Friday, December 28, 2007

Realpolitiks in Pakistan and Bhutto's Assassination

Yesterday the world was rocked by the news of the death of Benazir Bhutto who was assassinated just days before the general election, an election in which most observers predicted she would be ushered in as the next prime minister of Pakistan. The news media and politicians condemned the killers for the crime and lamented the death of the hope for a democratic Pakistan -- an elusive phantom that Bhutto promised her people should she get elected.

But, like so much on the mainstream news, most Americans who only listen to the sound bites will miss the realpolitiks about Pakistan which are covered up expertly by corporate/CIA spin masters.

Just last week I read a very interesting essay by Zahir Ebrahim called "Wakeup to the grotesque reality of the 'Grand Chessboard'!" which presents a very different dynamic about what's going on in that fractious country.

Ebrahim writes in this essay that western imperialistic forces are intent on destroying the sovereignty of Pakistan by using the fabricated "War on Terror" as an imperial doctrine to build their empire. He writes:
"In these times when the world's greatest minds, its foremost intellectuals, and its leading scholars and political-thinkers are seeding the underpinnings of the vast multi-faceted empire that very much needs this 'War on Terror' to accomplish its genocidal wet dreams of 'full spectrum dominance' of the planet, it is foolish to close ones' eyes and ones' mind to their doctrinal craftsmanship that is directly fueling the global power-plays and which is entirely crafting our own humble destiny while we are deliberately deflected into our own local petty gamesmanship!

...as a humble student of geopolitics of the 'Grand Chessboard', the following are the rational steps, in order, that the Pakistani nation must urgently initiate in order to save the country and its peoples from imminent destruction before the despotic 'hectoring hegemons' come to really 'save' Pakistan just as they did Iraq. They are already deftly planting, spinning, and loudly singing the prelude 'unbirthday party' song to 'shock and awe' with copious unwitting help from our own 'native informants' (see “Response to Zia Mian's 'How Not to Handle Nuclear Security'”)!"

Zahir Ebrahim, "Wakeup to the grotesque reality of the 'Grand Chessboard'!", 2007
How does Bhutto fit into this global power play that Ebrahim describes in his essay? Journalist Gail Sheehy's recent article for Parade Magazine, 'A Wrong Must Be Righted,' gives the reader some useful insights into Bhutto's ascendancy:

Sheehy quotes Humayun Gauhar, a confidant of General Musharraf:
"If the Americans can have a government led by Bhutto, they will get what Musharraf has refused them. She will allow NATO boots on the ground in our tribal areas and a chance to neuter our nuclear weapons," said Gauhar. This is exactly why the American government was eager to see Bhutto gain or share power with the Musharraf's highly unpopular regime."

Gail Sheehy, Parade Magazine, 2007, "A Wrong Must Be Righted'

In an interesting op/ed piece in the Los Angele's Times Benazir's niece, Fatima Bhutto, thinks that her aunt is a great pretender when it comes to democratic reform and that her loyalties lie somewhere else. The piece titled, "Aunt Benazir's false promises" Fatima writes:
"I have personal reasons to fear the danger that Ms. Bhutto's presence in Pakistan brings, but I am not alone. The Islamists are waiting at the gate. They have been waiting for confirmation that the reforms for which the Pakistani people have been struggling have been a farce, propped up by the White House. Since Musharraf seized power in 1999, there has been an earnest grass-roots movement for democratic reform. The last thing we need is to be tied to a neocon agenda through a puppet "democrat" like Ms. Bhutto."

-- Los Angeles Times, Op/Ed., November 14, 2007
Now, is this the real story behind the continuing tragedy of Pakistan today? The pro-Western, Harvard- and Oxford-educated Bhutto had desires to bring in Western military forces into the country in order to dismantle the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service, and Pakistan's nuclear weapons arsenal, making Pakistan a puppet government the Neocons could control? Would the ISI and others who believed in a sovereign Pakistan allow that to happen?

And, if the axiom that one is judged by the company one keeps is correct then one should be wary of Bhutto as she had a penchant for hiring the advice for those that are profiting greatly off the "War on Terror".

