Given the wonderfully free nature of the US mainstream press, readers may have missed the fact that, over the past few weeks, no less than three government and intelligence agency officials from the US and Britain have openly called into question the US government's version of events on September 11th 2001.

The first authority figure to state the glaringly obvious was former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush's first term, Morgan Reynolds. Reynolds stated that he believes that the official story about the collapse of the WTC is "bogus" and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.

Reynolds, who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and is now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University said:

"If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling." Reynolds commented from his Texas A&M office, "It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings."

Next up to blow away the faltering smokescreen around 9/11 was former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, who is listed by 'Who's Who in America' as one of the 1,000 most influential political thinkers in the world. While Roberts still holds on to his Republican/Conservative ideology, he has become severely disillusioned with the present gang of ultra-right NeoCons running the show in Washington, he states: "I just can't respect a party leadership who doesn't respect the truth."

According to Roberts, 9/11 is "only a part of a mysterious but deadly Neo-Con puzzle" and the NeoCons are "making such fatalistic mistakes and are about as insane as Hitler and the Nazi Party when they invaded Russia in the dead of the winter."

Although professing to know "a little about engineering" from his undergraduate days at Georgia Tech, Roberts deferred formulating any serious conclusions about the fall of the WTC, but expressed doubt as to the credibility of the entire official version based on past government lies uncovered at Waco, Ruby Ridge and the threat of WMD in Iraq.

Referring to Reynolds' comments on the WTC collapse, Roberts suggests that they reveal just how flimsy and unbelievable the government story comes across. He states:

"This is not some kind of conspiracy nut or kook talking. He is a man with extremely qualified credentials, whose opinions I respect," said Roberts referring to Reynolds’ comments.

The third and most recent authority to debunk the 9/11 official story fantasy was former MI5 agent David Shayler who spoke to Alex Jones of Prison Planet. Shayler hit the headlines in the UK a few years ago when he was sentenced to 6 months in prison for disclosing documents to the media obtained during his time as an MI5 officer.

Shayler had become disgusted by the duplicity and deceit that was rife within the British intelligence community and, after resigning, decided to go public with his claim that both MI6 and MI5 (UK equivalent to the CIA and the FBI) had been involved in a failed coup attempt whereby £100,000 ($180,000) was paid to known al-Qaeda operatives to kill Libyan leader Mummar Gadaffi in late 1995. One of the hit men, Anas al-Liby, who was known to the British government as an al-Qaeda "terrorist", was even given political asylum in Britain and lived in Manchester until May of 2000. Shayler claims that, at the time of the plot, MI6 knew the location of Bin Laden and had an excellent opportunity to arrest him but chose to allow him to remain at large.

During Shayler's trial, the judge required him to disclose in advance the questions he planned to ask prosecution witnesses in cross-examination. Shayler was also denied the right to question the credibility of the five prosecution witnesses, four of whom remained anonymous at the behest of the British Home Secretary and was prevented from calling two witnesses who overheard a conversation in which an MI6 agent confirmed British intelligence involvement in the coup attempt.

During the trial, Home Secretary David Blunkett and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw signed Public Interest Immunity certificates to protect national security.

These restrictions led to a row between the Attorney General and the so-called D-Notice Committee, which advises the press on national security issues.

The committee, officially known as the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee, has objected to demands by the prosecution to apply the Official Secrets Act retrospectively to cover information already published or broadcast as a result of Shayler's disclosures. Members of the committee, who include senior national newspaper executives, are said to be horrified at the unprecedented attempt to censor the media during the trial.

Given the efforts made by the Blair government to gag Mr. Shayler and the fact that his claims have since been verified as true by French Intelligence, it would appear the Mr Shayler is not just a bitter ex-spook out to damage his former employer with spurious allegations. As mentioned, last week, Shayler spoke to Alex Jones about the 9/11 attacks, despite a gag imposed by the British government preventing him from speaking about his work as an MI5 agent. During the interview, Shayler made clear his conviction that 9/11 was an inside job meant to bring about a permanent state of emergency in America and pave the way for the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq and ultimately Iran and Syria.

Shayler said that his suspicions were first aroused about 9/11 when the usual route of crime scene investigation was impeded when the debris was immediately seized and shipped off to China.

"It is in fact a criminal offence to interfere with a crime scene and yet in the case of 9/11 all the metal from the buildings is shipped out to China, there are no forensications done on that metal. Now that to me suggests they never wanted anybody to look at that metal because it was not going to provide the evidence they wanted to show people that it was Al-Qaeda."

Shayler then went on to dismiss the incompetence theory.

"The more I look at it, you realize that it’s not incompetence. There were FBI officers all over the country, Colleen Rowley is obviously the one who managed to get a congressional hearing, but there was plenty of evidence certainly."

"There are so many questions that need to be answered, protocols being overridden within national defense, people actively being stopped from carrying out investigations. This wasn’t an accident, they were aware there was intelligence indicating those kind of attacks, there were FBI intercepts saying it in the days before the attacks. When you look at it all, that is a big big intelligence picture and yet these people were crucially stopped from doing their jobs, stopped from trying to protect the American people."

Shayler elaborated by saying the evidence suggests the attack was originally meant to be much wider in scope and was an attempt at a violent coup intended to decapitate the entire government as a pretext for martial law.

