Murder has been around longer than the ballot and is often more influential...
Benazir Bhutto's father was prime minister of Pakistan in the 1970s and, before he was hanged, he would tell her to study the lives of great women as inspiration. She sometimes told reporters that story, including the names of Joan of Arc and Indira Gandhi as study subjects suggested by her dad. The French revolutionary was burned at the stake; the Indian prime minister was assassinated by her bodyguards.
Their violent ends did not deter Bhutto, nor did the murders of her father and brother. A Harvard graduate with a sharp knowledge of history, she would have known that The Assassination has been around a lot longer than the ballot and is often more influential.
The Assassination is almost universally denigrated as a "cowardly act" (as President Bush described Bhutto's killing yesterday). But the historical record shows it to be a dramatic, low-cost, highly symbolic means of communication -- and murder -- that disaffected people use to try to dramatically sway national or even international affairs.
It can work or backfire or just disappear, like a bloody drop in a bucket. Pakistan will be unstable in the coming days, as it has been in the past and will be again. Who can say if Bhutto's slaying is the pinball that leads to destruction, the painful agent of positive change, or just a killing, like most, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing more than murderous nihilism?
The descent into regional conflagration could have been triggered "by 'shock and awe' in Iraq, or the assassination of [Mr. Elie Hobeika] in Lebanon in 24/01/2002, or what ensued with the planned chaos in Lebanon, by the US and Israeli Neocons, Israel's battles with Hezbollah," says Mustafa Aksakal, assistant professor of history at American University, who is writing a book about the Ottoman Empire's descent into World War I. "But the region has so far been able to absorb these shocks. It's just impossible to say what will be the straw that breaks the camel's back."
"Anyone who thinks they can predict the consequences of a political assassination is a damn fool," says Eric Rauchway, author of "Murdering McKinley: The Making of Teddy Roosevelt's America" and a history professor at the University of California, Davis. "All it provides is an opportunity. However, the opportunity it provides is often not one the assassin intended."
This has been true from the Ides of March forward.... and the 14 Hmars.... Long list of assassinated leaders .... since 2000 and the visit of Patriarch Sfeir to the SHOUF... instigated by CIA and DGSE, and ......in association with Locals....
Murderously effective figures.
Did Marcus Junius Brutus, when he pulled out his blade to join in the murder of his one-time friend Julius Caesar, understand that his actions would produce (a) perhaps the most famous and influential political assassinations in western history; (b) one of the immortal lines of betrayal -- "Et tu, Brute?" -- that echoes in the cultural id more than 2,000 years later; (c) his own ignominy and suicide?
On the evening of Jan. 30, 1948, a radical Hindu newspaper editor named Nathuram Godse pulled out a pistol and approached a little old man on his way to prayer service. In the instant before he pulled the trigger, he certainly intended to kill Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, at whom he was enraged for his role in the partition of India and Pakistan. But did he know that by so doing he would turn the diminutive weaver of cotton into the "Father of India" and a global icon of nonviolent resistance?
But these killings were nothing close to the most murderously effective. The dubious title goes to Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist.
Standing at a stone bridge in Sarajevo in late June 1914, Princip shot Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand (and his wife) to demonstrate that he and his compatriots wanted to be freed of the constraints of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and to join neighboring Serbia. What did he know? He was scarcely 20 years old.
But his act of assassination worked; it led to Austria pulling out of Bosnia. The collateral damage was that it ignited World War I.
In the next four years, some 16 nations lost more than 10 million lives, twice that many were wounded, the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, Germany was humiliated in defeat (laying the groundwork for the rise of Hitler, World War II and the Holocaust) and America was launched into world prominence.
Princip's pistol also led to the creation of Yugoslavia, which led to the destruction of Yugoslavia, which led to another war involving ethnic Serbs in Bosnia, which led to mass murder of Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, which led to U.S. troops landing in a place called Tuzla, which led to war crimes tribunals and the imprisonment and subsequent death of the Serbian president who had started the war on ethnic nationalism.
