Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network

Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.

The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.

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The "Nexus" Of Evil

By SAMANTHA POWER

Published: May 2, 2004

But none of this was enough to bring about fascist rule. One of Paxton's main contributions is to focus less on the ''Duce myth'' and the ''Führer myth'' and more on the indispensable ''conservative complicities'' behind the fascist takeovers. Paxton debunks the consoling fiction that Mussolini and Hitler seized power. Rather, conservative elites desperate to subdue leftist populist movements ''normalized'' the fascists by inviting them to share power. It was the mob that flocked to fascism, but the elites who elevated it. ''At each fork in the road, they choose the antisocialist solution,'

Morality Mission: How Karen Hughes Sees Her Job

by John Brown

The recently named Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Bush confidante and long-time Presbyterian church Sunday school teacher Karen Hughes, has an significant new foreign affairs position: "to provide the moral basis for U.S. leadership in the world." This phrase, introduced not long ago on the State Department website in the section dealing with Ms. Hughes's job, may bring Ms. Hughes closer to the All-Mighty, with whom her boss, he often reminds us, is in frequent communication. But Ms. Hughes's "moral leadership" function hardly furthers American national interests. Indeed, it can make our public diplomacy all the more ineffective by muddying our dialogue with other countries, and it opens the U.S. to even more charges of hypocrisy. Members of the foreign affairs community have expressed reservations about the new language describing the Under Secretary's priorities. The most generous remark, by a commentator on public diplomacy, was: "Let's hope it's only a typo." "The [moral] definition," says a university professor who specializes in public diplomacy, "projects arrogance, patronage and selfishness. It seems that it has been designed to appeal to domestic rather than foreign audiences." Hugh Burleson, a retired Foreign Service officer (USIA), puts it this way: "PD existing to provide a moral basis for US leadership ... is absolutely wrong -- a narrow and distorted definition or mission statement. What would it do for us when our policy is widely seen, even by friends, to be wrong and even immoral? Public diplomacy should exist to make US policy and the thinking and society behind it understandable to foreign audiences." The strongest criticism of "moral leadership" comes from a current State Department employee I contacted privately: "This is yet another example of the spin-obsessed White House's infantile declarativism -- i.e., if I state that something is true (and better yet, keep repeating it), then it must be true ... our . Deputy Assistant Secretaries (DAS's) [may] start coming up with exciting, new "moral basis" initiatives -- they're usually quite adept at calculating which way the wind is (or should be) blowing." Clearly, as foreign policy professionals suggest, Ms. Hughes's moral approach is problematical if not counterproductive. First, with its preachy attitude, it can interfere with public diplomacy's core function, as defined by the State Department -- to engage, inform and influence key international audiences. Second, it is self-defeating: How can a torture-based administration that -- as is now widely acknowledged -- shamelessly misled the U.S. into war thanks to the WHIG (White House Iraq Group, to which Ms. Hughes belonged) have a credible right to claim "moral leadership"? John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer, compiles the "Public Diplomacy Press Review," available

Neurotypical Syndrome --- Eerily Similar To Conservative Personality Disorder.

Neurotypical Syndrome?

Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity. Neurotypical individuals often assume that their experience of the world is either the only one, or the only correct one. NTs find it difficult to be alone. NTs are often intolerant of seemingly minor differences in others. When in groups NTs are socially and behaviorally rigid, and frequently insist upon the performance of dysfunctional, destructive, and even impossible rituals as a way of maintaining group identity. NTs find it difficult to communicate directly, and have a much higher incidence of lying as compared to persons on the autistic spectrum. Sounds like a conservative to me!

another nut for easy crackin'

Another wingnut who can't see the cultural, anthropological or sociological similarities between Zionism and Nazism.....near twins when looked at objectively.

A Palestinian rocket – one of dozens fired randomly at Israelis most weeks – exploded in an Israeli army base early this morning (Tuesday), wounding at least 69 young Israeli soldiers, some severely.

69 injuries without a single death? Can we say...'beggars belief'? Who could tell such a lie without having to answer to press scrutiny? Of course...It happened on an IDF Army base. "State secrets" doncha know.... and wouldn't soldiers be a legitimates target for people whose land is bing illegally occupied by another states army? of course it would. so Gross immediately launches into "Siderot, a working-class town near the Israel-Gaza border, and surrounding towns and villages, have been battered by thousands of rockets launched nearly daily from Gaza. The rockets have killed over two dozen civilians.

