It is a pro-business book that focuses on opportunities. It is extremely well-organized, with three parts, twelve chapters, and three appendices including a superb list of active web sites relevant to doing well by doing good.
This book is based on hundreds of interviews over four years, and every aspect of it is professional presented, including boxes with “10 second overviews” interspersed throughout.
The authors are compellingly pointed in their discussion of how the environment, and attendant regulations and attendant risks of catastrophic costs, is no longer a fringe issue. Mistakes in cadmium content of connecting cables can cost hundreds of millions.
The authors excel at discussing the new pressures from natural limits that are now visible (changes that used to take 10,000 years now take 3–see my reviews on Ecological Economics, the Republican War on Science, the varied books on Climate Change, etc) and the fact that there is a growing range of stake-holders who are altering the balance of power.
The authors are clear in noting that environmental compliance and wisdom is neither easy nor cheap, but they are equally detailed in documenting that most investments to reduce environmental costs are recouped within 12-18 months. In one cited example, 3M saves $1 billion in the first year alone on pollution reduction, and over the course of a decade, was able to reduce its pollution by 90%.
On page 33 they list the top 10 environmental issues and I like this list very much as an expansion on “Environmental Degradation” which is the over-all threat that the High Level Threat Panel of the United Nations ranked as third out of ten, to Poverty and Infectious Disease. They are:
01 Climate Change
02 Energy
03 Water
04 Biodiversity and Land Use
05 Chemicals, Toxics, and Heavy Metals
06 Air Pollution
07 Waste Management
08 Ozone Layer Depletion
09 Oceans and Fisheries
10 Deforestation
The bottom line for the first part of the book: extremes can no longer be dampened down; and we now recognize the eco-system value of the wetlands that we have paid the Army Corps of Engineers to eradicate for decades.
The authors devised a schema for businesses to develop an understanding and then a strategy for reducing their environmental footprint. The authors do extremely well with their organized examination of Aspects, Upstream, Downstream, Issues, and Opportunities (AUDIO), and anyone looking at the book in a store can go directly to pages 62-63. This is an operational management handbook.
There is an excellent overview of the many new stake-holders (or significantly matured stake-holders including NGOs, religions, and local citizens. Business can no longer bribe government–government cannot “deliver” the way it used to (see my review of The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back for a sense of how corruption of other elites by our elites has accelerated all the ills of the world).
Regulations, according to these authors, should be seen as vital incentives and parameters for both reducing costs and gaining trust.
Forty global banks, and many insurance companies, now demand proper examination of ecological costs as a condition for funding or coverage.
The authors remind me of General Tony Zinni, whose books I have reviewed, in their emphasis on relationships developed over time. They urge a strong focus on relationships NOW, across the board, as a means of building a “trust bank” as well as a deeper understanding. Blocks that used to be labels “not our problem” or “not legally liable” are now labeled “IMPORTANT TO US.”
In the middle of the book they explore the digital information advantages that can accrue to those who get out of their closed loops and increase innovation. In one instance, simply adding load to trucks reduced fuel consumption and emissions considerably.
The middle of the book contains 8 detailed “Green to Gold” plays, and I won't spoil it by listing them. A box in this section says “Truth Matters” and I applaud silently.
The authors stress that mind-set, not just a check-book, is required to get this right. Five basic rules are 1) See the forest; 2) Start at the top; 3) No is not an option; 4) Feelings are facts; and 5) Do the right thing, morality DOES pay.
Pages 168-169 are sheer brilliance, and illustrate why the value chain must be completely integrated into the environmental strategy of each element of that value chain and most especially the largest and most powerful of the elements, which must carefully consider and accept responsibility for demanding improvements by the smallest elements.
Eight lessons of partnering, 13 problems and their solutions, and a final chapter of very specific actions that managers can take, conclude the book.
My final note on this book: a pleasure to read, easy to read, so well done I got through it in half the time characteristic of denser or less well designed books. This is first rate stuff!
