Intel Drop: Liar Liar, Trump Negotiating with Iran…Pompeo and Esper’s Heads on a Platter (updated)

Karbala, 60 miles southwest of Baghdad, is usually no more than a 90-minute drive through an increasingly green landscape of date palms, eucalyptus trees and reeds watered by the nearby Euphrates. But for most of a week this past October, the journey turned into a five-hour crawl. Highways leading to Karbala were choked by an enormous mass of humanity heading toward the city to celebrate the birth of the 12th Imam, a redeemer born more than a thousand years ago who disappeared as a child and, so these travelers believe, will one day return to overthrow all tyrants. Many walked all the way from Baghdad—crowds had been streaming out of the city since midweek—while others had set out days earlier from towns as far away as Nasiriyah, in the deep south, and Kirkuk, 200 miles north of Baghdad.

Despite the dust and 90-degree heat, the pilgrims, many of them barefoot, kept up an urgent pace. The flags they carried— mostly bright green, but also red, yellow, pink—made brilliant splashes of color in the flat landscape, contrasting with the all-enveloping black abayas of the women. They marched in separate groups, parties of friends or neighbors until they drew close to their destination and coalesced into one dense column. Every so often a group would break into a rhythmic chant, invoking the names of the martyr-saints that inspire their faith.

“We are Shia,” the men roared in unison, stabbing their fists in the air. “We are the sons of Imam Hussein, and the name of Ali is always on our tongues.” Shiites or Shia—the terms are used interchangeably and both mean “partisans”—form one of the two great branches of Islam. About 150 million Shiites are spread around the world, most of them in Iran, Iraq, India, and Pakistan. While the Sunni branch makes up the greater part of the global Muslim population of more than a billion, Shiites form the majority in Iraq—as many as 15 million out of a population of 24 million. Nonetheless, Shiites have never held power in Iraq nor fully participated in its government, and at times have been brutally repressed.

The future role of the Shiites is one of the most important issues facing Iraq. Now that their greatest oppressor, Saddam Hussein, is gone, they will no longer tolerate second-class status. At the same time, others in Iraq and elsewhere, including many in the United States, fear that a Shiite-dominated government might impose an Iranian-style fundamentalist Islamic regime. If a democratic Iraq is to emerge from the ruins bequeathed by Saddam Hussein, both the hopes of the Shiites and the fears of non-Shiites will somehow have to be accommodated.

Iraqi Shiites are a diverse group. Some are educated and middle class, but most are poor Arabs living in rural southern Iraq or Baghdad’s slums (there are significant communities among the non-Arab Kurdish and Turkmen peoples of the north as well). They range from the deeply religious to the wholly secular. Their common bond is a memory of discrimination, whether in the form of the mass executions common during the reign of Saddam Hussein or simply in their exclusion from power throughout Iraq’s history.

Today, the Shiites are confident that those days ended with the fall of Saddam Hussein. “Everything is changing,” Adil Abdul Mehdi, a leader of a powerful Shiite party, told me cheerfully in Baghdad, as we sped across town in a convoy of SUVs, surrounded by armed bodyguards. “For too long the Shia have been a majority that acted as a minority. They have to raise their heads. They have a right to represent Iraq.”

Now, on the road to Karbala, I was watching the Shiites assert one of those rights: the freedom to celebrate one of their great religious festivals. Fifteenth Shaban, as the festival is called, is the date in the Muslim calendar (October 11 this year) that marks the birthday of the 12th Imam. By the evening of the festival, well over a million people were crowded onto the vast plaza surrounding the two colossal shrines crowned with golden domes and minarets that dominate the center of the city.

Karbala is a holy place for Shiites because of the two men buried in those shrines. Half brothers, they died in a battle here long ago, a battle that grew out of a ferocious struggle to lead Islam after the death of the prophet Muhammad in a.d. 632. The Shiite faith originated with those Muslims who thought that the wrong side—that led by Abu Bakr, father-in-law of the prophet Muhammad—won, unjustly usurping Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali. (Sunnis believe that Abu Bakr was the rightful heir.) Ali did finally become caliph in 656 but was assassinated five years later and buried in nearby Najaf. Shiites regard Ali’s brief reign as the last period of legitimate and just rule on earth.

Nineteen years after Ali’s death, his second son, Hussein, who had been living without evident political ambition in Medina, responded to a call from the people of Kufa, then chafing under the harsh rule of a Sunni caliph, Yazid, and set out across the desert to lead them in rebellion. It is a fundamental tenet of Shiism that Hussein’s motivation was not power-lust but revulsion at Yazid’s tyrannical rule. As one cleric in a theological school in Najaf assured me, “When Imam Hussein left Medina, he said, ‘I’m not going to win a fortune or a throne. I am going out for justice,’ even though he knew he was going to be sacrificed.” Indeed, many believe that Hussein knew before he left Medina that his supporters had been rounded up and that his cause was doomed. Intercepted by the caliph’s army on the plain of Karbala after a long journey across the desert, Hussein and his band of 72 family members and followers refused to surrender, digging a ditch behind them to preclude retreat. The saga cherished by Iraqi Shiites recounts how, in the midst of battle, Hussein’s warrior half brother Abbas heard the women and children crying from thirst. Fighting his way to a nearby stream to fetch water, he was cut down. Hussein, fighting on a few hundred yards away, was the last to die, sword in one hand, Koran in the other.

