So You Think Military Intervention is a Good Idea?
Well, if you really feel that strongly about it..
Here's your rifle..
Here's your parachute..
We ran out of the desert camo, but here is a bright day-glo orange jumpsuit left over from Gitmo..
Watch your head climbing into that transport plane..
Click for larger
And we'll call whoever it is you are telling us needs to be invaded this week and tell them you are on your way to kick their butts all by yourself.
But given the very long history of the United States government and the corporate media lying and tricking us into wars, you will forgive We The People if we sit this one out and keep our children safe at home.
And just in case you are one of those poor government or media people who are not as well educated in history as the average American citizen, here is a comprehensive but by no means complete list of just how many times We The People have been made total fools of by the US Government and the corporate media.
When the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor in 1898, the Captain, Charles Sigsbee, reported it as an accident resulting from an on-board fire. President McKinley and the newspapers of the day claimed it was an attack with a Spanish mine and told that lie to trick the American people into supporting war with Spain.
In 1975 the USS Maine was examined by a team of investigators led by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the father of America's nuclear navy, and their conclusion was the Captain Charles Sigsbee had been correct. The ship was destroyed by an on-board fire and there was no evidence of an external attack.
Rickover's excavation of the remains of USS Maine.
On May 7th, 1915, a German U-Boat U-20 torpedoed and sank RMS Lusitania, a passenger ship operated by the Cunard line. Like many ships built during that time, Lusitania was heavily subsidized by the British Government and designed to be easily converted into a military auxiliary cruiser in time of war. Although the United States was officially neutral, Germany declared that Lusitania was being used to transport military cargoes to England, which made her a legitimate target of war. Germany even went so far as to take out ads in the American newspapers warning civilians not to take passage on the Lusitania.
The ad placed by Germany warning passengers not to take passage on the Lusitania
The United States and Britain denied that Lusitania carried war materials, and the story of the Germans sinking a helpless passenger ship turned public opinion against Germany and allowed the United States government to convince the American people to enter WW1 against Germany.
War munitions recovered from the wreck of the Lusitania
In 2008, divers finally entered the hold of Lusitania, and proved once and for all that she had been smuggling military munitions to England. Germany had been legally in the right to sink her. The US Government and the media deliberately lied to the American people to trick them into WW1.
Remains of the USS Arizona
FDR claimed Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack. It wasn't. The United States saw war with Japan as the means to get into war with Germany, which Americans opposed. So Roosevelt needed Japan to appear to strike first. Following an 8-step plan devised by the Office of Naval Intelligence, Roosevelt intentionally provoked Japan into the attack. Contrary to the official story, the Japanese fleet did not maintain radio silence, but sent messages intercepted and decoded by US intercept stations. Tricked by the lie of a surprise attack, Americans marched off to war.
Honolulu newspaper warning of the attack on Pearl Harbor one week before it occurred. It was no surprise.
Documents declassified in 1994 revealed that Roosevelt spent 1941 following an 8 step plan to provoke Japan crafted by ONI Lt. Cmdr. Arthur H. McCollum, as a back door to war against Nazi Germany. Far from being a surprise, British agent Dusko Popov, code-named Tricycle, delivered a copy of the complete Japanese plan for the attack to the FBI in August of 1941. While the public was told that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence, the reality is that they were broadcasting all the way across the ocean, and intercepted by the government's Station-H on windward Oahu (which intercepted Admiral Yamamoto's order to set sail for the attack on November 25th) and by Leslie Grogan, the civilian radio operator on the Matson steamship SS Lurline, who was able to plot the progress of the fleet towards Japan, and handed a map to the Hawaiian Navel Intelligence office when the Lurline arrived in Honolulu, three days before the attack. Roosevelt, along with ordering all the newer ships away from Pearl Harbor ahead of the attack, ordered a Navy training cruise, Exercise 191, that happened to lie directly in the path of the oncoming Japanese fleet, back to Pearl without explanation. Had Exercise 191 been allowed to continue, the japanese fleet would have been discovered and the planned attack thwarted.
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
President Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to send Americans off to fight in Vietnam.
USS Maddox
On August 4th, 1964, an inexperienced sonar operator on the USS Maddox, rattled by an encounter with North Vietnamese patrol boats trying to keep US ships out of their territorial waters just two days previously, picked up the sounds of his own ship's screws and mistakenly interpreted them as incoming torpedoes. Although the Captain of the Maddox immediately reported the error up the chain of command, the initial report of an attack garnered headlines which President Johnson used to goad Congress into escalating the Vietnam War.
As for 9-11, there is ample evidence of deception. Here are just two out of many.
The official report does not mention WTC building 7 at all, which although not hit by an airplane, collapsed into its own footprint just like a controlled demolition.
The collapse of WTC Building 7.
One of the surviving videos actually captured the sound of the explosives.
Unedited video of WTC-7 collapse reveals sound
of explosion as collapse starts at Penthouse at the 12 second mark
Here is an MP3 of the relevant portion, with the higher frequencies reduced by 10db.
Here is the audio spectrogram for the above, indicating the start of the explosion.