Sheehy gives us this interesting detail about Bhutto:
"Reflecting on the lessons of her two terms as prime minister, Bhutto tells me, “It’s only now that America has awakened to what we were already fighting—Islamic jihadis.” Fortunately for her, the West’s urgent fear of Pakistan as a breeding ground for terrorists has given Bhutto the chance to redefine herself. During most of her exile, she was considered irrelevant by Washington. Then she hired Hillary Clinton’s image-maker, Mark Penn, and began playing up to Musharraf."

Gail Sheehy, Parade Magazine, 2007, "A Wrong Must Be Righted'
For all those who have not heard of Mark Penn, he is CEO and President of the PR firm Burson-Marsteller and was Hillary Clinton's chief campaign strategist. His company helped defend the mercenary company Blackwater in hearings before Congress.

Bhutto also was a long-term client of Scribe Securities & Advisors which provided her with advice and counseling on political and media strategies. The president of Scribe, Joseph Szlavik Jr., served at the White House during the first Bush Administration as a policy analyst in the Office of Policy Development and as liaison with the Office of Cabinet Affairs and the Office of Legislative Affairs. The company also specializes in Homeland Security and Defense Consulting.

Bhutto was obviously not being propelled to government by grassroots support but by well-greased, well-connected consulting firms heavily tied to the Military Industrial Complex. With the Middle East blowing up both figuratively and literally because of the phony "War on Terror," does it surprise anybody that the very real world of realpolitiks caught up with her.

* * *


Also see:
The Destabilization of Pakistan, by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky for an excellent indepth analysis of the West's program to destabilize and balkanize Pakistan.

Bhutto tried to hire U.S. security guards Benazir tried to hire British and American security firms, including Blackwater, to protect her, but Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf refused to allow the foreign contractors to operate in Pakistan, according to aides.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

The UN: Global Government, Gun Control and Genocide

A couple of years ago I was invited to a friend's house to hear Norwegian sociologist and founder of the discipline of Peace and Conflict Studies, Johan Galtung, speak on the topic of conflict resolution. My friend, a long-time peace activist, also invited many of her friends to hear him speak, and one of her guests caught my eye for the rather large UN flag draped around her shoulders.

I couldn't understand why this woman was wearing the UN flag so proudly when it was just a little over a year ago that UN soldiers went into Haiti to suppress an uprising by the Haitian people who were protesting the kidnapping of their beloved president Jean-Bertrand Aristide by U.S. and Canadian troops.

Even at the time of my friend's house party we were hearing reports coming out of Haiti that UN troops were massacring civilians indiscriminately in the slum district of Cite Soleil where there is strong Aristide support. Under the U.S. initiated coup about 7500 elected officials were removed from government, and thousands of people -- most of whom were supporters of Lavalas, Aristide's political party -- were killed, disappeared, or forced into exile. The U.S. and U.N. were instrumental in organizing a police force controlled by the Haitian elite who went about the business of incarcerating Lavalas elected officials, activists, and supporters.

So, I was curious to talk with her about this as well as the UN's involvement in a genocide of near Biblical proportions over a decade ago in Rwanda, where more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in just over a 100 days. Could she explain to me failure by the U.N. to intercede after it received advanced warnings that a massacre was imminent, and why the U.N. gave explicit instructions to its commanders not to intervene to stop the impending bloodshed?

For a little background into this horrifying story, General Romeo Dallaire, who was the head of the UN African mission in Rwanda, tells Mother Jones Magazine:
"It became very obvious very soon from the office of the DPKO [Department of Peacekeeping Operations], from Kofi Annan and them. No one -- absolutely no one -- gave a damn. Or, to put it another way, no one wanted to risk soldiers in another “African adventure” where the country was of absolutely no strategic importance to anyone. So they simply applied the “Mogadishu rule,” that, unless it’s in your self-interest, you don’t go and waste resources or risk your people in these conflicts. So led by the Americans, and supported by the British and the French at the time, they simply pulled out and decided not to come back."

Amid escalating violence, Dallaire faced a nearly impossible situation. The United Nations repeatedly refused to send him reinforcements, and his force shrunk from 2,600 soldiers to 800 as nations withdrew their troops in the first days of the slaughter. Dallaire and his remaining forces stayed, trying to save as many people as they could while the killing continued, witnessing acts so inhuman that the general later suffered severe post-traumatic stress disorder."

