4 Million Israeli Bomblets Dropped On Southern Lebanon The U.N. estimated Israel dropped up to 4 million bomblets in southern Lebanon during the conflict, with as many as 40 percent failing to explode on impact. IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) used cluster bombs and fired them into civilian populated areas. Using artillery batteries, Multiple Launch Systems and aircraft, Israel is thought to have delivered thousands of cluster bombs, containing a total of some four million bomblets during the war. The United Nations estimates a 30% to 40% actual failure rate for cluster bomblets in Lebanon, leaving them to kill and maim innocent Lebanese. On July 23, however, the Israeli military censor Colonel Sima Valknin-Gil issued a directive banning all reporting of the *"use of unique kinds of ammunition and weaponry” by the Israeli military in Lebanon. The directive was sent to all Israeli media, including editors, producers, broadcasters and correspondents. Israel fired as many as 4 million cluster bombs into Lebanon during the war, especially in the last hours before the August 14 cease-fire. UN demining experts say up to 1 million cluster bombs failed to explode immediately and continue to threaten Lebanese civilians. Cluster bombs burst into bomblets and spread out near the ground. While some aim to destroy tanks, others are designed to kill or maim humans over a wide area. An unexploded cluster bomb may look like a soda can or a dusty rock and can be set off by as little as a touch, packing enough force to rip off a leg or kill a child. Cluster munitions are bombs or rockets that contain 200 to 600 smaller bombs, or "bomblets" that are designed to scatter over a wide area when the larger bomb is detonated. Bomblets are typically the size of a soda can or a D-cell battery and are designed to explode soon after impact. But not all of them do. Instead, unexploded bombs often litter the target area-silent and nondescript-until picked up by a child, kicked by a passerby, or stepped on by an unsuspecting farmer or grazing animal. They are hidden killers. According to the UN, the cluster bomb contamination in Lebanon is the worst ever seen, worse than the contamination in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The reason for this is the sheer volume of cluster bombs dropped on a "postage stamp" size country like Lebanon. There will be a residual land mine and unexploded ordnance problem in Lebanon for years to come. Seventy percent of south Lebanon's economy is based on agriculture, mostly tobacco, olives, bananas, citrus fruit and melons. Farmers cannot tend their fields because the bombing and shelling have destroyed crops, and they cannot plant spring crops because the fields and orchards are still contaminated by unexploded cluster bombs. Israel will not give up the bombing site coordinates to the UN fearing closer scrutiny from the world media. Close to 200,000 people lost shelter from the bombing in this country of 4 million, and 119,000 houses were either totally destroyed or damaged, mostly in villages and towns in the south, in the suburbs of the capital Beirut and in the town of Baalbek. The UN has been "SCREAMING" for information on where Israel fired cluster bombs. Israel is reluctant to give up battlefield information that would provide the dates and coordinates, because this would leave them open to international scrutiny on it's use of cluster bombs in civilian areas. The UN estimates that Israel fired 90 percent of those munition in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when Israel knew that the ceasefire (UN Security Council Resolution 1701) was imminent. Read more *Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure *A Million Unexploded Cluster Bomblets:The Deadly Legacy of Israel's Assault on Lebanon Israel dominates the lives and land of over 3 million Palestinians through massive military assaults, imprisonment of thousands, torture and systematic starvation policies that have lead to a major humanitarian crisis in many areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. (In Memory of Rachel Corrie, American peace activist murdered by Israel) Read more *A War Without Balance - Israeli War Crimes *Israeli bulldozer driver murders American peace activist *Protest Israeli “war crimes” against civilians in Rafah;Gaza The War Crimes of Israel Videos (Many of these Videos are Suppressed in the Mass Media) *Dispatches:The Killing Zone *Israel Crimes: Israeli Apartheid.Palestinians torment *Israeli soldiers vs Palestinian men *Video Israel Doesn't Want You to See *Lebanon Bint Jbeil and Tyre War Crimes *Israeli Terror Attack on Tyre - Aftermath *Lebanon Rising *Zionist Berlin Wall in Israel *Israeli war crimes *War crimes *Galloway on Israel and Lebanon 06/08/2006 *Ramsay Clark Charges Israel, U.S. with War Crimes *Zionist War Crimes Genocide in Palestine Stumble It!