This religious schism between Sunnis and Shiites is not, however, mutually antagonistic in the manner of Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland or Christians and Muslims in Beirut. “My mother is Sunni, my father Shia,” says Baghdad native Fareer Yassin. “One-third of the Muslims in my high- school graduating class were from mixed Sunni Shia marriages, and that was typical of Baghdad.” I have heard similar stories from many Iraqis, who also point out that direct clashes between the two communities are extremely rare and that discrimination against the Shiites has inevitably been orchestrated by rulers—whether kings or Saddam Hussein— for political, not religious reasons.

For the masses of faithful pouring into Karbala for the festival this past October, the ancient battle at this site might well have happened yesterday. Strolling late in the warm evening through the vast crowd around the shrines of Hussein and Abbas, I heard constant reaffirmations of support for the long-dead heroes. “See the love that people have for Imam Hussein,” said my guide, Ala’a Baqir, a pharmacist influential in local affairs. “He is for justice, and people think we are losing that in our own time. We are ready to fight at any time for Imam Hussein.”

It would be easy to dismiss such assertions as simply the celebration of a folk myth, but the saga of the martyrs has preserved a potent philosophy at the core of the Shiite faith. “Shiites regard the opposing of injustice and tyranny and fighting against an unjust ruler as a supreme religious duty,” explained Hussain Shahristani, a nuclear scientist, devout Shiite and lifelong rebel, as we sat in the Karbala office of the humanitarian relief group he founded and directs. He cited the great national uprising of 1920 (his father’s first cousin was one of its leaders) against the British, who occupied Iraq between 1917 and 1932—and effectively controlled it until 1958. Although both Shiites and Sunnis joined the revolt, Shiite religious and tribal leaders played the major role. Politically, the failed rebellion proved disastrous for the Shiites, since the British thereafter relied exclusively on the Sunni elite to govern Iraq. But, says Shahristani, Shiites “couldn’t do anything else. It might be politically better to just go along with the master, but for us that’s impossible.”

Shahristani speaks with authority on the topic of dissent. In September 1979 he told Saddam Hussein to his face that building a nuclear weapon was wrong and refused to work on the project. He was tortured and spent 11 years behind bars, 10 in solitary confinement. During the Gulf War in 1991, he made a daring escape—he stole a guard’s uniform and drove out the prison’s main gate. Afterward, he declined a comfortable exile in the West in favor of organizing humanitarian aid for both Iraqi refugees in Iran and anti-Saddam resistance in Iraq.

I found Shahristani’s views echoed by religious authorities, who made it clear that this obligation to resist applies even to the American-led occupation, of which the Shiites are increasingly resentful. In a modest house in the center of Karbala, Sheik Abdul Mehdi Salami, who leads the Friday prayers at the Hussein shrine (an immensely prestigious position), said that “fighting injustice is the principal duty for all Shia.” “In the meantime,” he added, his people were using “peaceful means” to assert their rights from the coalition and that Shiites do not like “killing and blood.” But if they must, they will “sacrifice everything to get their rights.”

Compared with what they endured in Saddam Hussein’s time, the Shiites today appear to have little cause for complaint. Saddam not only had banned all public religious processions but, according to worshipers I spoke to, particularly disliked the notion of a 12th Imam who would return to overthrow tyrants. As a result, anyone who attended the birthday festival during Saddam’s rule was risking his life. Strolling with me through the crowd on the eve of the festival, Ala’a Baqir recalled how celebrants would evade Saddam’s security forces on the main roads by sneaking through fields and palm groves. “We would go out and leave food and put down little lights to guide them,” said Baqir.

This year, for the first time in decades, there was no need for surreptitious measures, and the plaza was alive with light and the noise of declaiming preachers and chanting marchers—“we are the Shia . . .”—against the background noise of several hundred thousand people. Above us, party balloons soared up past the golden dome of the Abbas shrine.

Yet even this happy atmosphere harbored ominous undercurrents. A coffin was carried around the Hussein shrine—a traditional Shiite rite—but this one contained the body of a man killed the night before in a firefight with American soldiers in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum in northeast Baghdad. I began noticing how many young men in the crowd were wearing white burial shrouds over their shoulders, a symbol of their willingness to die as martyrs, an attitude much favored by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, the 30- year-old extremist whose men had ambushed and killed two American soldiers in that firefight.

