12:18 pm - Rape of Iraqi Women by US Occupation Forces
maxwell  Photos Show Rape of Iraqi Women by US Occupation Forces (Please Note: Many of the photographs showing the rape of Iraqi women and the sodomization of Iraqi POW's at the Abu Ghraib prison are now at USA pornographic websites pointing to the possibility of collusion between the depraved US soldiers in the pictures and US based Jewish pornographers. Many of these photographs were also freely disseminated to US occupation forces, perhaps to inflame their nefarious desires and to motivate them to strike out against the Iraqi populace in these perverse ways.) by Ernesto Cienfuegos La Voz de Aztlan Los Angeles, Alta California - May 2, 2004 - (ACN) The release, by CBS News, of the photographs showing the heinous sexual abuse and torture of Iraqi POW's at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison has opened a Pandora's box for the Bush regime. Apparently, the suspended US commander of the prison where the worst abuses took place, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, has refused to take the fall by herself and has implicated the CIA, Military Intelligence and private US government contractors in the torturing of POW's and in the raping of Iraqi women detainees as well. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski said to the Washington Post that Military Intelligence, rather than the Military Police, dictated the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. "The prison, and that particular cellblock where the events took place, were under the control of the Military Intelligence command," Brigadier General Karpinski said to the Washington Post Saturday night in a telephone interview from her home in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Brigadier General Karpinski, who commanded the 800th Military Police Brigade, described a high-pressure Military Intelligence and CIA command that prized successful interrogations. A month before the alleged abuses and rapes occurred, she said, a team of CIA, Military Intelligence officers and private consultants under the employ of the US government came to Abu Ghraib. "Their main and specific mission was to give the interrogators new techniques to get more information from detainees," she said. Today, new photographs were sent to La Voz de Aztlan from confidential sources depicting the shocking rapes of two Iraqi women by what are purported to be US Military Intelligence personnel and private US mercenaries in military fatigues. It is now known that hundreds of these photographs had been in circulation among the troops in Iraq. The graphic photos were being swapped between the soldiers like baseball cards. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one Mexican-American soldier told La Voz de Aztlan, "Maybe the officers didn't know what was going on, but everybody else did. I have seen literally hundreds of these types of pictures." Many of the pictures were destroyed last September when the luggage of soldiers was searched as they left Iraq, he said An investigation, led by Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, identified two military intelligence officers and two civilian contractors for the Army as key figures in the abuse cases at the Abu Ghraib prison. In an internal report on his findings, Major General Taguba said he suspected that the four were "either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and strongly recommended disciplinary action." The Taguba report states that "military intelligence interrogators and other U.S. Government Agency interrogators actively requested that Military Police guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses." The report noted that one civilian interrogator, a contractor from a company called CACI International and attached to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, "clearly knew his instructions" to the Military Police equated to physical and sexual abuse. It is not known whether these instructions included, or led to, the raping of Iraqi women detainees as well. A released Iraqi POW has come forward and stated to the internationl media that that he was sodomized at the Abu Ghraib prison while a female US soldier cheered and the entire incident filmed. . . . .     Related La Voz de Aztlan article: The Rape of Latinas in the US Military   Iraqi POW Torture Photographs (Click Here)     HOME (1 comment | comment on this)
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
7:41 am - Master of Denial: The Rumsfeld Chronicles
