*Written by Rob Rimes.

I’ve lost count of all the debates that we’ve had thus far but thank god we only have another half dozen or so, unless of course they decide to work more into the schedule somewhere. This one was thrown by Fox News and held in South Carolina as their primary is less than a week away. Fox News gave us Bret Baier and Juan Williams with Kelly Evans and Gerald Seib from the Wall Street Journal as moderators for this round. I should mention that answers in this debate have been expanded to ninety seconds, as the GOP field is now narrowed down to five. Yes, five.

The reason being, is that Jon Huntmsman dropped out of the race earlier in the day. Huntsman, who was great on foreign policy, jumped ship and announced his endorsement for golden boy Mitt Romney. What’s disappointing about that is Huntsman was incredibly critical of Romney even less than a week prior. Huntsman went as far as to call Romney “unelectable” but now he is supporting him as he sees him as the best chance at beating Barack Obama. Huntsman lost a lot of credibility with me due to his blooming Romney love. Maybe it’s a Mormon thing or maybe it’s because they are both actually cousins, which has been ignored by the media mind you. Whatever the reason, Huntsman is out and he’s now on the Romney train like so many other so-called “conservatives” that aren’t able to see their own progressive ways. At least Huntsman can go back to his regular job of walking around on eight legs and scaring the shit out of Australians.

Newt Gingrich gets the first question and he is asked about his ads that attack Mitt Romney’s business record and if he thinks they are justified. Newtie Bootie says that it is important to look at and analyze job creation. He then quickly gets in a Ronald Reagan name drop and follows it up with a second Ronald Reagan name drop when he said that he and Clinton came up with a Reagan-like program for job creation in the 90′s. Newt points to the fact that Mitt raised taxes in Massachusetts and was actually ranked 47th out of 50 states in the realm of job creation. He stole that talking point from Jon Huntsman. Gingrich adds that if Romney promotes his business skills as part of his campaign then he, as a rival candidate, has the right to question it. He is then asked what he thinks about the Wall Street Journal criticizing him and saying that he is “embarrassing himself” with his attack ads against Mitt Romney. Gingrich responds by saying that he isn’t intimidated by the media just because he is asking questions about candidates.

In an effort to respond, Mitt Romney says that he has real experience in job creation due to his time in the private sector. Mitt says that he learned a lot from working in the private sector, as opposed to the other candidates who have spent much of their time in the public sector. He talks about how four of the companies he helped establish have gone on to create hundreds-of-thousands of jobs. Mitt adds that his record is public and available to anyone that wants to analyze his job creation skills. He claims that he has continually demonstrated a record of success. Romney points out that the unemployment rate in Massachusetts when he left was 4.7 percent. He also throws in that he balanced the state budget every year.

Rick Perry, in an effort to make this debate all about Mitt, is asked about his comments where he referred to Mitt Romney as a “vulture capitalist”. Perry is also asked what he would put in place to curb vulture capitalism. Perry says that his record proves that he is a real capitalist. Really? Tweaking the law and protecting a company that you own a stake in from getting in trouble for distributing porn illegally is the actions of a real capitalist? You mean taking money from Merck and then attempting to force young girls to be vaccinated with Merck products is also the action of a real capitalist? Looks like Perry is a fucking vulture too from where I sit. He then goes on to bitch like a liberal about how Bain destroyed jobs. He then tells us that his record and income tax has been public for years and uses that to call out Mitt and then asks him to release his income tax information so that the public can see how he really made his money. Perry then rambles about killing Dodd-Frank and talks about how regulations are strangling America. He adds that he will get rid of some of the financial regulators. He didn’t say “all of them”.

Responding to Perry, as this is the Romney variety hour, Mitt blames the Chinese and their cheating ways for closing down the steel mills Rick Perry was blaming Mitt for closing. Romney says that he agrees with Perry about regulations but never really defends himself in a proper fashion other than pointing his finger at China. Romney, on the regulations issue, claims that he will end all Obama era regulations. I guess the regulations from the Bush era, the Clinton era and all other eras aren’t important.

So just when you think that’s over, Gerald Seib asks Romney a question! Fucking hell! Romney answers the question, which was abut his experience at Bain. He says that they often times consolidated plants and factories and if they closed one down, the workers were free to move to the new plant or factory. He points out though that many workers didn’t move as the new jobs didn’t come with union support.

Ron Paul is asked about his “scathing” attack ads and whether or not such ads should be abandoned. Well, considering he’s running them, I doubt he’ll feel that they should be abandoned, duh! Paul responds by saying that he is exposing voting records and in that case, his “attacks” are proper. He goes on to say that he couldn’t fit everything he wanted to in his anti-Santorum ad as there wasn’t enough time to get it all in. He then goes on to list all the dumb crap that Santorum voted for.

Thin skinned piss boy Rick Santorum says that Paul is quoting Soros-like leftist groups which discredits his facts because leftist groups attack conservatives. Santorum basically says that being attacked by leftist groups is a badge of honor and he’s proud of the distinction. What a stupid fucktard! It doesn’t matter what the source is, the fact is the facts are FACTS! You can’t just ignore your own voting record and try to spin it to the public as leftist propaganda! Santorum who voted for No Child Left Behind says that he would veto it now. Of course he would, he’s pandering to South Carolinians. He then defends his vote against “right to work” as he says that Pennsylvania wasn’t a “right to work” state. Santorum who is outraged over the attacks on himself is then put on the spot by Juan Williams who asks if Santorum’s own attack ads should be pulled. The crowd boos Juan because they are idiot assholes and Santorum goes on to says that his attacks are “positive”. He then gets all bitchy with Mitt about his attack ads while citing the fact that it is Martin Luther King Day to make some dimwitted point. Why do people support this whiney juvenile brat?

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum get in a spat about whether or not people who have committed violent crimes should be allowed to vote. I get bored to tears listening to them bicker as basically each candidate is trying to steal time from the other in order to make their lame ass points. While I’d like there to be some blood in these things, pink ass bitch blood isn’t as cool to see as the reddish bad ass real American blood. I was really just staring in awe waiting for these two Tinas to breakout with some limp-wristed slap fighting. And just when you think it’s over, Rick Perry jumps in the battle over who has the filthiest tampon.

Time monopolizer Mitt Romney is asked about Jon Huntsman’s recent criticism even though he came out and endorsed him. He is also asked how he can convince the voter that he won’t change his views in the future as he has a career as a flip-flopper. Mittens rambles on and on about how he was a pro-life governor contrary to popular belief and that he has always opposed gay marriage. However he adds that he is for equal rights for everyone including gays. Okay, so how is denying them marriage equal? Damn these Orwellian characters! Romney ends his soulless rant by saying that everything he has ever done and will do is about “strengthening America.”

In an effort to make himself relevant again, Rick Perry said that Texas was under assault by the federal government and then added that South Carolina was at war with Obama. The cheap pop attempt works and the crowd goes crazy. Too bad Perry is crazier than the crowd, he’s still deader than shit in this race. Perry talks about how the federal government is taking states to task on voter ID laws and immigration. He then says that Obama is at war with organized religion. Damn, Perry likes throwing the word “war” around. I’m starting to think he either doesn’t know what it means or it is just the answer to everything. “Obama is at war with peanuts! Send troops to the peanut farm! Obama is at war with puppies! Secure the entrance to PetLand!” Perry finishes by saying that Obama is out of control yet he fails to realize that he is foaming at the mouth and tweaking like an infant after two double espressos.

Santorum is asked if he would extend benefits for unemployment. Ricky Boy says that we need a reasonable time table for people to find a job but points out that 99 weeks is just too much. He goes on to say that this should be handled by the states and not the federal government. He calls for a job training program to be a part of unemployment benefits. Okay broski, how much will that shit cost? I’d imagine such a program would be expensive and even if we shortened the time one could collect benefits, the cost of this program could make all that moot. Truthfully, with the government being as wasteful as it is, this may cost us a shitload more than our current dilemma of 99 weeks. Also, when the hell has government done anything well? They certainly can’t offer a jobs program that will benefit anyone.

Gingrich jumps in the mix and agrees with Santorum that there should be a job training program. Okay idiots, what jobs are they training for and what happens when someone is six weeks into a program and decides that whatever they are training for is stupid and they want to get training in something else? Are people allowed to drop out and start over elsewhere and if so, how many times could they do this? Maybe once they start in something they are forced to finish it in order to get their benefits. Realistically, all this will do is waste more money as they will obviously stay in the program, collect the benefits and rack up more debt due to the cost of training them. What happens when they get out of the program? Well, I doubt they’d look for a job in the field they trained in if they grew to dislike it. Essentially this is a lose-lose for everyone but these statist shitcocks are blind to that reality. Newt Gingrich closes his statements on job programs by saying, “I’ll help you if you think helping yourself is good.” I shouldn’t even have to spell out what is wrong with that statement and I’m not going to.

Mitt Romney gives us another soulless rant. In this one he bitches about Obama’s business practices and use of crony capitalism. Romney says that the system of laws we have now work and that we don’t need government regulation. Is he living under a goddamned rock? The system of laws we have now IS government regulation. He adds that we need to open up markets and stop bailing people out. Right, he really wants to have free trade after all the smack he’s talked about China.

