Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Original version published Aug. 27, 2004, in The Moscow Times.

If you would know the hell that awaits us - and not far off - there's no need to consult ancient prophecies, or the intricate coils of hidden conspiracies, or the tortured arcana of high-credentialed experts. You need only read the public words, sworn before God, of top public officials, the great lords of state, the defenders of civilization, as they explain - clearly, openly, with confidence and pride - their plans to foment terror, rape, war and repression across the face of the earth.

Last month, in little-noticed testimony before Congress, the Bush Regime unveiled its plans to raise a host of warlord armies in the most volatile areas in the world, Agence France-Presse reports. Bush wants $500 million in seed money to arm and train non-governmental "local militias" - i.e., bands of lawless freebooters - to serve as Washington's proxy killers in the so-called "arc of crisis" that just happens to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and strategic pipeline routes of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and South America.

Flanked by a gaggle of military brass, Pentagon deputy honcho Paul Wolfowitz told a rapt panel of Congressional rubber-stamps that Bush wants big bucks to run "counter-insurgency" and "counter-terrorist" operations in "ungoverned areas" of the world - and in the hinterlands of nations providing "sanctuary" for terrorists. Making copious citations from Bush's 2002 "National Security Strategy" of unprovoked aggressive war against "potential" enemies, Howlin' Wolf proposed expanding the definition of "terrorist sanctuary" to any nation that allows clerics and other rabble-rousers to offer even verbal encouragement to America's designated enemies du jour.

Any rogue state that countenances such freedom of speech within its borders will become a prime target for "the path of action," said Wolf, quoting Bush's most ringing Hitlerian phrase from the 2002 manifesto. To relieve the overstretched U.S. military, the "action" will be carried out largely by Bush's new hired guns: religious and ethnic militias, tribal forces, mercenaries, cultists, insurrectionists, druglords, pirates - basically anyone willing to slit throats and terrorize populations at the order of the Oval One.

A more sinister - not to mention stupid - policy can scarcely be imagined. One of the most spectacular miscalculations in modern history was the American decision to create an international army of Islamic extremists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Together with the repressive militarists of Pakistan and the head-chopping religious tyrants of Saudi Arabia, American leaders armed, funded, supplied and shaped the global jihad - beginning before the Soviet intervention, which the bloody religious insurgency successfully provoked, as Washington intended. The CIA ended up fighting cheek-by-jowl with the likes of Osama bin Laden, helpfully providing the holy warriors with extensive training in "asymmetrical warfare" - i.e., terrorism. These rabid chickens came home to roost with a vengeance on Sept. 11, 2001, and are now running wild all over the world.

Meanwhile, the Afghan warlords thus empowered by Washington proceeded to tear the country to shreds, killing more than 50,000 people in Kabul alone during their post-Soviet factional frenzy, creating a hell so dire that even the Taliban's vicious moralism seemed a welcome relief for a time. These same warlords are back in the saddle again, paid by Bush as they re-establish their petty fiefdoms of repression, religious obscurantism, rampant crime, factional violence - and dope-dealing on a record-breaking scale, the Independent reports.

The "victory" in Afghanistan has deteriorated so badly that last month the UN's own staff workers called on the organization to leave the country because it is too dangerous, the BBC reports. This follows the July pull-out of Medecins Sans Frontieres, the Nobel-winning medical aid group that managed to survive in Afghanistan for 24 years, through the anti-Soviet jihad, the murderous civil war and the depredations of the Taliban. But with Bush's paid proxies now in control, even the redoubtable doctors have had to quit the field.

There's nothing really new in Bush's murder-by-proxy scheme, of course; America has a long, bipartisan tradition of paying local thugs to do Washington's bloodwork. For example, late last month, Guatemala was forced to pay $420 million in extortion to veterans of the U.S.-backed "paramilitaries" who helped Ronald Reagan's favorite dictator, right-wing Christian coupster Efrain Rios Montt, kill 100,000 innocent people during his reign, the BBC reports. The paramilitaries, whose well-documented war crimes include rape, murder and torture, had threatened to shut down the country if they weren't given some belated booty for their yeoman service in the Reagan-Bush cause.