For centuries, Karbala and its sister shrine city, Najaf, had been islands of Shiism, well connected to the international Shiite community but with few ties to the nomadic Bedouin tribes roaming the desert just beyond the cities’ gates. Only at the beginning of the 19th century did the clergy of Karbala and Najaf begin to convert the desert tribes, partly because they needed muscle to defend against increasing attacks by fanatical Wahhabi Sunni sweeping across the desert from what is now Saudi Arabia.

At the same time, Shiite clerical leaders decided that only the most learned among them should be allowed to issue fatwas, religious rulings on matters of law or common concern. These few senior figures became known as “sources of emulation.” One hot day in late September I sat in on a class at Najaf’s 900-year-old religious university conducted by one of four such living sources of emulation, the Pakistan-born Ayatollah Bashir al-Najri. My classmates were turbaned, gray whiskered elders. We sat respectfully on the floor while our revered teacher expounded at some length on the requirements of women to perform ritual ablutions. Some parts of the syllabus, I felt, had probably not changed over the centuries.

The Shiite religious leadership gained power and influence in the last years of Ottoman rule, just before World War I, then fell on harder times during the British occupation and the succeeding Sunni monarchy installed in 1921. “The first Shia prime minister was appointed in 1947,” Adil Mehdi said bitterly. “That was nearly 28 years after the founding of the state. Though the Shia represented 60 percent of the population, we only ever had 20 percent of the cabinet posts.”

In hopes of bettering their lot in the 1950s and early ’60s, many Shiites were drawn to radical organizations, principally the Communist Party but also the Arab nationalist Baath Party. Thus, when the monarchy was swept away by a leftist revolution in 1958, the Shiites were at last represented in the radical military government that assumed power. But that regime was overthrown in another coup five years later, and the Shiites’ brief moment in the sun came to an end.

Though the Baath Party had originally numbered many Shiites among its leaders, by the time it began its 35-year rule with a coup in 1968, the leadership was solidly in the hands of a tight group of Sunni tribesmen, including a ruthless hitman named Saddam Hussein, from the region around Tikrit. Apart from hunting down and killing their former Communist rivals, Saddam and his militantly secular colleagues also took aim at the Shiite religious leadership.

In response to the wholesale defection of many of their flock to the Communists, the Shiite religious leadership made efforts to modernize their message and attract new followers. Prominent among them was a brilliant scholar named Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, the principal sponsor of Dawa, a radical Islamic political party that confronted the Baathists as an opposition group throughout the 1970s.

The confrontation intensified after Ayatollah Khomeini, himself a Shiite who had spent most of the 1960s and ’70s in Najaf developing his theory that clergy had the exclusive right to govern, seized power in Iran in 1979. Sadr, thrilled by Iran’s mass Islamic uprising against the shah, thought a similar religious takeover of the government was possible in Iraq. Saddam, apparently worried that Sadr might be right, launched a campaign to round up his supporters. In April 1980, Sadr and his sister were arrested and executed.

Shahristani, the nuclear scientist and prison escapee, was close to Sadr. He told me that at the end, the Baathists offered Sadr a deal. “They said they would release him in exchange for a promise of silence. Sadr said, ‘No. I have closed all the doors, there is no escape for you. Now you have to kill me so the people can rise up.’ ” As any Shiite would immediately understand, it was an embrace of martyrdom that echoed the self-sacrifice of Hussein 1,300 years before.

But after the 1991 Gulf War, inspired by calls for an uprising from Washington, Shiites finally erupted in furious rebellion. That the expected U.S. assistance never came has hardly been forgotten.

Nobody knows how many people were killed in Saddam’s savage reprisals for the uprising, but the number is at least in the tens of thousands. One mass grave of those slaughtered has alone yielded more than 3,000 bodies, and hundreds of such graves have been unearthed. Ironically, the Baathist’s savagery helped unify the diverse Shiite community.

In the 1990s, even while cracking down viciously on Shiite religious leadership, Saddam made attempts to bolster his support among religious conservatives by encouraging such Islamic practices as the veiling of women, the segregation of the sexes in schools and the prohibition of alcohol. (Gestures to appease Shiites included repairs to shrines and a manufactured family tree tracing Saddam’s ancestry back to Ali.) But while the measures helped revive traditions, they produced no corresponding support for the dictator.

Toward the end of the decade, Shiites found a leader in the person of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, a teacher from Najaf and a distant relative of the resistance leader executed in 1980. Initially encouraged by the regime because of his denunciations of the United States, Sadr II, as he is often called, set up a network of followers across southern Iraq and in Baghdad.

Late in 1998, though, he began wearing the white martyr’s shroud while denouncing Saddam’s regime to growing and enthusiastic crowds. In February 1999, while driving home in Najaf, Sadr, along with two of his sons, was duly machine-gunned to death by state security agents.