(See article)
(Mother Jones Magazine, January 25, 2005)
"Absolutely no one -- gave a damn."

(Dallaire was found in Quebec in the summer of 2000 curled up on a park bench, disheveled, drunk and suffering from PTS. A victim too of the Rwandan genocide.)

Soon Galtung's talk ended and I had a chance to talk with the women with the UN scarf around her neck. I brought up both the UN's role in Haiti and Rwanda and waited to hear how she would justify those actions. She acknowledged that mistakes were made but, according to her, there was no evil intent, just errors in judgment and unclear mandates by the UN. She also brought up the often-repeated canard that if only the member states would pull their weight and give more money to the organization then the UN could do the job that they were designed to do.

But, why should we believe her, or the UN for that matter? As Haiti and Rwanda demonstrate the UN was used as a tool by members of the General Security Council (the five permanent members are the United States, England, Russia, China and France) for political reasons. The Security Council has been dominated by the United States and other powerful nations and many times, their national interests have come to be described as the “will of the international community.” As General Dallaire pointed out in his interview with Mother Jones, the UN got their instructions not to get involved in the Rwandan genocide by the United States with the tacit support of both Britain and France and Kofi Annan.

Why would these General Council member states and the head of the UN not want to intervene when they knew an imminent slaughter was on its way? What ever happened to "never again!" -- the sentiment coined to refer to stopping future genocides from ever taking place?

One horrible thought that comes to mind is that perhaps the genocide was intentional. For all the UN's humanitarian rhetoric, the body was founded and promoted by members of the Council of Foreign Relations, a organization controlled by the world's financial elite and whose agenda is to advance global government. (See article). Many members of the CFR have written some curious policy papers and one of these papers, Global 2000, could only be described as simply evil. Written by Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig this document lays out the arguments for the necessity to depopulate the world.

According to Lonnie Wolfe from Executive Intelligence Review. The papers advocate for creating:
"...a planning apparatus operating outside the control of the White House whose sole purpose is to reduce the world's population by 2 billion people through war, famine, disease and any other means necessary. This apparatus, which includes various levels of the government is determining U.S. foreign policy. In every political hotspot -- El Salvador, the so-called arc of crisis in the Persian Gulf, Latin America, Southeast Asia and in Africa -- the goal of U.S. foreign policy is population reduction. The targeting agency for the operation is the National Security Council's Ad Hoc Group on Population Policy. Its policy-planning group is in the U.S. State Department's Office of Population Affairs, established in 1975 by Henry Kissinger. This group drafted the Carter administration's Global 2000 document, which calls for global population reduction, and the same apparatus is conducting the civil war in El Salvador as a conscious depopulation project."
Unbelievably, Thomas Ferguson, Latin American case officer for the State Department's Office of Population Affairs, the policy-planning group that develop the Global 2000 document, is blunt about the the elite's murderous intentions:
"There is a single theme behind all our work -- we must reduce population levels. Either they [governments] do it our way, through nice clean methods or they will get the kind of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran, or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it. "The professionals," said Ferguson, "aren't interested in lowering population for humanitarian reasons. That sounds nice. We look at resources and environmental constraints. We look at our strategic needs, and we say that this country must lower its population -- or else we will have trouble."

(see article)
-- Lonnie Wolfe - Special Report EIR, Executive Intelligence Review
Do the elite really think this way?

The elite really do.

To make my point: here is another quote from the 5th World Bank President and former U.S. Secretary of Defense and key architect of the Vietnam War, Robert Strange(love?) McNamara:

"...There are only two possible ways in which a world of 10 billion people can be averted. Either the current birth rates must come down more quickly. Or the current death rates must go up. There is no other way. There are, of course, many ways in which the death rates can go up. In a thermonuclear age, war can accomplish it very quickly and decisively. Famine and disease are nature's ancient checks on population growth, and neither one has disappeared from the scene.... To put it simply: Excessive population growth is the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of most of the societies in the developing world."