The idiot from Wall Street Journal Mr. Seib asks Ron Paul to explain his stance on cutting defense and more importantly on how his military plans would not cost South Carolinians jobs. Really? Is this a real question? Is this the best guy they could find to sit on the moderators’ panel? Ron Paul says that the moderator is confused about his position. He adds that he wants to cut military spending not defense and once again finds himself having to explain to the establishment conservatives for the umpteenth time over the course of these debates what the difference is between the two. Ron Paul says that cutting back on bases overseas would actually affect other countries not the United States. In fact, the U.S. would benefit greatly by bringing our troops home. Paul adds that the idea that this would make us weaker is “absolutely wrong”. Ron Paul is right on this because our presence is spread too thin throughout the world. He then points out that he raises more than twice as much money from the active duty military than all the other candidates combined! Slam dunk bitch! Watching this exchange is like watching Dr. Paul educate ADD-afflicted kindergartners in a college poli-sci class. Ron Paul finishes by quoting Eisenhower who warned about the “military industrial complex”. Paul slam dunks again when says, “We’re supposed to be conservative and that means spend less money!”

All the candidates are asked what the tax rate would be under them. Rick Perry says he will shoot for a 20 percent flat tax rate. Rick Santorum gives a weird answer because he’s probably never thought about this. Romney says that he would get us down to 25 percent but that is still too much. Newt calls for a 15 percent flat tax. Ron Paul then says that he would try to get us down to zero percent! He points to the fact that we didn’t have income tax before 1913 (well, excluding the Civil War era). His proposal is a reflection of how much he wishes to cut spending but the morons in the room can’t put two and two together and probably just think that Ron Paul’s still that crazy kook at the end of the bar. Paul also says that inflation is a tax and if he stopped inflation, we would be freed up from its hidden taxation.

Mitt Romney is asked if he will release his tax records soon. He gargles something about McCain and Bush and says that he hasn’t planned on releasing them. He says that he isn’t opposed to doing it however. He is then asked about his ties to Mexico and the crowd boos at the question. He is asked that if he has close ties to Mexico, why doesn’t he work towards helping Latinos and does he feel like his actions are alienating the Latino voters. Mitt says that Latinos, like all people, are interested in America because it is an “opportunity nation”. Mitt adds that he must communicate to all people that America can be better. He says that illegal immigrants shouldn’t be showed favoritism over those who have been waiting in line legally to enter this country. He then throws in that he would veto the DREAM Act.

Santorum starts pushing some mumbo jumbo about how if people get married before having children it’ll keep them out of poverty. He then blames Obama for everything and bitches about how public schools can’t promote marriage anymore. Santorum says that Obama is “..deliberately sabotaging young girls.” And Ron Paul is the crazy kook?

The moderators then ask Dr. Paul about racial disparities in drug related arrests and convictions. Paul says that it is very clear that racial disparity exists in both those convicted of drug charges and those sentenced to the death penalty. Paul points out that murderers often times get out of jail before drug offenders. He says that the drug war is bringing violence to our border and that it is the real border security issue of today.

Newt Gingrich is criticized about recent comments he made about blacks needing to ask for jobs instead of food stamps. He’s asked if he sees this sort of rhetoric as insulting to blacks, if not all people. Of course Gingrich says it isn’t insulting. He tells some weak story about how his daughter was a janitor at thirteen and how she loved making money and therefore black people should like it too. Juan Williams presses Newt further but gets booed by the South Carolinians in the crowd. What the fuck? Between this and the Romney-Mexico issue, these people are coming off as backwoods bigoted rednecks and people wonder why Republicans have that sort of stereotype! Newt adds that Obama has put more people on food stamps than any other president. While this may be true, it was the Bush administration that really got that ball rolling for Obama. In the end, Newt Gingrich doesn’t explain how his ideas help blacks, he just brushes it off and doesn’t bother dispelling the concerns brought up by the only minority on the stage or on the panel as a chorus of boos continue to be directed at that minority.

Ron Paul is then asked about comments he never made that he supposedly didn’t want to track down Osama bin Laden. Dr. Paul informs the moderators that he never said such a thing and that he voted for the military to apprehend the Al-Qaeda leader. Paul says his frustration was in how the situation was handled as we had the guy cornered before and didn’t go after him, instead we fucked around for a decade and then finally nabbed him almost ten years after 9/11. Paul adds that he wanted a properly executed mission but the whole situation was handled awfully. He then says that we need to respect other nations’ sovereignty and we need to follow proper procedures and not dig bigger holes for ourselves. Bret Baier takes a jab at Ron Paul and says that his stance on taking down terrorists is “to the left of Obama”. Ron Paul points out that we went in and got Saddam Hussein quickly. He then questions why acting quickly, capturing the enemy and detaining them to ask them questions is a bad thing yet waiting a decade and then flat out killing them is perceived as great.

Gingrich is asked if he would go into Pakistan to kill terrorists without getting permission from Pakistan first, even if doing so would end our relationship with Pakistan. Newt doesn’t answer the question, he just immediately attacks Ron Paul and says that Dr. Paul’s stance on foreign policy is “irrational”. Gingrich continues to ignore the question and goes on to just talk shit about Pakistan for continually reaping the benefits of foreign aid but not helping us militarily. Yep, because giving foreign aid apparently isn’t an act of kindness it is a transaction where we buy the countries we “aid”. Gingrich then channels Andrew Jackson and says, “Andrew Jackson had a clear cut idea about Americas enemies…KILL THEM!” This soundbite was met with thunderous applause because just like the establishment dickheads on stage, the majority of the South Carolinians in that building would rather murder someone who doesn’t like us than attempt to work towards a peaceful resolution.

Ron Paul then responds to Newt by saying that if other countries did to us what we do to them, we wouldn’t be cool with it. He then goes on to use the “golden rule” example and the rude crowd starts booing Ron Paul loudly! These people are sick! They are very vocally supporting murder and want to hear nothing of peace. This is the Republican stereotype that will continue to keep sane people away from their party. Paul doesn’t falter like other candidates however. He powers through his points, despite the evil jeers of the scumbags booing. Those of us that don’t condone unjustified cold-blooded murder and imperialism cheer from our living rooms because the oldest man in the room stood strong against the vehement hatred and hunger of hundreds of establishment zombies who only call a man crazy because they don’t have the brain power to understand him. I think it was Dave Chappelle who once said that people use the word “crazy” to describe things that they don’t understand. At this point, it doesn’t matter how many times Dr. Paul tries to educate the idiots, eventually you’ve got to just accept the fact that some people are ignorant and move on. Hopefully Dr. Paul learned this lesson but kudos to him for not faltering before these assholes. Another lesson learned, South Carolinians are rude as fuck.

So immediately after the sane man made his statements, Mitt Romney essentially went on a rant that we’ve got to “Kill! Kill! Kill!” and he actually said, “A bullet in the head is the right course of action.” Yep, this also got thunderous applause from the pro-murder sect of the Republican Party. Romney then went on to say that he would build a military so strong that no one would test the United States and thus, it would keep us out of war. He does realize that we go to war with everyone else first, not the other way around, right? I know.. I know, I’m giving this haircut too much credit.

Rick Santorum gets in ”Kill! Kill! Kill!” mode as well and starts bashing Obama for being what he deems as pro-Assad because we put an embassy in Syria. Yeah dude, why reach out and try to build a relationship when you can just shove bombs down their throats?! Santorum spins it into Obama being anti-Israel as Syria is in bed with Iran. Of course the racist “bomb the world” crowd cheers and cheers.

Perry has to get some ”Kill! Kill! Kill!” action too! He says that he wants to send a powerful message to Iran, Syria and Turkey. He takes a little bitch shot at Ron Paul because he’s a pandering redneck dickweed. He then goes on to defend the Marines that pissed on the dead Taliban soldiers which gets the asshole crowd on their feet. I get this feeling in my gut that the Sith have finally come out of hiding. Perry rambles on and on about decapitated soldiers in an attempt to excuse the heinous acts of our Marines. He then tries to explain that Obama is to blame as his bad policies affected the military. Huh? What? Is this dude drinking all the left over vaccinations he couldn’t force into young girls’ arms?

Here’s the kicker of the night however. Mitt Romney was asked about NDAA and he actually says that he would have signed it into law as Obama has! Romney gets a chorus of boos from the asshole crowd but this time I agree with them. Mitt demands more time so he can explain himself; time is granted and then he just rambles incoherently about it and about expanding military power. Okay, so unless you have been in the dark for months, Mitt Romney is for a Nazi-like law that allows the military to arrest and detain American citizens without due process! This guy is leading in the polls people!

Oh wait! Rick Santorum is also on board and he even tries to dispel concerns about the law proving that he is completely ignorant on the subject and incompetent as a decision maker. What does that tell you when a guy who has been a Washington insider, as long as Rick Santorum has, can’t understand a law that he is reading. Then again, the prick never even probably thumbed through the evil bill.

They quickly move over to Ron Paul and change the subject. Paul, who has been a big critic of the NDAA bill, requests time to talk about the issue. Paul is given the opportunity by the moderators. He talks about how the bill is tyrannical and how it destroys the 4th Amendment and our constitutional rights. He says that Americans being held indefinitely without habeas corpus is a horrible thing.

On sacred cow entitlements, Romney says that he would adopt the Paul Ryan Plan in regards to dealing with the Medicare problem. He goes on to say that he would provide “..higher benefits for lower income people and lower benefits for higher income people.” Yep, he’s not a progressive shitbag. Newt calls for the Chilean model on Social Security and adds that Social Security under his plan would be voluntary.