Today, portraits of Sadr II, who is invariably depicted as a humble ancient with a snow-white beard, adorn walls and billboards around Iraq. These frequently share space with bearded, turbaned portraits of other Shiite leaders, many of them dead—testimony to the high mortality rate in Shiite religious politics. A few hundred yards from the site of the al-Sadr murder, for example, is a green-domed tomb, still, under construction, that contains what few remains could be collected of the late Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, founder and leader of a political party called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He was the victim of a massive car bomb that exploded as he was leaving Najaf ’s Imam Ali shrine on August 29 this year.

I viewed the massive destruction caused by the Hakim bomb during a trip to the shrine to see where a man I once knew had also been murdered. Last April, Abdul Majid al- Khoei, the son of a grand ayatollah, had just returned to Najaf—with the blessing of coalition forces, who appreciated his energy and liberal views—after 12 years of exile in London. Just inside the courtyard of the Ali shrine, a mob attacked him. Two companions were stabbed to death, but Khoei managed to escape and run the 50 or so yards that brought him to the front door of a house belonging to Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite extremist, who is a son of the martyred Sadr II. Khoei pleaded for shelter, but although there is little doubt that Muqtada was inside, the door did not open. A shopkeeper finally took Khoei in, but the mob followed, dragged him down the street and around the corner, and knifed him to death.

Muqtada has always denied having had any role in the killing, though no one in Najaf that I talked to doubts his responsibility. Khoei not only believed in cooperation with the occupation but also stood for the separation of church and state, as opposed to the Iranian system of clerical rule, which Muqtada has endorsed.

On the day I retraced Khoei’s desperate flight, Muqtada’s well-guarded door was open and his front room crowded with petitioners seeking his help or advice. Three clerics sat at a table collecting wads of banknotes contributed by the faithful. Six months after the invasion that toppled his father’s killer, Muqtada was embroiled in an escalating conflict with the coalition forces and seemed to welcome any opportunity to confront them or, for that matter, other Shiite groups.

Muqtada certainly enjoys a large amount of support among the poorer Shiites, most particularly among young unemployed men in the great Shiite slum of SadrCity in Baghdad. In the week following the peaceful 15th Shaban celebrations in Karbala, Muqtada’s gunmen attempted to take over the Hussein shrine in a shootout with supporters of a rival leader that left several dead and wounded on both sides. A few days later, they fought a U.S. patrol near the shrine, killing three Americans. (There were reports of a U.S. crackdown on Muqtada as we went to press.)

Opposing Muqtada in Karbala had been a shrine protection force loyal to perhaps the most important and revered Shiite leader in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Sistani, 73, was born in Iran but moved to Najaf more than 50 years ago to study. He spent much of the 1990s under the baleful surveillance of Saddam’s security forces. Yet from his house, he maintained an extraordinary moral authority over the Shiite masses. When, in mid-April, there was an erroneous radio report that Sistani’s house was under siege by followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, the news spread like wildfire. “I was sleeping in a village near Basra that night,” recalls Hussain Shahristani. “Suddenly I saw the villagers grabbing their guns and preparing to rush to Najaf, hundreds of miles away. ‘Sistani is under attack,’ they told me. That was all they needed to know. The same thing happened all over Iraq.”

Though he has denounced violence and the proliferation of firearms in Iraq, Sistani himself has command of a far more potent weapon—the immense authority of his fatwas. Last July he addressed the fundamental question of how he wanted the constitution for Iraq to be written. The occupation authorities had endorsed a plan by which their handpicked governing council would appoint a committee that would, in turn, devise the new constitution. In a fatwa written in graceful classical Arabic, Sistani declared that this approach was “unacceptable” because there was no guarantee that a constitution produced in this way would “represent the (Iraqi) National identity of which Islam and the noble values of society are an integral part.” (Sistani has always rejected Khomeini’s thesis on direct clerical rule.) Instead, he insisted, anyone writing a constitution would have to be elected. A constitution devised by any other means, he made clear, would be “illegitimate.”

The story goes that when Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, sent a message to the venerable religious leader suggesting that the two men cooperate on the constitution, Sistani sent a message back: “Mr. Bremer, you are an American and I am an Iranian. I suggest we leave it up to the Iraqis to devise their constitution.”

Few in Iraq believe that a constitution denounced by Sistani would stand a chance. But any fair election would almost certainly deliver a Shiite-dominated constitutional assembly. The underdogs and rebels would, at last, be in power—a sea change for a group that has so long defined itself through resistance to oppression. Will the Shiites still celebrate martyrdom when they are, themselves, in power? And who will judge them if they prove unjust?

Addendum II

GORDON DUFF: ROGUE AMERICA, THE QUIET MUTINY

HOW PRIVATIZATION, RELIGION AND CONSTITUTIONAL ABUSES  HAVE CREATED A ‘SHADOW’ STATE

“Forces well outside any political system envisioned by the Founding Fathers control America, forces capable of side-stepping or overruling any elected official or any law, up to and including, even especially, the Constitution of the United States of America.”

