For Americans, About America, By an American

Author: Michael Rivero

I want to start out by responding to that tiny percentage of negative email I receive that accuses me of being anti American. I'm not. I think America is a great place, and the American people by and large are to be admired.

What I am against is any government that lies to its people. This includes the government of the United States which, contrary to Bill Clinton's comments on the matter, is not the same thing as the country. The country is the people. The country is the land. The country is those who build, teach, heal, grow, manufacture, and along the way raise a family. The United States is not found in the marble buildings along the Potomac. The United States is found in the homes and hearts of 266 million Americans. 

The government, its self delusions of grandeur aside, is nothing but a custodian, and a temporary one, hired by the people to care for our nation, and if that custodian fails in that job, like any menial, they should be replaced. Our nation did just that once before, in 1776, and it must be remembered that those who were called "Patriot" were those who stood with the people of the nation, not with the corrupted government.

There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the government, as custodian of the nation,
to lie to the people. It's just not in there. And yet the government of the United States has been caught repeatedly lying to the people of the nation in recent years, lying about Vince Foster , TWA 800 , Waco , Martin Luther King , John F. Kennedy , The Oklahoma City Bombing , and others too numerous to mention. Suffice it to say that if the government of the United States finds itself with a credibility problem, it has only itself to blame. 

When the government of the United States lies to the people, it acts illegally and un-Constitutionally and by the strict interpretation of that document ceases to be the legal government of the land. But let us set that aside for the moment and look at why the US Government lies to the people and what such lies have accomplished in the past. Only then can we understand why the reasoning citizen must have serious doubt we are being told the truth by the government in the present case. 

Some of the biggest lies told by the government of the United States are those used to initiate a war. Modern pundits keep equating the attacks of 9/11 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This is a slippery, indeed dangerous analogy, since it has been proven in recent years, by way of recently declassified documents, that FDR deliberately maneuvered Japan into the attack on Pearl Harbor and kept the Hawaii commanders from knowing of the attack so that there would be plenty of dead bodies with which to enrage Americans into support of a war that as of December 6th, 1941, nobody wanted. American boys, shouting "Remember Pearl Harbor", marched off to war. Many did not come back. 

The Spanish/American war was likewise started with deception. The Hearst Newspapers flooded the land with stories of Spanish abuses of the Cuban people; stories which turned out to be fictional and which were published solely to fan the flames of a war, not for the benefit of the Cuban people, but to enlarge American territory and influence. When USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, the Captain of that ship insisted that the explosion was not the result of any attack. But he was shouted down by the press, and American boys, shouting "Remember The Maine", marched off to war. Many did not come back. And all because of a lie. In 1975, a review of the evidence by admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the modern nuclear Navy, concluded that there hadn't been any Spanish mine at all, just as the Maine's Captain had reported. The ships had suffered a fire in a coal bunker, detonating the ship's magazine, imprudently located nearby.

The same with the Gulf of Tonkin. Even as Johnson exhorted the American people to respond to the torpedo attack on the Maddox, Johnson knew there hadn't really been any torpedoes, not had the USS Maddox been as innocent as claimed. American boys again marched off to war. Many did not come back. 

Following the Bay of Pigs, which was by any definition an invasion of a foreign nation, the US Joint Chiefs proposed staging fake terrorist attacks that would be blamed on Cuba, to build support for a second invasion. 

Of course, there is nothing new about politicians using terror on their own citizens to get what they
want. The trick goes back to Roman times, and even Hitler fond it useful. 

So, let's take a moment to push aside those flags being held in front of our eyes like blindfold and
take a close look at the current situation. 

The United States government, despite nice sounding speeches about freedom and Democracy, has a record of overthrowing actual working Democracies and supporting outright dictatorships. The US, for example, backed Cuban Dictator Batista, Panama's Noriega, Chile's Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, and the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, to name just a few. The US backed these regimes because the dictators were willing to do favors for American multi-national corporations. Batista, for example, kept the prices of Cuban agricultural products below the prevailing market rate. This made American companies like United Fruit and PepsiCo more profitable, at the expense of the
Cuban farmers, who eventually revolted, bringing Castro to power. Castro let the market set the price of Cuban produce, whereupon the United States declared an embargo and invaded at the Bay of Pigs. Then we wonder why the Cuban people may not like us.

Another classic example of US foreign policy as it really is was South America. Chile had a working
democracy under Allende. But US corporate interests saw a greater chance for profits if the Democracy were to be replaced by a dictator friendly to US interests. This led to the US backed coup, complete with torture squads trained by US experts. Henry Kissenger flat out stated that the United States had a right to intervene in any Democracy that voted contrary to American interests, adding, "The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

Same deal in Iran. The US Government backed the Shah of Iran. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer (same as in the United States) and the people of Iran revolted, bringing the Ayatollah Khomeini to power.

Iran was our friend, now it's our enemy.

The same with Iraq, once our friend, and now our enemy. Indeed, the United States keeps switching sides so often, with the American people expected to follow along like lemmings, that
one is reminded of George Orwell's "1984" in which the perpetually warring nations are
always changing allegiance, and the war weary people wake up one morning to be told, "Eastasia is our friend. Eastasia has always been our friend. Eurasia is the enemy, and always has been." 

This brings us to Osama Bin Laden.

Osama is the modern equivalent of Orwell's "Emmanual Goldstien", the boogie man on whom the government blames everything. Even though careful observers have long known the United States economy was poised for a major decline, the media is spinning the current economic woes as a direct result of the attacks on the World Trade Towers, in the hopes that the general public will be stupid enough to believe it.

