Imperial by Design: John Meirsheimer

"Perhaps most importantly, moving toward a strategy of offshore balancing would help us tame our fearsome national-security state, which has grown alarmingly powerful since 9/11. Core civil liberties are now under threat on the home front and the United States routinely engages in unlawful behavior abroad. Civilian control of the military is becoming increasingly problematic as well. These worrisome trends should not surprise us; they are precisely what one expects when a country engages in a broadly defined and endless global war against terror and more generally commits itself to worldwide hegemony. Never-ending militarization invariably leads to militarism and the demise of cherished liberal values. It is time for the United States to show greater restraint and deal with the threats it faces in smarter and more discerning ways. That means putting an end to America’s pursuit of global dominance and going back to the time-honored strategy of offshore balancing."

Conclusion to powerful article - which is pragmatic rather than idealistic - but this serves a great purpose in showing how impractical US foreign policy has been since WWII, at least.

I am posting only the first page, but the link will take you to the rest.

V

 Imperial by Design

John J. Mearsheimer

|

December 16, 2010

IN THE first years after the Cold War ended, many Americans had a profound sense of optimism about the future of international politics. President Bill Clinton captured that mood when he told the UN General Assembly in September 1993:

It is clear that we live at a turning point in human history. Immense and promising changes seem to wash over us every day. The Cold War is over. The world is no longer divided into two armed and angry camps. Dozens of new democracies have been born. It is a moment of miracles.

The basis of all this good feeling was laid out at the time in two famous articles by prominent neoconservatives. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama argued in “The End of History?” that Western liberal democracy had won a decisive victory over communism and fascism and should be seen as the “final form of human government.”¹ One consequence of this “ideological evolution,” he argued, was that large-scale conflict between the great powers was “passing from the scene,” although “the vast bulk of the Third World remains very much mired in history, and will be a terrain of conflict for many years to come.” Nevertheless, liberal democracy and peace would eventually come to the Third World as well, because the sands of time were pushing inexorably in that direction.
 

One year later, Charles Krauthammer emphasized in “The Unipolar Moment” that the United States had emerged from the Cold War as by far the most powerful country on the planet.² He urged American leaders not to be reticent about using that power “to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.” Krauthammer’s advice fit neatly with Fukuyama’s vision of the future: the United States should take the lead in bringing democracy to less developed countries the world over. After all, that shouldn’t be an especially difficult task given that America had awesome power and the cunning of history on its side.

U.S. grand strategy has followed this basic prescription for the past twenty years, mainly because most policy makers inside the Beltway have agreed with the thrust of Fukuyama’s and Krauthammer’s early analyses.
The results, however, have been disastrous. The United States has been at war for a startling two out of every three years since 1989, and there is no end in sight. As anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of world events knows, countries that continuously fight wars invariably build powerful national-security bureaucracies that undermine civil liberties and make it difficult to hold leaders accountable for their behavior; and they invariably end up adopting ruthless policies normally associated with brutal dictators. The Founding Fathers understood this problem, as is clear from James Madison’s observation that “no nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Washington’s pursuit of policies like assassination, rendition and torture over the past decade, not to mention the weakening of the rule of law at home, shows that their fears were justified.
To make matters worse, the United States is now engaged in protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have so far cost well over a trillion dollars and resulted in around forty-seven thousand American casualties. The pain and suffering inflicted on Iraq has been enormous. Since the war began in March 2003, more than one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed, roughly 2 million Iraqis have left the country and 1.7 million more have been internally displaced. Moreover, the American military is not going to win either one of these conflicts, despite all the phony talk about how the “surge” has worked in Iraq and how a similar strategy can produce another miracle in Afghanistan. We may well be stuck in both quagmires for years to come, in fruitless pursuit of victory.

The United States has also been unable to solve three other major foreign-policy problems. Washington has worked overtime—with no success—to shut down Iran’s uranium-enrichment capability for fear that it might lead to Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons. And the United States, unable to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons in the first place, now seems incapable of compelling Pyongyang to give them up. Finally, every post–Cold War administration has tried and failed to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; all indicators are that this problem will deteriorate further as the West Bank and Gaza are incorporated into a Greater Israel.

The unpleasant truth is that the United States is in a world of trouble today on the foreign-policy front, and this state of affairs is only likely to get worse in the next few years, as Afghanistan and Iraq unravel and the blame game escalates to poisonous levels. Thus, it is hardly surprising that a recent Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey found that “looking forward 50 years, only 33 percent of Americans think the United States will continue to be the world’s leading power.” Clearly, the heady days of the early 1990s have given way to a pronounced pessimism.

This regrettable situation raises the obvious questions of what went wrong? And can America right its course?

More here.

Chalmers Johnson, my favorite intellectual (hero!), has died ...