Read Hare's Review, Excellent Complement to Tarpley Book on Bush,
March 2, 2007
William John Cox
After reading Hare's review I do not have anything to add other than to say that this book is a wonderful compelemnt to “The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush” by Webster Tarpley, whose book on 9/11 I also recommend very highly.
As documented by this book, this attorney and author, George Bush is one of the most crooked, inept, and deceitful people ever to serve in the Presidency. By no means alone, he never-the-less takes mendacity to a new level, and this author is to be congratulated for his painstaking effort to document the facts–I only regret that we could not reach enough Americans in 2004 to prevent a second four years.
From Nero to 9/11, via Pearl Harbour and the Gulf of Tonkin incident… Joe Crubaugh provides an “all time greatest hits” of false flag operations, whereby one scenario is repeated… as the world keeps falling for the same lie.
The most commonly known false flag operations consist of a government agency staging a terror attack, whereby an uninvolved entity gets blamed for the carnage. As at least two millennia have proven, false flag operations, with healthy doses of propaganda and ignorance, provided a great recipe for endless war. _In “War is a Racket”, Two-time Medal of Honor recipient Major General Smedley Butler wrote: “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.” _You may not have heard of these operations, but perhaps you have heard of these?
1. Nero, Christians, and the Great Fire of Rome
Rome, the night of July 19, 64 AD. The Great Fire burst through the rooftops of shops near the mass entertainment and chariot racing venue called Circus Maximus. The flames, whipped by a strong wind, rapidly engulfed densely populated areas of the city. After burning uncontrolled for five days, four of the 14 Roman districts were burned to the ground, and seven more were severely damaged._It was no secret that Nero wanted to build a series of palaces which he planned to name “Neropolis”. But, the planned location was in the city and in order to build Neropolis, a third of Rome would have to be torn down. The Senate rejected the idea. Then, coincidentally, the fire cleared the very real estate Neropolis required.
Despite the obvious benefit, there's still a good probability that Nero did not start the fire. Up to a hundred small fires regularly broke out in Rome each day. On top of that, the fire destroyed Nero's own palace and it appears that Nero did everything he could to stop the fire. Accounts of the day say that when Nero heard about the fire, he rushed back from Antium to organize a relief effort, using his own money. He opened his palaces to let in the homeless and had food supplies delivered to the survivors._Nero also devised a new urban development plan that would make Rome less vulnerable to fire. But, although he put in place rules to insure a safer reconstruction, he also gave himself a huge tract of city property with the intention of building his new palace there. _People knew of Nero's plans for Neropolis, and all his efforts to help the city could not counteract the rampant rumours that he'd help start the fire. As his poll numbers dropped, Nero's administration realised the need to employ False Flag 101: When something – anything – bad happens to you, even if it's accidental, point the finger at your enemy._Luckily, there was a new cult of religious nuts at hand. The cult was unpopular because its followers refused to worship the emperor, denounced possessions, held secret meetings and they were always talking about the destruction of Rome and the end of the world. Even more luckily for Nero, two of the cult's biggest leaders, Peter and Paul, were currently in town. Nero spread word that the Christians had started the Great Fire. The citizens of Rome bought his lie hook, line and sinker. Peter was crucified and Paul beheaded. Hundreds of others in the young cult were fed to the lions or smeared with tar and set on fire to become human street lamps.
2. Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain
The Spanish Empire was the first truly global empire, reaching its territorial height in the late 1700s. By 1898, Spain was losing territories regularly. Cuba too was becoming increasingly hard to control and a minor revolution had broken out. This wasn't welcome news to people in the United States who owned Cuban sugar, tobacco and iron industry properties valued at over $50 million (worth ca. $1.2 billion today). The main stream media, then dominated by newspaper magnates Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, exaggerated – and outright fabricated – stories of horrible conditions under Spanish rule. Following the age-old maxim, “If it bleeds, it leads”, the newspapers published stories about Spanish death camps, Spanish cannibalism and inhumane torture. The newspapers sent reporters to Cuba. However, when they got there, they found a different story. Artist and correspondent Frederick Remington wrote back to Hearst: “There is no war. Request to be recalled.” Hearst's famous reply: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war.” And he did. His newspaper, continually screaming how Spanish Cuba was going to hell in a hand basket, convinced big business interests in the US to put pressure on anti-war President William McKinley to protect their Cuban investments. McKinley, in response, sent the USS Maine battleship to Havana Harbour as a calming show of force.