9/11/2001 radio broadcast: "...I was just standing there, ya know... we were watching the building [WTC 7] actually 'cuz it was on fire... the bottom floors of the building were on fire and... we heard this sound that sounded like a clap of thunder... turned around - we were shocked to see that the building was... well it looked like there was a shockwave ripping through the building and the windows all busted out... it was horrifying... about a second later the bottom floor caved out and the building followed after that... we saw the building crash down all the way to the ground... we were in shock." [197kB wma download]
Prior to 9-11 and since, no steel-framed building ever totally collapsed from a fire, and because WTC Building 7 contained Federal Government offices, it was built to much higher standards than the normal building codes in New York.
BBC, CNN, and Fox news all reported the collapse of WTC building 7 twenty six minutes BEFORE it happened.
The two screen shots below show WTC 7 behind the reporter.
2. On the day of 9-11, President Bush was at Booker Elementary School in Sarasota Florida, reading about pet goats.
Video shows White House aid Andy Card walking in to whisper to Bush that a second plane has hit the WTC, and Bush himself claimed that was the moment when he knew the nation was being attacked.
Bush also claimed to have seen the first impact into the WTC on TV, and said it twice, once on CNN. The second impact took place while Bush was inside the classroom reading about pet goats, so there is no possibility of confusion.
Obviously, the only way Bush could have seen the first impact was over a closed-circuit system, since video of the first impact, shot by the Naudet brothers for their firehouse documentary, was not broadcast until late that night.
In theory, there are an unknown number of hijacked planes in the air, flying over the eastern half of the United States, crashing into buildings. Bush's presence at Booker Elementary School was announced in the media three days before in the Sarasota Times, giving the planners of 9-11 ample time to target the President. Other media also announced his plan to visit the school ahead of time.
And there is an airport just 4 miles away from Booker Elementary School.
Click for larger map
Everyone knew the nation was under terror attack form crashing airplanes, but we did not see the Secret Service take a single step to protect the President! They didn't grab Bush and toss him in that armored limo and start driving in a random direction to foil a possible inbound plane. From their inaction, it is clear the United States Secret Service KNEW FOR A FACT that President Bush was not a target that day. And the only way the Secret Service could know for a fact that the President was not a target is that they all knew what the targets were going to be.
Then there were the lies used to trick the US into war with Iraq.
First off was Tony Blair's "Dodgy Dossier", a document released by the Prime Minister that made many of the claims used to support the push for war. The dossier soon collapsed when it was revealed that much of it had been plagiarized from a student thesis paper that was 12 years old!
The contents of the dossier, however much they seemed to create a good case for invasion, were obsolete and outdated, having been plagiarized from a 12-year old student thesis paper.
Iraq lies: Mobile Bioweapons Labs
British balloon inflator system, presented to the public as a mobile biological weapons lab
Then there was the claim about the "Mobile biological weapons laboratories". Proffered in the absence of any real laboratories in the wake of the invasion, photos of these trailers were shown on all the US Mainstream Media, with the claim they while seeming to lack anything suggesting biological processing, these were part of a much larger assembly of multiple trailers that churned out biological weapons of mass destruction.
Illustration on how a balloon inflator is supposed to be part of a system to make weapons of mass destruction
The chief proponent of this hoax was Colin Powell, who presented illustrations such as this one to the United Nations on February 5th, 2003.
This claim fell apart when it was revealed that these trailers were nothing more than hydrogen gas generators used to inflate weather balloons. This fact was already known to both the US and UK, as a British company manufactured the units and sold them to Iraq.
Colin Powell's speech to the UN was itself one misstatement after another. Powell claimed that Iraq had purchased special aluminum tubes whose only possible use was in uranium enrichment centrifuges. Both CIA and Powell's own State Department confirmed that the tubes were parts for missiles Saddam was legally allowed to have. Following the invasion, no centrifuges, aluminum or otherwise were found.
Ariel photos with fictitious labels
Powell also claimed to the United Nations that the photo above showed "Decontamination Vehicles". But when United Nations inspectors visited the site after the invasion, they located the vehicles and discovered they were just fire fighting equipment.
Powell claimed the Iraqis had illegal rockets and launchers hidden in the palm trees of Western Iraq. None were ever found.
Powell claimed that the Iraqis had 8,500 liters (2245 gallons) of Anthrax. None was ever found.
Powell claimed that Iraq had four tons of VX nerve gas. The UN had already confirmed that it was destroyed. The only VX ever found were samples the US had left as "standards" for testing. When the UN suspected that the US samples had been used to contaminate Iraqi warheads, the US moved quickly to destroy the samples before comparison tests could be carried out.
Powell claimed that Iraq was building long-range remote drones specifically designed to carry biological weapons. The only drones found were short-range reconnaissance drones.
Powell claimed that Iraq had an aggregate of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical and biological warfare agents. Powell gave no basis for that claim at all, and a DIA report issued the same time directly contradicted the claim. No biological or chemical weapons were found in Iraq following the invasion.
