-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message: Date: October 7, 2005 8:24:08 AM PDT Subject: Bush's Televised Speech Arranged by Neocons
Bush says Muslim radicals building [rival?] empireSwitzerland: http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?id=13071 ISN SECURITY WATCH (06/10/2005) - US President George Bush, fighting low poll numbers and setbacks on Capitol Hill, told the US people on Thursday that intelligence agencies had foiled at least 10 terror plots around the world, including three in the US. In a speech at the "National Endowment for Democracy," a congressionally funded but independent institute <<see below>>, Bush warned that Muslim radicals were trying to set up an empire with Iraq as their base. He said the only way to counter them was not to back down, as some critics of the war in Iraq are demanding, but to stay the course and show the militants that the resolve of the US had not waned. "The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia," Bush said. "Against such an enemy, there's only one effective response: We never back down, never give in, and never accept anything less than complete victory." Since the 11 September 2001 terror attacks on the US and subsequent US-led "war on terror", Bush has presented terrorism and Muslim militancy as the new challenge facing the world. On Thursday, the president said intelligence agencies had foiled 10 terror attacks worldwide, including three in the US. He did not elaborate. Separately on Thursday, officials in New York said they had received a specific and unconfirmed threat against the city's transit system and said that police presence would be heightened. The threat extended to the coming days, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. On Thursday, Bush compared radical Islam to Communism and invoked the memory of the Cold War-era struggle for ideology. "The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century," Bush said. "Like the ideology of Communism, our new enemy teaches that innocent individuals can be sacrificed to serve a political vision." The comments came amid slumping poll numbers for the president and criticism even from his allies in Congress over the way the war in Iraq is being conducted. In the latest setback, the Senate voted on Thursday overwhelmingly, 90-9, to establish specific guidelines outlawing torture and abuse in interrogations of detainees in the "war on terror". Bush has threatened to veto such an attempt, saying it undermines the war effort. The president also noted, in the face of growing calls for a complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, that it was important to stay the course. Otherwise, he said, extremists might think they had the upper hand. He said the extremists hoped to use "the vacuum created by an American retreat" to gain control of Iraq and use it as a base for launching attacks against other countries. "There's always a temptation in the middle of a long struggle to seek the quiet life, to escape the duties and problems of the world, and to hope the enemy grows weary of fanaticism and tired of murder," he said. "We will keep our nerve and we will win that victory." Bush also criticized Iran and Syria, calling them "allies for convenience" for their alleged support of Iraq's anti-US insurgency. Both nations have dismissed the allegations. Democrats criticized the speech, saying it was more of the same. "The president went into Iraq under a false premise, without a plan, and has totally mismanaged our involvement," Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said. "Now he is trying to justify his actions with a series of excuses." Top Republicans praised it, however. "I've been saying for a long time the president needs to better define this war," Republican Senator Rick Santorum said. Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told ISN Security Watch there was nothing new in what the president had said, except for his attempt to link radical Islam and Communism. "The speech was another feeble attempt to shoehorn his unwise war in Iraq to his larger war on radical Islam,” Carpenter said. "Iraq is unpopular. The public supports the war on terror, so he tries to merge the two." (By Krishnadev Calamur in Washington, DC) --------------------------------- Trojan Horse: "The National Endowment for Democracy" excerpted from the book "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower" by William Blum Common Courage Press, 2000http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/TrojanHorse_RS.html How many Americans could identify the "National Endowment for Democracy," an organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name implies? The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate, the Church Committee of the Senate, the Pike Committee of the House, and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment. Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name -- the "National Endowment for Democracy." The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities. It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations and of cynicism. Thus it was that in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to "support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". Notice the "nongovernmental" part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED. The Endowment has four principal initial recipients of funds: the International Republican Institute; the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs; an affiliate of the AFL-CIO (such as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity); and an affiliate of the Chamber of Commerce (such as the Center for International Private Enterprise). These institutions then disburse funds to other institutions in the US and all over the world, which then often disburse funds to yet other organizations. In a multitude of ways, NED meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries by supplying funds, technical know-how, training, educational materials, computers, fax machines, copiers, automobiles and so on, to selected political groups, civic organizations, labor unions, dissident movements, student groups, book publishers, newspapers, other media, etc. NED programs generally impart the basic philosophy that working people and other citizens are best served under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation, collective bargaining, minimal government intervention in the economy and opposition to socialism in any shape or form. A freemarket economy is equated with democracy, reform and growth, and the merits of foreign investment are emphasized. From 1994 to 1996, NED awarded 15 grants, totaling more than $2,500,000, to the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an organization used by the CIA for decades to subvert progressive labor unions. AlFLD's work within Third World unions typically involved a considerable educational effort very similar to the basic NED philosophy described above. The description of one of the 1996 NED grants to AIFLD includes as one its objectives: "build union-management cooperation". Like many things that NED says, this sounds innocuous, if not positive, but these in fact are ideological code words meaning "keep the labor agitation down...don't rock the status quo boat". The relationship between NED and AIFLD very well captures the CIA origins of NED. The Endowment has funded centrist and rightist labor organizations to help them oppose those unions which were too militantly proworker. This has taken place in France, Portugal and Spain amongst many other places. In France, during the 1983-4 period, NED supported a "trade union-like organization for professors and students" to counter "left-wing organizations of professors". To this end it funded a series of seminars and the publication of posters, books and pamphlets such as "Subversion and the Theology of Revolution" and "Neutralism or Liberty". ("Neutralism" here refers to being unaligned in the Cold War.) NED describes one of its 1997-98 programs thusly: "To identify barriers to private sector development at the local and federal levels in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and to push for legislative change...[and] to develop strategies for private sector growth." Critics of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic have been supported by NED grants for years. In short, NED's programs are in sync with the basic needs and objectives of the New World Order's economic globalization, just as the programs have for years been on the same wavelength as US foreign policy. Because of a controversy in 1984-when NED funds were used to aid a Panamanian presidential candidate backed by Manuel Noriega and the CIA-Congress enacted a law prohibiting the use of NED funds "to finance the campaigns of candidates for public office." But the ways to circumvent the spirit of such a prohibition are not difficult to come up with; as with American elections, there's "hard money" and there's "soft money". ... NED successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996 and helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992. In Haiti in the late l990s, NED was busy working on behalf of right wing groups who were united in their opposition to former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his progressive ideology. NED has made its weight felt in the electoral-political process in numerous other countries. NED would have the world believe that it's only teaching the ABCs of democracy and elections to people who don't know them, but in all five countries named above there had already been free and fair elections held. The problem, from NED's point of view, is that the elections had been won by political parties not on NED's favorites list. The Endowment maintains that it's engaged in "opposition building" and "encouraging pluralism". "We support people who otherwise do not have a voice in their political system," said Louisa Coan, a NED program officer. But NED hasn't provided aid to foster progressive or leftist opposition in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua or Eastern Europe-or, for that matter, in the United States even though these groups are hard pressed for funds and to make themselves heard. Cuban dissident groups and media are heavily supported however. NED's reports carry on endlessly about "democracy", but at best it's a modest measure of mechanical political democracy they have in mind, not economic democracy; nothing that aims to threaten the powers-that-be or the way-things-are, unless of course it's in a place like Cuba. The Endowment played an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components of Oliver North's shadowy "Project Democracy" network <<see below>>, which privatized US foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs and engaged in other equally charming activities. At one point in 1987, a White House spokesman stated that those at NED "run Project Democracy". This was an exaggeration; it would have been more correct to say that NED was the public arm of Project Democracy, while North ran the covert end of things. In any event, the statement caused much less of a stir than if-as in an earlier period-it had been revealed that it was the CIA which was behind such an unscrupulous operation. NED also