"So you’re looking at a situation in which you almost have a coup de’tat because you’ve got to bear in mind that there were weapons discovered on planes that didn’t take off on 9/11. Now people have obviously postulated that they were going perhaps to attack the White House, Capitol Hill. That looks to me like an attempt to destroy American government and declare a state of emergency, in fact a coup de’tat, a violent coup de’tat."

"There are so very many questions about this and you realize again that none of the enquiries ever get to the bottom of any of these things, they don’t take all the evidence, they don’t often take any evidence under oath when they should be taking it under oath."

Shayler was forthright in his assertion that the attack was planned and executed within the jurisdiction of the military-industrial complex.

"They let it happen, they made it happen to create a trigger to be able to allow the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq and of course what they’re trying to do now is the same thing with the invasion of Iran and Syria."

Shayler ended by questioning the highly suspicious nature of the collapse of the twin towers and Building 7, the first buildings in history, all in the same day, to collapse from so-called fire damage alone.

"I’ve seen the results of terroristic explosions and so on and no terrorist explosion has ever brought down a building. When the IRA put something like a thousands tonnes of home-made explosives in front of the Baltic Exchange building in Bishopsgate and let off the bomb, all the glass came out, the building shook a bit but there was no question about the building falling down and it doesn’t obey the laws of physics for buildings to fall down in the way the World Trade Center came down. So you have the comparison of the two, Building 7 compared with the north and south towers coming down and those two things are exactly the same, they were demolished."

The former MI5 agent also mentioned the proclivity of Israeli intelligence to carry out 'False Flag' operations, stating that in the july 1994 bombing of the Israeli embassy in London, some within MI5 believed that the Israelis themselves bombed the embassy and that they then framed two Palestinians who remain in jail to this day.

"The same thing has happened with two Palestinians who were convicted of conspiracy to cause the attack on the Israeli Embassy in Britain in 1994 but MI5 didn’t disclose two documents which indicated their innocence. One document indicated another group had carried out the attack and the other document was the belief of an MI5 officer that the Israelis had actually bombed their own embassy and allowed a controlled explosion to try and get better security and these documents were never shown to the trial judge let alone the defense."

So there it is folks. No longer are allegations that the US government was complicit in the 9/11 attacks the domain of "fringe conspiracy kooks" alone but now also include internationally respected economists, former Bush administration officials and vindicated ex-British government intelligence agents.

That’s what I said. And to hell with the press’s sanctimonious lamentations over First Amendment rights. If they were so committed to the press being some kind of democratic tripwire, they wouldn’t behave like such craven hucksters about virtually every real issue that comes along. In particular, they would be critical of themselves about the likes of propaganda hacks like Judith Miller.

Jose Padilla, Wen Ho Lee, and lengthening list of others have had their Constitutional rights trampled as public spectacles in which the press participates as eagerly as any lynching crowd on a picnic, but where was Judith Miller when all this was happening?

She was working for the White House as a disinformation specialist even as she worked for the mighty New York Times, helping the administration make its case for the war in Iraq. No single reporter was more solicitous in retransmitting the Rendon Group’s fabrication about mushroom clouds over New York and the Saddam-A-bomb.

It’s unlikely that more than a handful of reporters in the ntaion had as many chances as Miller to rub elbows with Dick Cheney’s favorite Iraqi advisor, Rendon Group vet, con man, and convicted embezzler, Ahmed Chalabi. Miller appeared at one point in Iraq to be actually working for Chalabi while working as an embedded reporter.

Little wonder, then, that Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Scooter Libby, is a prime target of the investigation into the administration’s vengeance outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, when her husband Joseph Wilson refused to doctor evidence for the Bush administration to develop the weird claim that Iraq was buying weaponizable uranium from Niger. Libby, or whomever (someone on the White House staff) “leaked” Plame’s identity as a U.S. intelligence operative abroad - which is a felony violation of federal law.

Me. I don’t sit around losing sleep at night about the disempowerments of the Cenral Intelligence Agency (they’ve done more to disempower themselves than any opponent could ever do). I admit I’m seriously into situational ethics here… the ethics being whether the protections that ostensibly exist for journalists and their sources being a means to protect the public FROM official power can be reasonably claimed when a reporter lets themselves be used BY official power to punish people like Wilson for having a shred of integrity. I’ve always thought the categorical imperative is a form of detached philospohical stupidity anyhow. This case seems to prove that.

It’s an obligation for political activists to know what the masses are watching on television, so every day I try to force myself to see a bit of CNN, a bit of MSNBC, a bit of local affiliate news. It’s about as joyful as having a sea urchin packed up your behind, but it still seems like an obligation. It seldom changes, this self-referential parade of air-brushed news-models regurgitating the manufactured cliche of the day, and slobbering over think-tank reptiles and retired generals who are themselves reduced to preaning cheap-jackery before narcotic America.

It’s only the shortest step between this and Judith Miller’s breathless ranting about Saddam’s bombs on the flagshit NYT. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would give the NYT any more credence than the Debka-file. They get things right about equally as often.

When I see them give as much ink to Jose Padilla as they are to this vicious, self-serving hack, who willlingly let herself be used by the White House she now calims the First Amendment to protect, I’ll stand in front of the Supreme Court with a “Free the lying little shit” sign. But for now, she can rot for all the hell I care, and I’d be delighted to see “Scooter” Libby in the same cell block.