Three weeks after arriving, on the night of February 15, 1898, the USS Maine exploded, killing 266 men. There are two theories for the explosion: some believe the explosion was caused by an external mine that detonated the ship's ammunition magazines. Others say it was caused by a spontaneous coal bunker fire that reached the ammunition magazines. Currently, the evidence seems to favour the external mine theory. Without waiting on an investigation, America's mainstream media blamed the tragedy on Spain and beat the drums for war. By April, McKinley yielded to public pressure and signed a congressional resolution declaring war on Spain. To help pay for the Spanish-American War, congress enacted a “temporary” tax of 3 percent on long-distance telephone bills. This was essentially a tax on the rich, as only about 1,300 Americans owned phones in 1898. Although the Spanish-American War ended in 1898, the temporary tax was only abolished in… 2005. Over its lifetime, the 107-year-old tax generated almost $94 billion – more than 230 times the cost of the Spanish-American War.
The Spanish-American War put a large nail in the coffin of Spain's global empire. And by the end of 1898, the United States, which was founded in opposition to imperialism, found itself in control not only of Cuba, but of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Hawaiian Islands as well.
3. The Manchurian Incident
The economic slump following 1929's thorough and convincing near-obliteration of Wall Street hit Japan especially hard: exports fell, unemployment rose. Japan, not being rich in natural resources, needed oil and coal to make power to run machines to produce goods to sell to other countries to make money to buy food to have enough energy. Manchuria, a province of China, had its fair share of oil and coal._After Japan decided it needed to invade Manchuria, they needed a pretext to justify the invasion. They chose to create a false flag attack on a railway close to Liutiao Lake… a big flat area that had no military value to either the Japanese or the Chinese. The main reason the spot was chosen was for its proximity (about 800 meters distant) to Chinese troops stationed at Beidaying. The Japanese press labelled the no-name site of the blast Liutiaogou, which was Japanese for “Liutiao Bridge.” There was no bridge there, but the name helped convince some that the sabotage was a strategic Chinese attack._Colonel Itagaki Seishiro and Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara ordered officers of the Shimamoto Regiment to place a bomb beneath the tracks. The original bomb failed to detonate and a replacement had to be found. Then, at 10.20pm, September 18, 1931, the tracks were blown. Surprisingly, the explosion was minor. Only one side of the rail was damaged, and the damage was so light that a train headed for Shenyang passed by only a few minutes later. But it was a good enough excuse to invade…
The Japanese immediately charged the Chinese soldiers with the destruction, then invaded Manchuria. A puppet government known as Manchukuo was installed. The League of Nations investigated and in a 1932 report denied that the invasion was an act of defence, as Japan had advertised. But rather than vacate Manchuria, Japan decided to vacate the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations.