maxwell Media Advisory The Return of PSYOPS Military's media manipulation demands more investigation 12/3/04 The Los Angeles Times revealed...(12/1/04) that the U.S. military lied to CNNin the course of executing psychological warfare operations, or PSYOPS, in advance of the (recent)attack on Fallujah.   This incident raises serious questions about government disinformation and journalistic credibility, but recent discussions of the government's propaganda plans have excluded some valuable context. In an October 14 on-air interview, Marine Lt. Lyle Gilbert told CNN Pentagon reporter Jamie McIntyre that a U.S. military assault on Fallujah had begun. In fact, the offensive would not actually begin for another three weeks. The goal of the psychological operation, according to the Times , was to deceive Iraqi insurgents into revealing what they would do in the event of an actual offensive. This operation raises obvious questions about the government's use of media to broadcast disinformation at home and abroad-- not to mention questions about journalistic gullibility and reluctance to question official claims . But the CNN story has received little pick-up so far from other news outlets-- and when it is covered, it's treated like an isolated episode, even though recent history shows that U.S. government plans to deceive journalists and the public are widespread and systematic, not aberrational.     Shortly before the launch of the "war on terror," an unnamed Pentagon ar planner seemed to warn journalists everywhere when he told Washington Post eporter Howard Kurtz: "This is the most information-intensive war you an imagine... We're going to lie about things." (9/24/01) In February 2002, the New York Times eported that the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) was "developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to oreign media organizations" in an effort "to influence public entiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries." The story got widespread attention, and the Pentagon announced that the office would be eliminated. But considerably less media attention was paid when efense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later said that, while the OSI had been closed, its mission would be taken up by other agencies. As Rumsfeld put it, "I went down that next day and said:  'Fine, if you want to savage this thing, fine-- I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.'" (   The ability to detect the "shift" And a 1996 unofficial strategy paper written by an Army officer and published by the U.S. Naval War College ("Military Operations in the CNN World: Using the Media as a Force Multiplier") urged military commanders to find ways to "leverage the vast resources of the fourth estate" for the purposes of "communicating the [mission's] objective and endstate, boosting friendly morale, executing more effective psychological operations, playing a major role in deception of the enemy, and enhancing intelligence collection." Of course, the full extent of these programs is not yet known. But the fact that the U.S. government is intentionally lying to journalists, and by extension to the public, should be big news. Unfortunately, the L.A. Times report is generating little mainstream media attention. CNN's Aaron Brown reported the story (12/1/04), admitting that "none of us are particularly comfortable when we're talking about things, about ourselves if you will." Brown also made another, even more revealing comment: "There is an important and explicitbargainbetween the press and the Pentagon in a time of war. Wedon'tdoanything to endanger the troops or operations. Theydon'tlie to us. Each is essential in a freesociety and each is mademorecomplicated by the informationage, but it seems that sometimes in an effort to mislead the enemy the military has come close, very close, to crossing the line and misleading you." Of course, in this case the military did not come "very close" to misleading the public; they did mislead the public. And while Brown may have confidence that such a "bargain" exists between the press and the military, it would appear that the Pentagon does not agree. If journalists were more willing to accept the old adage that "all governments lie," we might all be better served. CNN Responds to FAIR on PSYOPS in the Newsroom ACTIVISM UPDATE: April 5, 2000 On March 27, FAIR released an action alert urging readers to contact CNN and ask why the network allowed military propaganda specialists from an Army Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) unit to work in the news division of its Atlanta headquarters. That action alert can be found on FAIR's website: ( http://www.fair.org/activism/cnn-psyops.html).