mounted a multi-level campaign to fight the leftist insurgency in the Philippines in the mid-1980s, funding a host of private organizations, including unions and the media. This was a replica of a typical CIA operation of pre-NED days. And between 1990 and 1992, the Endowment donated a quarter-million dollars of taxpayers' money to the Cuban-American National Fund, the ultra-fanatic anti-Castro Miami group. The CANF, in turn, financed Luis Posada Carriles, one of the most prolific and pitiless terrorists of modern times, who was involved in the blowing up of a Cuban airplane in 1976, which killed 73 people. In 1997, he was involved in a series of bomb explosions in Havana hotels. The NED, like the CIA before it, calls what it does supporting democracy. The governments and movements whom the NED targets call it destabilization. ---------------------- **A recently incarnated "Project Democracy" outfit, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), was created post-9/11 to provide "bipartisan" support to the war on terrorism. The directors of the FDD are Steve Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine and former Republican Party Presidential pre-candidate; former Congressman and Bob Dole Vice Presidential running-mate Jack Kemp; and Dr. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the Reagan Administration United Nations Ambassador and founder of Social Democrats USA. The two "Distinguished Advisors" to the group are former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and R. James Woolsey, the former CIA Director. Both Gingrich and Woolsey are on Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, along with Richard Perle, and are unabashed advocates of a broad war against Islam — what Woolsey promotes as "World War IV," in articles prominently displayed on the FDD website.Other members of its Advisory Board include rabid Christian Zionist Gary Bauer, Center for Security Policy neo-con wildman Frank Gaffney, Weekly Standard editor and American Enterprise Institute Strauss-disciple William Kristol, and Richard Perle, until recently the chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board. Among the Foundation's staff are former Republican National Committee official and FDD President Clifford May; and Stephen Schwartz, author of a recent hysterical diatribe against Saudi Arabia, The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud From Tradition to Terror. ... The neo-cons migrated into the GOP in 1980, landing top posts in the Reagan Pentagon. They were pivotal in the formal launching of "Project Democracy," the global covert operation to make the world "safe for democracy and free trade," which had been first demanded in Huntington's 1975 Crisis of Democracy. While speaking of "democracy," Huntington actually called for a new authoritarianism "with a democratic face," to deal with the looming global financial and economic crises and the consequences of the drive for a "post-industrial" paradigm shift. Key to that was the co-opting of the Democratic and Republican parties as instrumentalities for a new totalitarianism at home, and imperial wars abroad. On board were McCain, Lieberman, Wolfowitz, Perle, and Cheney, pushing President Bush to cave in to the war party and invade Iraq. On Feb. 25, it sent a letter to the President, which began, "We write because we share the view that it is essential to bring Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq to an early end. Broad and bi-partisan support at home—not simply passive assent—must be sought for this objective." The signators stated, "We must act alone if that proves necessary, but first we must do all we can to win allies." The letter praised Bush's British war partner: "We believe that a significant body of opinion can be persuaded of the view argued by Prime Minister Tony Blair: 'Ridding the world of Saddam would be an act of humanity.' A clear statement of your plan for supporting democracy and human rights in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East will help us all reach out to those who are open to this truth." The letter was signed by 53 prominent neo-cons. Among the most significant: Charles Fairbanks, a lifetime personal friend and protégé of Paul Wolfowitz, and co-author, with Perle and Douglas Feith, of the 1996 "Clean Break" study for Benjamin Netanyahu; Hillel Fradkin, who replaced Elliott Abrams as head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and is another disciple of Leo Strauss; Bruce P. Jackson, founder and director of the liberal imperialist lobby, Project for the New American Century; Robert Kagan, alter ego to William Kristol, and a second-generation Straussian; Penn Kemble, a central player in the Reagan era Iran-Contra fiasco, as head of the Project Democracy money conduit, Prodemca; Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the think-tank of the DLC, and the editor-at-large of the DLC's Blueprint; Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; Constantine Menges, Hudson Institute war fanatic and former Reagan NSC staffer; Michael Novak, the resident right-wing heretical Catholic at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI); New Republic publisher and co-owner (with DLC bankroller Michael Steinhardt) Martin Peretz; Nina Shea, Freedom House activist; R. Emmett Tyrrell, editor-in-chief of the American Spectator; Ben Wattenberg, leading first-generation neo-con ideologue at AEI; and R. James Woolsey. http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2003/3026dlc_n_cheney.html
www.ctrl.org
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/
<A HREF="">ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
|