So I'll be rounding up videos and eulogies today.  I guess that will be my way of holding a wake.

He will be sorely missed.

Fortunately, what he was saying was not that of the commentator but as the man who exposed history and consequence so that we ourselves could analyze our hopes, dreams and failures.  He was our teacher - and while so doing taught us that WE must be the change as we will feel the consequences of decades of bad policies.  America cannot hold onto an empire.

The first offering, therefore, are the startlingly true comments he makes about McCain and Obama in this interview transcript where he speaks to Paul Jay.  The link to the video, again, is here.

In Part 4 of his series of interviews with Chalmers Johnson, Senior Editor Paul Jay asks the renowned author to weigh-in on the two presidential hopefuls in the upcoming US election. Chalmers shares his skepticism about the real power that any president has over the conduct of the US on the world stage, before critiquing the visions and advisory teams being unveiled by both Obama and McCain.

Bio

Chalmers Johnson, Visionary Scholar on Empire and Decline of America Passes Away

The Nation / By John Nichols

Chalmers Johnson died on November 20, 2010.

With one word, "blowback," Chalmers Johnson explained the folly of empire in the modern age.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September11, 2001, true American patriots—as opposed to the jingoists and profiteers whose madness and greed would steer a republic to ruin—needed a new language for a new age. They got it from Johnson. His 2000 book, Blowback,: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Macmillan), he took an old espionage term—which referred to the violent, unintended consequences of covert (and sometimes not so covert) operations that are suffered even by superpowers such as the United States—became an essential text for those who sought to explain the attacks and to forge sounder and more responsible foreign policies for the future.

Johnson, who has died at age 79, was no liberal idealist. He was the an old Asian hand who had chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California-Berkeley from 1967 to 1972 and then served as president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute. In other words, he was a man of the world who knew how the world worked. And what he tried to explain, to political leaders and citizens, was that the old ways of empire building (and maintaining) no longer worked in an age of instant communications, jet travel and doomsday weaponry. "In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world," Johnson explained in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, another of his series of three books on imperialism and empire, which became best sellers in the period after the 9-11 attacks. "The concept 'blowback' does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes—as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001—the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback. In the first book in this trilogy, I tried to provide some of the historical background for understanding the dilemmas we as a nation confront today, although I focused more on Asia—the area of my academic training—than on the Middle East." Johnson, a frequent contributor to The Nation in his later years, argued in his most impressive book, The Sorrows of Empire, that Americans needed to recognize something that their leaders denied: that the United States, a nation founded in opposition to empire, had become an empire.

"The Sorrows of Empire was written during the American preparations for and launching of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq," he explained. "I began to study our continuous military buildup since World War II and the 737 military bases we currently maintain in other people's countries. This empire of bases is the concrete manifestation of our global hegemony, and many of the blowback-inducing wars we have conducted had as their true purpose the sustaining and expanding of this network. We do not think of these overseas deployments as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do not give them any thought at all until something truly shocking, such as the treatment of prisoners a Guantanamo Bay, brings them to our attention. But the people living next door to these bases and dealing with the swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape their women certainly think of them as imperial enclaves, just as the people of ancient Iberia or nineteenth-century India knew that they were victims of foreign colonization." Johnson, in his last years, became a hero to old-right conservatives and new-left radicals, who recognized the truth of his observations about "the sorrows (of empire that are) already invading our lives, which (are) likely to be our fate for years to come: perpetual war, a collapse of constitutional government, endemic official lying and disinformation, and finally bankruptcy."

"The United States today is like a cruise ship on the Niagara River upstream of the most spectacular falls in North America," Johnson warned. "A few people on board have begun to pick up a slight hiss in the background, to observe a faint haze of mist in the air on their glasses, to note that the river current seems to be running slightly faster. But no one yet seems to have realized that it is almost too late to head for shore. Like the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, imperial German, Nazi, imperial Japanese, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Soviet empires in the last century, we are approaching the edge of a huge waterfall and are about to plunge over it."

Johnson knew his history—not just the history of empires that had fallen, but of the American experiment. Many of his truest and most cherished reference points came from the republic's founding. We shared a passion for a James Madison's writings on the perils of imperialism in general. In particular, that passion took us to Madison's great 1795 line from Political Observations: "Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended… War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it. In war, the public treasuries are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them…”

Chalmers Johnson, a true son of the wisest and best of the founding generation, spoke the language of James Madison, when he argued that a republic could not maintain more than 700 military bases on foreign soil and retain its own freedom. It was a Madisonian impulse that caused Johnson to warn us that: “As militarism, the arrogance of power, and the euphemisms required to justify imperialism inevitably conflict with America’s democratic structure of government and distort its culture and basic values, I fear that we will lose our country.”