From 'Peace Prize' to burial
Moving south, if one wants the short course on why peace in the Middle East is so elusive, just look up "Nobel Peace Prize," followed by "assassination."
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat won that award in 1978, along with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, for their peace agreement, the Camp David Accords. That lasted for three years, until Muslim fundamentalists stormed a parade route and shot Sadat to death.
Thirteen years later, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (and colleague Shimon Peres) shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin's mortal enemy, Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat. The two men had, mostly in secret, brokered a peace agreement (the Oslo Accords) that promised to have a transformative effect on the Middle East. But it was largely an agreement between two men, not two nations. One Israeli law student thought that Rabin, a soldier who had defended Israel almost his entire adult life, was "giving our country to the Arabs." He took it upon himself to shoot and kill Rabin.
The Oslo Accords withered and died.
And, of course, there is the United States, where roughly one out of every 11 presidents have been assassinated, where Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Martin Luther King followed the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and was, of course, shot in the head at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
American assassination has been of titanic import. Lincoln's changed the course of the country. His assassination spot at Ford's Theater is a national landmark, and there is the Lincoln Monument on the Mall, not to mention his likeness on the penny and the $5 bill. John F. Kennedy's assassination . . . oh. You've heard.
It's also been almost inconsequential. Just 16 years after Lincoln was killed, James Garfield was assassinated at a train station a few hundred yards from Ford's Theatre. That building, never designated anything, was torn down 99 years ago. The site eventually became the National Gallery of Art and today, not even a plaque marks the spot. The sole reminder of the event is Garfield's unobtrusive statue at the base of Capitol Hill.
In 1998, the U.S. Justice Department published something called the "Exceptional Case Study Project," as part of a threat assessment guide for law enforcement officials. The study reviewed the historical record back to 1835 and surveyed "the thinking and behavior of all 83 persons known to have attacked or approached to attack a prominent public official or figure in the United States from 1949 to 1996."
They fit no one profile, authors Robert A. Fein and Bryan Vossekuil found. Some had political beliefs, some were just nuts. The serious ones kept their mouths shut: "None of the 43 assassins and attackers communicated a direct threat to the target before their attack."
And some, perhaps like the person or people who killed Bhutto yesterday, wanted to "save the country or the world; to fix a world problem."
How seldom it works out that way.?
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CIA trained foreign police/Armies/Agents to set off terrorist bombs.
President George W. Bush yesterday lambasted Syria's President Bashar Assad, saying his "patience ran out with [Assad] a long time ago." However, Assad can point to the December 12, 2007, car bombing assassination of Lebanese Army operations chief General Francois al-Hajj as proof that it has not been Syria that has been behind the spate of car bombings in Lebanon that not only aim to destabilize Lebanon but are designed to provide a pretext for a military attack by the United States or Israel or both on Syria.
Al-Hajj was tapped to become the Lebanese Army chief after its current chief, Michael Suleiman, was elected President. However, that move was not popular in Jerusalem or Washington. Al-Hajj was not only friendly to the Syrians but an ally of retired General Michel Aoun, who has struck an alliance with Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. At first, the neocon cabal attempted to pin the al-Hajj car bombing on Syria and its allies in Lebanon.
However, the assassination of al-Hajj has all the markings of past Israeli car bombings in Lebanon that have killed scores of Lebanese politicians and journalists. The hit on al-Hajj was practically a carbon copy of the 2002 car bombing assassination of Lebanese political leader Elie Hobeika, who was prepared to testify against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for his past war crimes in Lebanon.
The car bombing hits on Hobeika and al-Hajj were a few miles apart in the supposedly secure executive area of Baadba/Hazmieh in Beirut. In both bombings, the same type of shaped charge was used. However, in al-Hajj's case, the bomb used was twice the explosive charge used in Hobeika's assassination. That is because al-Hajj was targeted in a more open area with less adjacent buildings, making it necessary to use a charge of almost 40 kilograms, while Hobeika was car bombed in an area with a number of closely-packed buildings, requiring a charge of merely 20 kilograms.