Rick Santorum is asked if his jobs plan is crony capitalism as it seems to pick winners and losers. Ricky Boy says that he would cut corporate taxes for everybody, so it’s fair. He then rants and raves about foreign competition. When the hell did our leaders turn into such pussies, so afraid of foreign competition? Man the fuck up and compete bitch! He then goes on to whine about regulations. Wait, isn’t he responsible for a lot of those? Baier signals that his time is up and Santorum snaps at Baier like the little Yorkshire lapdog bitch that he is. No one wants to hear your boring rant dipshit! Not even Fox News who has been the only force pimping you out! Santorum’s tantrum then turns over to Newt and they bicker back and forth and I zone out and go to the kitchen for a granola bar.

Juan Williams questions Mitt Romney’s consistency and asks him how he is pro-gun rights when he was the first governor to ever sign an assault weapons ban. Mitt tells Juan that he worked with both pro-gun and anti-gun groups on the legislation and they all agreed on it. He even mentions that he took a picture with the leaders of both groups when the bill was signed. He then talks about hunting elk and pheasants. Wow, you’re a tough cookie Mittens!

Santorum is asked about his anti-gun history and he goes on to say that all his votes were supported by the NRA. He said that they supported him signing certain laws because if they didn’t something worse might come down the pipeline. Oh c’mon! What a crock of shit! So you eat a small piece of poop today because you fear that if you don’t there might be a big piece of poop tomorrow?! No dude, you stand by your convictions and you kick both piles of poop and call it a day. Santorum is such a weak pushover hoe. He lets fear dictate his life, whether that’s fear of hypothetical future legislation or fear of a God he doesn’t even understand. Rick Santorum is of the old establishment mentality that you have to take away some rights in order to protect other rights. This guy is beyond stupid.

This discussion about guns carries over to Ron Paul who says that gun laws should be left to the state. Santorum then has to make it known that Ron Paul tried to do away with the 2nd Amendment! Really? God, doesn’t the Bible talk ill of liars? There goes Ricky Boy disappointing Jesus again! Ron Paul says that he would repeal anything that would ban guns. He then points out that Rick Santorum is just nibbling away at the Constitution for his own means.

Newt Gingrich goes on to defend himself from being accused of supporting China’s “one child policy”. He says that he never, in any way, supported that policy. He and Mitt then get into a pointless quarrel over Super PACs. Mitt days that he would get rid of Super PACs as they are corrupt and wrong. Rick Perry then closes out the debate talking about troops on the border and “aviation assets”. In his funny Texan accent he promises to “..lock the border down within a year after taking my hand off of that Bible.”

This debate was hard to watch. The audience was absolutely awful and even though I talked some shit about South Carolina, I hope that their attitudes and behavior doesn’t reflect that of the rest of the state. I guess we’ll find out as the next debate is also in South Carolina. If the crowd at that one is just as ridiculous, it’ll deter me from ever wanting to set foot in that state again!

In the end, Ron Paul did well, even with the whole world seemingly against him. It wasn’t his best performance but it was solid enough. I believe that Romney walked away weak, especially after his NDAA comments. Plus he just pandered and filibustered most of the debate. Newt did really well despite the Fox News and Wall Street Journal moderators trying to “gotcha” him to death and hang him out to dry. Rick Santorum is going to end up sucking gay dicks in Hell so I don’t care about him. Perry is probably going to drop the fuck out because again, he’s deader than shit in this race.

I tried to keep this one short and sweet but these idiots just give you so much material to rip apart and bash.

Grading Scale:
Grade B-: Newt Gingrich
Grade B-: Ron Paul
Grade D: Rick Perry
Grade D-: Mitt Romney
Grade F: Rick Santorum

*Written by Rob Rimes.

I almost don’t want to write about this debate because it was utter fucking shit! But then I thought about it and since I’ve written about every other debate, except the first one back in May, I felt it necessary to continue chronicling my thoughts and analysis and to use my disgust over this shit debate to my advantage. It amazes me that the top network in the world was able to produce such garbage but CBS pulled it off brilliantly!

To start, the set looked morbid, not to mention small. It’s like CBS threw this thing together last minute and were lucky enough to find the only National Guard Armory in America that wasn’t running a local wrestling show that night. Not to say that the entertainment provided wasn’t similar to a small town wrestling show, it was. Granted the heated rivalries weren’t turned up to maximum but the show did feel like it was scripted. Oddly enough, there is some leaked info that came out to support this wild theory. More on that at the end.

The moderators were hot garbage and the format was weak. The worst part about this whole thing is that it was a 90 minute debate and not 120 minutes like all the others. Not only that, but the last half hour was cut off in favor of running an episode of NCIS. I guess a shit forensics show is more important than listening to potential presidents having a much needed discussion on foreign policy. So, I, like many others who are more interested in our future than a cookie cutter crime show had to watch the last 30 minutes on the Internet. I don’t know if it was just me or if other people had the same problem, but the live feed cut out a few times and at the end, I lost 6 out of the final 10 minutes. Whatever, it’s not like CBS was taking any of this seriously anyway.

CBS does the standard introductions and everyone gets a pop, it is worth noting that Ron Paul got the loudest ovation from the South Carolina crowd. Being that this debate was primarily focused on foreign policy, it should’ve been expected that Ron Paul’s answers would upset the conservative establishment. Shit, Bachmann was ready to swing on Ron Paul a few times. I’ll get to that shortly.

Kicking things off, Herman Cain gets the first question, which is basically about his strategy for dealing with Iran, whom many conservatives feel is a crazy enemy that is on the brink of developing nuclear weapons just so they can terrorize Israel as well as us. Cain, subscribing to standard GOP theory on Iran says that he would place warships all over the Middle East strategically. Theoretically, he believes that this will deter Iran from using weapons on us. Yep, let’s build our military up in their backyard and point our guns at them so they don’t point their guns at us. We will force peace!

When the issue of Iran moves over to Mitt Romney, he says that if Obama is re-elected, Iran will become weaponized. Mitt says that if he is president, he will wave his magic wand which will make Iran’s nuclear progress disappear. Romney says that Iran having weapons is unacceptable but it is okay for the United States and its allies to be armed to the teeth. Only we can have the guns. Sounds like something a bully would want. Mitt Romney reminds me of the kid that would only play Nintendo with a Game Genie.

Unfortunately for those of us who have an appreciation for Newt “Honey Badger” Gingrich, our love was thwarted a bit when Mr. Badger admitted that he liked Romney’s answer on the Iran situation. Things like this are why I cannot get behind Newt Gingrich. Where he has won me over on several points, to support Romney’s misguided logic here, is just careless and dangerous. Essentially, guys like Romney, Gingrich and Cain are the ones changing the oil in the American imperialist machine.

Ron Paul steps in with an astute observation and likens the talk in the debate thus far over Iran to the war propaganda pimped out by the media and the fear-mongers leading up to the invasion of Iraq. If you remember, we went there to stop Saddam Hussein from using his cache of nuclear weapons against us. We quickly discovered that no such weapons existed. Although we are still there a decade later, which means that the threats sold to the American people weren’t the real catalyst for war. So what is the real catalyst for war with Iran? That is what we are building towards isn’t it?

Rick Perry ads to the war propaganda by saying that we need to use our power and influence to collapse the Iranian banking system. Yes idiot, let’s send the whole country completely into the dark ages to make our point. Let’s cripple them all so that they starve, shoot and kill each other. Let’s start our mission of peace through war by completely disrupting their lives and forcing them to suffer. One’s gotta love these humanitarian conservatives.

Dork Dick Santorum gets pissy like the little bitch he is because he wasn’t asked the Iran question. Santorum espouses some nonsense and then says vthat he defines victory as “no longer a security threat”. Hmm.. well, what if they aren’t a threat to begin with? These conservatives are always chasing phantoms and boogeymen.

Bachmann looks somewhat normal this round, I can’t really knock her fashion choice for this debate even though she looks like a woman at a funeral in a western film. Shit, I just knocked her, ah well. She talks a bunch of gibberish I can’t really hear over the sound of my urine hitting the side of the toilet bowl. “Bachmann” has become Minnesotan for “piss break” as far as I’m concerned.

When Huntsman is brought into this foreign policy debate, he says that we need to stop nation building oversees and focus on rebuilding our own nation, as it is suffering. His observation brings light to the fact that our problems at home need to be addressed before we can even really think about expanding military action in other regions. Talk like this is why conservatives claim that Huntsman is running in the wrong party. Talk like this is why I sometimes like what Huntsman has to say because at least it differs from the large helping of bullshit served up by most of the candidates in this race, excluding Ron Paul and Gary Johnson.

Truth is, where I do not like Huntsman on most things, he does understand foreign policy better than most of the people on the stage and should have some sort of cabinet position, even if it is being the ambassador to China once again. Although, that might not work since the Chinese government associates Huntsman with the Jasmine Revolution, which saw young Chinese taking to the streets protesting the need for democracy in Red China. The Chinese government also went as far as to censor Jon Huntsman from search results on the Internet.

When Mitt Romney is asked if he would talk directly to the Taliban in order to bring forth peace in Afghanistan, he proudly proclaimed that he “..will NOT negotiate with terrorists!” Of course this got a loud pop. What he really meant to say was that the world better do things his way or they were going to be licking the shit off of his Salvatore Ferragamo python loafers.