-- Robert McNamara, Oct. 2, 1979
Now, my premise is: Could the UN be instrumental in carrying out genocide for the purposes of depopulation? Well, think about what McNamara said, and think about this statement from the World Bank Website in the "About Us" section:

"Cooperation between the (World) Bank and the UN has been in place since the founding of the two organizations (1944 and 1945) and focuses on economic and social areas of mutual concern such as reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and investing in people. In addition to a shared agenda, the Bank and the UN have almost the same membership. Only a handful of UN member countries, including Cuba and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, are not Bank members."(See link)
Hmmmm, the World Bank and the UN have been cooperating together since their founding and have almost the same membership. Knowing this information and knowing that the elite think like McNamara and Ferguson, and that the U.S. and other Security Council members are functionally in control of the UN, is it a stretch to think that the genocide in Rwanda, and the genocide that is currently happening in the Congo and the Sudan, aren't part of a depopulation program designed by the people controlling the UN? Can will rule this out.

Let me just say that I don't mean to malign all the good people working for the UN. I am sure that the majority believe they are doing good for humanity and the planet, and at some levels they probably are; however, when the leadership roles in the UN go to people who think like Annan, McNamara and Ferguson, how can we so sure that the UN isn't being used as a tool to carry out imperialistic aggression, like demonstrated in Haiti and Yugoslavia, and for depopulation programs like those devised in the Global 2000 document, and advocated by McNamara?

We can't.

GUN CONTROL AND THE UN

There is also another important topic to consider in light of this knowledge and that is the UN's global campaign to disarm civilians. According to the UN "illicit" guns are those guns not controlled by the State, under the aegis of the UN.

William Norman Grigg writes in Global Gun Grab: The United Nation's Campaign to Disarm Americans:
"Unveiled by President John F. Kennedy in a September 1961 speech before the UN General Assembly, Freedom from War, and its 1962 follow-up, Blueprint for the Peace Race, outline a three-stage program for the disarmament of all nations, associations, and individuals who are not under the authority of a UN 'peace force.' In the third stage of the Freedom from War plan, 'States would retain only those forces, non-nuclear armaments, and establishments required for the purpose of maintaining internal order; they would also support and provide agreed manpower for the UN Peace Force.'"

-- Global Gun Grab: The United Nation's Campaign to Disarm Americans, p. 40
In the United Nation's Millennium Declaration adopted on September 19, 2000, under the title:
"Peace, security and disarmament" we read: "We will resolve: To ensure the implementation, by States Parties, of treaties in areas such as arms control and disarmament... and To take concerted action to end illicit traffic in small arms and light weapons, especially by making arms transfers more transparent and supporting regional disarmament measures, taking account of all the recommendations of the forthcoming United Nations Conference on Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light weapons." (See UN's Website)
The UN is spearheading this campaign to disarm civilians by saying that civilian ownership of guns is the major cause of violence around the world, but is that true? Who if not States hold the monopoly on violence? It is reported that over 60 million people were murdered during Stalin's rule; seven million during Hitler's and up to 3 million in Cambodia during Pol Pot's regime. These are just a few examples of mass killing of civilians by an all powerful state that has the monopoly on weapons. (This number does not reflect the 100s of millions that have died in the 20th century in state-sponsored wars which the elite manufactured and profited from. The UN is strangely silent about these violent actors on the world stage.)

In these countries, as well as Rwanda, civilians were prohibited from owning guns, the only factor which could have gave them a chance to defend themselves from murder and genocide.

Today in America, under various administrations, we are seeing the rapid destruction of the U.S. Constitution. A globalization plan through stealth and deception? Already, we have lost good portions of the 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th amendments. Is the 2nd amendment, the one that gives the citizenry the right to bear arms to protect itself from tyranny the next to disappear?

One thing we need to ask ourselves: If Americans give up our 2nd amendment rights how could we protect ourselves when and if the State becomes rogue and/or genocidal like in Rwanda in the early 90s, and German during the Nazi period? We couldn't. The state would have complete life and death control over us. Given the history of governments to kill their citizens in large quantities, it would be incredibly foolish for Americans to give up their 2nd Amendment rights.

Though the Constitution is wounded and almost in its death throws, we will know when it is dead and buried when the State comes after our guns. Whether they come under the black helmets or blue ones we should be prepared for a for a loss of our liberties and a potential bloodbath if we forfeit our 2nd Amendment rights.

As English essayist James Burgh wrote at the time of the American Revolution to British Parliamentarians that "the possession of arms is the distinction between a freemen and a slave."

We must ask ourselves, will we be free or slaves?