Eric H. May: Top Ten False Flag Terror Targets!

False Flags are a standard stratagem, particularly in democracies, in which it's necessary to create consensus before waging war. Prior to the Spanish-American War in 1898, the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor propelled the American people into an imperial affrey, much as 9/11 did a century later, instigating invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Half a dozen headlines describe our situation, in which a false flag attack, blamed on Iran, may well pull us into our third post-9/11 Mid East war: 1.) US Military Wanted to Provoke War with Cuba: In 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed a multi-faceted false flag operation to JFK. 2.) New revelations in attack on American spy ship: LBJ helped a 1967 Israeli false flag attack against the USS Liberty, intended to draw the US into its Six-Day War. (Chicago Tribune, 2007) In that particular situation, while I was the Intelligence Operations Officer for the 4th US Armored Division in Goeppingen, Germany, under Colonel Aakkula, I was ordered to immediately bring the news to General Sherrer, the commander of our division. His only comment was: "With friends like Israel, we have no need of enemies." In half a dozen situations a false flag attack may well pull us into our third post-9/11 Mid East War: 1. US Military Wanted to Provoke War with Cuba: In 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed a multi-faceted false flag operation to JFK. 2. New revelations in attack on American spy ship: LBJ helped a 1967 Israeli false flag attack against the USS Liberty, intended to draw the US into its Six-Day War, according to Jewish writer Ari Shavit. (Haaretz, 2003).   

Robert Parry: Romney's Upside-Down Constitution!

Mitt Romney's "liberty speech" to the National Rifle Association demonstrates how central the Right's false narrative of the nation's founding will be in the November elections, as Republicans depict Barack Obama as alien to the nation's First Principles. Essentially, the Right's narrative holds that the Framers of the Constitution were hostile to a strong central government, for anything but national defense, rejected a federal role in addressing the nation's economic problems, leaving that to the private sector, and supported a system in which the states were very powerful. None of these points are true, of course, at least not for the Constitution. They were true for the Articles of Confederation, which governed the original 13 states from 1777 to 1787. But the Framers, especially James Madison and George Washington, came to view the Articles as ineffectual and dangerous. Madison, Washington and most other Founders recognized that a system of 13 "sovereign" and "independent" states within a weak confederation was a threat to the young nation's commerce, for instance, was viewed as an invitation for rich European countries to lure away a state or even a region by offering commercial advantages. Thus, contrary to the Right's notion that the Framers were government-hating ideologues, akin to today's Tea Partiers, the reality was that most of the Framers were pragmatic individuals dedicated to the nation's political independence and economic success. For that, they realized that the Articles, with their weak central government had to be jettisoned in favor of an entirely new system that granted the central government broad powers to tax, to issue currency, to make treaties, to build a military, and to pass laws to "promote the general Welfare." One of the most important new powers was an unlimited one, authorizing the federal government to regulate interstate commerce.   

Lisa Karpova: New Research Indicates Hugo Chavez Favored!

The president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, has a 32 percentage point advantage over the conservative candidate heading toward elections next October in Zulia state, according to the results of a survey released on Thursday (3rd) in the Venezuelan capital. According to the results of a survey conducted by researchers from the Social Research Group XXI (GIS XXI) of the Venezuelan state, Chavez is the preference of 58 percent of voters for these elections, while Henrique Capriles Radonski is preferred by 26 percent. Governed by Pablo Perez, who competed with presidential candidate Capriles to represent the opposing force, the Zulia state is surrounded by Lake Maracaibo, and is one of the major oil production centers in the country. Zulia is, moreover, one of the most populated states, with 3.8 million inhabitants. Its capital, Maracaibo, is the second-most important city of Venezuela, only surpassed by Caracas. GIS XXI research suggests, moreover, that 68 percent of the population considers the performance of the President last year very good overall, while 44 percent qualifies much of the opposition as very bad in the same period. GIS XXI asked about Governor Pablo Perez and the main leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in the state, Francisco Arias Cardenas, who also aspires to take over the government in regional elections on 16 December. According to the researcher, the socialist leader won 31 percent of electoral preferences, against 24 percent for the current state representative. In the opinion of Jesse Chacon, president of GIS XXI, the fall in the polls by Pablo Perez is due to at least four factors, including the work done so far by Arias Cardenas on behalf of the PSUV in that state.   