Newt comes into the debate next and is asked how we can bring about peace in Afghanistan without negotiating with the Taliban. Newt points out that the Taliban has a sanctuary in Pakistan and informs us that it is Iran and Pakistan, two countries that border Afghanistan that are the ones we need to be focusing on.

Herman Cain says that it isn’t clear whether or not Pakistan is a friend or an enemy. He says that clarity is missing. Um.. dude, just pay attention. Didn’t Mark Block put down his cigarette long enough before the debate to hand you some notes? You’ve got to be prepared for these things and stop getting caught with your pants down, pun intended.

When the issue of foreign aid comes up, Rick Perry says that every country needs to be sent a clear message. Perry’s clear message is to make everybody start at zero dollars. Perry says that it is real clear that Pakistan is sending us a message that they don’t deserve our aid.

Bachmann vehemently disagrees with Perry, which I stayed to listen to as I didn’t have to pee at that moment. Michele, instilling fear, points out that Pakistan has a nuke and that the Al-Qaeda is close by. Bachmann, instilling even more fear, says that the table is set for nuclear war between Israel and its enemies.

Okay, so by this logic, Bachmann would rather give foreign fucking aid to a bunch of anti-American fucksacks in order to keep them at bay. Really lady? Are you shitting me? So you’re like one of those business owners that pays the mafia’s “protection fee” once a month to keep them from vandalizing your store. You’re too much of a goddamned fear turtle to run the show.

Newt agrees with Rick Perry and adds that countries receiving foreign aid should have to explain to us why they need it. He also warns that the Arab Spring is becoming the Anti-Christian Spring, which shows that we do need to go through the list of countries that we give foreign aid to, so that we can stop wasting it on those that aren’t even our friends.

Santorum jumps back into the debate and says that we must make sure that Pakistan is our friend because they have nukes. Okay, so with this idiot’s dumb ass logic we should be besties with North Korea since they hate us and are estimated to have 6 to 8 WMDs. Shit, maybe we should stop bashing Iran and send them some gift baskets full of love and Reese’s peanut butter cups before they point their superweapons back at us. Conservatives are confusing.

The debate shifts back to Newt who bitchslaps a gotcha question like the pro he is. He talks about Iran and North Korea and says that he would manage those situations with the same strategy Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II used against communism. Newt says that we need to build up the Navy. He also says that he would reevaluate our relationship with the United Nations.

Rick Perry is asked how he would manage America’s nuclear weapons if he were to eliminate the Department of Energy. Perry says that he would surround himself with the best advisors and he would consult them on it. Homie is sounding a lot like Herman Cain.

We move on to the torture part of the debate where the only two sane people in the room are Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman. Cain kicks it off by saying that he is against torture but would trust the military to make the right decisions. Once again, Cain puts his trust in others to lead. Is this really who you want to waste a fucking vote on? Maybe Godfather’s Pizza was successful because of Cain’s advisors not because of Cain. Then again, they are only the 9th biggest pizza chain in America. Cain also says that waterboarding is not torture, that it is just “enhanced interrogation”. Yep, so is a testicle in a vice dude.

The moderators turn to Bachmann. She thinks that waterboarding is super fun.

Ron Paul points out that waterboarding is bullshit and that it is torture. He says that it is impractical, ineffective and that it has never been proven to work. He also states that it is un-American on principle alone. Crazy Eyes Bachmann starts shouting out of her shit pipe for the moderators to allow her to battle it out with Ron Paul but they ignore her. Jon Huntsman cuts in and says that waterboarding is indeed torture and warns us against using it.

The subject of presidents using their executive power to assassinate American citizens, without arrest or a trial, comes up and Mitt Romney chimes in. Romney says that it is okay if the citizen is deemed a terrorist. Okay, well shitpickle, any American can be deemed a terrorist if one goes by the guidelines laid out for what constitutes a potential terrorist in the MIAC Report. Mitt Romney is a tyrant without power, hopefully he doesn’t get power.

Newt makes a point to say that if you engage in war against the United States, that that makes you an enemy combatant and the rules change because war is war. This is a seemingly solid point but the word “war” isn’t as clearly defined as some might think. Once again, refer to the MIAC Report and see what constitutes a potential threat to national security.

The debate moves towards our relationship with China where the optimistic Rick Perry says that he believes that China will have the same fate as the Soviet Union because China doesn’t have the virtues that America has. The virtues that Perry is referring to are those same virtues that made him try to force needles into the arms of young girls in Texas. Perry also says that we must fight the cyberwar and we must win it.

Mitt is asked how he would prevent a second Cold War, this time with China. Mitt goes through his spiel about how China is a currency manipulator and how they don’t play by the rules, etcetera, etcetera, et-fucking-cetera. Mitt says that China has to be forced to play by the rules and that he would bring an action against them to the World Trade Organization. Romney says that contrary to his critics fears, he will not start a trade war because we are already in a trade war.

Huntsman is asked to give his two cents on Romney’s stance. Huntsman says that you cannot bring an action against China to the WTO. He also says that the key to reaching out to China is the young people. Remember earlier when I mentioned that China felt that Huntsman was somehow associated with the Jasmine Revolution? Well, Huntsman points out that the young people of China are fighting against the older generation and those in power who are stuck in their tyrannical communist ways. Huntsman lets us know that the future in China could be drastically different than what we know now. Where I stand, I can only hope that what will probably be a hard-fought and hopefully non-violent revolution ends up a success. The young people of China are hungry and they are tired of being subservient pawns to an overbearing state. Huntsman assures us that China’s Internet generation will bring down the tyranny in their country.

Rick Perry is then asked if his zero dollar foreign aid policy would apply to Israel. Perry says that Israel would also be reset to zero. Perry is then cut off as he starts to explain how he would handle Israel. Why is Perry cut off? Well, CBS tells us that the televised portion of the debate is over because NCIS is coming on. The audience at home is told to tune in on CBS.com to watch the last half hour of the debate.

The Internet only portion of the debate kicks off with Michele Bachmann painting a birdhouse.. just kidding. Actually, Bachmann says that we need a fixed cost system for the military. She says she will modernize military spending.

Herman Cain is asked about the Obama administration’s handling of the Middle East. Cain says that the Obama administration has mishandled all of the recent Arab uprisings but doesn’t really explain why.

Ron Paul is asked about Syria and he states that it is wrong for the United States to get involved in the problems of all these other countries. He says that it is wrong of us to go in and prop up dictators, which has been our history with similar situations. Paul points out that every time we do this sort of thing, it creates worse problems. Ron Paul gets cheers but the moderators cut him off before he can finish his quick rundown. Funny, because they let almost everyone else go over on their time.

Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich both agree that they would use covert activity to take out Assad. Chances are, he would be dragged around in the street, shot like a dog and then be sodomized to death with a knife just like Gaddafi was. Or they would just assassinate him like Osama bin Laden. Mitt Romney says that it is very important that we help Syria get rid of Assad and give them a new leader. Jesus people, do any of you listen to the common sense being dropped on you by Ron Paul? Have any of you ever picked up a fucking history book?

Herman Cain and Rick Santorum both admit that they would leave Gitmo open. They also say that they would continue to allow “enhanced interrogation” tactics.

Ron Paul attempts to educate the other conservatives again. He states that we have a bad foreign policy and we pretend we are at war with everyone. He points out that we have gone as far as assassinating American citizens, even a 16-year-old kid, the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who’s death has been widely ignored and unmentioned by the mainstream media. Ron Paul says that in regards to torture and assassination, even our leaders have to live within the constraints of the law. Ron Paul is owning these cockpuppets and then Bachmann starts yelping like a fucking Yorkshire Terrier in an effort to respond to Ron Paul. Once again, the moderators ignore Bachmann’s pleas and tell her that there are rules to follow.

Rick Perry, who is up next, disagrees with Ron Paul. Perry declares that “THIS IS WAR!” and goes on to tell us about how we have to do certain things when we are at war. Jesus, it’s like these people are just locked in this war mode and completely oblivious to their own insanity. It’s like our leaders are programmed to perpetuate this aimless blind madness forever!

Bachmann finally gets her moment and actually compares the death of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki. She treats them as if they are one in the same, even though one was a citizen and one was not. Granted both were enemies of the state but there is something fundamentally wrong with our country when its leaders kill its own citizens without a trial, regardless of the situation. If you can’t see why, fuck you.

The only way a citizen, even one aligned with terrorists, should be murdered without a trial is if he happens to be caught in a crossfire or a battle and is slain. If this citizen turned terrorist was found by intelligence and then targeted for death by an unmanned drone, there is something incredibly wrong with that. If he tries to evade capture and is shot, that is understandable but to send a robot to terminate him like a T-1000 hunting down John Connor is something that evil machines do, not human beings. Then again, we are dealing with imperialistic bastards here.

Jon Huntsman gets the conch again and tells us that our debt is our biggest national security problem. He pimps out the Paul Ryan Plan and also mentions that he believes that education should be handled at a state level.

They bring in “Tutti Frutti” Bachmann again, a name given to her by Herman Cain (see here). She goes on some weird tirade about how she hates LBJ and how great China is for not having LBJ’s “Great Society”. Huh? What she is saying is that the United States should be more like China because China doesn’t have a welfare system. Yes, she wants us to be less socialist like communist China.