Powell claimed that "unnamed sources" confirmed that Saddam had authorized his field commanders to use biological weapons. No such weapons were ever used by the Iraqis to defend against the invasion and, of course, none were ever found in Iraq.
Powell claimed that 122mm warheads found by the UN inspectors were chemical weapons. The warheads were empty, the corroded remains of weapons given to Iraq by the US to use against Iran, and showed no signs of ever having contained chemical weapons.
Powell claimed that Iraq had a secret force of illegal long-range Scud missiles. None were ever found. Powell claimed to have an audio tape proving that Saddam was supporting Osama Bin Laden. But independent translation of the tape revealed Osama's wish for Saddam's death.
"That dot is a chemical weapons dump. Honest!"
Colin Powell's UN debacle also included spy photos taken from high flying aircraft and spacecraft. On the photos were circles and arrows and labels pointing to various fuzzy white blobs and identifying them as laboratories and storage areas for Saddam's massive weapons of mass destruction program. Nothing in the photos actually suggested what the blobby shapes were and during inspections which followed the invasion, all of them turned out to be benign.
In at least one case, the satellite Powell claimed had taken one of the pictures had actually been out of operation at the time. And many questioned why Powell was showing black and white photos when the satellites in use at the time over Iraq took color images.
Forged Niger uranium sales document
Another piece of evidence consists of documents which President Bush referenced as in his 2003 State of the Union Speech. According to Bush, these documents proved that Iraq was buying tons of uranium oxide, called "Yellow Cake" from Niger.
Since Israel had bombed Iraq's nuclear power plant years before, it was claimed that the only reason Saddam would have for buying uranium oxide was to build bombs.
This hoax fell apart fast when it was pointed out that Iraq has a great deal of uranium ore inside their own borders and no need to import any from Niger or anywhere else. The I.A.E.A. then blew the cover off the fraud by announcing that the documents Bush had used were not only forgeries, but too obvious to believe that anyone in the Bush administration did not know they were forgeries! The forged documents were reported as being "discovered" in Italy by SISMI, the Italian Security Service. Shortly before the "discovery" the head of SISMI had been paid a visit by Michael Ledeen, Manucher Ghorbanifar, and two officials from OSP, one of whom was Larry Franklin, the AIPAC Israeli spy operating inside the Pentagon's Office of Special Projects, from which many of the Iraq fabrications came.
In July, 2005, the Italian Parliament concluded their own investigation and named four men as suspects in the creation of the forged documents. Michael Ledeen, Dewey Clarridge, Ahmed Chalabi and Francis Brookes. This report has been included in Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame, and Paul McNulty, the prosecutor of the AIPAC spy case.
A recently declassified memo proves that the State Department reported the fact that the Niger documents were forgeries to the CIA 11 days before President Bush made the claim about the Niger uranium based on those documents.
In the end, the real proof that we were lied to about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. That means that every single piece of paper that purported to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was by default a fraud, a hoax, and a lie. There could be no evidence that supported the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In a way, the existence of any faked documents about Iraq's WMDs is actually an admission of guilt. If one is taking the time to create fake documents, the implication is that the faker is already aware that there are no genuine documents.
What the US Government had, ALL that they had, were copied student papers, forged "Yellow Cake" documents, balloon inflators mislabeled as bioweapons labs, and photos with misleading labels on them. And somewhere along the line, someone deliberatly decided, with malice aforethought, to put those misleading labels on those photos, to pretend that balloon inflators were portable bioweapons labs, and to pass off an outdated stolen student paper as a contemporary analysis.
The President of the United States and his Neocon associates lied to the people of the United States to send them off on a war of conquest.
Saddam's Nuclear Weapons did not exist.
In 2011, President Obama sent in covert operatives to create civil unrest in Libya, then lied by claiming it was a revolution to trick the American people into war with Libya (similar to the failed attempt to do the same in Iran in 2009.
Syria combines two of the lies, a covert overthrow masquerading as a revolution, coupled with unfounded claims of weapons of mass destruction.
The question is not whether the US Government is lying about Syria. History shows that the US Government lies all the time to trick Americans into wars. The claim that Iraq had nuclear weapons was not an isolated case, but business as usual. The US government lies about everything, and uses every trick they can (including obedient presstitutes and whorespondants in the corporate media to prop up failed lies and ridicule those who think for themselves) to trick the nation into war after war after war.
So, to recap..
If you think military intervention is a good idea..
Here's your rifle..
Here's your parachute..
We ran out of the desert camo, but here is a bright day-glo orange jumpsuit left over from Gitmo..
Watch your head climbing into that transport plane..
Click for larger
And we'll call whoever it is you are telling us needs to be invaded this week and tell them you are on your way to kick their butts all by yourself.
But given the very long history of the United States government and the corporate media lying and tricking us into wars, you will forgive We The People if we sit this one out and keep our children safe at home.
P.S. Just in case you want to demonstrate your commitment to this military action you endorse, here is the official enlistment form for the United States Armed Forces. Just fill it out, and email it back to me, and I will be happy to deliver it to the recruiting offices next time I head down to the shopping mall!
PDF of the above article for emailing.
