases the more information available the more predictable the response.

So how much information does your government keep on you?

We can start with the basics: name, birth date, social security numbers, income, place of work, religion, education, etc. All of this information most people hand over to the government during census time. It is, after all your civic duty (to obey). What other information are they collecting to help enhance the census?

The US Census Bureau plans to capture the latitude and longitude of the front door of every house, apartment and improvised shelter in America. This will be done by an army of 100,000 temporary workers down every street and dusty, dirt road in America armed with a handheld GPS device.

So they know who is living in the house (or impoverished shelter) and exactly where the front door is located. A picture sure would be nice.

The Calgary-based company, Zao, is now in the process of photographing and appraising every household in the United States. “That means every house, commercial building, industrial and institutional structure is being photographed and appraised property-by-property and street-by-street”. This process is legal because the photos are taken from public spaces and anyone (to the delight of all peeping toms, pedophiles, stalker, rapists, thieves, tyrants, etc.) willing to pay can access their database. This compliments the satellite photographs of your property as well.

Scary? It gets worse.

Your new North American ID card will contain your fingerprints and other biometric data like retinal scans. This will be pushed through as a new high-tech drivers license in the US under the Real ID act or in Canada as a Hegelian compromise with the American demand for a passport to cross the border. This of course is a very old idea in Canada, but the time seems right to push it through.

Any tyrant would agree that you cannot ignore the children.

European Union children, possibly as young as six, will be subjected to compulsory fingerprinting under European Union rules being drawn up in secret. The prints will be stored on a database which could be shared with countries around the world. Of course this bad idea can only be expanded. European Union ministers of justice and ministers of the interior have proposed a pan-European network of fingerprint and DNA databases.

DNA? The European Union is not alone in that regard either.

In Britain, 750,000 juveniles have their DNA recorded in a national DNA database. This database now includes EVERY newborn child in Edinburgh and the Lothians (with plans to expand). Each file will be closed when the child reaches 16, but it will then be kept on record for up to 75 years.

“Teachers, police, GPs and social workers [that is over 400,000 people] will be able to access the files to check for signs of abuse. If the child is regularly late for school or their behaviour changes dramatically, the details could be put into the system where it is hoped it will build up a picture of the child’s overall welfare.”

And on this side of the pond, the US may soon be collecting DNA of all suspected criminals, even if they are proven to be innocent of any crime.

Sadly, this is an incomplete list of the information (health records, financial history, credit rating, Google searches, …) that is being stored on every civilian (or serf or slave) in the western world. But no need to worry, the new ID cards will be consolidated into a single database to make “protecting” your information that much easier. If this complete invasion of your privacy does not make your blood boil, then you should just let them install a video camera in your home.

Four years ago this week, the tanks rolled for what President Bush originally called, “Operation Iraqi Liberation” — O.I.L. I kid you not.

And it was four years ago that, from the White House, George Bush, declaring war, said, “I want to talk to the Iraqi people.” That Dick Cheney didn’t tell Bush that Iraqis speak Arabic … well, never mind. I expected the President to say something like, “Our troops are coming to liberate you, so don’t shoot them.” Instead, Mr. Bush told, the Iraqis,

“Do not destroy oil wells.“

Nevertheless, the Bush Administration said the war had nothing to do with Iraq’s oil. Indeed, in 2002, the State Department stated, and its official newsletter, the Washington Post, repeated, that State’s Iraq study group, “does not have oil on its list of issues.”

But now, we’ve learned that, despite protestations to the contrary, Condoleezza Rice held a secret meeting with the former Secretary-General of OPEC, Fadhil Chalabi, an Iraqi, and offered Chalabi the job of Oil Minister for Iraq. (It is well established that the President of the United States may appoint the cabinet ministers of another nation if that appointment is confirmed by the 101st Airborne.)

In all the chest-beating about how the war did badly, no one seems to remember how the war did very, very well — for Big Oil.