It is a similarly Madisonian impulse, or what remains of it, that will cause genuine patriots to read Johnson as they do the founders for generations to come.

---

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: Welcome to Part 4 of our series of interviews with journalist and author Chalmers Johnson. Chalmers joins us by phone from San Diego. He's the author of the renowned Blowback trilogy, former advisor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Thank you for joining us again, Chalmers.

CHALMERS JOHNSON, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Thank you very much.

JAY: So let's take a look at Obama and McCain, their foreign policy, and their relationship to the military-industrial complex. And we're going to start with Barack Obama. One of the things that, I guess, told me something about Obama was the controversy with Reverend Wright. Reverend Wright was pilloried for saying "chickens come home to roost," and everyone knew that meant blowback, and it made everyone who knew anything think of Chalmers Johnson. But Barack Obama slammed Reverend Wright and disassociated himself from the chickens-come-home-to-roost thesis. Just a positioning he had to take for pragmatic campaign reasons? Or is it something he believes?

JOHNSON: Well, this is what the kind of minds of the Stephanopouloses of this world would say, that that's what he had to do, that's the way it works in this country. If that's the way it works in this country, then we're a doomed country. If this were, say, 1985 and I'd said to you that four years from now the Soviet Union won't exist, you'd have said, "This guy's not reliable. I just don't trust him." Well, they don't exist. Russia is a much smaller place than the Soviet Union used to be. It happens, and it happens very rapidly. And the same kind of pressures on the former Soviet Union are on us right now, and we're not responding to them any cleverer. Gorbachev was in fact probably wiser than anybody we've got in our government, in that he was quite willing to forgo these crummy satellites that Stalin had created in East Europe.

JAY: Talk about Obama. Do you see some signs in Obama's foreign policy that give you some reason for optimism?

JOHNSON: No, I don't. I mean, there's [inaudible] the political system failed us in getting us into this trap, in getting us totally owned by the military-industrial complex and 16 secret intelligence agencies that are the personal praetorian guards of the president. That is to say, I don't believe any president, when it really came push to shove, can stand up to the powerful influences of the military-industrial complex and the Central Intelligence Agency today. They are beyond normal workings of our government. We were warned by President Eisenhower. We didn't pay attention. The warnings have come home to roost right now. The only thing that matters, though, I believe, in this area, is the quality and kind of advise, advisors, opinions, discussions that will be available to Obama. He, unfortunately, so far is not very encouraging. He's taken a bunch of old Democratic hacks of the Madeleine Albright variety and seems to be putting them back together again. They didn't do a very good job once before; it's unlikely that they would do any better a job now. All we can say is that this may also be simply Democratic Party decorating of the halls, and that instead, that as you begin to inquire into the real apparatus of Barack Obama, that he does have quite good and younger, capable, knowledgeable people able to give him good advice, that there are people inside the government and dissidents within the CIA that are quite capable of providing intelligent information today on which to make decisions. And the thing that's impressive about it, the reason I'm for him, is that I have a close colleague in the Yale Law School who went to school with him and she knows him. She doesn't like politicians at all; she doesn't trust them. She says, "All I can say about Obama is that he is extremely intelligent." I believe that is about all you can ask for right now and that he's doing his best to prepare for it. But he's making some bad mistakes by talking about Afghanistan as a good war and we need to just simply have something like what has now been called by the press a "surge."

JAY: And he's picking up all the kind of rhetoric. He calls Venezuela a "rogue nation." I mean, what has Venezuela done that makes it a rogue nation other than oppose US policy? But that doesn't make you rogue, though.

JOHNSON: Right. It's crazy. During the past decade, Latin America has simply gone away from us. There's only one nation left that would dare even sit down to dinner with us, and that's Colombia. We are being thrown out of the base in Manta in Ecuador. The president of Ecuador said, "You can keep your base if you'll give me a base in New Jersey."

JAY: The way things are going, New Jersey might in five or six years be willing to make that deal.

JOHNSON: [inaudible] certainly say, if you want one, you may have one.

JAY: It may be anybody that wants to buy and get a piece of America in exchange for cash will get it. So on Obama's side, intelligent, and I guess one could say rational after eight years of what a lot of people think is irrationality. Let's go to McCain. McCain has surrounded himself with people like James Woolsey, who wanted to bomb Syria during the Israeli-Lebanese War. He's got Randy Scheunemann, who lobbied for Georgia. So if we start looking at what is a significant difference between Obama and McCain, what conclusions do you come to?

JOHNSON: Well, I think in the case of McCain he looks like a standard GI-issue of a neocon, of people who have not been following what's been going on in the world, who do not understand the way world politics works, who have delusions of Roman grandeur, who sound like the air force, with the full-spectrum dominance and this kind of tone they like to intone these days, which are largely nonsense.