 

 

 

 

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Reviews

 

 

    Heinlein wrote TakeBackYourGovernment (originally entitled, How to be a Politician) in the months following the end of World War II, at a time when he felt an urgent need to warn the U.S. populace about the arms race.

Heinlein himself referred to that time as his 'world saving' phase.

Given the tenor of TakeBackYourGovernment, Heinlein might have felt concern over the way the Truman administration was handling any number of situations in the wake of the war(this was written as everyone was witnessing radical and sometimes painful postbellum changes: housing shortages, spiraling inflation, epidemic labor strikes, Taft-Hartley, the Marshall Plan and other outlays of foreign aid, the National Security Act, the creation of the United Nations and many other things).

And perhaps Heinlein had a little more faith in the wisdom of ordinary citizens acting in their enlightened self interest during this period of gearing down from World War II and ratchetting up to a new Cold War footing. To this end, he penned what amounts to a manual for citizens who wished to get involved in politics at the precinct level.

     As recently as late September 2007 we could see basic private citizens approaching government on the Direct Democracy level - in particular the rap artists David Banner and Percy B. Miller. 

     It was the sad place of Direct Democracy in the setting of Constitutional Republic -- two artists testifying about the harshness of their life experiences as Afro-Americans, and how that experience led to the harsh poetry of their chosen genres.  That is what Direct Democracy has been since the time of Pericles -- citizens dealing directly as representatives with no electoral "middleman."

PERIKLES (c. 495–429 BC)

Athenian politician under whom Athens reached the height of power. He persuaded the Athenians to reject Sparta's ultimata in 432 BC, and was responsible for Athenian strategy in the opening years of the Peloponnesian War. His policies helped to transform the Delian League into an empire, but the disasters of the Peloponnesian War led to his removal from office in 430 BC. Although quickly reinstated, he died soon after.

    The difference? In Perikles' nascent Democracy women had effectively no voice.  That is a situation which after centuries of grindingly slow political evolution is on the verge of changing for the better. Perhaps.  But Democracy is different than Res Publika:  in Democracy the voice of the people is the voice of God.  That has been a despised and lied about ethic since the time of Plato and it is Plato's Republic in ideology and manifestation that those who would change the American federal system face, period.

    Although we all know RobertHeinlein best as one of the truly great authors of speculative fiction, it is in the pages of TakeBackYourGovernment that he shares with us his considerable know-how in the field of politics. In the 1930's, before he became a professional writer, Heinlein got thoroughly involved in California politics (as a Democrat!), both turning out copy for Sinclair Lewis' gubernatorial bid and himself running for a seat in the state legislature. Lewis and Heinlein both lost, but in the process, Heinlein learned a lot about the art and science of politics, from building coalitions to canvassing neighborhoods to dispensing patronage to working with machine pols, and he shares it all in this manual. His style is friendly and politically impartial, forsaking his opinions to concentrate totally on the civic processes that constitute the science of politics, and on the human niceties which constitute the art.

    One might wonder why a book written in 1946 about a style of politics that mass media and PACs have largely killed should be trotted out for publication in 1992.

What possible relevance could it have in 1990s America, where money and Madison Avenue put officials in office and a vast portion of the electorate is effectively disenfranchised?

In the election year of 1992, a lot of people felt a need to enfranchise themselves again and manifested their will by giving Ross Perot the largest percentage of the popular vote of any third-party presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose in 1912.

Though TakeBackYourGovernment hardly advocates the top-down approach that the Perotistas took, it does assure the ordinary citizen that he can, with a bit of dedication, make his will be felt.

 

 

 

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Excerpts

http://particlezen.proboards7.com/index.cgi?
John 16:33

the*edge*of*everything*

 

Robert Heinlein at 100

How the science fiction master created the template for our looser, hipper, more pluralist world.

Brian Doherty | August/September 2007 Print Edition

http://www.reason.com/news/show/120766.html

The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein's 100th birthday is July 7. Despite his visions of near-immortals and cryogenic sleep, he didn't live to see it. He died in 1988, mourned by millions of readers who saw him more as a father or a guru than merely as a spinner of captivating tales.

Fans plan to celebrate his centennial at a conference in Kansas City, near Heinlein's birthplace, in July. Among those who will be paying him homage are Buzz Aldrin (the second man to walk on the moon) and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), whose past includes stints as both a hippie folksinger and a Reagan speechwriter.

That pair of devotees says something about the range of Heinlein's influence. His influence on science fiction almost goes without saying; when the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America chose their field's first Grand Master, Heinlein was the easy choice. But Heinlein was bigger than his literary genre. Following him could lead you to seemingly contradictory places, from the military to a free-love commune.

Heinlein venerated the armed forces, most notoriously in his 1959 novel Starship Troopers, which celebrated an elite military order. Just two years later, he was publishing the counterculture classic Stranger in a Strange Land, with its simultaneously beatific, sexy, and heroic vision of Martian-inspired communal living. A rich mix of bohemian and straight-arrow values, Heinlein's unique take on American individualism made him the bridge between such disparate '60s icons as Barry Goldwater and Charles Manson.