But Wolfowitz did reveal one original twist in Bush's plan: targeting the Homeland itself as a "terrorist sanctuary." In addition to loosing his own personal Janjaweed on global hotspots, Bush is also seeking new powers to prevent anyone he designates a "terrorist" from "abusing the freedom of democratic societies" or "exploiting the technologies of communication" - i.e., defending themselves in court or logging on to the Internet. As AFP notes, Wolfowitz tactfully refrained from detailing just how the Regime intends to curb the dangerous use of American freedom, but he did allow that "difficult decisions" would be required. (Perhaps a stateside version of those rigged "military tribunals" now serving up prime kangaroo meat down in Guantanamo Bay?)

No doubt the arrogant Bushists believe they can control the mercenary dogs of war they're now unleashing. But history shows that armed bands driven by religious, ideological or ethnic fervor - or just the ordinary lust for loot and power - rarely follow the script set for them by their elitist paymasters. Bush's morally depraved "path of action" is in fact a highway to hell.

Chris Floyd

Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Heart of Darkness: The Bush Cult and American Madness
Originally published in The Moscow Times, Oct. 22, 2004.

Now we come at last to the heart of darkness. Now we know, from their own words, that the Bush Regime is a cult - a cult whose god is Power, whose adherents believe that they alone control reality, that indeed they create the world anew with each act of their iron will. And the goal of this will - undergirded by the cult's supreme virtues of war, fury and blind faith - is likewise openly declared: "Empire."

You think this is an exaggeration? A typical bout of "liberal paranoia"? Then heed the words of the White House itself: a "senior adviser" to the president, who, as the New York Times reports, explained the cult to author Ron Suskind in the heady pre-war days of 2002.

First, the top Bush insider mocked the journalist and all those "in what we call the reality-based community," i.e., people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." Suskind's attempt to defend the principles of reason and enlightenment cut no ice with the Bush-man. "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," he said. "And while you're studying that reality, we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors.and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Anyone with any knowledge of 20th century history will know that this same megalomaniacal outburst could have been made by a "senior adviser" to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or Mao. Indeed, as scholar Juan Cole points out, the dogma of the Bush Cult is identical with the "reality-creating" declaration of Mao's Little Red Book: "It is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever." For Bush, as for Mao in the all-devouring Great Leap Forward, "discernible reality" has no meaning: political, cultural, economic, scientific truth - even the fundamental processes of nature, even human nature itself - must give way to the faith-statements of ideology, ruthlessly applied by unbending zealots.

Thus the reality-twisting assertions of Bush's ideologues: The conquered will welcome their killers. The poor will be happy to slave for the rich. The earth can sustain any amount of damage without lasting harm. The loss of rights is essential to liberty. War without end is the only way to peace. Corruption and cronyism lead to universal prosperity. Dissent is evil; dissenters are "with the terrorists." But God is with the Leader; whatever he does is righteous, even if in the eyes of unbelievers - the "reality-based community" - his acts are criminal: aggressive war that kills thousands of innocent people, widespread torture, secret assassinations, imprisonment without charges or trial, electoral subversion.

Indeed, the doctrine "Gott mit Uns" is the linchpin of the Bush Cult. Tens of millions of Americans have now embraced the Cult's fusion of Bush's leadership with Divine Will. As a Bush volunteer in Missouri told Suskind: "I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down.God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time." God appointed Bush; thus Bush's acts are Godly. It's a circular, self-confirming mindset that can't be penetrated by reason or facts, can't be shaken by crimes and scandals. That's why Bush's core support - comprising almost half of the electorate - stays rock-solid, despite the manifest failures of his administration. It's based on blind faith, on poisonous fantasy: simple, flattering ("We're uniquely good, we're God's special nation!"), comforting, complete - so unlike the harsh, bewildering, splintered shards of real life.

