Stephen C. Webster | Raw Story | Friday, Dec 19, 2008
April Gallop ‘will be very disappointed,’ lawyer tells RAW STORY.
April Gallop, whom the Army News Service called a “hero” after she was awarded the Purple Heart for injuries sustained at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, will not likely be triggering another such response from internal government media.
On behalf of Spc. April Gallop, who served in the Network Infrastructure Services Agency as an administrative specialist, California attorney William Veale on Monday filed a civil suit against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and former US Air Force General Richard Myers, who was acting chairman of the joint chiefs on 9/11.
The suit alleges they engaged in conspiracy to facilitate the terrorist attacks and purposefully failed to warn those inside the Pentagon, contributing to injuries she and her two-month-old son incurred. Additional, unnamed persons with foreknowledge of the attacks are also named.
First news of the suit was carried exclusively by RAW STORY. Full text of the claims may be read here.
“Everything happened so fast,” Gallop said in an Oct. 2001 published report. “I remember thinking that we had been bombed.”
After rescuing one of her coworkers, the two began searching the smoldering debris that used to be April’s office for her two-month-old son Elisha. She pulled him out and escaped the smoke-filled building, out onto the Pentagon’s lawn, and collapsed.
Though thankful she survived the event, “I’m still angry at the enemy,” she said. “…They will pay.”
There are only a handful of people who predicted this financial crisis, or at least its severity.
What are they predicting now?
Peter Schiff and Ron Paul
Schiff, the manager of over $1 billion dollars in investments, says the U.S. will enter a long period which could be worse than the Great Depression.
Schiff also thinks that the economic crisis might lead to martial law.
He thinks that Asia and Europe, after a period of economic downturn, will “decouple” from the U.S., eventually enjoying great prosperity long before the U.S. recovers.
Schiff has admitted that he did not foresee the current rally in the dollar, and his investors – long in Asian and European stocks – are way down.
I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the US. I have never seen black helicopters hovering in the sky above Montana. But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible.
A “world government” would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the ability to deploy military force.
So could the European model go global? There are three reasons for thinking that it might.
First, it is increasingly clear that the most difficult issues facing national governments are international in nature: there is global warming, a global financial crisis and a “global war on terror”.
Second, it could be done. The transport and communications revolutions have shrunk the world so that, as Geoffrey Blainey, an eminent Australian historian, has written: “For the first time in human history, world government of some sort is now possible.” Mr Blainey foresees an attempt to form a world government at some point in the next two centuries, which is an unusually long time horizon for the average newspaper column.
But – the third point – a change in the political atmosphere suggests that “global governance” could come much sooner than that. The financial crisis and climate change are pushing national governments towards global solutions, even in countries such as China and the US that are traditionally fierce guardians of national sovereignty. Continue reading ‘And now for a world government’
The American way of war is usually a term used to think about sort of what America brought to war making that other countries hadnt done before, typically sort of mass production of equipment and weapons and logistics. And I sort of saw something evolve over our history that I thought was better represented by that term, the American way of war, which is really how America lost her way through war making, what war has done, the best of wars, the worst of wars, wars that seemed, quote, necessary and wars that seemed frivolous or sort of shadowy motives, like the one weve just experienced. The wars of all kinds, they guide America away from her founding principles, from basic standard norms of decency and humanity. And I think the American way of war is a sort of—is a very tragic way, in a sense, that needs now to be fixed, needs to be rescued. And thats where I think the public comes in so necessarily.
Perfect example. You know, the B-1 bomber has a piece of it made, a piece of the plane made, in every single US state. Now, why? I mean, thats not an efficient way to make a product. So, it must be serving some end. And the end, it turns out, that it serves is that the B-1 bomber was designed by its makers according to a process called political engineering, fancy word for distributing the contracts and subcontracts to build a given weapons system to as many states, as many congressional districts as possible, not lets make it as efficient as possible, but rather, lets put it in as many districts as possible, so that if this thing ever comes up for review, everybodys getting a piece of the action, everybodys in on it. And as a result, when, you know, the questions arise—Do we need the B-1 bomber? Do we need to be spending this money?—there is a constituency built in in Congress thats going to keep that thing going.