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable." U.S. Historian ~Howard Zinn, 1993

As the war in Afghanistan and Iraq rolls onward like a well-heeled Greek wheel, a little under-the-radar event went unnoticed by the disserving mainstream news media. Less than a week before Memorial Day, while we as a nation prepared for another mournful day of remembrance of those who died while serving bravely in the Armed Forces, another special celebration was in the works: On May 25th 2005, with hardly a smidgeon of news coverage, U.S. officials celebrated the completion of the first section of a 1,100-mile U.S.-backed pipeline bringing Caspian Sea oil to Western markets. British Petroleum (B.P.) Chief Executive John Brown, whose company leads the venture that built the pipeline, was in attendance and ecstatic with dollar signs dancing in his head (and in his bank account). It was after all, a "pipedream" come true after years of denial from a Clinton Administration who prevented American businessmen from doing business with terrorist regimes.

The $3.2 billion project is expected to deliver 1 million barrels of "Texas Tea" a day from the world's third-largest oil and gas reserves, through Georgia to the Mediterranean. That's a lot of oil even by "Texas" standards. And for those who stand to gain immensely -- undoubtedly, this venture is considered a pot of black gold at the end of a very bloody rainbow.

However, it's common knowledge that before you can enjoy a rainbow, you must first weather the storm, and no one can appreciate a depleted-uranium hailstorm more than the Afghan and Iraqi populations. I don't speak Afghan or Iraqi, but - I'm sure the horrified expression on the many faces of young and old alike served as a chilling interpretation, as coalition bombers delivered their "hard steel rain." I guess it's safe to say that "fear" is a universal language that anyone can understand, sort of like speaking in war tongues, if you catch my meaning.

I want you to think about this for a moment: while thousands of Americans made painful pilgrimages across this vast nation to honor our fallen and to pay their respects at cemeteries and churches on Memorial Day, U.S. officials joined BP officials and other oil tycoons in celebrating their pipeline. And they continue to celebrate it even today as our sons and daughters continue to perish on multiple battlefields. I guess British Petroleum, and the rest of the shrewd gang concluded that oil is much thicker and far more profitable than the spilled blood of American soldiers and innocent civilians. Indeed. They must.

And logic dictates in the wake of this madness that if you want something bad enough, anything can be made to happen or be "fixed" in order to achieve that means, including Pearl Harbor events, manipulation of national foreign policy, and wars being fought under the pretense of lies. Hummm, a haunting phrase comes to mind as they celebrated their pipeline, as they count their blood money and as they continue on with their grim war agenda -- "Mission Accomplished."

Americans are not stupid; they are beginning to understand that this bunch of greedy warmongers is the worst collection of cowards ever to land on the throne of power -- in this "freedom-loving" country anyway. It does not set well with the American people for a group to get away with murder just because they have the money and power to do so. And they despise those who are willing to sacrifice the lives of their fellow citizens as well as innocent women and children for no other reason than to extend that power.

Generation after generation has always seen the yellow stripe that runs down the backs of rich preppies who are shielded from the horrors of war by their rich and powerful parents. Even the village idiot in the White House can appreciate the fact of gentility. He fully understands that, when the rich start their wars, it's not the rich who get sent to fight them. Oh sure, a few of them go as they put together a political career, but we know who toes the frontline. Hey George, can you say champagne unit three times real fast and keep a straight face? I didn't think so.

So remember, next time you see the commander-in-thief propped up in front of his corporate media teleprompter, blathering on about spreading bunker-buster democracy -- and how we must not retreat from war -- remember, he held the coats as others fought in his absence during the Vietnam War. And currently, while his oil buddies high-five each other in celebration of their new oil pipeline, our sons and daughters will continue to pay for their greed with their lives. They will continue to die for the lies that were fixed to support their policy of greed, power and imperialism.

My motive in writing this essay is quite simple, I want you to get angry. I want you to get very angry and demand that this madness be stopped. History has proven time and time again that when the warmongers lose the mob (society), war comes to an abrupt end. Spread the word, peace is patriotic, bring the troops home now.

When the public liars sat down together – in Crawford, in the Pentagon, in the Oval Office, at 10 Downing Street – and very deliberately, very guilefully and very knowingly devised their act of mass murder in Iraq, it is unlikely they gave any thought to the most vulnerable targets of their war crime: the children. So in considering this aspect of the bloodbath, we should give the liars the benefit of the doubt. Let's not make them more monstrous than they are. Let's stick to the facts.

Let us say -- as the incontrovertible facts compel us to say -- that they were willing to kill tens of thousands of innocent people in an action they knew to be illegal, reckless, ill-planned and unsupported by evidence; that they knew their public statements about the plans for war were lies; that they started the war with a vicious bombing campaign months before obtaining even a fig leaf of approval from their respective legislatures, a clear and treasonous violation of their own national laws; that long before their blitzkrieg rolled across the border, they were already divvying up the loot of conquest: the oil rights, the "privatizations," the crony contracts.

In short, let us say that, yes, they are killers, liars, thieves and incompetent fools. But let's not imagine that as they settled their safe and cosseted backsides into the fine upholstery of their elegantly appointed war rooms, they gleefully regaled each other with visions of the exquisite tortures they would soon inflict upon the children of Iraq.