This closed mindset is constantly reinforced by the ubiquitous rightwing media - evoking the threat of demonic enemies on every side, relentlessly manufacturing righteous outrage with distortion and deceit - and by Bush's appearances (epiphanies?) at his carefully-screened rallies, where even the slightest hint of demurral from his Godly greatness is ruthlessly expunged. For example, three schoolteachers were ejected from a Bush rally under threat of arrest last week: not for protesting - they hadn't said a word - but merely for wearing t-shirts that read, "Protect Our Civil Liberties." Thus the faithful "create the new reality" of undivided loyalty to the Leader. And it's clear that the very idea of "civil liberties" is now a dangerous blasphemy in the divinvely-sanctioned Empire.

The dogma of Bush's godliness is no mere rhetorical flourish; it's being forged with blood and iron. Consider General Jerry Boykin, who, in uniform, toured churches across America, declaring openly that "George W. Bush was not elected by the majority of the American people; he was appointed by God" to lead his "Christian nation" against Satan and the "idol-worshippers" of Islam, as Salon.com reports. Bush then made Boykin the Pentagon's chief of military intelligence - the point man for wringing information out of Islamic captives in the "war on terror." The result - confirmed even by the Pentagon's own anemic investigations - was a military intelligence system gone berserk, systematically torturing and occasionally murdering prisoners who, as the Red Cross notes, were overwhelmingly innocent of any crime. Bush signed orders removing these prisoners from the protection of U.S. and international law; Boykin's boys then visited divine wrath upon the heathens. But these atrocities cannot be crimes, because Bush and Boykin are, in the general's own phraseology, "Kingdom warriors" in the "army of God."

This isn't "politics as usual" - not even an extreme version of it, not McCarthyism revisited, Reaganism times two, or Nixon in a Stetson hat. There's never been anything like it in American life before: a messianic cult backed by vast corporate power, a massive cadre of religious zealots, a highly disciplined party, an overwhelming media machine and the mammoth force of history's most powerful government - all led by men who "create new realities" out of lies, blood, theft and torment.

Their "empire" - their Death-Cult, their power-mania - is an old madness come again, an old heresy in new form, another outbreak of the fever, the deep soul-sickness that devoured so many nations in the last century. Now it's come to America. After decades of sliding toward the abyss - blithely, blindly, drunk with corruption, letting democracy and justice wither on the vine - now we are here at last, in the heart of darkness.

Chris Floyd

SILENCE of the SHEEP
B15705 / Mon, 29 May 2006 15:34:43 / "War on Terror"
What's in the wrong with a world under the heel of another man-made kill and conquest spree sold as "war on terror"? This, the slogan coined and pumped days after the start of a fig leaf 911 cover-up (next blog) that is actually a war OF terror as all wars have been.

When a typical murder victim dies, any valid criminal police investigation deals with a pointed "why". That is, for the root cause, reason and purpose of a slaying. The "why" goes to motive and opportunity. When it come to the mass killing fields and murder of war, it seems most don't "get" the why or don't want to. The truth? Outside of passion or insanity, the reason for killing fellow human beings has always been for private gain.

So. what is the "cuo bono" as in who benefits?

War has constantly been at the dark and deadly heart of the most profitable of trades on earth. What's more, recent wars have been fought against countries that have things "we" want to "liberate". Of course, the "we" is not you and I. It's a cozy class apart that takes private profit from war paid for in public blood and treasure. And from this super-privileged class - thru its DC-MSM echo chamber - we are told "war on terror" is all about "democracy" and never mind those silly old oil trillions under the Mid East and Eurasia. It's as if a self-serve ruler waves the nation by another murder scene with an "it's national security, move along, there's nothing to see here".