And what does that tell us? That tells us that—first of all, the defense sector is not alone in that. Every industry has their version of politically engineering Congress. But what it does is it puts the congressperson in a position of being a professional pleader to that corporation, that corporate interest, on behalf of them to the federal government. And it suborns, it really undermines the purity of their decision making. It produces some of the very tragic and wrong-headed decisions that weve seen in recent years.
INSURRECTION Members of the Sons of Liberty raise a “Liberty Pole” to protest the rule of King George III.
When Benjamin Franklin returned to America in 1762, after almost five years in London, he was shocked at the housing prices.
“The expence of living is greatly advanc’d in my absence,” he commented. “Rent of old houses, and value of lands … are trebled in the past six years.”
Franklin, it seems, had come home to a real estate bubble. It eventually popped — bringing on a credit crunch and deep recession that was the macroeconomic backdrop to the American Revolution.
Sound familiar?
The parallels between the current economy and the one Franklin saw highlight a debate among historians: how big a role did economics, as opposed to ideas, play in fomenting revolution?
“I think there’s reason to doubt the Revolution would have happened as it did if it weren’t for these economic conditions,” said Ronald W. Michener, an economics professor at the University of Virginia, in a radical departure from today’s popular notion that the Revolution was a product primarily of grand ideas about self-government.
Gordon S. Wood, a professor at Brown University and perhaps the pre-eminent living historian on the subject, counters: “There was a great deal of instability, but that is hardly an explanation for the Revolution. I don’t think you can make a strong argument for an economic interpretation of the Revolution.”
Professor Michener and his collaborator, Robert W. Wright, a financial historian at New York University, plan to do just that. The tandem worked for several years on a manuscript arguing that the American Revolution was a direct result of the economic malaise that followed the French and Indian War. Continue reading ‘The Housing-Bubble and the American Revolution’
Election Day is two weeks away, and this year may see one of the highest voter turnouts in US history. But filmmaker and author Eugene Jarecki argues that while voting is essential, it is not enough. He writes, Unless we see our vote as part of a commitment to involve ourselves consistently and unrelentingly in the political process, our vote is wasted. This is because the forces that have led us to this economic, military, and political precipice exert such awesome power over the mechanics of Washington that no single candidate or group of legislators, whatever their intentions, can possibly go up against them unless armed with an irrepressible public mandate.
Eugene Jarecki, filmmaker who made the acclaimed documentaries Why We Fight and The Trials of Henry Kissinger. His new book, just published, is The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril.
PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER:
My fellow Americans, this evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Three-and-a-half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
The American way of war is usually a term used to think about sort of what America brought to war making that other countries hadnt done before, typically sort of mass production of equipment and weapons and logistics. And I sort of saw something evolve over our history that I thought was better represented by that term, the American way of war, which is really how America lost her way through war making, what war has done, the best of wars, the worst of wars, wars that seemed, quote, necessary and wars that seemed frivolous or sort of shadowy motives, like the one weve just experienced. The wars of all kinds, they guide America away from her founding principles, from basic standard norms of decency and humanity. And I think the American way of war is a sort of—is a very tragic way, in a sense, that needs now to be fixed, needs to be rescued. And thats where I think the public comes in so necessarily.
Perfect example. You know, the B-1 bomber has a piece of it made, a piece of the plane made, in every single US state. Now, why? I mean, thats not an efficient way to make a product. So, it must be serving some end. And the end, it turns out, that it serves is that the B-1 bomber was designed by its makers according to a process called political engineering, fancy word for distributing the contracts and subcontracts to build a given weapons system to as many states, as many congressional districts as possible, not lets make it as efficient as possible, but rather, lets put it in as many districts as possible, so that if this thing ever comes up for review, everybodys getting a piece of the action, everybodys in on it. And as a result, when, you know, the questions arise—Do we need the B-1 bomber? Do we need to be spending this money?—there is a constituency built in in Congress thats going to keep that thing going.
And what does that tell us? That tells us that—first of all, the defense sector is not alone in that. Every industry has their version of politically engineering Congress. But what it does is it puts the congressperson in a position of being a professional pleader to that corporation, that corporate interest, on behalf of them to the federal government. And it suborns, it really undermines the purity of their decision making. It produces some of the very tragic and wrong-headed decisions that weve seen in recent years.
Eugene Jarecki describes how American history has been mislead by lies about the necessity to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. Jarecki wrote about this here – http://www.antiwar.com/orig/jarecki.p…
Published by Free Press/Simon&Schuster, October 14, 2008.
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