Let's not imagine George W. Bush nudging Tony Blair in the ribs as they masticated their pork together, saying, "Cholera, eh? Typhoid fever. Malnutrition! By God, we can grind these Iraqi children lower than the slum rats of Haiti!" Let's not picture Dick Cheney chiding Donald Rumsfeld over the steak tartare: "Damn it, Don, if there's a single pregnant Iraqi woman left without hepatitis before we're through, heads are going to roll! I want the wombs of those Arab cows swimming in lethal viruses. Lethal, do you hear me?"

Of course it wasn't like that. Such suppositions do these honored national leaders a grave injustice. No doubt their discourse was elevated, focused on lofty matters of state and strategy, on the practicalities of logistics and presentation. If anyone there spoke of the "human factor" -- the actual reality of bleeding flesh, of death, wounds, disease and rot -- it would only have been as part of the political calculations: What level of casualties would the American people accept, how do we keep the dead and maimed out of the public eye? It was all about numbers, processes, abstractions. Nothing to disturb the moral imagination, nothing to put them off the hearty meals and tasty snacks discreetly laid before them by the servants.

So when leading international agencies -- including the World Bank, now headed by one of the chief liars, Paul Wolfowitz -- find that Iraq's children are dwindling and dying twice as fast under the coalition's benevolent care than under the despotism of Saddam Hussein, we should not conclude that this was the liars' conscious intention. Yes, it's true that Iraq's child malnutrition rate is now worse than the broken nations of Uganda or Haiti, as the Japan Times reports. Yes, cholera and typhoid are cutting swaths through the population, with especial virulence in the "stable" areas of the Shiite south. Yes, epidemics of hepatitis are killing pregnant women. Yes, antibiotics are scarce, leaving children, the old and the weak to die of common infections -- that is, when they can get treated at all in a health system ravaged by the liars' war and its atrocious aftermath. (Such as the destruction of Fallujah, for example, when coalition forces deliberately destroyed the city's health clinics and imprisoned doctors to prevent news of civilian casualties from leaking to the press, as the Pentagon's own "information specialists" told The New York Times.)

And yes, it's true that Iraq -- once a modern and prosperous nation -- has suffered "one of the most dramatic declines in human welfare in recent history" during the occupation, as the UN says. But again, this was not part of the liars' deliberate design. The torment of children was outside the parameters of their "metrics of success." It was not a factor one way or the other.

In fact, let's go even further and declare forthrightly that if the liars could have established a client regime and a permanent military presence in Iraq without harming the hair of a single child, they would have done so. If they could have transferred more than $300 billion from the public treasury to the pockets of their family members and business partners without having to concoct a brutal and baseless war of aggression, they would have done so. If they could have legitimized their radical, rapacious domestic agenda without engineering the slaughter of innocent people in order to assume the politically expedient role of "wartime leaders," they would have done so.

But they couldn't. So like all murderers, they did whatever they had to do to get what they wanted, regardless of the consequences for others. Like all terrorists, they rationalized their atrocities with noble rhetoric, citing the unassailable righteousness of their cause as justification for the unspeakable evil they were unleashing. And like all abusers of innocent children, they covered up their baser motives with self-serving lies.

Annotations:

Unending Health Disaster for Iraqi Kids

Japan Times, June 18, 2005

Iraq Attacks Preceded Congressional OK

San Francisco Chronicle, June 19, 2005

Former Reagan Official: This is War Waged by Liars and Morons

CounterPunch, June 21, 2005

They Died So Republicans Could Take the Senate

Buzzflash.com, June 20, 2005

House Agrees to Spend More for Iraq War

Reuters, June 21, 2005

Heat and Dust: Inside the Green Republic

Baghdad Burning, June 21, 2005

WMD Claims Were Totally Implausible, says Key UK Diplomat

The Guardian, June 20, 2005

Why the Memo Matters

TomDispatch, June 19, 2005

How Much Proof Needed Before the Truth Comes Out?

Online Journal, June 17, 2005

British Documents Show Determined U.S. March to War

Knight-Ridder, June 17, 2005

Down the Iraqi Rabbit Hole

TomDispatch, June 15, 2005

Bush Wanted to Invade Iraq if Elected in 2000, Says Family Biographer

Guerilla News, Oct. 27, 2004

British Military Chief Reveals New Legal Fears Over Iraq War

The Observer, May 1, 2005

President Bush’s televised address to the nation produced no noticeable bounce in his approval numbers, with his job approval rating slipping a point from a week ago, to 43%, in the latest Zogby International poll.

And, in a sign of continuing polarization, more than two-in-five voters (42%) say they would favor impeachment proceedings if it is found the President misled the nation about his reasons for going to war with Iraq.

Foreign wars need cannon fodder, the youth of a country to go out and give and take the bullets and bombs in the name of policy established by leaders who are safe at home. In the case of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, an illegal war carried out under false pretences against an "enemy" that was no threat to the invaders, the leaders, many of whom were of draftable age during the war in Vietnam, managed to avoid the military altogether or active service in that war. They are referred to as the Chickenhawks: people who talk a belligerent game but who are unwilling to put their own lives on the line for their beliefs. Let the sons and daughters of the less fortunate die and be maimed.

The current US Commander-in-Chief went AWOL from his cushy post as a pilot with the Texas National Guard when he avoided the medical exam that would have shown traces of his cocaine habit in his blood. Now he struts his stuff in custom-made military garb to quicken the drug-primed hearts of military studs like Jeff Gannon.