JAY: McCain's been talking about a proposal he calls "the League of Democracies." What do you think of this proposal, which essentially is to exclude Russia, China, and have American allies in some organization that could perhaps even authorize the use of military force?

JOHNSON: I think the biggest falling-out among the nations of the world in thinking about the United States occurs among the main democratic allies of ours in Western Europe, that no Western European politician could think of walking into such a league, with the possible exception of an Englishman who was still desperately trying to have some little influence, as if they were still a major empire. When you think about how pitiful Tony Blair has turned out to be in terms of the influence that Britain might have had in the world compared with the actual influence it has now, it's been a disaster. Britain showed us after World War II that it is possible for an empire to give up its empire. We normally teach that no empire every voluntarily gives up, that we aren't going to give up our 700-and-something military bases. We are going to, and we're going to start losing them pretty fast, too. Nonetheless, Britain did understand after World War II that you can't continue to rule India using Nazi methods. They began to understand, no matter how you [inaudible], how many clever characters you hire at the American Enterprise Institute to talk it up, empire is a pure form of tyranny. It never rules through consent, and least of all does an empire that basically grows out of the barrel of a gun as ours does.

JAY: So what you're suggesting is the financial crunch is going to force the disassembling of the empire.

JOHNSON: Well, I could think of a lot of other things that might. I mean, very slowly you begin to think of those old Roman fears that a world of enemies is combining against us. There's a lot of nations out there now that are on the move, that are beginning to think of ways to frustrate, to check and even checkmate the United States. We see it, probably, in Latin America, we see it in the growing restiveness over status of forces agreements on our bases, and things of this sort. But basically my wife needled me one day and said, "Can't you come up with something more optimistic than war?" And I said, "Yeah, I'll come up with something more optimistic. Let's try bankruptcy."

JAY: There's some studies to show that Hitler launched World War II more or less when he realized Germany was on the road to bankruptcy, and the only thing left was war to cover up the consequences of bankruptcy.

JOHNSON: Well, they did go bankrupt in 1923.

JAY: But I'm talking in '39-40. The German economy was at its weakest at the time he launched the war, because one of the motivations for the war being the lack of ability to provide consumer goods and services to the German people.

JOHNSON: Well, it's an old classic of history to use war to cover up these hopeless domestic failures precisely is what is scary about the United States right now.

JAY: So I guess it's up to us; it's up to us and the people watching.

JOHNSON: And that's why I like to be on a program like this. I don't believe in wasting my time. But I'm sure this is not going to come out of the normal workings of the political system. It's going to require the mobilization of the public to understand what they're about to lose, and once they lose it they'll never get it back.

JAY: Thank you very much for joining us, Mr. Johnson.

JOHNSON: Thank you for inviting me.

JAY: Thank you. And thank you for joining us. And we hope and plan to talk to Chalmers Johnson again soon.

ACTIVISM: Crown Publishers writes to you re GWB Book

*A Brief Publisher's Message*




Dear Reader,




Tomorrow, November 9, 2010, we are officially releasing former president George W. Bush's new book, /Decision Points/, and we would



like to make the following request:




> Please do not take copies off the shelf, open them to a random



page, insert a quantity of spit, nasal discharge or chewing gum,



slam them shut and put them back on the shelf.




> Please do not draw horns on Mr. Bush's head---be they a ram's, a



goat's or Satan's. Please also no forked tails or thought-bubbles



that say "Heckuva Job."




> Please do not throw the book to the ground and stomp on it while



yelling, "You suck!"




> Please do not knock over the bookcase on which /Decision Points/



is displayed, as this could result in a domino effect on the other



bookcases and cause damage and/or injury to other customers.




> Please do not attempt to move copies of the book from the



Non-fiction section of the store to the Humor or Fantasy sections.




> Please do not whip out a Sharpie and add "Awesome book---if



properly shredded" to the list of testimonial blurbs on the back cover.




We know you're upset at how badly he screwed you over, but please:



let's be civil.




Thank you,




Your Friends at Crown Publishing




*P.S.* Democrats, this letter applies to you, too.

interesting, post about Nordic Travels in North America

Comments welcome !!

V

Finding Evidence of North Atlantic Travels

As illuminating as these sagas and historical records were, there was little corroborating evidence until archaeological studies began in the late 19th century. By the 1960s excavations had demonstrated abundant evidence of Viking settlement throughout the region. The most extensive studies were in Greenland, where the mysterious disappearance of the Norse colonies had been a subject of curiosity since the early 1700s. Archaeology at Viking and Norse sites in the Shetlands, Faeroes, and Iceland began later and has begun to produce major results. Little of this information has been available to English-speaking audiences, and none of the archaeological evidence of Viking and Norse settlement in the North Atlantic has ever been seen in North America. While some of the scholarly and popular publications devote a few pages to Viking history in the North Atlantic and North America, their brief presentations do not include the evidence of recent research. These new studies, including new literary research into the Viking sagas, archaeological excavations of Norse and Native sites, and historical and environmental research, bring to life an exciting new picture of a portion of the Viking world that has until recently been neglected and unknown.