Herman Cain is then asked a military question and he can’t answer it! C’mon man! Well, he does technically answer it, he just says that he would put his trust in his advisors to make the right decisions. Alright dude, are we voting for you or a team of advisors? Do we even need you? Can we just have the advisors then? What the fuck is this guy doing up there? It’s time to leave the big kids table and stop making an ass out of yourself. Rachel Maddow was right when she called your campaign “performance art” and god I hate saying Maddow was right about anything. Thanks a lot Mr. Cain! Now could you conservatives stop giving this guy an endless supply of mulligans? It’s like he’s using the Konami Code and has 30 lives!

With 10 minutes left my Internet dropped the feed. I got it back 6 minutes later with only 4 minutes left in the debate. I probably didn’t miss much.

Huntsman talks about how he has worked with Pakistan in the past and how most of the other candidates don’t get it. He tells us that they are incredibly hard to work with. Throwing money at them isn’t the answer.

Rick Perry is asked about the euro versus the dollar. He starts by saying that the euro was created to compete with the dollar but, just like 30 minutes earlier, he is cut off by the moderators who say we’re all out of time. These asshole moderators are shitty fucking timekeepers and horrible at managing debates. Fuck Major Garrett and his butt buddy.

God, this debate was fucking crap! It was painful to watch and it was just a big ass joke. It was obvious that the debate was structured in such a way that the most time was given to Romney, Cain and Gingrich. Ron Paul only had a total of 89 seconds in the one hour televised portion! He was cut off again and again and so were the other candidates that aren’t the mainstream media’s darlings. Hell, even Rick Perry, who was once their darling, was shitted on pretty hard.

Now I know that seems like conspiratorial nonsense but there was an e-mail sent to Michele Bachmann’s campaign staff from CBS that leaked out (I posted a story on it here). The e-mail basically admits that the decision to limit the time of certain candidates was deliberate on the part of CBS.

Here’s a piece of the story I posted earlier, which is written by Prison Planet’s Paul Joseph Watson:

As Marc Fortier points out, an email inadvertently sent to Michelle Bachmann’s campaign clearly indicates that certain candidates were given less air time as a result of a deliberate CBS policy.

When a CBS staffer referenced how Bachmann’s campaign had made representatives available for an after-debate webshow, CBS News political analyst John Dickerson responded by saying, “Okay let’s keep it loose though since she’s not going to get many questions and she’s nearly off the charts in the hopes that we can get someone else.”

Dickerson’s admission that CBS had deliberately ensured Bachmann was “not going to get many questions” during the debate indicated “a planned effort to limit questions to Michele Bachmann at tonight’s CBS/National Journal Debate,” the Bachmann campaign said in a statement.

Obviously, that policy of limiting air time to certain candidates was also applied to Congressman Ron Paul, despite the fact that he has consistently won straw polls and proven himself as a top tier candidate in national polls.

As we have documented, despite his popularity the establishment media has deliberately downplayed and sidelined Paul’s campaign.

After Ron Paul finished a close second to Bachmann in the highly regarded Ames straw poll, and was subsequently blacklisted by the corporate press, Politico’s Roger Simon said the reason for him being ignored was that “the media doesn’t believe he has a hoot in hells chance of winning the Iowa caucuses, the Republican nomination or winning the presidency, so we’re gonna ignore him.”

“We are in the business of kicking candidates out of the race,” CNN host Howard Kurtz responded.

It’s a fucked up crazy race people and the media is doing everything it can to try and shape the results. It’s up to us to make our own decisions and to speak up when they try and pull these kind of bullshit stunts.

Grading Scale:
Grade B-: Ron Paul
Grade C: Jon Huntsman
Grade C-: Newt Gingrich
Grade D+: Mitt Romney
Grade D: Rick Perry
Grade D: Herman Cain
Grade F: Michele Bachmann
Grade F: Rick Santorum
Grade I: Gary Johnson

*Taken from the Economic Collapse.

Over a trillion U.S. taxpayer dollars have been spent on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.  Whether you are for the wars or against the wars, it is important for all of us to step back and evaluate what we have really gotten for all of that money.  In Libya, we have actually helped al-Qaeda forces that were shooting at U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan take over the country.  Now they have announced that they will be imposing strict Sharia law on all of Libya.  After 10 years of having our boys shot up in Afghanistan, the Afghan government is so “grateful” that they are publicly saying that they will side with Pakistan in any future war against the United States.  In Iraq, Islamic radicals are beheading and murdering dozens and dozens of Christians and the new Iraqi government seemingly can’t wait to push the remaining U.S. soldiers out of the country.  We ran up well over a trillion dollars of new debt to “liberate” these countries, but are they really in better shape than they were before these wars?  Are we really in better shape than we were before these wars?

Today, the United States military has at least one base in more than half of all the nations on the planet.

The U.S. spends more than 7 times as much on the military as any other country on earth does.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from MyWay.

A top State Department diplomat says “it’s only a matter of time now” before besieged Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has to step down.

Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman says “I think what’s clear is that the rebels are winning.” He says U.S. officials don’t know Gadhafi’s whereabouts.

Interviewed on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Monday from Cairo, Feltman says “the rebels are clearly taking over the city. They are clearly taking over the institutions.” He says American officials have been told the rebels have seized control of Libya’s state television.

Asked whether he believes the al Qaida terrorist network will gain new footing in Libya, Feltman says the first step in a post-Gadhafi setting is “trying to prevent some kind of cycle where people act out their own retributions,” as happened when Saddam Hussein fell in Iraq.

CONTINUED..

John Stossel and David Boaz (CATO) discuss the proper role of America’s military.

*Taken from Reason. Written by Michael Munger.

Watching recent events in Egypt I have had a sense of both surreal distance and of personal connection. Distance because it is hard to imagine that American “friend” Hosni Mubarak, recipient of more than $45 billion of U.S. military and economic aid, has finally been called out for his acts of brutal repression. Connection because one of the people Mubarak imprisoned was my brother-in-law.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim is an Egyptian academic sociologist and democracy activist. He is also married to my step-sister Barbara. In 2000 Saad was arrested by the national police, and charged by the Mubarak regime with embezzlement and defaming Egypt’s image.

What Saad had actually done was to obtain a large academic grant from the European Union and spend it on research. He also publicly asked when Egypt was going to have free and fair elections. In response, Saad was sentenced to seven years of hard labor. Given the state of Egyptian prisons, and Saad’s physical condition and age, it could have been a death sentence. He was finally released three years later.

I remember talking to Saad after he got out. His view of the American role was heartbreaking. Democracy activists in Egypt, and throughout the Middle East, had to distance themselves from America, he said. U.S. support for Mubarak was tarnishing America’s image, just as Mubarak himself was tarnishing Egypt’s image. How did we get to that point?

The answer is that American foreign policy seems to rest on a simple premise: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Except it’s not simple. It’s a blatant double standard. Our attitude seems to be, “Sure, that dictator is a murderous thug, but he’s our murderous thug”

Letting our enemies choose our friends is also dangerous. The U.S. supplied the rockets that the mujahedeen used to attack Russian helicopters in Afghanistan. Now we call the mujahedeen the Taliban, and they kill Americans. We also propped up Saddam Hussein and a host of other brutes who started out as docile U.S. puppets.

But the real problem is that we compound our errors in judgment with an error in doctrine. This disastrous policy was clearly stated in a 1979 Commentary article titled “Dictatorships and Double Standards” written by future Reagan administration U.N. Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick. In Kirkpatrick’s view, dictatorships could be classified either as authoritarian or totalitarian, and the difference mattered.

Authoritarians can be useful allies, Kirkpatrick argued, because their rule is based on money and power. More importantly, authoritarians may give way to friendly, democratic regimes. The U.S. should just look the other way until they do.

Not so with totalitarians, according to Kirkpatrick. Totalitarians construct a regime that is persistent and expansionist. They don’t care much about money or power. And they are animated by ideology.

Kirkpatrick’s concern was communism, because that ideology appeared to be perpetual and communicable. No country, once it had “gone communist,” could be expected to return to the fold of legitimate governments. And communist regimes actively tried to spread their ideas, like mutant strains of a deadly virus, to other nations.

That meant the U.S. was at war with an idea, and brutal tactics were required to stop the idea’s spread. The U.S. therefore supported some pretty awful allies, and more than a few of the dissidents who were killed or tortured by those allies suffered at the hands of foreign military officers trained at U.S. bases.

The Kirkpatrick doctrine seems silly in retrospect. A lot of formerly communist countries have now found democracy, or something close to it. The holdouts, Cuba and North Korea, can barely feed themselves. But Cold War U.S. policy in Latin America has robbed us of our moral legitimacy, because we did little to foster the move towards democracy in that part of the world. If the U.S. could enable the near enslavement of much of Central America for decades by supporting the worst sort of thuggish authoritarians, how could we claim credit for anything except hypocrisy?

At least we won’t make that mistake again, right? Wrong. We have a new Kirkpatrick doctrine that explains much of contemporary U.S. foreign policy. Instead of communism, the new mutant ideology is Islam.

The story goes like this: Islam is perpetual and expansionist. Any country that goes theocratic will never again be democratic. So even a bad authoritarian dictator is better than an Islamic totalitarian. Repression, torture, secret police, and thousands of political prisoners are all acceptable, provided the favored dictator is the enemy of our enemy. And once again our enemy is an idea. In Egypt, millions of people are struggling for self-determination. But democracy activists have to be careful not to be labeled “pro-American,” because that would destroy their credibility. In other words, by supporting anti-Islamist thugs like Mubarak, we have contributed to the very problem we hoped to solve.