By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
January 14, 2011

A little over 2 weeks ago, John Wheeler III, former Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force, a man whose Washington resume put him in contact with presidents, was found in the back of a garbage truck.  Two weeks later, there is no police investigation, no cause of death, no questions from the press, just silence, deafening silence.

Nothing is said of Wheeler’s career, a high profile Vietnam veteran, a man much admired, even loved.  Work, bio-chem warfare, nuclear programs, now totally blacked out.  All that remains is a moment or two of video, very inexplicable, Wheeler, the consummate disciplined professional drifting in what seems to be an LSD induced haze.  There, the curtain was drawn, the door was closed, no further cover story, no prepared lie, the “Imagineers” responsible for such things caught off-balance, this time at least.

John Wheeler was clearly, “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

Wheeler was also a “contractor,” part of the army of private citizens that now control everything that the Department of Homeland Security does not.  We call this “privatization.”

PRIVATIZATION AND UNACCOUNTABILITY

“Privatization,” another word for “parallelization” put control of most defense and intelligence functions into the hands of unaccountable “no-bid” private contractors, invariably politically partisan and many uniquely willing to engage in criminality on a level heretofore unimagined.

WHAT THE MARRIAGE BETWEEN A PRIVATE SECTOR, TASKED WITH THE MOST SENSITIVE FUNCTIONS OF NATIONAL SECURITY, THOSE REQUIRING THE MOST OVERSIGHT, THOSE SUBJECT TO THE MOST HIDEOUS ABUSES AND AN ADMINISTRATION NO  LONGER CLEARLY IN CONTROL OF THE REINS OF GOVERNMENT, HAVE DONE TO THE WORLD IS A DISASTER, UNIQUE EVEN BY 20TH CENTURY STANDARDS.

The largest military power in the history of man would become a de facto mercenary force, virtually seizing Central Asia, pre-staging it for systematic enslavement, for stripping it of resources.  The economic model is amazing in scope.  $300 billion a year are spent in Afghanistan.  $200 billion of that is stolen.  The only result of America’s military action?  Destruction of the region, impoverishment of America and $65 billion in heroin production.

HIDING BEHIND A VEIL OF SECRECY, PROTECTED BY KAFKAESQUE BUREAUCRACIES, ONE UPON ANOTHER, SHIELDED BY A TOTAL BREAKDOWN OF SOCIETAL RESPONSIBILITY, EACH SECTOR, BE IT PUBLIC EDUCATION, FINANCE, NEWS AND MEDIA, GOVERNMENT AND DEFENSE, EACH MORE COMPLICIT THAN THE LAST, AN OVERWHELMING HUNGER FOR TRUTH AND A FEELING OF SOLIDITY, OF “BELIEVABILITY” HAS DRIVEN MILLIONS TO FOLLOW CONSPIRACY AS THE NEW RELIGION.

EVEN THAT, ITSELF, IS NOW MANAGED, WIKILEAKS AND ITS “PRESS PARTNERSHIPS,” THE ALTERNATIVE MEDIA DROWNED IN A CACOPHONY OF RUBBISH, CO-OPTED, INFILTRATED, INFLUENCED AND BOUGHT.

1963 THRU REAGAN

Since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, there have been continual whispers about a “shadow government” running the United States.  This cabal is said to have taken America into Vietnam, its most disastrous war and planned, with Israel,  the “false flag” USS Liberty attack in 1967 to push America into invading the Middle East.

The first undeniable public signs of a “shadow government” came to light under Reagan with Iran Contra, when a White House based group, selling arms to our enemies, running drugs on a massive scale, was discovered.  Dozens of top officials were tried, convicted, some convictions were overturned on manufactured technicalities, others, including a Secretary of Defense, received presidential pardons.  The claim was “fighting communism in Central America.”  The truth, the communists left power after losing free elections, ones the communists, themselves held, while our “patriots,” the secret government, filled our cities with crack cocaine by the ton, lined their own pockets and built an organization that would later be used to rig elections and derail America’s freedoms.

COUP BY LEWINSKI

Normally, the ‘shadow government’ is never spoken of.  We saw the hand of a shadow government when then ‘the first lady” Hillary Clinton talked about a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” She was immediately crushed by the press for this and her attempt to break the stranglehold the pharmaceutical industry has on Congress, one recently re-instituted with vigor.  It was the shadow government that unleashed Monica Lewinsky and later used private financing to impeach President Clinton.

Hillary, in an act of incredible bravery, had stepped on the real “third rail” of American power.  No, it isn’t the typical sacred cow, Israel.  Today we say that Carter was “anti-Israel” but it was Reagan that had the character to stand up to them, a power long disappeared from American politics.