We are talking hypocrisy and corruption on a massive scale. It is so unbelievable for most people that when you bring it up, they look at you as if you were putting money on the Vikings winning the Superbowl.

But wars need soldiers to give their lives or their arms and legs, eyes or minds. With 140,000 troops in Iraq, thousands more in Afghanistan, and plans to overthrow Iran and Syria, army recruiters have quotas to fill. In spite of the filtered coverage of the occupation of Iraq shown to Americans, enlistment is down. For four months in a row, the quotas have not been met.

What's an empire to do?

The first is to elect war-mongerers who can set the right example:

Name: George W. Bush (R-TX)
Born: 1946
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: You know when a guy walks away from a National Guard obligation during wartime and gets away with it, he must come from "a good family." Not that his daddy had anything to do with his getting a Guard slot in the first place - oh, no ...

Name: Richard "Dick" Cheney (R-WY)
Born: 1942
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Says he had "other priorities." You bet he had other priorities. Imagine how early in life you must begin scheming to get away with what this guy has. He was too busy thinking about Halliburton to go fight Charlie.

Name: I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby
Born: 1950±
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby is Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff. He’s had a string of no-doubt well-paying government jobs in State and Defense. He’s also practiced law. In fact, he was Marc Rich’s lawyer for years. Yes — the Marc Rich whose pardon from President Clinton was excoriated by so many high and mighty Republicans. Maybe if Scooter had been a better lawyer, his client wouldn’t have needed that pardon. Speaking of legal questions, “Scooter” is alleged by some to have traded energy stocks while helping his buddy Dick Cheney cook up a new energy policy in secret. He’s also suspected of having inserted the bogus “Niger yellowcake” reference into the President’s State of the Union address. As if all that weren’t enough, he’s also a top suspect in the outing of CIA operative Valeria Plame. Clearly “Scooter” is a ballsy kind of guy, so it’s a complete mystery to us why, when he graduated from Phillips Andover in 1968, he didn’t enlist in the Marines or go Airborne instead of going to Yale.

Name: Karl Rove
Born: 1950
Employer: Baal
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: This little cherub was born on Christmas Day, 1950. Karl “Bush’s Brain” Rove ran George W.’s campaign, right down to the tiny detail of deciding Bush was going to run. The hardest part was convincing a horde of Republican skeptics that it could be done.

He is said to have said of his boss, he’s "the kind of candidate and officeholder political hacks like me wait a lifetime to be associated with."

Now Karl’s Senior White House advisor. If he really is “Bush’s Brain,” and if the fondest wishes of former US Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV come true, one fine day Karl will be “frogmarched out of the White House in mandcuffs.”

Will history record that event as “Bush’s Lobotomy?”

Name: Donald "The Don" Rumsfeld
Born: 1932
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Korea
Notes: When the shooting started in Korea Rummy here was either 18, or about to turn 18. Not to worry for him, though — he spent the war at Princeton, wearing a ROTC uniform. Once the war was over he flew jets for the Navy for a few years. Defenders of Rumsfeld will say he’s no chickenhawk — he served, and it’s not his fault the war ended before he got his commission. To which others answer, “plenty of farmers and mechanics and kids just out of high school served. Anyone as full of whatever that stuffing in him is, could have tried out for a battlefield commission.”

Name: Paul Wolfowitz
Born: 1943
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Deputy Secretary for Defense - yet another Bush administration man in the Pentagon who has no idea what it's like to wear a uniform. He got a BA at Cornell in 1965. Maybe if we'd had a guy as bright as he thinks he is in Vietnam, it would have turned out differently.

For the fourth month in a row, the army has fallen well short of its recruitment targets. The result is that they're turning to some pretty unconventional methods to persuade young Americans to do it for Uncle Sam.

REPORTER: Sophie McNeill

St Cloud is a small industrial town in the northern state of Minnesota. Saturday evening, and normally it's pretty dead but tonight the local army recruiters have hit town armed with the latest teenage fad.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: Seven seconds, five, four, three, two, one.

'America's Army', the official video game created, designed and marketed by the US Department of Defense. Tonight, these kids have become virtual soldiers in the US army. They're out on missions to defend freedom and take out whoever gets in their way.

And while some parents might worry about the impact of graphic virtual violence on such young minds, here, a government department actively encourages it. And with the video game ranking at number four in the US charts, it's become an army recruiter's new best friend.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: This is 'America's Army: Special Forces' game. This is one of the latest editions we came out with. Kids can get it by calling the recruiting station, coming into the recruiting station. We take this to colleges, to high schools, it's kind of just like a giveaway.

I'm the recruiter out at St Cloud state now.

Sergeant Scott Link has been in army recruiting for three years.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: You guys have played quite a bit? You realise we're staying with the neutral settings?

Each month Scott is expected to convince three young Americans to join the army.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: You guys form a team. You're here, right? You like pizza? Yeah. OK, there'll be pizza a little later.

And with the current recruiting shortage, Scott has to try harder than ever.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: Have you used it before? You'll be fine, you've just got to register over here.

What I want to do is just talk with them, find out what they need and I want to see if what they need is something that the army can give them. And that's what I do. Basically I'm like a counsellor to the kids, I want to counsel them and see if the army is what fits them.