The Coming American Fascism

"When Fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross" - (Sinclair Lewis 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here") Read the Novel by Sinclair Lewis online *It Can't Happen Here American Fascism - Watch the Videos - *Full Movie America:Freedom To Fascism *American Fascist - Watch It! Read *The Coming American Fascism The police state American-style as imagined and satirized by Lewis, complete with concentration camps, martial law, and mass executions of strikers and other dissidents, then "it" hasn't happened here and isn't likely to happen anytime soon, or is it? For today's Americans, it could signify our own more gradual and insidious turn toward authoritarian rule. That is why Lewis's darkly funny but grim fable of an authoritarian coup achieved through a democratic election still resonates today along with all the eerie parallels between what he imagined then and what we live with now. Americans today have reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined. The reasons for popular disenchantment with the Republican regime are well known from the illegal and horrifically mismanaged war in Iraq to the heartless mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. In both instances, growing anger over the damage done to the national interest and the loss of life and treasure has been exacerbated by evidence of bad faith by lies, cronyism, and corruption. Historians and complex system theorists agree that the development of fascism is a complicated societal process. Clearly, the US elites and civil society have managed to accomplish that complicated process. Most of our national governments, with very few exceptions, have been of, by, and for the class-race elite. Dating from our 1789 beginnings, those sworn to uphold our constitutions have chronically represented and benefited the class-race elite and themselves -- at the expense of we the sovereign people. For over two hundred years, Hamilton's First Law of Government has dominated : "Money-power first, ordinary people last -- no matter what the law says". The only legal uncertainty remaining is whether the Bush-Cheney Usurpation was null and void from the date of SCOTUS' unconstitutional ruling, 12 December 2000, or from Bush's taking of the presidential oath, 20 January 2001. Whatever, all actions taken by Bush under color of law from the relevant date of his usurpation are null and void, plus unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous. That's every law signed, every regulation promulgated, every Emergency Order signed, every treaty negotiated, every judge and ambassador appointed, every treaty and judgeship confirmed by the Senate, every invasion order issued, every pardon signed by the fascist mutt -- everything. Most of those actions created unconstitutional anti-law regimes that create felony conspiracies against rights in violation of 18 USC 241 every time they are applied. Both the felonious initial actions and the compounding felonies of the consequent anti-law regimes will have to be criminally prosecuted and litigated. This could take a decade or longer. We shouldn't let anything except our political ignorance, stupidity, and greed stop us from those prosecutions and litigations. They will be an essential part of rebuilding our nation, or, ignored, they will be an essential part of our nation's death. No sniveling. Where there's a will, there's a way. We the sovereign people have the intrinsic power to create the way into, through, and beyond the criminal prosecutions and litigations called for by the 3-branch Bush-Cheney Usurpation. No waffling. As with German and Italian fascism in the early 20th Century, the Bush-Cheney Usurpation is pure fascism. It demonstrates a strong-man leader, extreme secrecy, controlled media, fraudulent elections, judicial rulings clearly violating the Constitution, negation of the rule of law by all three branches of government, obstruction of justice for political and corporate leaders, the making of ex post facto law to immunize political and corporate leaders from past crimes, redefinition of established law for corruption and ideological purposes, redefinition of commonly understood language terms to avoid legal retribution (e.g., 'torture' to mean only treatment resulting in severe organ damage or death, and 'terrorist surveillance' to mean the interception of any communication or bank activity done by US citizens), the making of unconstitutional law to limit rights, suppression of Constitutional rights for profits and power, misuse of policy and law for unstated intentions, cronyism and corruption, sham national security obsessions, war making for profits and power, supremacy of the military, sham nationalism for the masses while leadership creates policy to benefit the transnational and stateless super rich, hard science made politically relative, anti-intellectualism outside the political and corporate elites, suppression of critical