4. Secrets of the Reichstag Fire
In 1933, just a week before general elections that might place enough Nazis in office to make Hitler defacto dictator, the Reichstag, which housed the parliament of the German Empire, was set on fire. Adolf Hitler assured everyone that communist terrorists started the fire. Hitler's party member Hermann Gƶring stated that he had secret evidence that would soon be made public; evidence that proved communists did it. These proclamations came on top of weeks of Nazi-organized street violence designed to whip the public into a pathological fear of communists._The next day, the Nazis convinced a senile President von Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Decree. The decree, using defence against terrorism as an excuse, suspended just about every major civil liberty set forth in the Weimar Constitution: habeus corpus (the right to know why you're being put in jail)? Gone. Freedom of opinion? Gone. Freedom of the press? Not any more. Freedom to organise and assemble? Deported. The Reichstag decree even allowed the government to spy on its own citizens' personal mail and telephone conversations without a warrant… something most Americans today could hardly begin to fathom… a precursor to President George W. Bush secret order in 2002 ordering the National Security Agency to do just exactly the same thing._So what about the fire? The only thing historians seem to agree on is that Marinus van der Lubbe, a former Dutch Communist and mentally disturbed arsonist hungry for fame, was found inside the building. Despite the Nazi attempt to blame the fire on a group of communists, the communists were later acquitted by the Nazi government itself. After years of extensive investigation, most historians believe the Hitlerites themselves set fire to the Reichstag using van der Lubbe as their patsy: they knew a nut was going to try to burn down the building and not only did they let him do it, but they may have befriended him, encouraged him and even helped the blaze spread by scattering gasoline and incendiaries._Most Germans, feeling safe from terrorism again, didn't mind that their freedom and liberty had been stolen, or that so much of their life and work had become so strictly controlled. On the contrary, they felt very enthusiastic and patriotic about the new government because they ignorantly believed the new government cared about them. And as long as the average citizen worked hard, kept his mouth shut and let his kids take part in the Hitler Youth organization, he stayed out of the detention camps.
5. The Fake Invasion at Gleiwitz
In the late evening of Thursday, August 31, 1939, German covert operatives pretending to be Polish terrorists seized the Gleiwitz radio station in the German/Poland border region of Silesia. The station's music program came to an abrupt halt, followed by frantic German voices announcing that Polish formations were marching toward town. Germany was being invaded by Poland! Then, like a bad imitation of the previous year's infamous War of the Worlds broadcast, the transmission went dead for a moment of dramatic silence. Soon, the airwaves popped and crackled to life again, and this time Polish voices called for all Poles in the broadcast area to take up arms and attack Germany. In no time, radio stations across greater Europe picked up the story. The BBC broadcast this statement: “There have been reports of an attack on a radio station in Gleiwitz, which is just across the Polish border in Silesia. The German News Agency reports that the attack came at about 8.00pm this evening when the Poles forced their way into the studio and began broadcasting a statement in Polish. Within quarter of an hour, says reports, the Poles were overpowered by German police, who opened fire on them. Several of the Poles were reported killed, but the numbers are not yet known.” And thus, Hitler invented an excuse to invade Poland, which he did the next day: September 1, 1939. World War II began.
What really happened? Alfred Helmut Naujocks received the orders from Heinrich MĆ¼ller, chief of the Gestapo, to put the staged terrorist attack together at the Gleiwitz station. At Naujock's disposal were what the Germans had codenamed “canned goods,” which were dissenters and criminals kept alive in detention camps until the Gestapo needed a warm dead body. To add cogency to the Gleiwitz attack, Naujocks brought along one such canned good: Franciszek Honiok. Honiok, a German from the Silesian region, was a known Polish sympathizer. Before arriving at the station, the Gestapo gave him a lethal injection. Then, they dressed him up like a Polish terrorist and brought him to the front of the radio station. Naujocks later testified that the man was unconscious, but not dead yet, when he was shot full of pistol rounds. When the police and press found Honiok's body, they assumed he'd been one of the fictional Polish terrorists that attacked the station._In all, there were 21 fake terror actions along the border that same night, many of them using “canned goods” from German prisons so there would be plenty of bodies in the morning: evidence of Polish attackers that had been shot in self defence. The next day, after a long night filled with fake terror, Hitler gave a speech to the German Army, complete with synthetic anger: “The Polish State has refused the peaceful settlement of relations which I desired, and has appealed to arms. Germans in Poland are persecuted with bloody terror and driven from their houses. A series of violations of the frontier, intolerable to a great Power, prove that Poland is no longer willing to respect the frontier of the Reich. In order to put an end to this lunacy, I have no other choice than to meet force with force from now on. The German Army will fight the battle for the honour and the vital rights of reborn Germany with hard determination. I expect that every soldier, mindful of the great traditions of eternal German soldiery, will ever remain conscious that he is a representative of the National-Socialist Greater Germany. Long live our people and our Reich!”_Had it not been for the Nuremberg trials in 1945, the real story behind the Gleiwitz attack might never have been uncovered. It was there that the operation's leader, Alfred Naujocks, spilled the beans in a written affidavit.