REPORTER: Why are you here?

BOY: Um, I just came with my brother so I could have a good time playing the game with other people.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: They're all going to be possibly new soldiers for me down the road. If not, maybe friendships there when I'm out in the community they can say, "Hey, that's Sergeant Link, he was over at the gaming event, he's a pretty cool guy."

I even lost my star for a while. I got my star on there. I'll be on on Saturday night until 4:00, 5:00 in the morning. Just keep playing and playing like you said, it's different. The more people come on, different clans they jump in with, it just depends how the clan is how long you stay with that one. Get bored of a map, boom, you've got what, a dozen other maps to go to.

HEATHER: I'm staying in one corner.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: Staying in your corner you're not going to win.

13-year-old Heather and 14-year-old Amy are playing the urban assault map - an exercise in street warfare that has a disturbing resemblance to current US missions in Iraq. Armed with M16s and grenades, the girls have received instructions to conduct a house-by-house assault and capture the local insurgents.

REPORTER: Does a game like this maybe make you think about wanting to join the army?

HEATHER: A little bit but I'm kind of afraid to join the army.

REPORTER: What about you, Amy?

AMY: No.

REPORTER: No? Not at all?

AMY: Maybe a little bit but I'm kind of afraid of guns so I just - I don't think I could do that.

REPORTER: So it's just for fun?

AMY: Yeah.

But that's not what the Pentagon wants to hear. It takes this game very seriously.

The game was developed here in upstate New York at the prestigious West Point Military Academy. It cost over $25 million.

MAJOR CHRIS CHAMBERS: Well, this poster here commemorates the launch of the game in 2002.

Major Chris Chambers is the deputy director of the 'America's Army' project.

MAJOR CHRIS CHAMBERS: In terms of just raw budget figures, we're a very small percentage, less than 3% of the overall recruiting budget, and with 5 million registered users being added at 100,000 users per month, this is one of the most effective methods that the army has in reaching Americans of all ages.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: So what do you guys think about the realism in the game? It scares you? The cars are real, the bullets hitting off the buildings.

The army wanted to make this game as realistic as possible. The most talented web designers in America were hired to design the graphics and all the weapons in the game are identical copies of the real thing.

MAJOR CHRIS CHAMBERS: And that attention to detail is really important. Not only is it important for us, because that is what we bring to the industry is a new level of realism, but it's important to the players because they feel that this vicarious experience they're having with the army is closer and closer to reality.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: The bigger your target is, the easier it is to hit. You want to get down, coming in low. Coming down low. How much can people get me if I'm down low like this?

BOY: Not as much but then I aimed up and I shot him for like 10 seconds and then he aimed down at shot me.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: Then your aim bites.

BOY: Shoot him in the head.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: You got to go up if you want to hit.

BOY: I always aim for the head.

Scott is keen to make sure everyone's having a great time.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: They do have pizza over here now. So if you want to, eat up.

Apart from free games and giveaways, part of tonight's appeal was the lure of free pizza and soft drink - after all, these kids are under-age.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: So how's the pizza guys? Good? Have you guys played yet?

BOY: Yeah.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: How did you do?

BOY: We lost.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: You lost? Which team are you in? OK, so what was your strategy, why did you lose?

BOY: We don't have a strategy. We'd never played the game before.

And the army even has plans to use information gathered from the game to steer players to the appropriate career path.

MAJOR CHRIS CHAMBERS: We know it's technically possible to record a lot of game play information that a player has under their pseudonym or their character name, and that player data could be valuable to a recruiter at some point in terms of tailoring their choice in the army based on what they did voluntarily in the game.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: Right now, have you ever thought about joining the military?

AMY: No.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: Why not?

AMY: I don't think I could deal with that.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: Deal with what?

AMY: Like the stress and... I don't know I'm not good with guns.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: OK, you don't have to be good with guns. You think everybody that's in the military is good with guns? Yeah. No. We have over 200 jobs in the United States army for people to do. Firemen, policemen, paramedics, people to run stores, people to run gas stations, dentists, optometrists, everything you can think of - medically, truck drivers. Everything that you see out here we have.

AMY: But like wasn't like there like a truck driver in Iraq that got beheaded?

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: OK, I was a paramedic for 10 years in North Ambulance for this area. I was a paramedic for 10 years I saw probably I'd say 70 deaths, in that 10 years. That's not in the combat zone, that's here in the United States.

Now, you might not know this but there's about 117,000 people that die from car accidents, violence, drunk driving, accidents in the home, tons of different stuff, about 117,000 per year die in the United States.

Now, put that in perspective - in a combat zone in two years, yes, we have had deaths but nothing compared to how many people die per year here in the United States.

Congratulations. Hope you guys had fun. Enjoyed it, everybody? Yeah. Good time. Do it again?

REPORTER: Amy, are you actually considering the army as an option now after tonight?

AMY: Yes, I thought that was so interesting what he was talking about and his experiences and how many different stuff people could do in the army. I didn't know they could have their own radio stations or stuff like that. I just thought you'd like go over to like Iraq or some place and protect and shoot people. So it gave me like a wider perspective of stuff that they did.

REPORTER: So basically because of tonight you're considering perhaps joining the military?

AMY: Yeah, yeah. He said he had a card so I'm going to definitely pick one of those up.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: My business card is right up here. It's got my email, it's got my phone number, it's got my name.