thinking in public education, intermixing of government and religion, enemies and scapegoats obsessions, destruction of undesirable minority population and cultural centers (e.g., Warsaw ghetto and New Orleans), male chauvinism and suppression of women's rights, and corporation protection extremes including lassez faire economic policy and suppression of labor's rights and power. Fascism is not only a form of absurd, predator elitism governance, it is a national trait. Just as there was something inherently fascist about significant numbers of early 20th Century Germans and Italians, so there is something inherently fascist about significant numbers of late 20th and early 21st Century Americans. History will damn the American people for their fascism and fascist war crimes just as it damns the German and Italian peoples for theirs. The Council for National Policy The Council for National Policy, boasts that they control everything in the world. Described by People for the American way as "a secretive right-wing group" that meets behind closed doors to set its policy and agenda, the Council for National Policy was founded in 1981 by members of the John Birch Society, evangelicals, and old-style right-wingers. CNP was founded in 1981 by Tim LaHaye, the right-wing, evangelical political motivator and author of the Left Behind serial, which chronicles a fictional Armageddon and second coming (in which the non-believers are left behind while believers are carried off in a rapturous moment without their clothes. In 1999, candidate George W. Bush spoke before a closed-press CNP session in San Antonio. Shortly thereafter, magisterial conservatives pronounced the allegedly moderate younger Bush fit for the mantle of Republican leadership. Read more *Behind Closed Doors *Inside the Council for National Policy References *The Secret Society *Homegrown American Fascism *It could happen here *Abuses and Usurpations Everyone knows that the Bush administration misled the American people about the true purposes and likely costs of invading Iraq. It invented a mortal threat to the nation in order to justify illegal aggression. It has repeatedly sought, from the beginning, to exploit the state of war for partisan advantage and presidential image management. It has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, and probably over a trillion, on Pentagon contractors with patronage connections to the Republican Party. Authoritarians excuse their excesses as the necessary response to an enemy that every American knows to be real. For the past five years, the Republican leadership has argued that the attacks of September 11, 2001 -- and the continuing threat from jihadist groups such as al Qaeda -- demand permanent changes in American government, society, and foreign policy. Now not only liberals and leftists, but centrists, libertarians, and conservatives, of every party and no party, have come to distrust the answers given by those in power. The Fascist regimes in Italy, Germany, and Spain had in common a highly militarized state, backed by a corporate and wealthy elite, that rose to power through a false populism that exploited the public’s fear of foreigners and moral degenerates. This precisely defines the formula that Karl Rove designed to consolidate the Bush administration’s power in the recent election. The Evolution of American Fascism Franklin Roosevelt has come to represent a certain conception of America, one that is worlds apart from Jefferson's vision, and different from anything that even Lincoln could have imagined. Roosevelt stands for the national government as we know it today, a vast, unfathomable bureaucratic apparatus that recognizes no limits whatsoever to its power, either at home or abroad. Internationally, it gives every evidence of intending to run the whole world, of extending its hegemony – now that the Soviet Union is no more – to every corner of the globe. Domestically, it undertakes, through an annual budget of close to $2 trillion, to assuage every real or invented social ill and thus enters into every aspect of the people's lives. In particular, it is engaged in what even a couple of decades ago would have seemed fantastic – a campaign to annihilate freedom of association, subjecting the American people to a program of radical social engineering, in order to transform their voluntarily held traditional beliefs and values and way of life. The rise of fascism itself is a complex story, much less the rise of American fascism. Just as understanding the rise of fascism in Europe requires understanding the conditions of the time, so too understanding fascism in America requires understanding the conditions leading up to its transformation into a fascist state. Read more *The Rise of American Fascism *Fascism Comes to America *When Fascism Comes to America *From the Front Lines to the Margins with Chris Hedges Read more *It's Not Really Fascism When Christians Do It (click:Continue to Gallery) Stumble It!