The defining struggle in Muslim-majority countries will not be between U.S.-supported dictators and radical Islamists. The future will belong to the victor in an ideological struggle between moderate Islam and the jihadist version.

Yet our policy has empowered the jihadists by revealing the stark contradictions between what Americans say about democracy and what we actually do. By supporting dictators who promise to be the enemy of our enemy, we have become our enemy’s best friend.

The real solution is to allow new democracies to be born. Some of them may begin life as Iranian-style Islamic republics. But remember that the pro-democracy movement is alive in Iran, despite being brutally put down last year.

The U.S. role ultimately comes down to trust. Not trust of Islamic government, but a trust in the fundamental yearning of humans everywhere to have a say in their own government, and to control their own lives. This yearning, more than any other factor, tore down that wall in East Germany. Instead of helping to repress that desire, why don’t we help unshackle it? Why won’t the U.S. recognize that the most powerful mutant ideology is freedom?

My Two Cents: I love the Judge. He doesn’t suck up to Rummy like everyone else at Fox News. He just comes hard with REAL questions. End Two Cents.

My Two Cents: I found this interesting. End Two Cents.

*Taken from The Excavator. Written by Saman Mohammadi

The United States government has repeatedly stated that the treat from Al-Qaeda against America is very real, and that all action is being taken to eliminate that threat. Nobody in their right mind would question such a serious assessment about a sensitive national security matter from the world’s leading democracy. But the truth is that over the past fifty years America’s democratic institutions like the press have been weakened, and an elitist National Security State has risen, and taken control over all aspects of government.

Since World War II U.S. leaders have consistently lied to the American people about foreign threats in order to feed the military machine’s appetite for war. All of these wars are unjust and unwarranted but that does not stop the self-interested criminals who control U.S. foreign policy. A recent example of a lie they told was their assertion that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. That episode revealed to many people the true nature of the American government. Simply put, it does not care about the truth, or the American people, or the members of the military. U.S. leaders like former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, to name but a few, tell lies at will. Dishonesty means nothing to them. They deceive the American people, the American military, and the world about their motives and methods – and they lie to themselves about their own powers and abilities.

Next to the hundreds of thousands of innocent people who were slaughtered by the American war machine in its numerous criminal wars, U.S. soldiers have suffered the most – way more than the rest of the population in America. It can’t be said enough that the U.S. government’s treatment of its soldiers is scandalous and shameful. It is so out of whack that in America today dogs are treated better than military vets. Some dogs are even treated to luxurious spas while military vets are denied the proper health care that they deserve. Instead, they’re left to rot, and commit suicide. And for what? To defend America? To defeat Al-Qaeda? Or to keep the war machine and its benefactors rich and powerful? As you will see by the end of this post, it is the latter.

I. Setting The Historical Scene: The United States Government And The American Mainstream Media Are Anti-Democracy, Anti-Freedom, Anti-Peace

“All governments lie.” said American journalist I. F. Stone. You can add to that great quote “and all newspapers lie, too.”

By joining forces together, the CIA and American newspapers sold two criminal wars to the people – a manufactured and destructive “War on Terror,” and the Iraq war. Most journalists were not consciously part of the propaganda campaign, they just bought the hype, but, without a doubt, a lot of journalists who work for the CIA knowingly injected false information into their columns and helped spread nationalist fever across America to boost public support for the wars.

Government spies posing as independent journalists is one of the CIA’s least kept secrets. Former CIA director William Colby famously said “The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” Carl Bernstein revealed the relationship between the CIA and the media in his 1977 Rolling Stone article “The CIA and the Media.” An excerpt:

“Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services — from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested it the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements America’s leading news organizations.”

The media’s relationship with the CIA began well before the Vietnam war, but it was after that disastrous war ended when the Pentagon and the CIA took their clandestine media operations to another level. They wanted to completely gut the free press in America, which contributed to the anti-war sentiment in the late 60s and early 70s. Government officials secretly established deep ties to journalists to make sure that the American people would be less informed about America’s foreign policy, and future conflicts, and hence, less combative against the government and less anti-war.

The Pentagon has been interested in information warfare for many decades, and the fruits of their studies are applied to the American people, and to foreign enemies. “PSYOP,” shorthand for “Psychological Operations,” is a propaganda and disinformation Pentagon program that is used in the foreign battlefield to break the will of enemy forces, and make the ensuing battle a little less bloody. It worked wonderfully in the Gulf war. Retired Col. Jim Noll said that PSYOPs was a life-saving military technique. From a 2001 article called “Persian Gulf War 10 years later: Winning the war by convincing the enemy to go home” by Al Zdon:

“The psychological warfare in the end saved many lives, on both sides. “I know many American lives were saved because so many Iraqis had deserted or chose not to fight when we arrived. Many of them were holding up our leaflets to surrender with.”

The leaflets were based on the intelligence the Psyops battalion had gained from prisoners. Some showed large bombers dropping their payloads. Others showed tank units how to surrender. Others showed Americans landing from the sea (a military ploy to divert Iraqi defenses. The U.S. never did land from the sea.) Others were printed on fake Iraqi money so the soldiers could conceal them in their wallets.”

Wired magazine reported in June that the Pentagon may change the name PSYOP to Military Information Support and/to Operations (MISO). I wrote an article about the proposed name change back in July called “MISO: Making Intelligence Sound Obscure.”

The threat by PSYOPS to democracy, and freedom in America cannot be overstated. It is a fact that the Pentagon and the CIA routinely use PSYOPS against the American people to make them support illegal and unnecessary wars. Indeed, it is not a stretch to say that today the United States is a PSYOPS state, not a democratic state.

It should concern all Americans, and all citizens around the world that the CIA and Pentagon are using psychological military techniques inside the United States against the American people. The CIA was created to keep tabs on foreign enemies, not the American people. Former Governor Jesse Ventura has confirmed that the CIA is working within America’s borders a number of times in his many television interviews. He says that a cadre of CIA officials questioned him shortly after he won the election in Minnesota as an independent candidate about how he won. Ventura guesses that the CIA questioned him because they were surprised that a political maverick like him succeeded and wanted to know his political strategy in order to prevent a similar candidate from advancing to such a high political position in the future.

Former President Harry Truman criticized the CIA for intervening in domestic affairs in a Washington Post op-ed in 1963: “For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government…. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”

Philip Agee, who served in the CIA from 1957 to 1968, left the Agency because it failed to uphold the beliefs and values of the American people. He remained a leading critic of CIA policies until his death on January 7, 2008. In his 1975 book “Inside the Company: CIA Diary,” Agee warned that the murderous methods used by the CIA and the American empire in foreign lands would be used against the American people. “The killings at Kent State and Jackson State,” he wrote, “show clearly enough that sooner or later our counter-insurgency methods would be applied at home.” The rise of FEMA, TSA, and the overall police state proves that Agee’s prediction was accurate. In fact, the threat of martial law is so severe that it can be declared by the White House in the very near future.

II. Flashback: The Threat From Iraq Was Not Real

Knowing the truth matters in a democracy because without the truth citizens can’t make informed decisions about government policies that impact their lives. It is not possible to consciously answer fundamental societal questions like “should we go to war?” without a firm grasp of all the facts at hand. When independent journalists fail to provide the simple and straightforward facts to the public, they become complicit in government murder and fraud, and deserve even more ridicule than dishonest government officials and government-owned journalists.

Had the truth emerged that Saddam Hussein was not in possession of weapons of mass destruction before America invaded Iraq in March of 2003, there would not have been any public support for the war. True, hundreds of thousands of people around the world protested the invasion of Iraq before it was launched, but many people didn’t because they believed the lie that Saddam was a dangerous threat and would use WMDs against America if he wasn’t taken out. Leaders in the Bush administration used the oldest trick in the book of war to get the people to support a war that was not in their interest: they created a justification. Basically, they lied.

Since a government’s justification for war, whether real or contrived, carries weight with a significant amount of people because they accept the word of authority over science and critical thinking, it is crucial to know, especially in societies based on the consent of the people, if a justification given by the government for war is true, or false. In the case of Iraq, as we now know, it was false.

It is a tragedy that the world did not learn the fact that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction a lot sooner. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people died in Iraq who could have lived a long and fulfilling life, and the country itself was destroyed in a deliberate and systematic fashion. Dirk Adriaensens, a member of the Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal, which is a group that was part of the World Tribunal on Iraq, describes exactly how Iraq was demolished by the sick and murderous U.S. and U.K. governments in his article “Iraq: The Age of Darkness.”

Leaders in the Bush administration knew all along that Saddam did not have WMDs and was not a threat, but they wanted to go to war so bad that they made stuff up and presented it as the truth to the whole world. Ellen Knickmeyer, a former Washington Post bureau chief in Baghdad and Cairo, said this much and more in an article she wrote in October after WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of Iraq war logs. ”Recent revelations by WikiLeaks,” Knickmeyer said, “show how top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world.”

Some defenders of the Iraq war insist that it was noble and good because a tyrant was removed from power. This is a poisonous and dangerous half-truth. Indeed, it is true that Saddam was a vicious tyrant, and a godforsaken man, but his removal from power didn’t require a huge ground invasion and subsequent military occupation since he had no real support from his people and military. But that’s beside the point because removing tyrants from power is not an objective of U.S. foreign policy. And it should not be. Tyrants are always removed from below, never from above.