6. The Myth of Pearl Harbour
On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor that decimated the US Pacific Fleet and forced the United States to enter WWII. That's what most of us were taught as school children… But, except for the date, everything you just read is a myth. In reality, there was no sneak attack. The Pacific Fleet was far from destroyed. And, furthermore, the United States took great pains to bring about the assault._On January 27, 1941, Joseph C. Grew, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, wired Washington that he'd learned of the surprise attack Japan was preparing for Pearl Harbour. On September 24, a dispatch from Japanese naval intelligence to Japan's consul general in Honolulu was deciphered. The transmission was a request for a grid of exact locations of ships in Pearl Harbour. Surprisingly, Washington chose not to share this information with the officers at Pearl Harbour. Then, on November 26, the main body of the Japanese strike force (consisting of six aircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, nine destroyers, eight tankers, 23 fleet submarines, and five midget submarines) departed Japan for Hawaii._Despite the myth that the strike force maintained strict radio silence, US Naval intelligence intercepted and translated many dispatches. And, there was no shortage of dispatches: Tokyo sent over 1000 transmissions to the attack fleet before it reached Hawaii. Some of these dispatches, in particular this message from Admiral Yamamoto, left no doubt that Pearl Harbour was the target of a Japanese attack: “The task force, keeping its movement strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters, and upon the very opening of hostilities shall attack the main force of the United States fleet and deal it a mortal blow. The first air raid is planned for the dawn of x-day. Exact date to be given by later order.”_Even on the night before the attack, US intelligence decoded a message pointing to Sunday morning as a deadline for some kind of Japanese action. The message was delivered to the Washington high command more than four hours before the attack on Pearl Harbour. But, as many messages before, it was withheld from the Pearl Harbour commanders.Although many ships were damaged at Pearl Harbour, they were all old and slow. The main targets of the Japanese attack fleet were the Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers, but Roosevelt made sure these were safe from the attack: in November, at about the same time as the Japanese attack fleet left Japan, Roosevelt sent the Lexington and Enterprise out to sea. Meanwhile, the Saratoga was in San Diego._Why did Pearl Harbour happen? Roosevelt wanted a piece of the war pie. Having failed to bait Hitler by giving $50.1 billion in war supplies to Britain, the Soviet Union, France and China as part of the Lend Lease program, Roosevelt switched focus to Japan. Because Japan had signed a mutual defence pact with Germany and Italy, Roosevelt knew war with Japan was a legitimate back door to joining the war in Europe. On October 7, 1940, one of Roosevelt's military advisors, Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, wrote a memo detailing an 8-step plan that would provoke Japan into attacking the United States. Over the next year, Roosevelt implemented all eight of the recommended actions. In the summer of 1941, the US joined England in an oil embargo against Japan. Japan needed oil for its war with China, and had no remaining option but to invade the East Indies and Southeast Asia to get new resources. And that required getting rid of the US Pacific Fleet first._Although Roosevelt may have got more than he bargained for, he clearly let the attack on Pearl Harbour happen, and even helped Japan by making sure their attack was a surprise. He did this by withholding information from Pearl Harbour's commanders and even by ensuring the attack force wasn't accidentally discovered by commercial shipping traffic. As Rear Admiral Richmond K. Turner stated in 1941: “We were prepared to divert traffic when we believed war was imminent. We sent the traffic down via the Torres Strait, so that the track of the Japanese task force would be clear of any traffic.”