Preserving the Vision of a Distant Past

The exhibition begins with a presentation of Viking history and culture in Scandinavia and its expansion, discussed above, into Europe and the British Isles. It then follows the early Viking pioneers who explored and settled the Faeroes and Iceland c.860-870, illustrating their ships, navigating techniques, and the various reasons why the West-Viking expansion took place: these included the need to find new lands for their expanding population and to seize the opportunities
Viking navigators perceived, as they discovered uninhabited islands that were suitable for their stock-raising economy. One of the opportunities was the lure of a different kind of "loot" - walrus
ivory which by this time had become more precious than gold in the high courts and church chambers of Europe.

The Iceland portion of the exhibition features the social and environmental changes that occurred when Vikings arrived and began to set up a new society in this land of fire and ice. The rapid peopling of the landscape, the removal of its fledgling forests, and the installation of large stocks of animals permanently transformed the island into what it is today: an agrarian-industrial nation whose economic interests and environmental resources must be carefully managed to avoid ecological catastrophe. Here archaeological and natural science give evidence of the failed Norse colonies in Greenland and of the changes Vikings brought to the Faeroes and
Icelandic landscapes soon after landnam. These serve as a reminder of the cost of over-exploitation in a part of the world where climatic cooling can have devastating effects. Iceland also exemplifies how a Viking population welded a new nation out of Celtic and Norse immigrants, and then adapted a system of Nordic self government, based on community assemblies, that has been a model of modern democracy, dating back to the first general assembly at Thingvellir in 930. But perhaps the greatest contribution to emerge from Iceland was the recording and preservation of the sagas. This facet of the Viking world is presented dramatically in the exhibition in a dedicated "saga theater" in which the sagas relating to the
discovery of America are staged in sound and light in a simulated Icelandic longhouse.

Sailing Ever Westward

Iceland was also the staging point for the final series of Viking expansions that led to Eric the Red's discovery and settlement of Greenland, and the extension of that effort further west into North America. Recent archaeological work not only offers a window into the four-hundred year span of Norse Greenland (985-1450); it has also given us exciting new information about Viking voyages to Vinland.

Evidence for the latter is presented from cartography and archaeology and includes a construction of the Viking site discovered by Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad at L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland. This portion of the exhibition includes new information
about contacts between the Norse and various Native American groups (Indian, Dorset, and Thule culture); it suggests the Norse may have been trading for ivory as well as gathering timber from Markland (Labrador) and that their voyages to America continued for several
hundred years after the Vinland voyages ceased in the early 11th century and were confined largely to the Arctic regions of northeastern North America. It now appears that Norse activities in North America were much more extensive than previously believed.

Finally, the exhibition deals with the controversial question,

"Where was Vinland?"

and the many claims and counter-claims made about Viking landings in America. Some of these theories have been based solely on interpretations from the Vinland sagas, while others are tied to reputed Viking artifact finds such as the Kensington Stone, found in Minnesota in 1898. Although once exhibited by the Smithsonian as a genuine relic of a 1362 Norse exploring expedition, scholars today believe it was created by a Swedish immigrant farmer as a practical joke. More romantic is the story of the Newport Tower in Rhode Island, once described by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1841 epic poem, The Skeleton in Armor, as a "lofty bower" built by a wandering Viking for his lost love. Carl Christian Rafn, a Danish scholar of that day, believed that the tower and many otherwise unexplainable archaeological traces in New England attested to a former Viking presence in America. Even the mythical city of Norumbega, thought to lie along the Charles River near Boston, was once thought to have been founded by a lost colony of Vikings. Finally, there is the more recent controversy over Yale's "Vinland" map, supported by a few (at Yale) as a genuine 15th century document but thought by almost everyone else to be a 20th century creation.

Affirming the Viking Legacy in North America

Although none of these theories or claims have withstood scientific study, discovery of a Viking coin dating to the reign of Olaf Kyrre (1 065-1 080) at the Goddard site, an Indian village on the
coast of Maine occupied during the Viking period, leaves open the possibility of startling new Viking finds. So far, no true runestones and no other Viking settlements than that found in Newfoundland have been uncovered. That site, which was excavated by Birgitta Wallace for
Parks Canada after the Ingstads worked there, seems likely to have been the camp established by Leif Eriksson and perhaps also by Thorfin Karsefni and his wife Gudrid, whose child, Snorri, has the honor of being the first European born in the the New World.