Hillary threatened the pharmaceutical industry, then at the height of its influence.  Today, with up to 40% of America’s military forces on anti-psychotic medications, the dream of mind control and “MK Ultra” has been exceeded beyond any but the wildest imagination.  With typical “side effects” being suicidal ideation, chemical castration, tremors, delusion, loss of will, loss of judgment, loss of employability, generations of “zombies” walk, drive, stumble, many in a semi-dreamlike state, through America’s 21st-century landscape.

Censorship and secrecy are needed less and less as pharmacology and “dumbed down” public education takes its inevitable toll.

OVERTHROW

The “shadow government” gained form in 2000.  The Republican nomination was rigged, John McCain was crushed by manufactured scandals, all with one purpose, to put the team of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, cohorts since the Nixon years, into power.  The vehicle was the hapless dupe, George “W” Bush.

The 2000 election, rigged voting machines, a “strict construction” Supreme Court picking a president based on a “wildly liberal” interpretation of the constitutions “equal protection” theory, was the opening salvo in a war, the “globalists” against humanity.  Implementation of the agenda began with 9/11 and the phony terror wars.

The mechanism of entropy,  corruption, economic collapse and the drug empire in Afghanistan, there is little doubt anymore.  Forces well outside any political system envisioned by the Founding Fathers control America, forces capable of side-stepping or overruling any elected official or any law, up to and including, even especially, the Constitution of the United States of America.

Normally, the “shadow government” covers its tracks well, as members of the 9/11 Commission have been shouting from the rooftops for years.  Even when it doesn’t, secrecy and censorship step in, always “protecting” the public from the problems created by, well, created by censorship and secrecy.

MINOT-BARKSDALE, THE FORGOTTEN MUTINY

In August 2007, at least 6 nuclear warheads were stolen from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.  The moment they were loaded, they disappeared from America’s nuclear inventory, “location unknown,” something that is not supposed to happen.  There is no possible “misinterpretation” of orders, no mistake, no “wrong label” issue.  These weapons were stolen, pure and simple.  Discussions of individual commanders having authority to deploy weapons, stories of accidents, confusion or political alignments within the Air Force are “red herrings.”

Nothing is more controlled, more secure, more restricted, more classified, more protected than the nuclear arsenal of the United States.  However, on that fateful day in 2007,  a half dozen or more, hydrogen bombs,  were plucked out of a secure bunker with no paperwork, no orders, nothing.

This is the military.  People are jailed for losing flashlight batteries.

They were loaded into the weapons bay of a B-52 long-range bomber for transport to places unknown, for purposes unknown. The plane had no orders, was part of no mission, operated under no legal command structure, in fact, the moment the weapons were loaded, was no longer an American plane at all.  A mission, even under the most innocent possible circumstances, that would have required the knowledge of the President and his staff, certainly the Joint Chiefs of Staff and likely the National Security Council as well seems to have authorized itself, out of “thin air.”

Though the plane later landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, there is no evidence supporting this as the intended destination, far from it.

The theft, hijacking, you pick the term, these are the best two so far, happened outside the command authority of the United States government, contravening all protocols for the storage, handling, and deployment of nuclear weapons.  The incident was also a violation of treaties requiring America to safeguard her stockpile of nuclear weapons, not just from environmental disasters but, as with this incident, from a mutiny by members of the military and civilian branches of our government, acting outside authority, acting as civilians, an act of piracy, mutiny, an act of insurrection.

All the things Israel warns America about every day, radical groups in Iran and Pakistan getting control of nukes really happened, but not with Muslim radicals and not in the Middle East, it happened here at home.  The radicals were Christians, of a sort at least, possibly intent on Armageddon, maybe planning to sell the weapons to Iran or North Korea or, more likely, tucking them away for “a rainy day.”

The Minot-Barksdale “incident” demonstrated, not only that a secret government exists but it is capable of waging, not only foreign policy but of mounting a credible thermonuclear threat to the world.

A “NOT SO COINCIDENTAL” COINCIDENCE

When a planeload of nuclear weapons is hijacked by an extremist organization tied to the highest levels of power in America, we might ask, why then?  What was going on in America in August 2007?  Did something happen then?  Why were 6 nuclear weapons stolen at the exact same time America suffered the largest financial collapse, became the victim of the largest financial crime in world history?  Is this a coincidence?

We know these things for sure:

• This was the 11th hour, the last minutes of the 11th hour, the last chance to begin a war with Iran.  Iraq had been temporarily “stabilized” by massive bribes paid out under General Petraeus’ “Sunni Awakening” program, a ‘band-aid’ fix that would soon come apart, Afghanistan had become a hopeless quagmire and the public had turned on President Bush, giving him the lowest approval ratings of all time, leaving his presidency failed and discredited.