The war has kept Iraq’s oil production to 2.1 million barrels a day from pre-war, pre-embargo production of over 4 million barrels. In the oil game, that’s a lot to lose. In fact, the loss of Iraq’s 2 million barrels a day is equal to the entire planet’s reserve production capacity.

In other words, the war has caused a hell of a supply squeeze — and Big Oil just loves it. Oil today is $57 a barrel versus the $18 a barrel price under Bill “Love-Not-War” Clinton.

Since the launch of Operation Iraqi Liberation, Halliburton stock has tripled to $64 a share — not, as some believe, because of those Iraq reconstruction contracts — peanuts for Halliburton. Cheney’s former company’s main business is “oil services.” And, as one oilman complained to me, Cheney’s former company has captured a big hunk of the rise in oil prices by jacking up the charges for Halliburton drilling and piping equipment.

But before we shed tears for Big Oil’s having to hand Halliburton its slice, let me note that the value of the reserves of the five biggest oil companies more than doubled during the war to $2.36 trillion.

And that was the plan: putting a new floor under the price of oil. I have that in writing. In 2005, after a two-year battle with the State and Defense Departments, they released to my team at BBC Newsnight the “Options for a Sustainable Iraqi Oil Industry.” Now, you might think our government shouldn’t be writing a plan for another nation’s oil. Well, our government didn’t write it, despite the State Department seal on the cover. In fact, we discovered that the 323-page plan was drafted in Houston by oil industry executives and consultants.

The suspicion is that Bush went to war to get Iraq’s oil. That’s not true. The document, and secret recordings of those in on the scheme, made it clear that the Administration wanted to make certain America did not get the oil. In other words, keep the lid on Iraq’s oil production — and thereby keep the price of oil high.

Of course, the language was far more subtle than, “Let’s cut Iraq’s oil production and jack up prices.” Rather, the report uses industry jargon and euphemisms which require Iraq to remain an obedient member of the OPEC cartel and stick to the oil-production limits — “quotas” — which keep up oil prices.

The Houston plan, enforced by an army of occupation, would, “enhance [Iraq’s] relationship with OPEC,” the oil cartel.

And that’s undoubtedly why Condoleezza Rice asked Fadhil Chalabi to take charge of Iraq’s Oil Ministry. As former chief operating officer of OPEC, the oil cartel, Fadhil was a Big Oil favorite, certain to ensure that Iraq would never again allow the world to slip back to the Clinton era of low prices and low profits. (In investigating for BBC, I was told by the former chief of the CIA’s oil unit that he’d met with Fadhil regarding oil at Bush’s request. Fadhil recently complained to the BBC. He denied the meeting with the Bush emissary in London because, he noted, he was secretly meeting that week in Washington with Condi!)

Fadhil, by the way, turned down Condi’s offer to run Iraq’s Oil Ministry. Ultimately, Iraq’s Oil Ministry was given to Fadhil’s fellow tribesman, Ahmad Chalabi, a convicted bank swindler and neo-con idol. But whichever Chalabi is nominal head of Iraq’s oil industry in Baghdad, the orders come from Houston. Indeed, the oil law adopted by Iraq’s shaky government this month is virtually a photocopy of the “Options” plan first conceived in Texas long before Iraq was “liberated.”

In other words, the war has gone exactly to plan — the Houston plan. So forget the naïve cloth-rending about a conflict gone haywire. Exxon-Mobil reported a record $10 billion profit last quarter, the largest of any corporation in history. Mission Accomplished.

‘Beware the ides of March’, is said as a warning of impending and certain danger. Since it is from Plutarch, referring to a warning to Julius Caesar, it is unlikely to have influenced George W.Bush’s ‘shock and awe’ decision to invade Iraq in March, since literature is not his forte. (Unless you count ‘My Pet Goat’.)