7. Israeli Terrorist Cell Uncovered in Egypt
In July, 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell was activated inside Egypt. The ensuing attacks, cleverly designed to look like the work of Arabs, blasted and torched American and British targets. First, the Israeli terrorists firebombed the Alexandria Post Office. Then, they firebombed the US Information Agency libraries: one in Alexandria, and one in Cairo. Then, they firebombed a British-owned Metro-Goldwyn Mayer theatre, a railway terminal, the central post office, and a couple more theatres…_To smuggle their bombs inside the buildings, the terrorists used devices shaped like books, hiding them inside book covers. Once inside, bags filled with acid were placed on top of the nitroglycerin bombs. After several hours, the acid ate through the bags and ignited the nitroglycerin, causing explosions and blazing infernos.
In the early 1950s, the United States was making fast friends with Egypt, taking advantage of the new pan-Arab Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The warming relationship between the US and Egypt caused a very insecure Israel to feel threatened. Nassar also had plans to nationalize the Suez Canal, which had been controlled by the British for decades. Egypt had been known to blockade Israeli shipping through the canal and Israel feared Nassar would make a blockade permanent._After US President Eisenhower began encouraging the British to leave the Suez Canal Zone, Israel started looking for a way to make the British stay, and a way to remain best buddies with America. And what better way to treat your best friend than to stab them in the back and tell them one of your other friends did it?
In 1962, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously proposed state-sponsored acts of terrorism on American soil, against American citizens. The head of every branch of the US armed forces gave written approval to sink US ships, shoot down hijacked American planes, and gun down and bomb civilians on the streets of Washington, D.C., and Miami. The idea was to blame the self-inflicted terrorism on Cuba's leader, Fidel Castro, so the American public would beg and scream for the Marines to storm Havana. _The public learned about Operation Northwoods 35 years later, when the Top Secret document was declassified by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. Among other things, Operation Northwoods proposed:_- Faking the crash of an American passenger plane. The disaster was to be accomplished by faking a commercial flight from the US to Jamaica, and having the plane boarded at a public airport by CIA agents disguised as college students going on vacation. An empty remote-controlled plane would follow the commercial flight as it left Florida. The commercial flight's pilots would radio for help, mention that they had been attacked by a Cuban fighter, then land in secret at Eglin AFB. The empty remote-controlled plane would then be blown out of the sky and the public would be told all the poor college students aboard were killed._- Using a possible NASA disaster (astronaut John Glenn's death) as a pretext to launch the war. The plan called for “manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans” if something went wrong with NASA's third manned space launch. _- Blowing up buildings in Washington and Miami. Cuban agents (undercover CIA agents) would be arrested, and they would confess to the bombings. In addition, false documents proving Castro's involvement in the attacks would be “found” and given to the press. _- Attacking an American military base in Guantanamo with CIA recruits posing as Cuban mercenaries. This involved blowing up the ammunition depot and would obviously result in material damages and many dead American troops. As a last resort, the plan even mentioned bribing one of Castro's commanders to initiate the Guantanamo attack. That deserves repeating: the Pentagon considered using our tax dollars to bribe another country's military to attack our own troops in order to instigate a full-scale war.
Operation Northwoods was only one of several plans under the umbrella of Operation Mongoose. Shortly after the Joint Chiefs signed and presented the plan in March, 1962, President Kennedy, still smarting from the Bay of Pigs fiasco, declared that he would never authorize a military invasion of Cuba. In September, Kennedy denied the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Lyman Lemnitzer, a second term as the nation's highest ranking military officer. And by the winter of 1963, Kennedy was dead… killed, apparently, by a Cuban sympathiser in the streets of an American city.