Lawrence Sellin: Censorship and Disinformation in America

You will not see an article like this appear in any American mainstream media outlet. Barack Hussein Obama is an illegal President. He is not now, nor has he ever been eligible to be a candidate for or hold that office, because his father was a British subject at the time of his birth. Article II, Section I, Clause 5 of the US Constitution requires that all candidates for the Presidency be "natural born citizens." As defined in the binding Supreme Court precedent of Minor v Happerset (1875) and confirmed in the subsequent ruling of US v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) and others, all candidates for the offices of President and Vice President must be second generation Americans, that is, US citizens of citizen parents at the time of birth. President and Vice President are the only US political offices with that requirement. It was the intent of the American Founding Fathers that the chief executive and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces would not have dual allegiance or loyalty to a foreign power. There is no ambiguity, although the Democrat and Republican parties and the media are and have been deliberately trying to confuse the American public as to the true meaning of natural born citizenship. Case in point. On May 1, 2012, Fox News Channel anchor Bret Baier posted an explanation of the term 'natural born citizen' that was so factually incorrect that it must be considered propaganda. It is well beyond the scope of this, or perhaps any single article to document the full extent of the censorship conducted and the amount of disinformation disseminated, which has continued non-stop since the onset of the 2008 election cycle. Why did this happen? The cause stemmed from political expediency and cowardice. Since 1975, there have been numerous attempts by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress to redefine or amend the Article II "natural born citizen" clause.        

Eric Margolis: Cuba Starts To Come Alive!

Fifty years ago this month, the US and USSR came terrifyingly close to full-scale thermonuclear war. I recalled those days of fear while staring at a rusting Soviet medium-ranged SS-4 missile displayed outside La Cabana fortress. Nuclear-armed Soviet SS-4's, secretly brought into Cuba, were ready to destroy Washington and the entire US East Coast. Nuclear war was imminent. US forces were at DEFCON 2, and massed to invade Cuba. Washington was a prime target. As a student there at Georgetown University, I vividly recall how frightened we were, and how helpless we felt. In the end, the Soviets prevailed in the Cuban missile crisis. President John Kennedy backed down, pledging the US would never invade Cuba. US missiles in Italy and Turkey, targeted on the USSR were removed. Moscow took its SS-4's out of Cuba. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev won his goal of saving Cuba and Fidel Castro's Marxist regime from a US invasion. But it was such a terrifying gamble the Soviet Politburo deposed Khrushchev shortly after. Kennedy got far more credit than he deserved for the crisis. In the early 1960's, Communist Cuba was the vanguard of revolution in Latin America, then Africa. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara's Cuba was the only Communist regime outside Mao's China that had romantic appeal to western youth. Fidel's vows to promote education, health care and land distribution sounded revolutionary, when Latin America was mostly ruled by US-backed oligarchs and generals. But that was long ago. The combined pressure of crushing US trade and financial sanctions, and the inherent failures of the Marxist economic system left Cuba isolated, trapped in the past. Today, once picturesque colonial Havana is a Caribbean Pompeii, a museum of the 1950's with its crumbling buildings and magnificent vintage American cars.  

Drew Zahn: Can You Believe HBO Finds "This" Funny?

Cable network HBO has often portrayed programming too "mature"for the broadcast airwaves, but its latest offering has some critics complaining the company has gone too far. HBO's irreverent mocku-mentary "Angry Boys" is under fire for combining child actors and phallic humor, including one scene in the series' 12th episode, where a little girl drinks from a water bottle shaped like a giant, pink penis. "The incident is meant to be comedic," writes Joe Wilson of the Media Research Center's Culture and Media Institute, or MRC. "But showing a young girl sucking on a penis in a comedic fashion is akin to showing child pornography." He continues in an MRC article on the show, "Penis humor is a major premise of 'Angry Boys.' Out Magazine reported that the show features a Japanese mother exploiting her teenage son 'to create a merchandising empire of cock-shaped products.' "In one episode, according to Out Magazine, the mother, played by a male, the creator and director of the show, Chris Lilley, unscrewed a pink plastic penis and shook it for parmesan cheese." "It's difficult to imagine that HBO would go any lower," the MRC's Dan Gainor told RadarOnline.com. "Oral sex 'humor' involving a young child shows precisely where the left's mind is really at."Gainor links the network to the left, in part, because of the network's only talk show, "Real Time with Bill Maher." "After all, it's already the Bill Maher network," Gainor said, "with all his sleaze and hatred of conservatives." "Angry Boys" is a co-production between HBO, the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the brainchild of Australian writer, performer and star of the show Chris Lilley.   

Noam Chomsky: America's Economic Suicide!

Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he's given lectures at Occupy Boston and talked with occupiers across the US. His new book. Occupy, published in the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series by Zuccotti Park Press brings together several of those lectures, a speech on "occupying foreign policy" and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn. From his speeches, and in this conversation, its's clear that the emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous, cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created, as he is by the movement's political impact. We're a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic "suicide" Chomsky says. But there are glimmers of possibility - in worker co-operatives, and other spaces where people get a taste of a different way of living. We talked in his office, for Free Speech TV on April 24: Let's start with the big picture. How do you describe the situation we're in, historically? NC: There is neither a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth, and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that, but it's a period of close to global stagnation. In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US, it's low growth and stagnation, and a very sharp income differentiation a shift, a striking shift, from production to financialization. The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it's austerity in the midst of recession, and that's guaranteed to be a disaster. There's some resistance to that now. In the US, it's essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration.