Eric Margolis - March 8, 2011

The US media, perfectly described by Israeli thinker Uri Avnery as “a mixture of propaganda, news and entertainment,” is steaming with righteous indignation over the awfulness of Libya’s wicked Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, and is once again baying for his blood.

“On to Libya! Down with the Tyrant of Tripoli!” That’s the latest hue and cry from North America’s lynch mob of right wingers, jingoistic media, and neoconservative jackals. Once again there’s talk of war against a small, almost defenseless nation that can’t seriously fight back. What Imperial Britain used to call, “a jolly little war.”

War fever over Libya is gripping the United States. After a hiatus of nine years, in which he was a useful ally to western interests, Col. Muammar Gadaffi is once again the monster we love to hate. It’s damned hard trying to keep track of when we love him and when we hate him. Not so long ago he was our bosom buddy in the “war on terror.” Now, he’s a devil all over again.

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Scott Horton - Fe. 15, 2010

After he was indicted for the murder of Alexander Hamilton, vice president Aaron Burr fled to South Carolina, to hide out with his daughter. Another vice president, Spiro Agnew, kept completely silent before pleading nolo contendere on corruption charges. Former vice president Dick Cheney, on the other hand, seems proud of his criminal misadventures. On Sunday, he took to the airwaves to brag about them.

“I was a big supporter of waterboarding,” Cheney said in an appearance on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. He went on to explain that Justice Department lawyers had been instructed to write legal opinions to cover the use of this and other torture techniques after the White House had settled on them.

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See also: Cheney Admits to Being War Criminal

Glenn Beck is a Neocon (Not a Libertarian)

“War on Terror” advocates want civilians to die to justify “War on Terror”

James Corbett
The Corbett Report
6 July, 2009

CIA analyst Michael Scheuer’s recent call for bin Laden to kill more Americans would be shocking if we hadn’t already heard it dozens of times before from other “War on Terror” advocates. “It’s an absurd situation,” Scheuer told FOX News personality Glenn Beck on his program last week. “Only Osama can execute an attack that will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.”

The comments have provoked much shock and outrage among pundits and websites like Jon Stewart and NewsHounds who may have considered him to be on their side. After all, he seemed to be a vociferous and effective critic of the neocons, having authored books like Imperial Hubris and having supported Ron Paul during the 2008 Presidential debates by asserting that 9/11 was merely blowback for American interventionism in the Middle East. With his latest comments, Scheuer is now relegated to the ignoble company of neocon shills like Stu Bykofsky of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who dreamed of another terrorist attack back in 2007 to rally people around the flag (and, presumably, George W. Bush) once again; Donald Rumsfeld, who complained in 2006 that the Bush regime was a victim of its own success in the “War on Terror” and that another terrorist attack was needed to remind people that the war was still necessary; and indeed the entire neocon establishment, who in their 2000 white paper Rebuilding America’s Defenses called for “a catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor” to mobilize the public to get behind their goal of projecting American military influence around the globe for another century. Despite his surprisingly unhelpful attempt to clarify his remarks, Scheuer is now—like all of those who have said that terrorism is needed to bring about political support for their idea—a terrorist himself by very definition.

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Glenn Greenwald - June 16

I’m going to leave the debate about whether Iran’s election was “stolen” and the domestic implications within Iran to people who actually know what they’re talking about (which is a very small subset of the class purporting to possess such knowledge).  But there is one point I want to make about the vocal and dramatic expressions of solidarity with Iranians issuing from some quarters in the U.S.

Much of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating a military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on their country — actions which would result in the slaughter of many of those very same Iranian People.  During the presidential campaign, John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-ing Iran.  The Wall St. Journal published a war screed from Commentary’s Norman Podhoretz entitled “The Case for Bombing Iran,” and following that, Podhoretz said in an interview that he “hopes and prays” that the U.S. “bombs the Iranians.”  John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol — with typical prescience — hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected.  Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program.

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Repudiated at the polls, they’re back – in a new liberal guise

Justin Raimondo, June 01, 2009

Whatever happened to the neocons, those creatures of legend whose fulminations led to the worst strategic disaster in American history? Oh, don’t worry, they’re still around and up to no good – out of power, but not out of mischief-making schemes to drag us into yet another war, this time on a scale much bigger than their previous “accomplishment.”