9. Phantoms in the Gulf of Tonkin
On August 2, 1964, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked a US destroyer, the USS Maddox. The boats reportedly fired torpedoes at the US ship in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin, about thirty miles off the Vietnam coast. On August 4, the US Navy reported another unprovoked attack on the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy._Within hours, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a retaliatory strike. As the bases for North Vietnamese torpedo boats were bombed, Johnson went on TV and told America: “Repeated acts of violence against the armed forces of the United States must be met not only with alert defense, but with a positive reply. That reply is being given as I speak tonight.” The next day, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara assured Capital Hill that the Maddox had only been “carrying out a routine mission of the type we carry out all over the world at all times.” McNamara said the two boats were in no way involved with recent South Vietnamese boat raids against North Vietnamese targets._At Johnson's request, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The resolution pre-approved any military actions Johnson would take. It gave Johnson a free ticket to wage war in Vietnam as large as the President wanted. And, true to his large Texas roots, Johnson got a big war: by 1969, over half a million US troops were fighting in Indochina. Despite McNamara's testimony to the contrary, the USS Maddox had been providing intelligence support to South Vietnamese boats carrying out raids against North Vietnam. McNamara had also testified that there was “unequivocable proof” of an “unprovoked” second attack against the USS Maddox. In fact, the second attack never occurred at all._At the time of the second incident, the two US destroyers misinterpreted radar and radio signals as attacks by the North Vietnamese navy. It's now known that no North Vietnamese boats were in the area. So, for two hours, the two US destroyers blasted away at nonexistent radar targets and vigorously manoeuvred to avoid phantom North Vietnamese ships. Even though the second “attack” only involved two US ships defending themselves against a nonexistent enemy, the President and Secretary of Defense used it to coerce Congress and the American people to start a war they neither wanted nor needed._After the Vietnam War turned into a quagmire, Congress decided to put limits on the President's authority to unilaterally wage war. Thus, on November 7, 1973, Congress overturned President Nixon's veto and passed the War Powers Resolution. The resolution requires the President to consult with Congress before making any decisions that engage the US military in hostilities. It is still in effect to this day.
10. The September 11, 2001 Attacks
Like many buildings built in the 1970s, the twin towers were constructed with vast quantities of cancer-causing asbestos. The cost of removing the Twin Tower asbestos? A year's worth of revenues at a minimum; possibly as much as the value of the buildings themselves. The cost to disassemble the Twin Towers floor by floor would have run into the double-digit billions. In addition, the Port Authority was prohibited from demolishing the towers because the resulting asbestos dust would cover the entire city, which it did when they collapsed, resulting in many cancers with a confirmed link to the WTC dust._Despite its questionable status, in January of 2001, Larry Silverstein made a $3.2 billion bid for the World Trade Center. On July 24, the Port Authority accepted the offer. Silverstein then took out an insurance policy that, understandably, covered terrorist attacks, which happened seven weeks later. To date, Silverstein has been awarded almost $5 billion from nine different insurance companies. What was an asbestos nightmare turned into a $1.8 billion profit within seven weeks.
Donald Rumsfeld said about the Pentagon on the morning of September 10, 2001: “According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” That bombshell was pretty much forgotten by the next morning. So, as a reward for losing $8,000 for every man, woman, and child in America, taxpayers patriotically forked over another $370 billion and counting to invade Iraq. True to form, the Pentagon promptly lost $9 billion of that money, too.
Eight days after the attacks, the 342-page Patriot Act was given to Congress. That same week, letters armed with anthrax from a US military lab entered the mail. Subsequently, while Congressional offices were evacuated, examined, cleaned and nasal cavities swabbed, the Patriot Act remained largely unread. Then, with little debate, the Patriot Act became law, giving the Bush administration unprecedented power to access people's medical records, tax records, information about the books they bought or borrowed and the power to conduct secret residential searches without notifying owners that their homes had been searched.
In early 2001, executives from Shell, BP, and Exxon met with Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force while it was developing its new national energy policy. Later, the companies freely admitted interest in profiting from Iraq's oil fields, even before the US invaded Iraq. And now? A new Iraq hydrocarbon law expected to pass in March 2007 will open the door for international investors, led by BP, Exxon and Shell, to siphon off 75 percent of Iraq oil wealth for the next thirty years.