Israeli War Crimes Continued

4 Million Israeli Bomblets Dropped On Southern Lebanon The U.N. estimated Israel dropped up to 4 million bomblets in southern Lebanon during the conflict, with as many as 40 percent failing to explode on impact. IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) used cluster bombs and fired them into civilian populated areas. Using artillery batteries, Multiple Launch Systems and aircraft, Israel is thought to have delivered thousands of cluster bombs, containing a total of some four million bomblets during the war. The United Nations estimates a 30% to 40% actual failure rate for cluster bomblets in Lebanon, leaving them to kill and maim innocent Lebanese. On July 23, however, the Israeli military censor Colonel Sima Valknin-Gil issued a directive banning all reporting of the *"use of unique kinds of ammunition and weaponry” by the Israeli military in Lebanon. The directive was sent to all Israeli media, including editors, producers, broadcasters and correspondents. Israel fired as many as 4 million cluster bombs into Lebanon during the war, especially in the last hours before the August 14 cease-fire. UN demining experts say up to 1 million cluster bombs failed to explode immediately and continue to threaten Lebanese civilians. Cluster bombs burst into bomblets and spread out near the ground. While some aim to destroy tanks, others are designed to kill or maim humans over a wide area. An unexploded cluster bomb may look like a soda can or a dusty rock and can be set off by as little as a touch, packing enough force to rip off a leg or kill a child. Cluster munitions are bombs or rockets that contain 200 to 600 smaller bombs, or "bomblets" that are designed to scatter over a wide area when the larger bomb is detonated. Bomblets are typically the size of a soda can or a D-cell battery and are designed to explode soon after impact. But not all of them do. Instead, unexploded bombs often litter the target area-silent and nondescript-until picked up by a child, kicked by a passerby, or stepped on by an unsuspecting farmer or grazing animal. They are hidden killers. According to the UN, the cluster bomb contamination in Lebanon is the worst ever seen, worse than the contamination in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The reason for this is the sheer volume of cluster bombs dropped on a "postage stamp" size country like Lebanon. There will be a residual land mine and unexploded ordnance problem in Lebanon for years to come. Seventy percent of south Lebanon's economy is based on agriculture, mostly tobacco, olives, bananas, citrus fruit and melons. Farmers cannot tend their fields because the bombing and shelling have destroyed crops, and they cannot plant spring crops because the fields and orchards are still contaminated by unexploded cluster bombs. Israel will not give up the bombing site coordinates to the UN fearing closer scrutiny from the world media. Close to 200,000 people lost shelter from the bombing in this country of 4 million, and 119,000 houses were either totally destroyed or damaged, mostly in villages and towns in the south, in the suburbs of the capital Beirut and in the town of Baalbek. The UN has been "SCREAMING" for information on where Israel fired cluster bombs. Israel is reluctant to give up battlefield information that would provide the dates and coordinates, because this would leave them open to international scrutiny on it's use of cluster bombs in civilian areas. The UN estimates that Israel fired 90 percent of those munition in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when Israel knew that the ceasefire (UN Security Council Resolution 1701) was imminent. Read more *Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure *A Million Unexploded Cluster Bomblets:The Deadly Legacy of Israel's Assault on Lebanon Israel dominates the lives and land of over 3 million Palestinians through massive military assaults, imprisonment of thousands, torture and systematic starvation policies that have lead to a major humanitarian crisis in many areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. (In Memory of Rachel Corrie, American peace activist murdered by Israel) Read more *A War Without Balance - Israeli War Crimes *Israeli bulldozer driver murders American peace activist *Protest Israeli “war crimes” against civilians in Rafah;Gaza The War Crimes of Israel Videos (Many of these Videos are Suppressed in the Mass Media) *Dispatches:The Killing Zone *Israel Crimes: Israeli Apartheid.Palestinians torment *Israeli soldiers vs Palestinian men *Video Israel Doesn't Want You to See *Lebanon Bint Jbeil and Tyre War Crimes *Israeli Terror Attack on Tyre - Aftermath *Lebanon Rising *Zionist Berlin Wall in Israel *Israeli war crimes *War crimes *Galloway on Israel and Lebanon 06/08/2006 *Ramsay Clark Charges Israel, U.S. with War Crimes *Zionist War Crimes Genocide in Palestine

The Coming American Fascism