• What had begun as a minor mortgage crisis had revealed a deeper disease, the “toxic derivatives” schemes that would collapse America’s entire financial system?  Only 5% of the mismanaged funds were mortgage-related, 95% was a massive Ponzi scheme by “banks” that had taken to creating wealth out of thin air, underwriting the entire American economy, bond and stock markets, corporate earnings, pension plans, all backed by nothing at all.  The money most American’s thought they had wasn’t even the “counterfeit” trash spewed by the Federal Reserve.  It was, in fact, imaginary, soon to be gone, “poof!”

How could 6 nuclear weapons, providing this was the only theft, something we may never learn, be used to cover the crimes of America’s entire financial community?  What use of weapons of mass destruction would have changed the public’s perception, a public increasingly suspicious of the other great coincidence of all time, 9/11?

Were weapons to be taken outside the country to attack others or to be brought back, a container in a seaport, a vending machine in a stadium, atop a missile, brought home?  For years, the front men for the secret government, the ones easily recognized, had done little but prepare America for such an eventuality.  With $12 trillion dollars “missing,” would the incineration of an American city be enough?

MEANS, MOTIVE, AND OPPORTUNITY

Professional law enforcement personnel, where such things still exist, look at any criminal act in three stages, Means, Motive, and Opportunity.  Means and motive are not obvious at all, not unless one is willing to accept that top commander of the United States Air Force are traitors.

Let’s take a second to examine a frightening trend that may have led to this seeming vulnerability.  How could the United States Air Force have been infiltrated with commanders loyal to power structure outside any accepted norm?  What kind of values would make this possible?  To understand the breakdown in command in the Air Force, we must look at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

THE “TALIBANIZATION” OF THE AIR FORCE

Several months ago, VT was contacted by a delegation of officers candidates attending the Academy.  They told us that the Academy was run by a religious cult, known as Dominionists.  This group, this cult, violent, predatory, accused of “brainwashing” recruits, tormenting, intimidating, is rapidly gaining total control of the officers’ corps of the United States Air Force.  Their agenda is a strange version of Evangelical Zionism, subservience of women, bizarre beliefs in the nuclear apocalypse and, worst of all, a total disregard for Constitutional authority and legal command structure.

Is this group capable of stealing nuclear weapons that might be used against the United States?  The only answer is a resounding “Yes!”

Can the beliefs of a bizarre religious cult constitute a motive for nuclear theft?  Does this cult have enough “means” and “opportunity” to attempt this kind of operation, one possibly meant to bring about a nuclear apocalypse and trigger the ‘end times’ as required by their beliefs?

What American has proven to the world, at least those nations with a free press and a people still capable of critical thinking is that not only is the nuclear arsenal of the United States the most vulnerable, those guarding it are the most radicalized and the most prone toward acts of terrorism.

America’s nuclear arsenal has been guarded by a Taliban for decades.  What could the motive for this be?

THE TAIWAN QUESTION AND MORE

An American B-52 was forced to land and hand over its cargo of nuclear weapons at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and 80 Air Force personnel were forced to resign. Problems with “discipline” were listed as the reason.  The Air Force calls the incident a “bent spear,” a simple violation of procedure.

Despite the public whitewash, the “bent spear” was clearly, not only a “broken arrow” but as Senator Levin indicated, “no breach  of nuclear procedures of this magnitude has ever occurred.”  Senator Bill Nelson called it “sloppy.”  What it wasn’t was the first time such a thing has happened.

In 2006, what we are told were “nuclear fuses” for the Minuteman III missile were sent to Taiwan, packaged as “helicopter batteries.”

At that time, the Minuteman was undergoing major upgrades, not only in safety mechanisms but in targeting capability also.  The “fusing” units that were available for shipment weren’t simply fuses, they were designed to upgrade our aging fleet of Minuteman missiles, America’s state of the art targeting technology for our most important deterrent system.

What really happened?  Certainly not what we were told.  Does Taiwan have the technology, having adapted it to systems they have purchased elsewhere, nuclear triggers, perhaps they have one or more of the nuclear weapons believed to be missing from the Israeli-South African arsenal?  Did they keep the technology or sell it to China or India?  Was this another accident,?

In October 2010, 50 Minuteman III missiles, 1/9th of those in America’s arsenal, went “walkabout” for 45 minutes, under the control of, well, we don’t really know.  We only know that the official government of the United States didn’t have, enough megatonnage to turn Europe into a cinder.

A month later, an ICBM was launched from a submarine 35 miles off Los Angeles.  The US claimed it was an airplane, a weather balloon but missile technicians identified it as a large ICBM, unknown origin, unauthorized and, as with the murder of John Wheeler III, something Americans are asked to overlook, forget, pretend never happened.

THE SHADOW “IN PLAIN SIGHT”

Normally, hubris, the ego that makes criminal sociopaths want their work appreciated, whether it is looting banks or raping and murdering busloads of small children, has negative consequences.  When Vice President Cheney established a special operations command inside his own office, one that directed military and intelligence operations without budget approval or legal oversight of any kind, he was demonstrating the hubris of a criminal psychopath.