1 rocket, 69 causalities, .....1000's almost daily, but only 20 something dead? something is very, very suspicious about these numbers.

Attacks last week on Sderot, including a rocket that landed near a crowded day care center, led anxious Israeli parents to pull thousands of children out of school and brought demands for the Israeli government to retaliate but Prime Minister Ehud Olmert refrained from doing so. Ohh, those noble Israeli's! People who refuses to retaliate despite all the Palestiniian wickedness. A claim he repeats ad nauseum anyhow, which means that we must somehow conclude that Pali suicide bombers and their rocket/mortar attacks are so badly aimed that the Pali's are actually killing themselves at a rate 8 x's that of their intended target! Of course anyone who would believe such nonsense is either a liar themselves, or mentally handicapped. Take your pick, but I long ago settled on fairly conclusive evidence that the 'right' is not simply a reflection of one's upbringing, an ideology resulting in their ideological "yin" to our "yang", but is in fact suffering a personality disorder, one with such widespread distribution as to suggest it has an ancient and/or genetic origin. The neolithic revolution provides us with both. I belive they are actually a 'bad' reaction to all the highly abnormal envorinmental stimuli we have lived with for the last 10,000 - 15,000 years or more. This is but a blink in time compared to the previous 3 million years of social evolution gained in an environment that went virtually unchanged in all that time. But I digress. He continues....'From speaking to recipients of this email list in a number of European countries, Australia, and South America, it has become apparent that very few people outside Israel and the U.S. have heard anything at all about the long history of Holocaust denial of Abu Mazen, the new Palestinian prime minister'. but when it coms to giving even one saccount of denial by AM, we get thois from gross. "Abu Mazen’s record does not amount to a single pernicious reference, like those of Jean Marie Le Pen, leader of the French (neo-Fascist) National Front (“the gas chambers were a footnote of history”), or Joerg Haider, leader of the misnamed Austrian Freedom party. Abu Mazen has spent years “researching” and writing on this subject, and produced an entire body of work, with horrifying claims that go well beyond anything Le Pen or Haider have said in public.' Note the citing of well known revisionists of whom AM exceeds as a denier., yet nothing from AM himself. in the article itslf we are down the page sevreral thousand words at this point, the above being mere excerpts. much further down aftermuch whining about how mysteriousit is that no world leaders arer willing to confront AM on the issue, we finally get to the heart of this guys hate of AM. "When negotiating with Abu Mazen, politicians should ask what kind of a man would choose to write his entire PhD thesis (at Moscow’s Oriental College) on the subject and follow it up with a book in 1983, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and the Zionist Movement,” which denies the Holocaust occurred." Ahuh... But still there's that claim of outright denial,which btw is not what is stated in the title of his work, whatever you may think about his idea that zionist leaders used Hitler to create an 'new exodus' back to the levant. Prior to the realization of the extent of killing at Auschwitz et al....why not? Americans were doing bussiness with Hitler througfhout the Spanish-Civil War, and even into WW2 itself. in any case, gross finally dances around so muchh that he becomes the instrument of his own undoing. "Abu Mazen claimed that Hitler did not decide to kill the Jews until David Ben-Gurion provoked him into doing so when he [Ben-Gurion] “declared war on the Nazis” in 1942.' Hitker decides to kill 'the jews" i.e genocide,. in 1942. The reason given is not important, merely the fact that am statd quite explicitly that Hitler set about killing "Jews". Not 'some' or even 'a lot', but "Jews". Period. As if this libel wasn't enough, Gross launches intosome tirade about a 'villa' owned by mazen xsomewher in gaza, alomng with other claims of immense wealth beinfg secreted away by a Palestinian arab living in Gaza, under illegal Israeli ocupution. Now we are to believe the completely assinine assertion that a man who was only just now allowed, by Israeli IDF forces, too import and possess enough weapons to equip his own personal bodyguards, yet is somehow ammassing a fortune behind everyone's back.. this man has ethical standards whatsoever, only a burning hatred of all things that threaten his beloved Zion. Osama Bin Laden, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Zionism, fascism....all the same people saying 'I'm better than you!" This is the shit we've had to tip-toe through since the First Temple blowhards like Gross started their insane, elitist ranting.