"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever," George Orwell wrote.

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

the "other" September 11, in 1973, when a U.S.-led coup toppled Chile's democratically-elected Salvador Allende. "Like Caesar peering into the colonies from distant Rome, Nixon said the choice of government by the Chileans was unacceptable to the president of the United States," Sen. Frank Church remarked. "The attitude in the White House seemed to be, "If in the wake of Vietnam I can no longer send in the Marines, then I will send in the CIA."

"Never before in my 40 years of experience in this town has intelligence been used in so cynical and so orchestrated a way," former CIA analyst and supervisor Raymond McGovern told CBS News


"Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object," Abraham Lincoln noted
mr ed - at least things arent getting worse...


"Can we have the permanent warfare state and democracy, too?" Moyers asked. "How do the people cry fowl when their liberties are imperiled if public officials can break the rules, lie to us about it and wave the wand of national security to silence us?,"

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people." - President Theodore Roosevelt

"When George Bush was running for president, he essentially went to school," Newsweek's Evan Thomas told PBS. "And various great and worthy men trooped down to Austin to teach George Bush about the world. And by and large, they told him that Iraq was unfinished. . . And if George W. Bush was elected president, he may end up having to do what his father didn't do or couldn't do, and that is killing off Saddam Hussein."


"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that The State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." - Arthur Miller

And could the "joint removals of deportees," mentioned in the U.S./Canadian "Smart Border Declaration," [LINK] prevent future draft dodgers from seeking refuge in the great white north?

The marble logo at the entrance of CIA headquarters bears the inscription: 'You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.'

And if we don't demand the truth, our children will most certainly become enslaved.

In less than four months, then, nine of the world’s top microbiologists were dead. All had been doing research that had connections with the creation and prevention of biological warfare.

In October, press reports revealed that White House staff had been on a regimen of the powerful antibiotic Cipro since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Judicial Watch wants to know why White House workers, including President Bush, began taking the drug nearly a month before anthrax was detected on Capitol Hill.

When Steve Baldwin, the executive director of an organization with the stale-as-old-bread name of the Council for National Policy, boasts that "we control everything in the world," he is only half-kidding.


"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"I don't think the prayer will be published in my time," Twain rightfully predicted. "None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth."

Twain's depiction of the progression from war banter to acceptance to rigid disregard for the truth is dripping with relevance and by the time Twain discusses "free speech" being "strangled by hordes of furious men," visions of the Dixie Chicks dance through readers' heads. The entire text, in fact, though drafted nearly a century ago, is eerily fitting: "Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, [LINK, LINK] putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, [LINK] and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them [LINK]; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

It's impossible to know if a modern day Twain will emerge from our current mess, but a decade or so ago there was a writer, who, like Twain, saw things clearly -- and was similarly censored. His name was Steve Tesich,

And, like Twain, as Professor Tesich explains, "He wrote to expose, to bear witness against this era, this monster without an adequate name or a real face, so people will know many years later that someone objected."

"The problems confronting us now are no longer seen as problems. Truth is perceived as the problem, as the real enemy," he explained, of our desire to feel good at any cost. "We would only see what our government wanted us to see and we saw nothing wrong with that. We liked it that way," he wrote, of media censorship and public complicity. "We are rapidly becoming prototypes of a people that totalitarian monsters could only drool about in their dreams," he warned, about the decidedly un-American qualities starting to define America.

mr ed:
the drum is beating
things are heating - up
the 911 commission thing is *finally* heating up
i question whether the dow should have fallen alongside the russian bourse
barometer sez: pressurepiece

mr -ed - i just heard another story abuot a p&o cruise ship with sick people in greece. if i *really* had my conspiracy lenses on, in lite of the presumably unrelated death of microbiologists, one imagines that a cruise ship is the perfect place to test diseases... perfectly isolated, perfectly isolatabale. easy to track infection patterns. and in lite of SARS which some have theorised is race specific...

twain:
"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;Help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead;
Help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;
Help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire;
Help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief;
Help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -
"For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
"We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."
After a pause: "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

as Bill Maher put it, "Between trying to impeach Bill Clinton, Florida 2000 and the recall in California, I'm beginning to think that Republicans will do anything to win an election -- except get the most votes."


Bush predicted his son would triumph due to his pledge to "restore honor and integrity" to the Oval Office. "It isn't even debatable, in my view," the former President asserted.

In his private diary, Bush wrote of the Iran operation, "I'm one of the few people that know fully the details, and there is a lot of flack and misinformation out there." His own words prove he lied to the public about his involvement in the sordid affair.