Look at the legality, even by “Alberto Gonzales’ standards.

It is one thing for a nation-state to resort to torture, kidnapping or even acts of military aggression, backed by attempts at justification such as those seen in 2003 by Colin Powell at the United Nations.  Powell lost his career, the respect of the world and America was branded a rogue nation and aggressor.

When an elected official, such as the Vice President, an office tasked with attending funerals and, in actuality, nothing else, begins, not only formulating policy outside the office of the presidency but conducting military operations on its own authority, an authority that does not exist, no law, certainly not the constitution, then the individual holding that office is in insurrection against the government of the United States.

The vice president can’t order kidnappings, killings by the dozen, maybe hundreds or more, can’t command troops in the field, the vice president is the Commander in Chief of nothing whatsoever.  There is no command authority of any kind, real or implied, in that office nor can any be assigned or transferred there unless the President of the United States is incapacitated.

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1967, contains the following language:

SECTION 3. WHENEVER THE PRESIDENT TRANSMITS TO THE PRESIDENT PRO-TEMPORE OF THE SENATE AND THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES HIS WRITTEN DECLARATION THAT HE IS UNABLE TO DISCHARGE THE POWERS AND DUTIES OF HIS OFFICE, AND UNTIL HE TRANSMITS TO THEM A WRITTEN DECLARATION TO THE CONTRARY, SUCH POWERS AND DUTIES SHALL BE DISCHARGED BY THE VICE PRESIDENT AS ACTING PRESIDENT.

SECTION 4. WHENEVER THE VICE PRESIDENT AND A MAJORITY OF EITHER THE PRINCIPAL OFFICERS OF THE EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS OR OF SUCH OTHER BODY AS CONGRESS MAY BY LAW PROVIDE, TRANSMIT TO THE PRESIDENT PRO TEMPORE OF THE SENATE AND THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES THEIR WRITTEN DECLARATION THAT THE PRESIDENT IS UNABLE TO DISCHARGE THE POWERS AND DUTIES OF HIS OFFICE, THE VICE PRESIDENT SHALL IMMEDIATELY ASSUME THE POWERS AND DUTIES OF THE OFFICE AS ACTING PRESIDENT.

THEREAFTER, WHEN THE PRESIDENT TRANSMITS TO THE PRESIDENT PRO TEMPORE OF THE SENATE AND THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES HIS WRITTEN DECLARATION THAT NO INABILITY EXISTS, HE SHALL RESUME THE POWERS AND DUTIES OF HIS OFFICE UNLESS THE VICE PRESIDENT AND A MAJORITY OF EITHER THE PRINCIPAL OFFICERS OF THE EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT OR OF SUCH OTHER BODY AS CONGRESS MAY BY LAW PROVIDE, TRANSMIT WITHIN FOUR DAYS TO THE PRESIDENT PRO TEMPORE OF THE SENATE AND THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES THEIR WRITTEN DECLARATION THAT THE PRESIDENT IS UNABLE TO DISCHARGE THE POWERS AND DUTIES OF HIS OFFICE. THEREUPON CONGRESS SHALL DECIDE THE ISSUE, ASSEMBLING WITHIN FORTY-EIGHT HOURS FOR THAT PURPOSE IF NOT IN SESSION. IF THE CONGRESS, WITHIN TWENTY-ONE DAYS AFTER RECEIPT OF THE LATTER WRITTEN DECLARATION, OR, IF CONGRESS IS NOT IN SESSION, WITHIN TWENTY-ONE DAYS AFTER CONGRESS IS REQUIRED TO ASSEMBLE, DETERMINES BY TWO-THIRDS VOTE OF BOTH HOUSES THAT THE PRESIDENT IS UNABLE TO DISCHARGE THE POWERS AND DUTIES OF HIS OFFICE, THE VICE PRESIDENT SHALL CONTINUE TO DISCHARGE THE SAME AS ACTING PRESIDENT; OTHERWISE, THE PRESIDENT SHALL RESUME THE POWERS AND DUTIES OF HIS OFFICE.

Outside of these specific circumstances, the Vice President acts in an advisory capacity only with no authority other than that outlined in the Constitution, which specifies that the Vice President presides over the Senate and may cast tie-breaking votes if and when circumstances dictate.

The issue of Vice President Cheney is only germane based on his public assumption of clear presidential and super-presidential authority, extra-constitutional authority, during the administration of George W. Bush.  The actions involved, aggressive war, operation of secret prisons, assassinations and more are capital crimes as outlined during the Nuremberg War Tribunals and subject to international jurisdiction.

Do these acts, the ones Cheney (and Rumsfeld) publicly acknowledge, the ones we can prove, combined with coincidences, so many of those, give an adequate reason for us to assume a conspiracy, a secret globalist cabal, is acting in place of the intended government of the United States?  Has the brush of history, itself, left little room for assumptions otherwise?