The Weekly Standard, Rupert Murdoch’s gift to the War Party, is no longer delivered in multiple copies to the White House, but that doesn’t mean editor Bill Kristol is totally bereft of influence in Washington. Kristol & Co., having disbanded their Project for a New American Century [.pdf] – which played a key role in dragging us into Iraq – have come up with a new vehicle, the Foreign Policy Initiative, which recently co-sponsored a conference with the head of the Center for a New American Security (the Obamaites’ favorite foreign policy think-tank) and the Center for American Progress, the Soros-funded headquarters for progressives such as Matt Yglesias. The subject was the “Af-Pak” front, and the attendees, whatever their other political differences, were in agreement that our new president is on the right track as he escalates this latest surge in the “war on terror.”

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Obama inherits Cheney’s army of assassins – and promotes their commander

by Justin Raimondo, May 20, 2009

By Paul Thompson | MailOnline

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was sold as a fight for freedom against the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. But for former U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his elite Pentagon strategists, it was more like a religious crusade.

The daily briefings about the progress of the war that Mr Rumsfeld gave to President George W Bush were illustrated with victorious quotes from the Bible and gung-ho photographs of U.S. troops, it has emerged.

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SHARON K. GILBERT
January 16, 2009

THE PNAC (Project for a New American Century) website first came onto the neo-conservative scene back in December, 2000.

From that date until their mysterious disappearance in mid-2008, the movers and shakers of the PNAC think-tank cranked out numerous opinion papers on globalism and global governance.

The most famous of these documents is Rebuilding America’s Defenses, but there numerous others that are well worth your time. These publications and reports reflect neo-con and globalist thinking during the lead-up to the Iraq War and after.

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Extremists Mark Chryson and Steve Stoll helped launch Palin’s political career in Alaska, and in return had influence over policy. “Her door was open,” says Chryson — and still is.

Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert - Oct. 10, 2008

On the afternoon of Sept. 24 in downtown Palmer, Alaska, as the sun began to sink behind the snowcapped mountains that flank the picturesque Mat-Su Valley, 51-year-old Mark Chryson sat for an hour on a park bench, reveling in tales of his days as chairman of the Alaska Independence Party. The stocky, gray-haired computer technician waxed nostalgic about quixotic battles to eliminate taxes, support the “traditional family” and secede from the United States.

So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order. He invited a Salon reporter to see a few items inside his pickup truck that were intended for his personal protection. “This here is my attack dog,” he said with a chuckle, handing the reporter an exuberant 8-pound papillon from his passenger seat. “Her name is Suzy.” Then he pulled a 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol — once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops — out of his glove compartment. “I’ve got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement,” he said, clutching the gun in his palm. “Then again, so do most Alaskans.” But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of that faraway place some Alaskans call “the 48.” “We want to go our separate ways,” he said, “but we are not going to kill you.”

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William N. Grigg - September 21, 2008

A foolish consistency, we are told, is the hobgoblin of little minds, and — this side of Sean Hannity, at least — it’s difficult to find anyone more consistently foolish, or more obviously small-minded, than George W. Bush.

During the nearly eight years his presidency has blighted our country, the Bushling has been a roving epicenter of disaster. And he has greeted each crisis with an indecent, if thoroughly predictable, eagerness to expand his own power, and that of the embedded oligarchy that produced him.

With the embarrassing enthusiasm of a dim-witted schoolchild, he strikes resolute poses and utters the same handful of banalities that translate into one perfectly consistent demand: Shut up and submit.

Undisguised Fascism

The one defining idea of George W. Bush’s career — and trust me, one idea is the storage capacity of his tiny yet uncluttered mind — is this: As creatures of privilege, he and his cronies are permitted to do whatever they please. This is what made him so useful to the Power Elite that stands poised this week to impose a system of undisguised fascism on our country.

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William N. Grigg - September 20, 2008

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, we are insistently told by advocates of further military adventurism in the Persian Gulf region, is the most recent version of Hitler Revisited, harboring an implacable desire to annihilate Israel.

The regime in Tehran doesn’t occupy an acre of land beyond its borders, and displays no desire to acquire any through aggression or other means. Yet we are told that Iran is a threat to the entire world, and must be contained by Washington through the use of economic impediments and covert operationsthat are tantamount to an undeclared war.

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Andrew Roberts, the Anglosphere’s greatest modern mythologist, may be perfectly suited to sanitize the Bush presidency.

By R.J. Stove

Connoisseurs of homicidal book reviews have long treasured the virtuosic evisceration that British immunologist Sir Peter Medawar performed in 1950 on Teilhard de Chardin, that once fashionable Gallic mountebank. Of Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man, Medawar remarked, “its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.”

Sir Peter’s slashing verdict inevitably comes to a mind confronted with the work of currently hip British neocon Andrew Roberts.

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