"When Fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross" - (Sinclair Lewis 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here") Read the Novel by Sinclair Lewis online *It Can't Happen Here American Fascism - Watch the Videos - *Full Movie America:Freedom To Fascism *American Fascist - Watch It! Read *The Coming American Fascism The police state American-style as imagined and satirized by Lewis, complete with concentration camps, martial law, and mass executions of strikers and other dissidents, then "it" hasn't happened here and isn't likely to happen anytime soon, or is it? For today's Americans, it could signify our own more gradual and insidious turn toward authoritarian rule. That is why Lewis's darkly funny but grim fable of an authoritarian coup achieved through a democratic election still resonates today along with all the eerie parallels between what he imagined then and what we live with now. Americans today have reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined. The reasons for popular disenchantment with the Republican regime are well known from the illegal and horrifically mismanaged war in Iraq to the heartless mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. In both instances, growing anger over the damage done to the national interest and the loss of life and treasure has been exacerbated by evidence of bad faith by lies, cronyism, and corruption. Historians and complex system theorists agree that the development of fascism is a complicated societal process. Clearly, the US elites and civil society have managed to accomplish that complicated process. Most of our national governments, with very few exceptions, have been of, by, and for the class-race elite. Dating from our 1789 beginnings, those sworn to uphold our constitutions have chronically represented and benefited the class-race elite and themselves -- at the expense of we the sovereign people. For over two hundred years, Hamilton's First Law of Government has dominated : "Money-power first, ordinary people last -- no matter what the law says". The only legal uncertainty remaining is whether the Bush-Cheney Usurpation was null and void from the date of SCOTUS' unconstitutional ruling, 12 December 2000, or from Bush's taking of the presidential oath, 20 January 2001. Whatever, all actions taken by Bush under color of law from the relevant date of his usurpation are null and void, plus unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous. That's every law signed, every regulation promulgated, every Emergency Order signed, every treaty negotiated, every judge and ambassador appointed, every treaty and judgeship confirmed by the Senate, every invasion order issued, every pardon signed by the fascist mutt -- everything. Most of those actions created unconstitutional anti-law regimes that create felony conspiracies against rights in violation of 18 USC 241 every time they are applied. Both the felonious initial actions and the compounding felonies of the consequent anti-law regimes will have to be criminally prosecuted and litigated. This could take a decade or longer. We shouldn't let anything except our political ignorance, stupidity, and greed stop us from those prosecutions and litigations. They will be an essential part of rebuilding our nation, or, ignored, they will be an essential part of our nation's death. No sniveling. Where there's a will, there's a way. We the sovereign people have the intrinsic power to create the way into, through, and beyond the criminal prosecutions and litigations called for by the 3-branch Bush-Cheney Usurpation. No waffling. As with German and Italian fascism in the early 20th Century, the Bush-Cheney Usurpation is pure fascism. It demonstrates a strong-man leader, extreme secrecy, controlled media, fraudulent elections, judicial rulings clearly violating the Constitution, negation of the rule of law by all three branches of government, obstruction of justice for political and corporate leaders, the making of ex post facto law to immunize political and corporate leaders from past crimes, redefinition of established law for corruption and ideological purposes, redefinition of commonly understood language terms to avoid legal retribution (e.g., 'torture' to mean only treatment resulting in severe organ damage or death, and 'terrorist surveillance' to mean the interception of any communication or bank activity done by US citizens), the making of unconstitutional law to limit rights, suppression of Constitutional rights for profits and power, misuse of policy and law for unstated intentions, cronyism and corruption, sham national security obsessions, war making for profits and power, supremacy of the military, sham nationalism for the masses while leadership creates policy to benefit the transnational and stateless super rich, hard science made politically relative, anti-intellectualism outside the political and corporate elites, suppression of critical thinking in