Another question: why is the official "left" so very toothless and why does it have so little impact let alone response to what an alleged "necon right" makes of the world?

Could it be a faux "left" has been owned and squarely framed by an equally phony "right"?

Case in point:

Most of the good little sheep have no clue that Lenin and Trotsky's so-called "Communist Bolshevik Revolution" was bankrolled lock, stock and barrel by "rightwing" cartel robber barons out of New York and London (ditto for Hitler and his German war machine). This is an "October Revolution" that cost 30 million lives in its direct aftermath. The "Revolution" eventually took the innocent lives of over sixty million in Russia and more than 100 million worldwide. And it was literally setup by the same cartel bloc that foisted an unconstitutional "Federal Reserve" Corporation, World Bank and IMF that yet cook a cartel global economy over its stooge political order.

Need more detail? I'll ID the mid management Rockefeller-Rothschild cartel players: Jacob Schiff (of Kuhn, Loeb and Co. New York) financed Leon Trotsky, corporate conman "Colonel" William Boyce Thompson (agent for the Rothschilds thru J.P. Morgan's UK securities ops) financed Lenin with help from Lord Alfred Milner (UK Governor General and High Commissioner of South Africa). Added to this brutal and murderous record - a bogus cartel "Red Cross Mission" began to scout and rape Russia after the ersatz "Communist Revolution". Other "communist" nations are incompetent offspring of the original fraud. The mass butchery perpetrated under Stalin (30-40 million Russians killed under his proxy autocrat reign) was further supported and abetted by a psyop robber baron cartel entrenched from before the Gilded Age.

By the way, Jacob Schiff was family kin to and very much part of the Rothschild central banking dynasty. Jacob was also kinsman and chum to one James Paul Warburg as prime agent of the Rockefeller-Rothschild bloc. It was J.P. Warburg that designed and wreaked the "Federal Reserve" Corporation on a trusting, naive America. As a privately owned cartel trap, the "Fed" was never federal and minus any "reserves" outside a Ponzi rigged bunko sting. So, what do you say to a "system" con that gives a freeloading cartel class the private license to print money out of thin air and the police power to enforce its every whim on the sheep?

My my, corporate crime does pay sweetly wrapped in an American flag and a psyops pose.

A few secondary pieces of slippery trivia: some would say it's mere accident Al Gore's daughter was recently married into the Schiff-Warburg-Rothschild central bank dynasty. But how random is it? Al Gore and his father owed any political career they had to robber baron Armand Hammer - another close collaborator of the Rockefeller-Schiff-Warburg-Rothschild cartel network at work in "Communist" Russia. Hammer was often heard to say he kept the Gores "in my back-pocket". Not surprisingly, the Bush family began as minor cartel enablers at Brown Brothers Harriman (via a covert web of Thyssen-operated ventures) where Prescott Bush helped grow and feed Hitler's Nazi war regime. And by now it should be a non-shocker as to who and what cartel was behind the first modern era Mid East takeover with the Sykes-Picot land grabs. If past is prologue, the sheep live the results.

Do you see any light at the end of this old tunnel? Not yet?

If not, allow me to ask a blunt question. Why did "rightwing" fascist oligarchs fully fund, setup and promote a homicidal pipedream better known as Marxist "Communist Revolution" that some (including Fidel Castro) are still flogging?

One answer: it's called distract, divide and vanquish the sheep.

Interesting that no establishment "education" or MSM source so much as touches on, much less teaches the actual core system at hand. Economics pros, historians and other MSM "experts" either refuse to publicly address the snake oil sham or pretend it can't exist. Is that denial bubble an accident?

Humor me for a moment [as if you think you haven't so far] and imagine a world run by a CARTEL PSYOPS STATE. A psychological monopolist rule that pretends to be "capitalist" as well as "free market democratic" and is anything but as it renders a horror show of what those things mean. To repeat: capitalism and open market democracy DO NOT EXIST under Cartel Psyops State rule. Under such rule, childlike ignorance of economic history and money science would be at the root of virtually every human woe.