MAJOR CHRIS CHAMBERS: The message to young people really is about this very strong team called the US army that performs missions with rules of engagement and within the laws of land warfare and that that's a very powerful team to be a part of and that's the strongest message we can send.

But obviously being a real-life member of this very powerful team is not all fun and games. With the US army suffering almost daily casualties in Iraq, it raises the question whether it's appropriate to suggest to young kids that a career in the army is as safe and as exciting as playing a video game.

BOY: I killed seven people, yeah. Yeah, did they have some issues with friendly fire, I think one of their guys might have killed their team. That was pretty awesome.

REPORTER: Major Chambers, do you think that the game could actually desensitise young men and women to the brutal realities of war and actually killing people?

MAJOR CHRIS CHAMBERS: Well, I think again we depict consequences for action and our role in this is to honestly depict those consequences and always keep in mind that we have 13-year-olds as well as, you know, 45-year-olds playing our game. So with that as a constraint, then we are as honest as we can about violence and death and the role that the US army plays and its constitutional role in terms of, you know, the violence and warfare.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: And, then, yeah, the magazines, they're just real simple. They're 30- or 20-round clips that we put in these things.

But Scott has to fill his monthly quota and he can't afford to let any of these nagging questions cloud the minds of his potential recruits. He has a job to do and, like all recruiters, you just never take no for an answer.

SERGEANT SCOTT LINK: But, hey, for all your friends that are like above 35 say "I'm too old to join", we've upped the aged to 39 now, OK. So we have something for all of you.

Copyright: Dateline - SBS - Australia

"With supreme guts and righteousness, President Bush went into Iraq," Gov. Pataki told the Republican National Convention last August. The place erupted with applause. It was all very stirring.

Almost one year later, Pataki's son Teddy is, with supreme guts and righteousness, seeking a three-year law school deferment from the Marines, which last week commissioned the recent Yale grad as a second lieutenant.

The governor, who himself received a medical deferment during the Vietnam War because of poor eyesight, has said he hopes his son is granted the deferment. Of course he does. No doubt all the parents of New York's nearly 100 war dead also wish their children could have gotten deferments. But they couldn't. They got killed instead.

During the run-up to the invasion, Pataki was one of Bush's biggest war whores in the Northeast, taking his pro-war stump speech on the road to warn New Yorkers about the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Since the governor's support for the war has yet to waver, it is more than a little annoying to hear him publicly wishing for his son's deferral.

If the cause in Iraq is even half as important as the governor has led us to believe, then surely his son is more needed in Fallujah than in some Cambridge lecture hall. If, on the other hand, the governor no longer considers the war important enough to justify his son's immediate contribution, then he should speak up as loudly as he did in the winter of 2003. Which is it, George?

I'm sure Teddy Pataki is a nice young man. And the fact that he signed up for the Marine Corps' officers training program while he was still an undergraduate at Yale suggests a willingness to serve his country.

But I would be really mad if 22-year-old Pataki, whose father is Gov. George Pataki, got to skate through the next three years of the Iraq conflict in law school.

The governor, who proudly announced last week that his son has been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marines, also noted that Teddy Pataki hopes to defer his military service for three years until he finishes law school.

Coming only days after 20-year-old Marine Cpl. Ramona Valdez of the Bronx was killed by a suicide bomber in Fallujah, to suggest that Lt. Pataki be allowed to pass the next three years studying torts and contracts seemed positively obscene.

It was another example of how politicians wage war but expect other people's children to fight them.

And at a time when the Marines, like all the other military branches, are struggling to fill their recruitment quotas because of the war, the idea of a politician's son getting an educational deferment makes my blood boil.

It takes me back to the Vietnam War, when thousands of sons of privilege hung out in college, graduate school, the National Guard and the various military reserve units to avoid the carnage that was playing out in Vietnam.

At the Republican National Convention last year, Gov. Pataki praised President George W. Bush for having the courage to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. And just as Bush did in his speech Tuesday night, the governor strove mightily to link Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But with the daily war toll mounting, why wouldn't his son want to put off serving for a while?

A Marine spokesman told me that what Pataki was talking about wasn't really a "deferment." The Marines need lawyers as well as regular soldiers, he said, and it allows some officers who are commissioned out of college to go on and complete their legal training. Sometimes, the Marines pay for professional school, and sometimes not, he said. If Pataki gets the deferment, the Marines will not be paying for his schooling, a spokeswoman for the governor said.

When I broached the possibility of a deferment to the office of Rep. Charles Rangel, one of his aides laughed out loud. Rangel has called for restoring the draft, because he believes that when a country decides to go to war, it should ask its citizens to share the sacrifice across the board.

So Teddy Pataki should get "no break" if he voluntarily signed up for the Marines, Rangel told me.

If he joined the Marines because he wanted a better way of life and wanted to go to law school, then his aspirations are no different from those of poorer kids in rural areas, Rangel said.

"They all want a better way of life, which is indicated by the fact that the only way they [the military] are able to recruit those who enlist is through money incentives and educational benefits."

Rangel said the public revelation of Teddy Pataki's request for a law school deferment must be "very embarrassing for him."

In his ringing "we must stay the course because things are getting better in Iraq" speech the other night, Bush made no enthusiastic appeal to young people to join the military, because to do so at this time, with the situation in Iraq as it is, would have been ridiculous. Instead, he assured those who might be considering a military career that there is "no higher calling."