public education, intermixing of government and religion, enemies and scapegoats obsessions, destruction of undesirable minority population and cultural centers (e.g., Warsaw ghetto and New Orleans), male chauvinism and suppression of women's rights, and corporation protection extremes including lassez faire economic policy and suppression of labor's rights and power. Fascism is not only a form of absurd, predator elitism governance, it is a national trait. Just as there was something inherently fascist about significant numbers of early 20th Century Germans and Italians, so there is something inherently fascist about significant numbers of late 20th and early 21st Century Americans. History will damn the American people for their fascism and fascist war crimes just as it damns the German and Italian peoples for theirs. The Council for National Policy The Council for National Policy, boasts that they control everything in the world. Described by People for the American way as "a secretive right-wing group" that meets behind closed doors to set its policy and agenda, the Council for National Policy was founded in 1981 by members of the John Birch Society, evangelicals, and old-style right-wingers. CNP was founded in 1981 by Tim LaHaye, the right-wing, evangelical political motivator and author of the Left Behind serial, which chronicles a fictional Armageddon and second coming (in which the non-believers are left behind while believers are carried off in a rapturous moment without their clothes. In 1999, candidate George W. Bush spoke before a closed-press CNP session in San Antonio. Shortly thereafter, magisterial conservatives pronounced the allegedly moderate younger Bush fit for the mantle of Republican leadership. Read more *Behind Closed Doors *Inside the Council for National Policy References *The Secret Society *Homegrown American Fascism *It could happen here *Abuses and Usurpations Everyone knows that the Bush administration misled the American people about the true purposes and likely costs of invading Iraq. It invented a mortal threat to the nation in order to justify illegal aggression. It has repeatedly sought, from the beginning, to exploit the state of war for partisan advantage and presidential image management. It has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, and probably over a trillion, on Pentagon contractors with patronage connections to the Republican Party. Authoritarians excuse their excesses as the necessary response to an enemy that every American knows to be real. For the past five years, the Republican leadership has argued that the attacks of September 11, 2001 -- and the continuing threat from jihadist groups such as al Qaeda -- demand permanent changes in American government, society, and foreign policy. Now not only liberals and leftists, but centrists, libertarians, and conservatives, of every party and no party, have come to distrust the answers given by those in power. The Fascist regimes in Italy, Germany, and Spain had in common a highly militarized state, backed by a corporate and wealthy elite, that rose to power through a false populism that exploited the public’s fear of foreigners and moral degenerates. This precisely defines the formula that Karl Rove designed to consolidate the Bush administration’s power in the recent election. The Evolution of American Fascism Franklin Roosevelt has come to represent a certain conception of America, one that is worlds apart from Jefferson's vision, and different from anything that even Lincoln could have imagined. Roosevelt stands for the national government as we know it today, a vast, unfathomable bureaucratic apparatus that recognizes no limits whatsoever to its power, either at home or abroad. Internationally, it gives every evidence of intending to run the whole world, of extending its hegemony – now that the Soviet Union is no more – to every corner of the globe. Domestically, it undertakes, through an annual budget of close to $2 trillion, to assuage every real or invented social ill and thus enters into every aspect of the people's lives. In particular, it is engaged in what even a couple of decades ago would have seemed fantastic – a campaign to annihilate freedom of association, subjecting the American people to a program of radical social engineering, in order to transform their voluntarily held traditional beliefs and values and way of life. The rise of fascism itself is a complex story, much less the rise of American fascism. Just as understanding the rise of fascism in Europe requires understanding the conditions of the time, so too understanding fascism in America requires understanding the conditions leading up to its transformation into a fascist state. Read more *The Rise of American Fascism *Fascism Comes to America *When Fascism Comes to America *From the Front Lines to the Margins with Chris Hedges Read more *It's Not Really Fascism When Christians Do It (click:Continue to Gallery)