Heinlein's novels and short stories reflected the rough-hewn anti-government but pro-defense message associated with Goldwater and the conservative movement he sparked. At the same time, his writings exuded the communal desire to live in blissful togetherness, ignoring the repressive sexual and religious mores of bourgeois America. With a libertarian vision that appealed to individualists of both the left and the right, Heinlein not only set the template for the American 1960s but helped create the looser, hipper, more pluralist world of the decades since.

Whether we're looking at post-Star Wars pop culture, post-Reagan politics, or the day-to-day tenor of our own lives in the Internet age, it's easy to see that while more literary novelists such as Philip Roth and Saul Bellow enjoy high-flying critical reputations, it's Heinlein's fingerprints that mark the modern world.

Heinlein the Soldier
Heinlein was born in 1907 in Butler, Missouri, the son of a farm equipment salesman. Family connections with the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City won him an appointment to Annapolis. He identified proudly with the Navy for the rest of his life, although he was retired in 1934 because of tuberculosis, just five years into his active service.

Heinlein sold his first S.F. story in 1939 and almost instantly became the acknowledged king of his field, under the tutelage of legendary Astounding editor John Campbell. In the Campbell era, with Heinlein leading the way, the S.F. magazines moved from didactic travelogues and amateurish intergalactic epics to intelligent treatments of politics, religion, and sociology. Heinlein was also the first S.F. writer to break into respectable "slick" fiction magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post after World War II, and he spearheaded the first sober space travel movie, Destination Moon(1950), in which private enterprise-beating back objections from early advocates of a sort of "precautionary principle," who feared it was to unsafe even to try-makes it to the moon.

Most important, from 1947 to 1958 Heinlein wrote a series of S.F. novels for boys, published by Scribner's, that seemed to make it into every high school and elementary school library. From book to book their scope widened, starting with plucky, capable boys making a simple moon flight (Rocket Ship Galileo) and progressing across the solar system, presenting young men fighting revolutions on Venus (Between Planets), farming on Ganymede (Farmer in the Sky), navigating interstellar starships ( Starman Jones), and finally defending the human race before an alien tribunal (Have Space Suit, Will Travel).

These coming-of-age adventure tales imagined an anti-xenophobic world in which aliens were lovable, inscrutable, and often wiser than men-although, for all that, occasionally dangerous. Those books lie close to the heart of almost everyone who went on to love or write science fiction, or to work to make its space travel dreams come true.

As the 1950s ended, Heinlein wrote a final boys' novel, Starship Troopers. Scribner's rejected it, finding it inappropriate for its intended youth market. It tells the story of a young man who finds his place in the world by joining the Mobile Infantry, going through the travails of training, and eventually fighting a war against sinister, implacable alien bugs whose ant-like lack of individuality was an unmistakable metaphor for communism.

Troopers was published in 1959, just before Barry Goldwater made his first big national splash with his 1960 manifesto Conscience of a Conservative. Goldwater's appeal had two things in common with Heinlein's: an individualist sense that Americans were being overmanaged and overpampered by an out-of-control federal government, and a belief that those rotten commies needed to get it, good and hard.

Heinlein was influenced by the same Cold War realities that inspired Goldwater. Even in the 1930s, during his brief involvement with Upton Sinclair's left-wing End Poverty in California movement, Heinlein had always been a staunch individualist (and somewhat of an elitist). His novels were peopled by super-competent men and women struggling against repressive governments and hidebound bureaucracies, not to mention more literal threats to their individuality, such as brain-controlling slugs from Saturn's moon Titan (in his 1951 Red Scare metaphor The Puppet Masters).

The struggle part was key to Heinlein's thought. In the 1950s, he viewed Soviet communism as a threat to individualism that needed to be combated by nearly any means necessary. (A draft, which he regarded as slavery under any circumstances, was not one of them.) One of his central ideas, repeated over and over again, was that man is the most dangerous beast in the universe. Thus, he saw no probable peaceful end to the Cold War. Preparing for a nuclear war he saw as bordering on inevitable was, he believed, an American's prime duty. In 1958 he bought newspaper ads calling for the formation of "Patrick Henry Leagues" to push this idea. (Among other things, the ads stated that "higher taxes" were a price worth paying to beat the Soviets.)