For Iraq though, March brings not alone the fourth anniversary of the illegal US led invasion, monumental destruction of life, all societal structures, history, the National Museum, libraries of ancient manuscripts, all records from educational qualifications to medical reports, births, deaths and marriages and never ending death and trauma beyond imagination, but the memory of the 1991 ‘turkey shoot’ on the Basra Road and the US encouraged uprisings in the south and north – then bloodily put down – with US assistance. March marked the beginning of the forty day period of mourning for the thousands of retreating conscripts and civilian families incinerated in their vehicles, when B52’s bombed the front and back of the sixty mile convoy, then relentlessly bombed the rest ‘like sitting ducks’, as one pilot explained.

At least ‘fifteen hundred tanks, armoured vehicles, jeeps, water and fuel tankers, ambulances, firetrucks, tractor trailors, buses and civilian vehicles and passenger cars … some flying white flags’ were ‘pounded for hours’ with anti-personel bombs ‘and finally finished off with devastating B52 bombing runs’. It is thought that thousands were crushed, or incinerated in their vehicles. Windscreens and humanity melted. As the William Tell overture and the Lone Ranger theme, blasted out on the USS Ranger, ‘planes reloaded and reloaded, returning to hit the convoy again and again, dropping everything from cluster bombs to five hundred pound bombs ‘like sharks in a feeding frenzy’.

US Air Force planes from Saudia Arabia ‘raced north to join in the fun’. There was so much air traffic involved in the ‘frenzy’ that the ‘killing box’ had to be divided up by air traffic controllers to prevent aircraft colliding. ‘I think we’re past the point of letting (Hussein) get in his tanks and drive them back to Iraq ….’ a US pilot said, adding: ‘I feel fairly punitive about it.’ Saddam Hussein, in whose name the United Nations denied medicines, food, pencils and even blackboards since he would personally misuse them, was now apparently capable of driving sixty miles of vehicles, single handedly.

‘It’s a slaughter’, Jordanian businessman Zaki Ayoubi said:’You are going to slaughter one hundred thousand young men who belong to one hundred thousand families. We’re not talking abstract artillery and machinery.’ President Bush senior, cared, not about indescribable carnage, but semantics. ‘Saddam’s most recent speech’ (saying Iraq was withdrawing from Kuwait, which they did) ‘is an outrage … his forces are retreating.’ Vice President Dan Quayle (over who, stories abound regarding string pulling in order to avoid service in Viet Nam abound) chimed in saying that a lasting peace and Saddam were incompatable. Thus was bloodbath justified.

Admitting ‘massive casualties’, those not vapourised were buried in mass graves in the desert. Soldiers cleaning up ‘said they were satisfied justice had been done.’ Bush senior was asked in beautiful Martinique whether he had any thoughts that the carnage had got out of hand and replied: ‘No, none at all’. Much was made of the fact that many of the vehicles contained ‘looted’ items – toys, silverware, vaccum cleaners, soap, even underwear, as some kind of justification for the massacre. Even in the casual world of US justice, looting does not carry the death penalty (if it did, there would be even more dead US and British soldiers in Iraq currently) and whilst there was indeed looting, Iraqis and Kuwaitis intermarried and many were fleeing with personal belongings from a home they had now had to leave. Then as now there were also many fleeing Palestinians. (See: ‘Desert Mirage’, Martin Yant, Prometheus Books.)

White House spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater had given a committment that US and coalition forces would not attack Iraqi forces leaving Kuwait. Yet: ‘Even in Viet Nam, I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic’, stated Major Bob Nugent of US Army Intelligence. (War Crimes. Ramsey Clark and others, Maisonneuve Press.)

The Iraqi pull out from Kuwait began on 26th February 1991, the ceasefire was signed on the 28th February. On 2nd March 1991, the US 24th Mechanised Division slaughtered thousands more Iraqi soldiers, an action approved by General Norman Schwatzkopf (who famously remarked: ‘no one left to kill’. His autobiography is ‘It doesn’t take a Hero’. Indeed.) ‘We really waxed them’, said one Commander. Another American was recorded saying ‘Say hello to Allah’, as his Hellfire missile obliterated a vehicle. ‘Yee-hah’, said another voice. There was an attempt to cover up the carnage of another vehicle strewn road, since: ‘..it didn’t look good coming after the ceasefire.’ (Ramsey Clark, The Fire this Time, Thunder’s Mouth Press.) The then US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had told Saddam Hussein that America had ‘no view on Arab-Arab conflicts.’ Hussein had consulted her on the possible invasion. Iraq accused Kuwait of slant-drilling into their Rumaila oil field across Kuwait’s border, destabilising Iraq’s currency and moving Kuwaiti settlements well into Iraqi territory.