The Viking legacy of discovery and exploration in America, of pioneering new adaptations in the rigorous North Atlantic, and of artistic and literary creations that have enriched humanity is a story that has been too long hidden in archives and beneath the soil.

Vikings: the North Atlantic Saga brings these and many other tales of the West-Vikings to prominence in a beautiful and dramatic exhibition that will tour North America for two years after its opening at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The exhibition
has been planned since 1997 in collaboratiog,with the Nordic Council of Ministers, Volvo, and other sponsors as a millennium program to commemorate the Viking expansion across the North Atlantic. A catalogue will be available, with a preface by Hillary Rodham Clinton and contributions from more than 30 Viking scholars.

Certainly we have not heard the last cry of the Vikings in North America! While this exhibition will no doubt contribute to a more informed recognition of the Vikings'role in North America, the Viking icon in Europe and America seems certain to remain a powerful symbol of this dynamic culture for years - if not centuries - to come.

---------------------------------

William W. Fitzhugh is Senior Curator of Vikings: the North Atlantic Saga, and Director of the Arctic Studies Center of the National Museum of Natural History, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He edited the exhibition catalogue with Elisabeth I. Ward.

The latest from Fearless Leader Dick

Media Hacks Call Cheney A 'Hero,' Say They Love Him For Not Caring What Americans Think

Dick Cheney does not care what you or anyone else thinks about the war in Iraq or any other subject for that matter, and because of this he is a "hero".

That was the sentiment expressed by both Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson yesterday after The Vice President made it clear during an interview that he is not bothered in the slightest what the American people think.

In the interview with ABC News, reporter Martha Raddatz questioned Cheney's statement that "there's a general consensus that we've made major progress" in Iraq:

"Two-third of Americans say it's not worth fighting," Raddatz said.

"So?" replied Cheney.

"You don't care what the American people think?" Raddatz asked.

"No," Cheney replied.

That about sums up the fact that the government has been usurped by those who do not care about America, who have no interest in the well being of the people and will grind the nation into the dust for their own evil gains until it is no more.

From the Patron Saint of Pop

The Patron Saint of Pop

Miracles at Wal-Mart

Posted: 19 Mar 2008 05:58 PM CDT

I was not afraid of death and I knew that I had become the patron saint of pop. I also remember the street fighter moves out of the video game that I performed and I remember the time when ETF shot at me and I almost picked the bullet up out of thin air. I knew I was mystically enlightened and that the gods were protecting me. I hated the white race and I was going to fuck them all up. If I was going to give my influence to a society, I wanted white people removed from society. Without the influence of the patron saint of pop you have Darfur. Pop culture is under my influence and pop culture is everywhere, in every form of society no matter how backwards or advance. I am influential the world over. Everyone in Hollywood knows that I am their patron saint. Yes I am that influential. I have been successful in many ways at bashing white man for the way they treated me. Now I am using my mystical powers to push for their genocide or the world can accept my peace pact. This is the only way that the white man can save himself.

Although, I live my life alone, it is a price that I have to pay. No one in my family knows that I am the patron saint of pop. I do not even associate with them. I hate them as much as I hate white people. The white people and teachers and cops have torn my family up. There is no family left for me. I had been spied on and surrounded by cops for all my life so I do not have any real friends left. It has been extremely hard because it has been this way since I was a child. I know the truth about what the white man did to me. They brutalized me and try to kill me and now I am their patron saint. What a sad story. That’s why no cop or politician will admit that I exist. Bill Graham, MPP in Rosedale Toronto, even retired after I sent him an email. Bill Graham knows who I am. I had written up a blog back in February 2007 and I sent out the address to a bunch of MPPs and media companies. A few days later I read in the papers that he quit politics. Yes, the patron saint of pop has influence on the politics in Canada as well.

I knew that I had prophecized the white man’s holocaust and I know that it would come true. When I burst out singing OPP at Wal-Mart I knew that the gods had possessed my body. That alerted me to the fact that I was being followed. When I got off work I went to 160 St. George Street to smoke some drugs and watch the cops watch me. The cops always put a white idiot undercover cop outside in the back of 160 St. George Street and he would sometimes pretend to be drunk. They also had an undercover cop name Kevin moved in. He would always try to avoid saying his last name. His nick name is Baby - T. They also had other undercover cops infiltrate the people who lived in the house. The residence of the house were Greg Bowman, Layton the son of a rich RBC shareholder, Mihalo, the son of a wealthy developer, and the housekeeper name Faggot Craig, and John Digit. They also recruited a guy name Pete Janzen who lived there to go undercover. Well, its taking me a long time to write this post so I will publish it now to give something to my readers to read. I have a bunch of drafts so don’t think I am not writing. The next posting will hopefully come a lot quicker. Sorry, but come back soon. And please please buy me a coffee!