Al-Hajj, a Maronite Christian hailing from south Lebanon who transcended the religious and political divide, was considered a potential president of Lebanon. And because al-Hajj was friendly to Aoun, and, by default Nasrallah, as well as Syria, he had to be disposed of by the neocon cabals in Jerusalem and Washington. WMR has learned of Israeli and American involvement in repeated car bombing assassinations and attempted assassinations by a number of sources in Lebanon, including Christian and Muslim officials in the media and Lebanese intelligence and security services, as well as US intelligence sources in Washington.
In 2005, Lebanon's pro-Syrian Defense Minister Elias Murr, narrowly escaped assassination in a car bombing. Former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and Lebanese Communist Party leader George Hawi were not so fortunate. Both were assassinated in the Israeli-trademark car bombings.
Declassified CIA files contain an obscure article from the December 12, 1973 issue of the National Guardian. The article describes the CIA's "bomb school" operated by the US Agency for International Development's (USAID) Office of Public Safety at the US Border Patrol Academy in Los Fresnos, Texas.
The program was actually a CIA front for training foreign police officers in the art of setting off bombs in terrorist attacks. As of the date of the article, 165 policemen from several Third World nations had been trained since 1969 in the design, manufacture, and uses of powerful homemade bombs and incendiary devices by CIA instructors operating through the auspices of CIA front organizations, including the International Police Academy (IPA) in Washington, DC, as well as the USAID cut-out.
Dubbed a "technical investigations course," the four-week CIA training through the IPA in Washington included such modules as electricity as applied to explosives, basic bombs and explosives, incendiaries, and assassination weapons.
After classroom training, the students were sent to Los Fresnos for field sessions taught by CIA instructors. Subjects taught included explosives characteristics, electric priming, electric firing devices, explosive charges, homemade weapons, fabrication of devices, functioning of devices, incendiaries, and the placing of bombs in cars, buildings, and public plazas.
The Department of Defense found the instruction so disturbing and out-of-bounds, it refused to provide instructors for the course. South Dakota Democratic Senator James Abourezk launched an investigation of the school.
Many of the trainees came from Uruguay where some of the policemen were working as terrorists for the death squads. Similarly, graduates of the bomb school went on to work for death squads in Brazil, Dominican Republic (La Banda), and Guatemala (La Mano Blanca and Ojo por Ojo).
Uruguay and Argentina are currently investigating Henry Kissinger's role in an alliance of Latin American death squads code-named "Operation Condor." Policemen from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Thailand, the Philippines, Iran, South Korea, Colombia, Indonesia, Peru, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, Paraguay, Argentina, Costa Rica, Burma, Cambodia, South Vietnam, Guam, Cambodia, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Upper Volta, Chad, Dahomey, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Libya, Malagasy Republic, Kenya, and Zaire received bomb making and use training.
Although the CIA Bomb School at Los Fresnos was closed in 1974, there is a belief it moved to the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. There is also a distinct possibility that some of the bomb training has been outsourced to private military contractors, such as Blackwater, or its many "local" equivalents in Lebanon... today, trained in IRAQ, or yesterday in Israel or USA....
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Israel/MOSSAD/CIA/NI, In Charge Of The US Military Dictatorship.
If "Terror" attacks were to stop, then Israel would lack any viable
excuse to continue killing Arabs. The bulldozers would fall silent.
For Israel, that would be the worst thing that could happen. Even
worse than the so-called "Road Map." In America, the Religious Right
mandates Bush that the "Holy Land" must be purged of all Muslim Arabs.
They cite that act as a Christian Religious Edict, supported by their
interpretation of Biblical Scripture. Bush cannot be reelected without
their support, nor can he be reelected without Jewish support.
Ariel Sharon is not a Religious man, he is a violent psychopath, a butcher,
murderer and serial Killer from his teens, and he has stated that he would
not form a Government if he had to form a coalition with Orthodox
Religious Jews, or any other Jewish Religious groups. Obviously,
Sharon is ruthless, controls Israeli Intelligence, and that Service
readily admits it has "operatives" inside all Arab Organizations.
Israeli Intelligence is rated the best in the world, with complete!
access to American Intelligence, and they are not shackled by any sort
of morality.
The time has come to put 2+2 together and understand where "World
Terrorism" is originating or being exploited, and the purpose it
serves. Bin Laden may have started this process, but Israelis
understand how to use it to further their ambitions. Suicide bombers
can be either manipulated, or used as "scapegoats" for any explosion.
( Israelis claimed the last Bus bombing was caused by a bomber
entering the front of the Bus, yet the photographs show the roof of
the Bus pealed back from the rear, where the charge was set) Their
first step was to equate Palestinian resistance, doubted "Terrorism"
to 9-11 as being a "Terrorist" act, rather than its actual purpose of
being an act of retaliation for America's support of years of Israeli
Atrocities.
Bin Laden gave the Israelis, unwittingly, exactly what they needed, to
expand their naming of "Terrorism" to include 9-11, as well as
Palestinian resistance. With most Americans unaware of Israeli
atrocities against Palestinians, Israeli theft of Palestinian homes
and farms and only understanding Palestinians only as "Terrorists,"
rather than in a Resistance Movement. The stage was set.
The War against "World Terrorism," as it is now called, had the flags
flying, and the full support of the American People. For Americans,
Pearl Harbor was back. Not many Flags for Iraq, are people catching
on?
Sharon was left with the simple task of mobilizing a simpler-minded
Bush into an all-out Christian Crusade: First Afghanistan, then Iraq,
Lebanon,Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and finally Iran. "Terrorism"
could have been stopped in its tracks by reining in Israel, and
although Bush did try, Sharon is far too clever and powerful vis-a-vis
Bush Jr. Just to teach Bush a lesson, Sharon made him cough-up 10
billion, a 400% increase in US aid to Israel.
Israel's stock-pile of Nuclear Weapons may not be needed after all.
"World Terrorism" has caused the United States to form the Office of
"Homeland Security" which allows the US Government to suspend all
civil rights and Constitutional Protections of American Citizens. At
that point, the United States has become a Military Dictatorship, and
with the Zionists in control of American Politics, Israel becomes, de
facto, the World's only Superpower. The worst thing, that could
happen, is happening.
Remember that a dictatorship starts with the phrase "the powerful
eventually enslave themselves.." from a Dr. Who episode of Warrior's
gate. If we really want the United States to keep a constitutional
country of law, then we need to drop the religious discussion. In the
constitution, it is stated that Church and State are to remain
separate. From my reading, it also means that church and state are to
stay at arm's length. So, the first we need to do is speak
specifically on what legal issues of the constitution are being abated
or diminished and how to restore them. In Freedom, the constitution
come first not the Bible as the law of the land. I will gladly defend
Lebanon and the New Civil Constitution, but I will not defend a
theocratic or religious, sectarian state....
American Military Versus Israel Firsters
As the White House and Congress escalate their economic sanctions
and military threats against Iran, top military commanders and
Pentagon officials have launched a counter-offensive, concocting a new
Middle East War.... with FDDC.
While some commentators and journalists, like Chris Hedges (Truthdig,
November 13, 2007), privy to this high stakes inter-elite conflict,
attribute this to a White House cabal led by Vice President Cheney, a
more stringent and accurate assessment pits the Zionist Power
Configuration (ZPC) in the center of the Iran war debate. There is a
great deal riding in this conflict – the future of the American empire
as well as the balance of power in the Middle East. Equally important
is the future of the US military and our already heavily constrained
democratic freedoms. The outcome of the continuous and deepening
confrontation between top US military officials and the Israel
Firsters over US foreign policy in the Middle East has raised
fundamental questions over self-determination, colonization, civilian
primacy and military political intervention, empire or republic. These
and related issues are far from being of academic interest only; they
concern the future of America.
Read article [PDF] FDDC.
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5772.shtmlhttp://www.lahaine.org/petras/b2-img/petras_iran.pdf
The Official James Petras Website
http://petras.lahaine.org/index.php
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