The novel that arose from this sense of mission, Starship Troopers , strikes many readers as overly militaristic, bordering on fascist. The S.F. writer and Nation critic Thomas Disch wrote that the book caused "so many of [Heinlein's] critics" to pin a "totalitarian" label on him. (Disch kindly said that "authoritarian" is more apt.) Troopers posited that a ruthless military was an inescapable aspect of human civilization, and it presented approvingly a society in which only veterans of public service could vote.

Heinlein's detractors ignored the fact that military service made up only a small portion of that public service. The novel kept its occasional paeans to authority and discipline strictly within the military context, not meant to apply to all human relations. It also explained that active military men were not permitted to hold public office and were in fact held in low regard by the rest of the culture.

The choice to enter the service and earn the franchise was both voluntary and rare. The society in Troopers was, despite such a restricted democracy, one where "personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits." Still, Heinlein's insistence on the importance and glory of the military, and of often brutal discipline within that context, left him, as Disch wrote, "able to amaze and appall the liberal imagination like almost no other SF writer."

Heinlein the Hippie
The anti-communist, pro-military message of Troopers might seem to suggest that Heinlein stood firmly on the right wing of the larger American individualist tradition. But Troopers appeared as Heinlein was in the middle of writing another novel, one that painted a very different picture.

The interrupted novel became his breakthrough both as a successful "mainstream" writer and as a public influence. It was Stranger in a Strange Land, about a human being raised by Martians who returns to Earth and begins a new religion of free love.

His name is Valentine Michael Smith, and he's brought back to Earth as a total naïf. He falls under the wings of a Heinlein stand-in, a popular fiction writer and curmudgeon named Jubal Harshaw. After many entertaining geopolitical machinations, lots of "everything you know is wrong"-style lectures from Harshaw, and a stint as a carnie, Smith starts a new religion which avers to each and every one of us that "Thou Art God."

Smith has the superhuman ability to, among other things, make both enemies and clothes disappear with just a thought. He teaches that casual sex with your "water brothers" (anyone you choose to share water with--a precious gesture on a desiccated Mars) is in Smith's words "a goodness," not a sin.

Stranger became a slow-burning bestseller, presaging the collapse of traditional sexual and religious mores in the 1960s. It gave the counterculture vocabulary the Martian word grok, that very '60s term meaning really, really understanding something, man, so that you and it were, like, as one. The novel presaged, among other things, the rise of charismatic non-Christian popular cults such as Transcendental Meditation and Scientology. Through Harshaw's lectures and Smith's attempts to teach repressed Earthlings a more loving, open way to live, it opened up the minds of many readers to an observation from George Bernard Shaw that Heinlein adored: that only a barbarian "believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature."

Stranger became a prop in youthful pads across the country. Unlike most such books that marked the owner as hip, this one actually presented a model, long before many American kids would actually try to put it into effect, of communal living. Many would-be "nests" arose, including a neopagan group that explicitly named itself after Smith's Church of All Worlds. Many of these seekers wrote Heinlein letters addressing him as "father" and requesting spiritual guidance. He found this disconcerting.

In 1967 David Crosby wrote a Stranger-inspired song of group love called "Triad" that name-checks "water brothers," and Crosby still enthusiastically considers Heinlein a personal hero. There are echoes of Stranger in the credo of the counterculture bible the Whole Earth Catalog, with its matter-of-fact declaration that "we are as gods and might as well get good at it." ("We all read Robert Heinlein's epic Stranger in a Strange Land as well as his libertarian screed-novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," catalog founder Stewart Brand later wrote. "Hippies and nerds alike reveled in Heinlein's contempt for centralized authority.") With the spirit of Valentine Michael Smit