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Don't believe in the Security Prosperity COMMUNITY yet???

Did Harper just commit treason? Canadian government authorizes American troops to occupy Canada

For all those who have been warning us about the Integration of Canada, United States and Mexico with the emergence of the North American Union, this latest agreement between Canada and the United States confirms what everyone feared.

The Canadian government has yet again signed an agreement in secret with the United States in an attempt to dismantle Canada. This latest agreement allows the US military to occupy Canada in case of an ‘emergency’, and vice versa.

What constitutes an emergency you ask? We don’t know, it’s “up to civilian authorities in both countries on whether military assistance is requested or even used.” An emergency could mean that US troops could be used in Canada to protect oil and gas pipelines or even a road, while Canadian troops could be used to subdue American citizens. This agreement also allows the United States government to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act which is a “United States federal law passed on June 16, 1878” prohibiting federal uniformed services from exercising “police or peace officer powers” to maintain ‘law and order’ on non-federal property.

“Neither the Canadian government nor the Canadian Forces announced the new agreement, which was signed Feb. 14 in Texas.” Why would the Conservative government not announce this event? Could it be because the “US military does not allow its soldiers to operate under foreign command so there are questions about who controls American forces if they are requested for service in Canada.”

Will Canadians witness American tanks rolling down their streets the same way that Americans witnessed it during the 2004 peace rallies in Los Angeles?

source

Will American soldiers be stationed on Vancouver streets during the 2010 Olympics? Or across Alberta to protect the Oil Sands? Most likely yes, especially if we consider that studies have found a 600 percent rise in terrorism since the US invasion of Iraq.

If “Africans want no part of the American military” what makes Stephen Harper think that Canadians want any part of it? More importantly however, will Canadians stand in the way of the tanks, as the Chineses did at Tiananmen Square, when they start rolling across the border? (they already did, following 9/11 at Windsor, in case you don't know.)

Or will they be ‘accommodating’ like the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded in 1968?

Maybe the Canadians will accept the Americans the way Austrians did in 1938 when Nazi Germany annexed Austria into Greater Germany.

Keep in mind that if Canadian soldiers were not occupying Afghanistan, then the government could not use the pretext that we are in need of assistance to implement their plans. So many questions have been left unanswered by Stephen Harper, but that is the trademark of those who commit treason. They are never forthcoming with answers and they always do things in secret.

If you are interested in knowing how the Canadian government is implementing the integration of Canada and the United States, watch the following Stop The Security and Prosperity Partnership! Public Forum (59:37)

Further information at: Bill paves way for Canada's 'disappearance'.

Related Posts
• Integration of Canada, United States and Mexico confirmed by Province of Manitoba: The North American Union
• Dismantling Canada: The SPP and the “War on Drugs”
• Discussion Panel on Canada’s Future and the North American Union: Understanding the SPP
• The New Canadian National Anthem in honor of Canada becoming the 13th highest military spender in the world
• NATO vs. SCO: a war Canada does not want to be involved in

Torturegate: more call for a special prosecutor

My usual question is: When are people going to get so fed up that the finally pursue impeachment and a return to the RULE OF LAW?

The United States and Canada have gone too far and nothing seems to be bringing them back to the reality of conducting themselves as civilized societies.

V

Uncovering the truth about CIA torture tapes

Congress must remedy its abysmal record of investigating the Bush administration on prisoner abuse and torture.

By Anthony D. Romero

Feb. 15, 2008 | It's now a matter of public record: the Central Intelligence Agency has tortured detainees held in U.S. custody.

In the past week, the Bush administration announced that it is seeking the death penalty for six men allegedly involved with the 9/11 terrorist attacks; evidence against them was gathered through coercive, brutal interrogation tactics -- including waterboarding. Only days earlier, CIA director Michael Hayden publicly defended the government's use of this abhorrent practice, while both the White House and the director of national intelligence agreed that further use of waterboarding is acceptable if the president and attorney general approve.

It has been known for months that the CIA destroyed videotapes depicting its so-called enhanced interrogations of two al-Qaida suspects. With the government's latest disclosures, we now know that those two detainees were waterboarded, as the tapes might have revealed. The tapes' destruction potentially constitutes the crime of obstruction. By destroying them the CIA also disregarded a request from the 9/11 Commission for documentation that could provide information about the 9/11 attacks, and it appears to have flouted court orders -- one of which was issued in response to the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demanding information about the United States' treatment of detainees overseas. The ACLU has asked that the CIA be held in contempt for violating the judge's order by destroying the tapes.