Of course, none of the prevailing cartel farce would work unless people were kept far in the psyop dark. So - let's say ignorance and silence of the good little sheep was not left to random chance. Instead, suppose ignorance of the true system was institutionalized. That is, by means of the same private extortion fiat as our cartel based banking system.

Sound tin-foil wild? Unreasonable?

Significant wars have always been fought over wealth (blood money) for private power. And habitually paid for by a gullible public. How reasonable is that? How much higher do the table stakes have to be for motive and opportunity?

So the denial bubble comes razor thin. Even one as well greased and loud as this one is due to pop.

The issue at hand:

An old MSM thru"education" mask of delusion has been what the ruling class palms off to blind and paralyze the citizen sheep. But how bad does counterfeit "war on terror" go before the sheep question system brainwash and begin to think outside it?

Final question: do the sheep wake this time? Or do they once more, go down silent.

http://www.freedomtofascism.com/

"THE RULING CLASS HAS THE SCHOOLS AND PRESS UNDER ITS THUMB. THIS ENABLES IT TO SWAY THE EMOTIONS OF THE MASSES."

"IT IS MY CONVICTION THAT KILLING UNDER THE CLOAK OF WAR IS NOTHING BUT AN ACT OF MURDER."

DOCTOR ALBERT EINSTEIN (Nobel Laureate and refugee from Nazi fascism. 1879-1955)

"WE WILL HAVE WORLD GOVERNMENT WHETHER OR NOT WE LIKE IT. THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHETHER WORLD GOVERNMENT WILL BE ACHIEVED BY CONQUEST OR CONSENT."
JAMES PAUL WARBURG - (in testimony before the US Senate. Warburg was an agent of the Rockefeller-Rothschild bloc and chief architect of the "Federal Reserve" Corporation, an unconstitutional private bank monopoly set up for cartel hegemony. James Paul Warburg was the son of Paul Moritz Warburg, nephew of Felix Warburg and of Jacob Schiff, both of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. who financed and setup Lenin and Trotsky's "Bolshevik Communist Revolution" thru James' brother Max, banker to the German government. February 17, 1950.)

"A STATE OF WAR ONLY SERVES AS AN EXCUSE FOR DOMESTIC TYRANNY."
ALEXANDER SOLZHENITZYN (ex political prisoner and Nobel Laureat. Living)

"THE STUDY OF MONEY, ABOVE ALL OTHER FIELDS IS ONE IN WHICH COMPLEXITY IS USED TO DISGUISE TRUTH OR TO EVADE TRUTH, NOT TO REVEAL IT."
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH (Nobel Laureate economist and author. Quote 1975 Living)

"THROUGH THE FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD OVER $30 BILLION OF AMERICAN MONEY HAS BEEN PUMPED INTO [HITLER'S] GERMANY.THE FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD HAS PUMPED SO MANY BILLIONS OF DOLLARS INTO [HITLER'S] GERMANY THAT THEY DARE NOT NAME THE TOTAL."
CONGRESSMAN LOUIS T. MCFADDEN (Mcfadden served 12 years as Chairman of the Committee on Banking and Currency.1876-1936).

"WAR IS A RACKET. IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN. A RACKET IS BEST DESCRIBED, I BELIEVE, AS SOMETHING THAT IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS TO THE MAJORITY OF THE PEOPLE. ONLY A SMALL 'INSIDE' GROUP KNOWS WHAT IT IS ABOUT. IT IS CONDUCTED FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE VERY FEW, AT THE EXPENSE OF THE VERY MANY. OUT OF WAR A FEW PEOPLE MAKE HUGE FORTUNES."
SMEDLEY DARLINGTON BUTLER (Major General - United States Marine Corps. Butler was awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor, for capture of Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1914, and for capture of Ft. Riviere, Haiti, 1917. He was also awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, 1919. Among other cartel robber barons, JP Morgan approached S.D. Butler for the Rockefeller-Rothschild bloc in 1934. The plan was for Butler to lead a military overthrow of the U.S. government then headed by FDR. Butler refused the proposed role as front man for an open fascist cartel takeover of America. The coup plan was abandoned for more discrete cartel variations. From his booklet "War is a Racket" 1935. 1881-1940)

Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Silent Partners: Bush, bin Laden and the 9/11 Commission
First published in The Moscow Times, Jan. 31, 2003

When George W. Bush's first choice to head an "independent" probe into the Sept. 11 attacks – suspected war criminal Henry Kissinger – went down like a bad pretzel, he quickly plucked another warm body from the stagnant pool of Establishment worthies who are periodically called upon to roll out the whitewash when the big boys screw up.

Kissinger's replacement, retired New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, was a "safe pair of hands," we were assured by the professional assurers in the mainstream media. The fact that he'd been out of public life for years – and that he hadn't collaborated in the deaths of tens of thousands of Cambodians, Chileans and East Timorese – certainly made him less controversial than his predecessor, although to be fair, Kissinger's expertise in mass murder surely would have given the panel some unique insights into the terrorist atrocity.

But now it seems that Kean might possess some unique insights of his own. Fortune Magazine reports this week that both Kean and Bush share an unusually well-placed business partner: one Khalid bin Mahfouz – a shadowy figure who looms large in the financial web that binds the Bushes, the bin Ladens and the Saudis.

Kean, like so many worthies, followed the revolving door out of public service into lucrative sweetheart deals and well-wadded sinecures on corporate boards. One of these, of course, is an oil company – pretty much a requirement for White House work these days. (Or as the sign says on the Oval Office door: "If your rigs ain't rockin', don't come a-knockin'!") Kean is a director of Amerada Hess, an oil giant married up to Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil in a venture to pump black gold in Azerbaijan. (The partnership is incorporated in a secretive offshore "tax haven," natch. You can't expect a worthy like Kean to pay taxes like some grubby wage slave.)

Among Delta's biggest backers are close associates of the aforesaid Mahfouz, a Saudi wheeler-dealer who has helped bankroll some of most dubious players on the world scene: Abu Nidal, Manuel Noreiga, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush. Mahfouz was also a front for the bin Laden family, funneling their vast wealth through American cut-outs in a bid to gain power and influence in the United States, reports Wayne Madsen of In These Times.

One of those cut-outs was Mahfouz factotum James Bath, a partner in George W.'s early oil venture, Arbusto (and a comrade in suspension from Bush's glory-less days as an AWOL National Guardsman). Bath has admitted serving as a pass-through for secret Saudi money. Years later, when Bush's maladroit business skills were about to sink another of his companies, Harken Energy, the firm was saved by a $25 million investment from a Swiss bank – a subsidiary of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BBCI), partly owned by the beneficent Mahfouz.

What was BCCI? Only "one of the largest criminal enterprises in history," according to the United States Senate. What did BCCI do? "It engaged in pandemic bribery of officials in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas," says journalist Christopher Bryon, who first exposed the operation. "It laundered money on a global scale, intimidated witnesses and law officers, engaged in extortion and blackmail. It supplied the financing for illegal arms trafficking and global terrorism. It financed and facilitated income tax evasion, smuggling and prostitution." Sort of an early version of the Bush Regime, then.

BCCI's bipartisan corruption first permeated the Carter Administration, then came to full flower in the Reagan-Bush years. The CIA uncovered the bank's criminal activities in 1981 – no great feat, considering how many of its own foreign "associates" were involved, including the head of Saudi intelligence, Kamal Adham, brother-in-law of King Faisal. But instead of stopping the drug-runners and terrorists, the agency decided to join them, using BCCI's secret channels to finance "black ops" all over the world.