But if that's the case, then newly minted young 2nd Lt. Teddy Pataki ought to be shipped straight to Iraq. Why wait? Give him the chance to serve his country the way Ramona Valdez did.

As I settled in my seat for an afternoon of speeches at the College Republican National Convention, I felt something crunch. It was an empty can of Busch Light, one of many strewn across the paisley-carpeted floor of the banquet hall in northern Virginia's Crystal City Gateway Marriott. All around me sat the Republican Party's future leaders: fresh-faced, nondescript white guys in blue suits, and slender blond girls in miniskirts and snug-fitting blazers, some with halter tops underneath.

[...] The high point of the day, however, belonged to the movement's favorite red-diaper baby, David Horowitz. Horowitz reminded his fawning audience that he could "be sitting at home in the coastal mountains of California, watching horses and rabbits run across my neighbor's yard." Instead he chose to appear for free before a bunch of College Republicans because, as he told them, "The future of the free peoples of the world depends on the Republican Party--and ultimately it depends on you."

In the past year, Horowitz has barnstormed universities across the country, organizing smear campaigns against leftist professors, advising conservative students on tactics to harass their perceived opponents and all the while raking in massive lecture fees. At the College Republicans' convention, Horowitz harped on his time-tested theme: "Universities are a base of the left. Universities are a base for terrorism." [...]

In interviews, more than a dozen conventiongoers explained why it is important that they stay on campus while other, less fortunate people their age wage a bloody war in Iraq. They strongly support the war, they told me, but they also want to enjoy college life and pursue interesting careers. Being a College Republican allows them to do both. It is warfare by other, much safer means. [...]

I chatted for a while with Collin Kelley, a senior at Washington State with a vague resemblance to the studly actor Orlando Bloom. Kelley told me he's "sick and tired of people saying our troops are dying in vain" and added, "This isn't an invasion of Iraq, it's a liberation--as David Horowitz said." When I asked him why he was staying on campus rather than fighting the good fight, he rubbed his shoulder and described a nagging football injury from high school. Plus, his parents didn't want him to go. "They're old hippies," Kelley said.

Munching on a chicken quesadilla at a table nearby was Edward Hauser, a senior at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas--a liberal school in a liberal town in the ultimate red state of Texas. "Austin is ninety square miles insulated from reality," Hauser said. When I broached the issue of Iraq, he replied, "I support our country. I support our troops." So why isn't he there?

"I know that I'm going to be better staying here and working to convince people why we're there [in Iraq]," Hauser explained, pausing in thought. "I'm a fighter, but with words."

At a table by the buffet was Justin Palmer, vice chairman of the Georgia Association of College Republicans, America's largest chapter of College Republicans. In 1984 the group gained prominence in conservative circles when its chairman, Ralph Reed, formed a political action committee credited with helping to re-elect Senator Jesse Helms. Palmer's future as a right-wing operative looked bright; he batted away my question about his decision to avoid fighting the war he supported with the closest thing I heard to a talking point all afternoon. "The country is like a body," Palmer explained, "and each part of the body has a different function. Certain people do certain things better than others." He said his "function" was planning a "Support Our Troops" day on campus this year in which students honored military recruiters from all four branches of the service.

Standing by Palmer's side and sipping a glass of rose wine, University of Georgia Republican member Kiera Ranke said she played her part as well. She and her sorority sisters sent care packages to troops in Iraq along with letters and pictures of themselves. "They wrote back and told us we boosted their morale," she said.

By the time I encountered Cory Bray, a towering senior from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, the beer was flowing freely. "The people opposed to the war aren't putting their asses on the line," Bray boomed from beside the bar. Then why isn't he putting his ass on the line? "I'm not putting my ass on the line because I had the opportunity to go to the number-one business school in the country," he declared, his voice rising in defensive anger, "and I wasn't going to pass that up."

And besides, being a College Republican is so much more fun than counterinsurgency warfare. Bray recounted the pride he and his buddies had felt walking through the center of campus last fall waving a giant American flag, wearing cowboy boots and hats with the letters B-U-S-H painted on their bare chests. "We're the big guys," he said. "We're the ones who stand up for what we believe in. The College Democrats just sit around talking about how much they hate Bush. We actually do shit."

When 25-year-old candidate Mike Davidson emerged in the center of the room, the party fell to a hush. [...]

His candidacy has been endorsed by Representative David Dreier and Ann Coulter, who hailed him as a pioneer of "the new McCarthyism." And with good reason. Last February, in a Horowitz-inspired redbaiting operation, College Republicans at Santa Rosa Junior College in Northern California posted fliers on the doors of ten professors' offices bearing a red star and a warning quoting a 1950s-era state education code forbidding "the advocacy and teaching of communism." One professor's crime was displaying a poster for the film Fahrenheit 9/11 in his office window. Soon after, a press release appeared on the California College Republicans' website identifying the stunt as "Operation Red Scare." [...]

PRESIDENT Bush gives plenty of lip service to men and women in uniform. Now it’s time for the President to put his money where his mouth is and fully fund veterans’ benefits.

An official of the Department of Veterans Affairs admitted last week that it is short $1 billion for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, but giving short shrift to those who have served their country is nothing new for this administration.

For several years now, the Bush bean counters have been slashing