If American leaders truly cared about the rule of law and democracy in Iraq they would have presented their case to the United Nations that Saddam was a war criminal for gassing the Kurds, which would have been met with agreement, and from there a variety of peaceful and legal means would have been recommended by the international community to bring Saddam to justice. If he then resisted international arrest, there would be a legal justification for using force to capture him and bring him to trial. But that course was not taken by American leaders because justice was only on their lips, not on their minds. American leaders and the CIA, unfortunately, are destroyers – not defenders – of democracy and the rule of a law. The same is true for Israeli leaders and Mossad. They are counterfeiters and war criminals who deserve to be hanged, not defended and praised.

Noam Chomsky said on Democracy Now last week that the political leadership in both the United States and Israel share a “profound hatred for democracy.” This statement gets at the truth of the current political reality in Washington and Tel Aviv, but U.S. and Israeli don’t just hate democracy, they also hate the American people, humanity, truth, honor, peace, and all that is good and righteous in the world.

Just as Iraq was destroyed by design by U.S. leaders, America is being destroyed by design by U.S. leaders. The American people are coming to this realization reluctantly, but they’re coming to it at last. They are beginning to discover that their country is in ruins not by accident but from other causes, namely, that their top leaders are traitors who desire the destruction of America and the advancement of a new world order in which their illegally acquired power and wealth grows evermore.

Both Herodotus and Socrates said “The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” Knowledge of the cause for war brings good into the world, ignorance of the causes of war brings evil into the world. Despite what we have been taught, war is not natural. War exists when ruling before the Second World War began, and when it ended, after millions of people died, historian Howard Zinn learned the same truth the hard way and then taught it to people for decades, up to the start of the Iraq war. In 2006 he wrote, “war itself is the enemy of the human race.”

To defeat war, humanity’s collective enemy, we must learn the truth for why there is war in our time. When asked why America is at war American leaders always point to the attacks on September 11, 2001, but the official account of what happened on that day is not true. New scientific evidence gathered by a collection of physicists, scientists, architects, and engineers, among them Steven E. Jones, Niels Harrit, and Richard Gage, proves unequivocally that the towers, including the rarely mentioned building 7, collapsed due to controlled demolition using explosives.

American leaders told one of the greatest lies in human history when they said that Al-Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. That lie spawned an immediate and criminal invasion of Afghanistan, and a much larger, and more consequential global war on terrorism that is still being waged in numerous countries more than nine years after the attacks. Former President George W. Bush also used the 9/11 lie to paint Saddam Hussein as a supporter of terrorism. In his State of the Union Address on January 28, 2003, Bush said: “Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaida.” This statement later was proven to be a complete lie. Saddam had no connections to Al-Qaeda.

President Barack Obama has frequently relied on the 9/11 lie to support his administration’s war in Afghanistan. After the Christmas Day airliner bombing attempt last December, which also remains a dubious eventbecause the bomber was boarded onto the plane with help from an unmentioned person who is presumed to be an intelligence official, Obamasaid: “We are at war against al Qaeda, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people and that is plotting to strike us again. And we will do whatever it takes to defeat them.”

Obama was blatantly lying when he said that Al-Qaeda is a “far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” Once you research the origins of Al-Qaeda, which in Arabic simply means “the base,” you can’t help but view American leaders like Bush and Obama as devilish tricksters who are trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

III. 11 Reasons Why The Threat From Al-Qaeda is Not Real

Al-Qaeda is either one of these things, or it is a combination of them: a) a completely fake threat; the organization does not exist, b) an organization that exists in small numbers but was created by the CIA to serve a corrupt U.S. foreign policy, and remains a U.S. intelligence asset in the manufactured global war on terrorism, or c) a small organization that exists independently of the U.S. government but its strength and influence in the Middle East is exaggerated by radical policymakers and officials in Washington. Out of all three statements the first and second deserve the most serious attention because they are supported by the evidence listed below.

#1. Radical American cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, who was ordered to beassassinated by President Obama, met with top military officials at the Pentagon months after the 9/11 attacks. Were Pentagon officials sincerely interested in reaching out to members of the Muslim community, or were they recruiting radical Muslim clerics to spread the message of radical Islam in order to validate and sustain the Bush administration’s war on terror? It is not outrageous or crazy to raise the question if the U.S. government aims to inflame radical Islam, even by funding and supporting undercover intelligence agents that front as terrorists, in order to make the American people perceive that they are in danger of violent Islamic extremism, and cause them to give up their liberties for permanent security.

An alarming piece of news is that follows an undeniable pattern of government-induced terrorist activity is of an FBI informant, Craig Monteilh, who infiltrated a Mosque in California, and shouted violent rhetoric with the intention to entrap potential terrorists, and then sell it to the public that “Hey, the FBI arrested someone at a Mosque who wanted to blow a building up,” without mentioning the fact that the FBI agent was the one who got the ball rolling in the first place. In this case, however, the government’s plan to attract and create terrorists didn’t work. The Washington Post reported: “In the Irvine case, Monteilh’s mission as an informant backfired. Muslims were so alarmed by his talk of violent jihad that they obtained a restraining order against him.”

#2. CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed in June 2010 on ABC’s This Week that there are less than 100 Al-Qaeda members in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. “I think the estimate on the number of Al Qaeda,” said Panetta, “is actually relatively small. At most, we’re looking at 50 to 100, maybe less. It’s in that vicinity.” By contrast, there are more than 100,000 American soldiers and military contractors in the region. You can’t call it a fair fight. You can’t even say “it’s not a fair fight,” because, in reality, it is not a fight at all. It is not a fight. 50,000 Al-Qaeda members would make it a fight. It still wouldn’t be a fair fight, but it would be a fight.

#3. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), one of the world’s leading security think tanks, published a report this year which said that the threat of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban is exaggerated by Western policymakers. The report warned that the war in Afghanistan will become a “long, drawn-out disaster” if troops are not withdrawn. Nigel Inkster, a former deputy chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service who is a member of the think tank, also said that the threat from Al-Qaeda in Pakistan is minimal, and almost absent in Yemen, and Somalia.

Commenting on the report by the IISS, journalist and author Eric Margolissaid:

“The IISS’s findings are a direct challenge to Obama, Britain’s new prime minister, David Cameron, and other US allies with troops in Afghanistan. This report undermines their rational used to sustain the increasingly unpopular conflict. It will certainly convince sceptics that the real reason for occupation of Afghanistan has to do with oil, excluding China from the region, and keeping watch on nuclear-armed Pakistan.”

#4. Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in an interview to the Los Angeles Times’s Patt Morrison in October 2010 that Al-Qaeda doesn’t exist. “The organization that did 9/11 — that Al Qaeda — I don’t think really exists,” said Rice. The statement is shocking, to say the least, and contradicts the official 9/11 story which is built on the premise that Al-Qaeda, regarded as an Islamic terrorist group by the United States, England, Canada, Israel,Saudi Arabia and many other governments, was large and sophisticated enough to plan and execute the biggest terrorist attack in the United States. Apparently, Rice doesn’t agree with President Obama that Al-Qaeda is a “far-reaching network of violence.”

#5. The U.S. government created, and funded Islamic fundamentalism in the 1980s to be used to draw the Soviet Union into Afghanistan, and bleed it to death in a costly and unwinnable war. This was no doubt a smart move when you have a strategic hat on, when you are sitting comfortably on the seat of power, but when you are confronting issues of peace and war, life and death, coexistence and annihilation, on a very small planet, it was a very cynical and dangerous error. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is considered a realist in foreign policy circles and a critic of Israel, was one of the leaders behind the operation as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor. In an interview he gave to a weekly French magazine called “Le Nouvel Observateur” in January 1998 he discussed how and why the U.S. funded Muslim terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on your outlook). Excerpt from the interview:

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the break-up of the Soviet empire.

The fact that America trained and funded a terrorist network in Central Asia less than two decades before the September 11, 2001 attacks is a relevant historical fact. It raises the strong possibility that after the Soviet Union collapsed the CIA used their terrorist network to promote U.S. foreign policy by covert means, including in the United States on September 11, 2001.

#6. Robin Cook, who served as a British MP for 22 years and as Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001, wrote an article for the Guardian in July 2005, a month before his death, called “The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means.” Throughout the article Cook makes many devastating critiques of the West’s war on terror, but here is a quote that requires our greatest attention:

“Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally “the database”, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.”

Cook’s analysis is dead on in certain respects, but, like others, including author Chalmers Johnson (RIP), he made the mistake of contextualizing terrorism against the West as the result of a blowback against American foreign policy that is orchestrated chiefly by a mad and independent Osama Bin Laden and his hardcore followers. In reality, the problem of terrorism originates directly from within Western governments, mainly the United States, England, and Israel – governments that are not democratic, but authoritarian, and rely on secrecy, misinformation, and deception to promote policies that enrich a few well-connected individuals who are powerful and immoral enough to negatively influence government legislation and government policy.

#7. A BBC article from July 2004 called “Al-Qaeda’s origins and links” reveals that Osama Bin Laden was a CIA agent in the 1980s. The article states: “During the anti-Soviet jihad Bin Laden and his fighters received American and Saudi funding. Some analysts believe Bin Laden himself had security training from the CIA.” It is highly possible that Osama Bin Laden was still an agent of the CIA on September 11, 2001. As they say of the CIA, once a member, always a member.