One conscript who survived the horrors of the Basra Road, with the remnants of his unit, told me how they had walked the five hundred and fifty kilometres, through the destruction, by the body parts, home, to carpet bombed Baghdad, none knowing whether family or house had survived: ‘We wanted to cry, but we had no tears left.’ Eighty eight thousand five hundred tonnes of bombs had fallen on ancient Mesapotamia, which brought the world all we call civlized.

As the wickedness of George W.Bush and his war criminal Administration are marked, four years on from the illegal invasion and destruction of the ‘cradle of civilisation’, another George Bush and other criminal acts should also be remembered. He may have taken to crying publicly over his son, he should also look in the mirror.

10. Refusing to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when his incompetence and maliciousness became apparent in the growing guerrilla war and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

9. Declining to intervene in the collapsed economy or help put Iraqi state industries back on a good footing, on the grounds that the “market” would magically produce prosperity effortlessly.

8. Invading and destroying the Sunni Arab city of Fallujah in November, 2004, thus pushing the Sunni Arabs into the arms of the insurgency in protest and ensuring that they would boycott the January, 2005, parliamentary elections, a boycott that excluded them from power and from a significant voice in crafting the new constitution, which they then rejected.

7. Suddenly announcing that the US would “kill or capture” young nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in spring, 2004, throwing the country into massive turmoil for months.

6. Replying to Baathist guerrilla provocations with harsh search and destroy missions that humiliated and angered ever more Sunni Arab clans, driving them to support or join the budding guerrilla movement.

4. Dissolving the Iraqi Army in May, 2003, and sending 400,000 men home, unemployed, resentful and heavily armed.

3. Allowing widespread looting after the fall of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003, on the grounds that “stuff happens,” “democracy is messy,” and “how many vases can they have?”– and thus signalling that there would be no serious attempt to provide law and order in American Iraq.

2. Plotting to install corrupt financier, notorious liar, and shady operator Ahmad Chalabi as the soft dictator of Iraq, and refusing to plan for a post-war administration of the country because that might forestall Chalabi’s coronation.

While serving as President Bush’s White House lawyer, Alberto Gonzales advised Bush that the president’s war time powers permitted Bush to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and to use the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on US citizens without obtaining warrants from the FISA court as required by law. Under an order signed by Bush in 2002, NSA illegally spied on Americans without warrants.

By spying on Americans without obtaining warrants, Bush committed felonies under FISA. Moreover, there is strong, indeed overwhelming, evidence that justice was obstructed when Bush and Gonzales blocked a 2006 Justice Department investigation into whether Gonzales acted properly as Attorney General in approving and overseeing the Bush administration’s program of spying on US citizens. Also at issue is whether Gonzales acted properly in advising Bush to kill an investigation of Gonzales’ professional actions with regard to the NSA spy program.

We are faced with the almost certain fact that the two highest law enforcement officials of the United States are criminals.

The evidence that Bush and Gonzales have obstructed justice comes from internal Justice Department memos and exchanges of letters between the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), an investigative office, and members of Congress. The documents were leaked to the National Journal, and the story was reported in the March 15, 2007, issue by Murray Waas, who also relied on interviews with both current and former high ranking DOJ officials. Ten months previously on May 25, 2006, Waas broke the story in the National Journal about the derailing of the OPR investigation.

From Waas’s report it is obvious that many current and former Justice Department officials have serious concerns about the high-handed behavior of the Bush administration. The incriminating documents were leaked to the National Journal, the only remaining national publication that has any credibility. The New York Times and Washington Post have proven to be supine tools of the Bush administration and are no longer trusted.