The Italian bank BNL was one of BCCI's main tentacles. BNL's Atlanta branch was the primary funnel used by the first Bush Administration to send millions of secret dollars to Saddam for arms purchases, including deadly chemicals and other WMD materials supplied by the Chilean arms dealer Cardoen and various politically-connected operators in the United States like, weapons merchant Matrix Churchill. (As always with the Busha Nostra, geopolitics – in this case, helping Saddam wage aggressive war against Iran – and crony profits go hand in hand. Once the war was over and Iran was left a shattered hulk, with millions dead and displaced, the useful idiot Saddam was expendable, swiftly morphing from good buddy into budding Hitler.)

As soon as the BNL case broke, President Bush I moved to throttle the investigation. He appointed lawyers from both Cardoen and Matrix to top Justice Department posts – where they supervised the officials investigating their old companies. The overall probe was directed by Justice Department investigator Robert Mueller. Meanwhile, White House aides applied heavy pressure on other prosecutors to restrict the range of the probe – especially the fact that Bush cabinet officials Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger had served as consultants for BNL during their pre-White House days as spear-carriers for yet another secretive international front that profits from war, weapons, and the avid greasing of highly-placed palms: Kissinger Associates.

The U.S. Senate later found that the probe had been unaccountably "botched" – witnesses went missing, CIA records got "lost," all sorts of bad luck. Most of the big BCCI players went unpunished or, like Mahfouz, got off with wrist-slap fines and sanctions.

One of the White House aides who unlawfully intervened in the BNL prosecution was a certain factotum named Jay S. ByBee. Now said factotum has just been nominated by the current warmer of the Oval Office seat, George W. Bush, to a place on the federal appeals court – a lifetime sinecure of perks and power. Mueller, of course, wound up as head of the FBI, appointed to the post in July 2001 – by George W. Bush. Well done, thou good and faithful servants!

In the late 1990s, U.S. authorities charged that Mahfouz was a major financier of bin Laden's activities. He has strenuously denied it, just as he has denied persistent reports that the spooked Saudis put him under "house arrest" – or in his case, "palatial mansion arrest." In any event, he and his clan are still wheeling and dealing with Delta Oil and other worthies. Indeed, one of Mahfouz's hirelings – the director of a Pakistani bank he owns – sits on the advisory board of our old friend the Carlyle Group, cheek by jowl with the firm's most celebrated shill: George Herbert Walker Bush.

Somehow we doubt that worthy Kean – even though he's resigning from his Delta perch – will poke very hard at the nexus of intersections between his former business partners, and the bin Ladens, the Bushes, the Saudi royals, Saddam, the CIA and BCCI. We've only scratched the surface here, but even this cursory glance makes the current world crisis look less like some grand geopolitical "clash of civilizations" and more like a nasty falling out among thieves, with rival mafias – who sometimes collude, sometimes collide – now duking it out for turf, cloaking their murderous criminality with pious rhetoric about freedom, security, jihad and God.

Chris Floyd

Original version published in The Moscow Times, Dec. 5, 2000.

Invisible Republic
The secret government has shown its face at last. And what a strange, multi-headed beast it is. On one stout neck we see the snarling visage of an angry "protester" banging on the doors of election commission offices, his pockets stuffed with campaign cash from Austin, Texas. Another head displays the jowly eminence of a grave courtier, a loyal family retainer bowing to the aristocratic clan that enriches him.
still another meaty gourd holds forth the squinting, scowling portrait of a pundit, wildly nodding, endlessly babbling in a panicky spiel about "closure," "stability," and "the mantle of legitimacy." Finally, there is the central head – small, walnutty, a bit lost and uncertain amid the furious activity of the other noggins – opening its pursed little lips to intone, tonelessly: "I am the president now."
Yes, it was yet another week through the looking glass for the American political system. But in the middle of much muddle, a few things became clear – even naked: The owners of the country want their presidency back, and they'll stop at nothing to get it.