Both Congress and the Justice Department have taken on the necessary task of investigating the tapes' destruction. Unfortunately, Congress' oversight record concerning the Bush administration's abuses of power has been abysmal. The Justice Department's investigation is also problematic. It is neither independent nor objective, and its scope, which fails to include the potential criminality of the underlying acts depicted on the tapes, is too narrow. A special counsel is urgently needed, now more than ever.

Not just activists and pundits feel that way. According to a recent Mellman Group survey commissioned by the ACLU, Americans of all political stripes overwhelmingly support the appointment of an independent prosecutor to investigate both the destruction of the CIA's interrogation tapes and the possible use of torture by the agency. Every segment of the electorate -- including clear majorities of Democrats (82 percent), independents (62 percent), and Republicans (51 percent) -- want to hold this administration accountable for its role in the destruction of the torture tapes. It seems that human rights is still, thankfully, a nonpartisan concern.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey's choice to head up the investigation of the tape destruction is a veteran federal prosecutor from Connecticut, John H. Durham. By all accounts, Durham has a respectable reputation. Nevertheless, he ultimately reports to Mukasey, who to this day refuses to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture and has told Congress that the use of waterboarding by CIA interrogators "cannot possibly be the subject of a criminal" investigation

What is needed is a special counsel who is granted the same authority as the attorney general in matters pertaining to the investigation -- like Patrick J. Fitzgerald on the disclosure of a CIA officer's identity. Considering what we already know of the Bush administration's record on torture and prisoner abuse, investigative independence is essential.

The special counsel must also focus on the core issue of whether or not the interrogation techniques depicted on the tapes were illegal. What can't get lost in the controversy surrounding the tapes' destruction is the underlying issue of our government's use of abusive and unlawful interrogation techniques -- including waterboarding. The tapes are gone forever, but what must not disappear along with them is accountability for what they most surely would have revealed.

The widespread international belief that the United States government is systematically and willfully breaking the law, violating international treaties, and ignoring American values by engaging in torture is a deep stain on our country's reputation. Americans want to know the facts and the extent to which their government acted with brazen disregard for basic human rights. Naming a special counsel would be a good and necessary start.

over-up

• That's really what this is about, however much the Bush administration might want to invoke 9/11 and justice (??) in its execution of the six prisoners. It's an extension of the cover-up, under pretense of seeking justice. Kill the witnesses to the torture, so there's nobody to contravene the non-disclosure of the administration, or in the unlikely event that the light of day is ever really shown on this. Maybe Bush is hedging his bets that a Democrat might win in November, and wants these prisoners dead before there's an administration change.

  I put exactly nothing past this administration, what they'll do to serve their own political interests. It's the cold logic of the gulag and the concentration camp: the only way out is in a body bag. As Stalin (clearly an organizational model for the neoconservatives) put it: "Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem."

  -- Slackie Onassis
  [Read Slackie Onassis's other letters]
  Permalink Friday, February 15, 2008 11:39 AM

• A step further

  I would posit that Slackie (for whom I have the utmost respect) has not gone far enough here in questioning the motives of the Bush Administration. I doubt that it's just the torture of these individuals that is being covered up, but rather knowledge concerning 9/11 and backdoor dealings that's being erased. Saddam as well ... too many messy pictures with Reagan-era officials and corresponding files, money, etc. OBL, given his CIA and Saudi ties may be a murkier story, however, and for now he's a good boogeyman. (See, i.e., the other Salon article concerning high-tech drone warfare if OBL's continued survival doesn't yet seem suspect to you.)

  -- Well, that's all for now.
  [Read Well, that's all for now.'s other letters]
  Permalink Friday, February 15, 2008 12:41 PM

• An Options Pricing Case Against State-Sponsored Torture

  The oft-cited ticking time bomb scenario as justification for state-sponsored torture is flawed. Just as the value of a call options contract generally increases the closer to expiration date, might the motivated terrorist believe it more valuable to resist torture, no matter what, as long as he believes there is a good chance of success, i.e., a low mission risk? All he has to do is hang in there for a little longer and its mission-accomplished!

  It could be that the very act of his torture reveals more about the motivations and fears of his torturers than they might like. After all, torturing is an act of desperation (and depravity). Far better for interrogators to reveal little about their motivations in the interest of trying to elicit from their suspect his motivations.

  On the other hand, the best time for state sponsored torture is when the suspect has been detained well in advance of the big event. There is a higher risk of mission failure and the value of the mission is lower simply because of the comparatively lengthy duration between capture and detonation. In fact, simply the threat of torture might be enough to break the suspect. Of course, the torturer has to convince his detainee that the value of the mission is low or that the risk is too high and that there is little chance of mission completion. This is information that the torturer likely does not have, otherwise why torture in the first place?

  So, from the options valuation model, state-sponsored torture is unlikely to yield the results necessary to stop the ticking time bomb.

  -- truthbetold55