#8. J. Michael Springmann, a 20 year foreign service official, and a former Consulate officer in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, has publicly stated for many years that the CIA brought over Muslim radicals to the United States for secret terrorist training. Most of these radicals were brought through Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where Springman was stationed from 1987 to 1989 before he was let go by the State Department because he raised questions about the weakly enforced VISA qualification process.

In an interview with Alex Jones in May 2002 Springmann pointed out that 15 of the 19 hijackers in the 9/11 attacks entered the United States after CIA officials in Jeddah approved their visas. “According to the Los Angeles Times,” said Springmann, “fifteen of the nineteen people, the Saudis who were allegedly responsible for flying planes into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, they got their visas from the Consulate at Jeddah.”

In an article written in February of 2003 called “Policing the Borders: Old Fears, New Realities” Springmann wrote about how U.S. foreign policy works, and to what ends:

“What very few Americans understand is the pathological Cold War mindset of those who have shaped U.S. foreign policy since the middle of the last century. It is a worldview with little interest in “security” per se. For those who exercise ultimate power, success is measured by the bottom lines on certain corporate quarterly reports. These numbers represent transcendent ends which have justified and continue to justify any and every means imaginable, from rubber-stamping illegitimate visa applications to full scale massacre.”

Click here to read the transcript of Alex Jones’s interview with Springmann in May 2002; click here to listen to Alex Jones’s interview with Springmann in February 2010. Both interviews are very revealing, and should be required listening/reading for everyone.

#9. Germany’s Der Spiegel’s published an article by Siegesmund von Ilsemann called “Arming the Middle East: The Checkered History of American Weapons Deals” in June 2007. The article backed up the reporting done by the BBC, and elsewhere that the United States government “supplied Afghan freedom fighters in the 1980s with money and arms for their struggle against occupying Soviet troops. One of the best customers for the CIA back then was Saudi millionaire Osama Bin Laden.” This account is only half-true. The CIA funded and trained a network of Muslim fighters not to liberate Afghanistan from corrupt Soviet influence, but to create havoc and instigate a Soviet invasion so that it would drain itself of blood and treasure. Once the objective of bringing down the Soviet Union was achieved, the stage was set for the United States and the West to invade Afghanistan and take advantage of the country’s vast resources, from oil to heroin.

#10. Selig Harrison, a current member of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, a former senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and an expert on South Asia, said in March 2001 at a conference called “Terrorism and Regional Security: Managing the Challenges in Asia,” that the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI helped create the backward and tyrannical Taliban. “The CIA made a historic mistake in encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan,” said Harrison, a quote that appears in an article in the Times of India from March 2001. According to Harrison, without the CIA and ISI’s funds and guns, the Taliban wouldn’t exist as a political and religious force in Afghanistan. An excerpt from the Times of India article:

The old associations between the intelligence agencies continue, Harrison said. “The CIA still has close links with the ISI (Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence).”

Today that money and those weapons have helped build up the Taliban, Harrison said. “The Taliban are not just recruits from ‘madrassas’ (Muslim theological schools) but are on the payroll of the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence, the intelligence wing of the Pakistani government).” The Taliban are now “making a living out of terrorism.”

Harrison said the UN Security Council resolution number 1333 calls for an embargo on arms to the Taliban. “But it is a resolution without teeth because it does not provide sanctions for non-compliance,” he said. “The US is not backing the Russians who want to give more teeth to the resolution.”

Now it is Pakistan that “holds the key to the future of Afghanistan,” Harrison said. The creation of the Taliban was central to Pakistan’s “pan-Islamic vision,” Harrison said.

It came after “the CIA made the historic mistake of encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan,” he said. The creation of the Taliban had been “actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA,” he said. “Pakistan has been building up Afghan collaborators who will sustain Pakistan,” he said.

#11. The September 11, 2001 attacks, which serve as the basis for America’s wars in the Middle East, were committed by the United States government with assistance from the government of Israel. This is an indisputable fact. Here is a list of three points that proves without a shadow of a doubt that the official 9/11 story is false, and indefensible:

* American physicist Steven E. Jones, Danish chemist Niels Harrit, and others wrote a peer-reviewed paper in 2009 called “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” that was published in The Open Chemical Physics Journal. The authors discovered nano-thermite in samples of the WTC dust, a highly advanced explosive that is made by a small number of companies. Theywrote:

“As measured using DSC, the material ignites and reacts vigorously at a temperature of approximately 430 °C, with a rather narrow exotherm, matching fairly closely an independent observation on a known super-thermite sample. The low temperature of ignition and the presence of iron oxide grains less than 120 nm show that the material is not conventional thermite (which ignites at temperatures above 900 °C) but very likely a form of super-thermite.”

* The vertical collapse of Building Se7en, a building that was not struck by a plane. Steel buildings have never collapsed before because of fire alone. Common sense suggests that explosives were used to bring the building down, which rules out involvement by radical Muslims because officer workers would have noticed their activity in the building prior to 9/11.

* Firefighters said they witnessed and heard loud back-to-back explosions coming from the Towers. In this video clip, a couple of firefighters recount what they saw. One of them says, “It was as if they had detonated. . . as if they were planning to take down a building: boom boom boom boom boom.”

There are so many more points, and so many more smoking guns, but it does not get any more obvious, any more in-your-face than hearing firefighters say that they heard bombs going off. All honest individuals must rethink their position on the 9/11 attacks after taking a look at the collapse of building 7, and watching firefighters say that they heard explosions. You don’t have to be an expert to see the obvious. You don’t even have to be smart. You just have to be honest and unafraid.

IV. Ending The Perpetual War on Terror And The Not So Great Game

Now that we know the threat from Al-Qaeda is not real, we must pressure our Western governments to end the global war on terrorism, and bring home all the troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and everywhere else in the Middle East. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are unjust, unnecessary, and destructive to global peace, global harmony, and global stability. The U.S. and UK governments are not waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan to establish free and open democracies but to fulfill criminal goals, and emerge victorious in the 21st century’s “Great Game.”

The West’s war on terror is all about the Great Game, not defeating “Al-Qaeda” or Islamic extremists. A small proof that this is true comes fromPrince Andrew’s own words. In one of the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, Andrew says:

Addressing the Ambassador directly, Prince Andrew then turned to regional politics. He stated baldly that “the United Kingdom, Western Europe (and by extension you Americans too”) were now back in the thick of playing the Great Game. More animated than ever, he stated cockily: “And this time we aim to win!”

Such arrogance reflects anti-human and anti-freedom beliefs, which are shared by many members of the elite in the United States, England, and Europe, who desire war and conflict over peace and brotherhood. Members of the Western political elite have the hearts of monsters. They are more interested in winning a geopolitical game that causes death and mass destruction than in uplifting humanity, and making the world a better place for all people.

U.S. and U.K. policymakers cynically fund and assist radical Muslims, and sometimes stage terrorist attacks that are blamed on radical Muslims, to maintain the public perception in the Western world that there are thousands of nasty terrorists who wish them harm. But this is not true. And it is a dangerous perception that must be erased. As Professor Michel Chossudovsky writes in his 2008 article “Al Qaeda and the “War on Terrorism”:

“U.S. foreign policy is not geared towards curbing the tide of Islamic fundamentalism. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The significant development of “radical Islam”, in the wake of the Cold War in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East is consistent with Washington’s hidden agenda. The latter consists in sustaining rather than combating international terrorism, with a view to destabilizing national societies and preventing the articulation of genuine secular social movements directed against the American Empire.

Washington continues to support — through CIA covert operations — the development of Islamic fundamentalism, throughout the Middle East, in the former Soviet Union as well in China and India.

Throughout the developing world, the growth of sectarian, fundamentalist and other such organizations tends to serve U.S. interests. These various organizations and armed insurgents have been developed, particularly in countries where state institutions have collapsed under the brunt of the IMF-sponsored economic reforms.

These fundamentalist organizations contribute by destroying and displacing secular institutions.

Islamic fundamentalism creates social and ethnic divisions. It undermines the capacity of people to organize against the American Empire. These organizations or movements, such as the Taliban, often foment “opposition to Uncle Sam” in a way which does not constitute any real threat to America’s broader geopolitical and economic interests.”

We must speak the full truth about the origins of the war on terror if we want to end it. Journalists need to publicize the historical facts about U.S. support for terrorism, and report the truth about the September 11, 2001 attacks. We can’t let the truth about government-staged terrorism be trapped in the black hole of history. There will be change once we speak the full truth passionately and demand justice. The old tyrants will vanish under a new sun.

A different world is possible. A world with universal and permanent peace on Earth is not a Utopian dream. There are no reasons for conflict in the world today. The threat of “terrorism” is a manufactured threat. Al-Qaeda doesn’t exist. And 9/11 is a big lie. In sum, the War on Terror is totally illegitimate and criminal. The governments of United States, England, Canada, Australia, and Israel represent the only obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Their leaders have committed crimes against humanity, and must be brought to justice.

“A war on world poverty may well do more for the security of the west than a war on terror,” said U.K. MP Robin Cook in 2005. He was right, and then some. But it is not enough to be right. We must win. We must put an end to the War on Terror and the Great Game. We must restart the global anti-war movement, and this time we must expose the lie about 9/11 because victory against the war criminals is impossible without a firm foothold on the ground of truth.