If Orwell is not to your taste, then let's try L. Frank Baum and the "Wizard Of Oz", who used a paper mache' mask to scare Dorothy Gale into doing war with the Wicked Witch of the West,
something farm girls would not normally be wise to do. After all, witches have air superiority! 

Likewise, Osama appears to be a manufactured monster, designed to scare us into doing things we otherwise would not so, including support a war, cease criticizing the government, and surrender our freedoms. Contrary to the public media image of Osama, he is not a lifelong religious fanatic. At the time the United States covert intervention in Afghanistan triggered the Soviet invasion , Osama, like the rest of his family, was living a westernized lifestyle. One of Osama's brothers was a business partner with the son of the then vice-president and former head of the CIA, George H. W. Bush. The CIA needed a front man in Afghanistan to oppose the Soviets, since Vietnam was too fresh a memory for the American people to tolerate another war, especially since the lid had just been blown off of the COINTELPRO scandal , revealing the criminal actions the FBI had engaged in to silence opposition to that war. So, trained and financed by the CIA, Osama quit being a westernized Saudi and seemingly overnight became a fanatical muslim and financier/leader of the fight against the Soviets, waging an indirect war on behalf of the United States. Osama was a creation of the CIA and we only have the CIA's word that Osama isn't still in their employ. However, as another CIA asset, David Ferrie, pointed out just prior to his own assassination, you don't leave the agency. Once you are in, you are in for life! 

Afghanistan is an interesting place. It has natural gas, petroleum, coal, copper, chromite, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, zinc, iron ore, salt, precious and semiprecious stones, and more opium than the Burmese Golden Triangle. It is also one of the most deadly places on Earth, having destroyed every invading army since the time of Alexander the Great! 

Afghanistan also sits on the proposed route for an oil pipeline which would allow the vast oil reserves sitting under the Caspian Sea to be brought to market, and it is no secret that a consortium of American oil companies want to build that pipeline. However, as John J. Maresca, vice president of international relations, Unocal Corporation, flat out told Congress in 1998, the pipeline would not be built until the Taliban was removed as the government in Afghanistan, even though the United States had installed the Taliban as part of the anti-Soviet strategy. 

When one considers the size of the Caspian oil fields, estimated at about 500 years' worth at present rates of consumption, one finds ample motive to start a war of conquest for that wealth. Compared to the trillions of dollars in oil profits which will flow from that pipeline stretching across Afghanistan, the cost of new World Trade Towers and a few thousand lives is a small price to pay to those who lust for wealth beyond dreams of avarice. 

Long before the attacks on the World Trade Towers, the United States was already announcing that there would be a war. While the American people were kept distracted by "All Condit All The Time" in the American press, the foreign press was reporting as early as March 2001 that the United States was planning to invade Afghanistan in October. and here it is, October. and here the United States is invading. and just like with FDR, a provocation occurred just when the government of the United States most needed one to anger the people into support of a war for oil. 

No sooner had the planes crashed into the World Trade Towers than the media was reporting official statements of suspicion that Osama Bin Laden was behind the attacks. The FBI issued names of suspected hijackers, none of which appeared on the actual passenger lists, and all based on what the FBI admits were forged IDs using stolen identities. Moreover, the men used those stolen identities the night before the attacks to visit strip bars, making so much noise that they would have to be noticed, ensuring that the credit card slips using the stolen names would be turned over to police. When Flight Attendant Madeline Sweeney phoned the ground from her hijacked plane, she gave the seat numbers of the hijackers. The passengers assigned to those seats
do not appear on the FBI's list of suspects. Then there was that suitcase, appearing out of nowhere and assumed to have been left off of one of the crashed planes by accident, containing a flight manual, a Koran, and a handwritten letter which any scholar of Islam would recognize was written by someone ignorant of the Religion. 

In short, the evidence that purports to link the attacks on the World Trade Towers with Osama appears to be planted, with the scene of the crime looking like the set of a cheap detective movie,
with a vital clue always carefully positioned within camera view. 

Because of the phony IDs, we do not really know who was on those airplanes, or who they worked for. 

But it is very obvious who we are all supposed to blame; the people sitting on that oil pipeline right
of way! So great is the rush to war in Afghanistan that Osama has himself almost become secondary in the media campaign to sell us all on hatred of the Afghani people. Indeed it isn't Osama who terrorizes Americans, it is the American media, waving fear all over the place. Yes, Anthrax is nasty, but would a real anthrax attack harm so few people? More people have been gunned down in Washington DC in the last 6 weeks than have died by anthrax. More people are sick with Dengue fever on Maui than are sick with Anthrax. Yet Anthrax, and the fear it is designed to cause, get the headlines, to keep the public scared, so scared that they cannot think.

Because once the people stop being terrorized by the media and start to think, they'll realize that it
makes no more moral sense to bomb the Afghani people over what crimes Osama has done than it makes to bomb people of Chicago over the crimes the mafia does. And once the American people realize this, they'll start to wonder what the real reason for bombing the Afghani people might be. The they'll start paying attention to John J. Maresca's comments before congress about that oil
pipeline. Then the American people will notice those foreign news articles that announced the US invasion of Afghanistan last spring. Then the American people will realize that the timing of the attacks on the World Trade Towers is just a little too convenient to the already scheduled invasion.

And that is when the American people will realize that, once again, they are being lied to to swindle
them out of their support for a war, a war not fought for moral principle but for profit, profit from oil paid for in the blood of our children. 

[ The author, Michael Rivero, maintains the site http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ ]

[ FOR AMERICANS, WITH LOVE ]