Having been declared the winner of the election by one of his own campaign operatives, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris – a decision based on an incomplete vote count marred by the violence of his own hired mob – George W. Bush, the second-place candidate in the presidential race, tottered out to read a few scripted lines claiming the White House for his own.

But it was evident this week that another Texan is actually controlling the destiny of the American republic: Tom DeLay.

We know DeLay – if we've been paying attention – as the puppeteer behind the hard-right's impeachment carnival a couple of years back. Ostensibly the No. 3 man in the House hierarchy, the Texas congressman – bearing the apt nickname of "The Hammer" – has spearheaded the Owners' drive to turn Congress into a corporate welfare office, while waging their well-financed war on President Bill Clinton and all his works. DeLay ousted Newt Gingrich as House speaker when that sad sack of shinola failed to dislodge the Great Satan in the White House, and installed a new mouthpiece, Dennis Hastert, a genial suit of clothes who may actually end up as president if the electoral process goes completely off the rails.
The Wall Street Journal reports this week that it was DeLay who organized the riots in Miami, when Bush supporters stormed the election commission offices and scared commissioners into suddenly calling off their hand recount of votes. DeLay "took charge of the effort on Capitol Hill," offering staffers "free airfare, accommodation and food in the Sunshine State, all paid for by the Bush campaign." More than 200 GOP House aides signed up and headed South to bang on doors, toss bricks, and make so many death threats to the local Democratic congressman, Robert Wexler, that federal authorities warned him to stay in Washington rather than risk a trip to his home.
Meanwhile, DeLay and his other hand puppet, House Majority leader Dick Armey, made it known that even if Al Gore ultimately wins in Florida, they will not allow him to take office. Armey said the GOP-controlled House reserves the right to reject any election results they don't happen to like. "It is our duty," said Armey, to take that decision away from the voters – especially the 50 million who voted for Al Gore.
And so it goes. The beast keeps barking from its several heads, the little walnut recites his lines, Daddy Bush's old cronies set up shop again in Washington, the pundits yip and yipe and bite their own tails – and the Republic slowly sinks into the swamps of Florida.
Open to Question
Speaking of Texas, a revealing glimpse into the mindset behind some of George W.'s "heartland values" was offered by Harper's Magazine this week, when they published an "employee exam" used by Rent-A-Center, a Texas-based appliance rental firm, to plumb the soul of each worker at their 2,100 stores around the country. Made up of 500 true-false questions, these are the kinds of things that concern good old-fashioned "real Americans" (as opposed to them blacks and Jews and com-symp libruls in Miami who tried to steal the election by having their votes counted).
If Rent-A-Center noted 12 "deviations" from the norm, the worker could be tossed out on their pervy behinds. Anxious employees thus had to come up with the "right" answer to questions like these: "Everything is turning out just like the prophets of the Bible said it would." "I have had no difficulty in starting or holding my bowel movements." "I believe in the Second Coming of Christ." "Sometimes I am strongly attracted by the personal articles of others, such as shoes, gloves, etc., so that I want to handle or steal them though I have no use for them."
The earnest concerns go on (and on): "I have never vomited blood or coughed up blood." "I would like to be a florist." (We know the wrong answer to that one!) "I like poetry." (Ditto!) "I have diarrhea once a month.""Evil spirits possess me at times." (Aren't those last two the same thing?) "I have often wished I were a girl."
And then there is that deep, dark secret that every employer needs to know: "The top of my head sometimes feels tender."
This line of inquiry led to a class-action suit filed by 1,200 employees, and the company eventually had to pony up $2 million for its unbridled weirdness. There was at least one true-false question, however, that made perfect sense – one which, if answered in the affirmative, would go a long way toward explaining the politics of Texas, of Florida, and indeed of America as a whole:
"Sometimes in elections I vote for men about whom I know very little."
Chris Floyd