According to statements by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a Bronze Star recipient with 22 years of experience in intelligence operations, a classified intelligence program codenamed Able Danger had uncovered two of the three 9/11 terrorist cells a year before the attacks and had identified four of the hijackers. Shaffer alerted the FBI in September of 2000, but the meetings he tried to set up with bureau officials were repeatedly blocked by military lawyers. Four credible witnesses have come forward to verify Shaffer's claims. _In August 2001, a Pan Am International Flight Academy instructor warned the FBI that a student (Zacarias Moussaoui) might use a commercial plane loaded with fuel as a weapon. The instructor asked “Do you realize that a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb?” Moussaoui was then arrested on immigration charges, but despite the repeated urging of the school and local agents, FBI headquarters refused a deeper investigation. The US also received dozens of detailed warnings (names, locations, dates) from the intelligence agencies of Indonesia, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Egypt, Jordan, India, Argentina, Morocco, Russia, Israel, France and even the Taliban. It would seem that the entire world was onto the bungling Saudi hijackers and somewhat perplexed that the US wasn't taking preventative actions. But in each case the US, as if by design, chose not to investigate. Instead. Condoleezza Rice, on May 16, 2002, stated: “I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon.”_We also know that on the morning of 9/11, multiple Air Force war games and drills were in progress. The hijackers would have never made it to their targets without these war games: Operation Northern Vigilance ensured that many jet fighters that would have normally been patrolling the east coast were flying over Alaska and northern Canada in a drill that simulated a Russian air attack, complete with false radar blips. _Remarkably, operation Vigilant Guardian simulated hijacked planes in the north eastern sector, while real hijackers were in the same airspace. This drill had NORAD and the Air Force reacting to false blips on FAA radar screens. Some of these blips corresponded to real military aircraft in the air posing as hijacked aircraft. That's why when NORAD's airborne control officer, Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins, heard Boston claim it had a hijacked airliner, her first words were, “It must be part of the exercise.” Changing colours
If you follow the money, you can see that the people with the most to gain occupied the key military and civilian positions to help 9/11 happen, as well as to cover up the crime. Such is the hallmark of false flag operations throughout history. But the incredible scale of the 9/11 sham, and the sheer number of people who still refuse to see the mountain of truth in front of their eyes…that's what makes the September 11, 2001 attacks the greatest false flag operation of all time._Hermann Gƶring stated: “Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. …Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”_Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, a book still forbidden in some countries (such as France), wrote: “In the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people…will more easily fall victim to a great lie than to a small one.”
Joe Crubaugh is a freelance writer, artist, and software consultant.
Renaud Theunens has a bachelor degree in social and military Sciences. In 1994-95 he served as G-2 (assessment desk) at the UNPROFOR/UNPF headquarters in Zagreb, Croatia. In 1996-97 he was military information officer (G-2 Analysis) at the UNTAES headquarters in Vukovar, Croatia. In 1998-99 he was chief of the Belgian National Intelligence Cell at the SFOR headquarters in Sarajevo. In 1999 and 2000 he was head of the European desk and senior Balkans analyst with the Belgium Military Intelligence Service. Among his previous publications is āUNTAES and the Military Challenges in Eastern Slavoniaā in M.J. Calic (ed.), Friedenskonsolidiering im ehemaligen Jugoslawien, (Ebenhausen, Germany: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik) 1996.
Viable Solutions Instead of Platitudes–In Public Service,
March 6, 2007
Allan J. Yeomans
This 492 page book is the work of a a seriious pioneer in Australia who decided that the public could use a serious book with serious solutions, instead of the range of platitudes, fear-mongering, or outright misrepresentation (energy companies like Exxon lying about the facts).
It is an over-size book that ships from the USA and reached me in a few days instead of the 4-6 weeks that Amazon shows. It is very well laid out, two-column, 12 chapters, listing 50 specific local, national, and global strategies that can be implemented today. I regard this book as the graduate school equivalent of “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth.”
What I find especially powerful about this book is that it focuses less on the industrial undermining of the atmosphere, and more on agriculture, which suffers from a range of problems including top soil rather than deep root farming, very unwise use of toxic chemcials that pollute aquifers (while failing to separate animal feces from water feeding into spinach fields, as the US found to its horror recently).
The author also does a superb job of pointing out that global warming is an ENERGY problem as much as it is an emissions problem. It is down-right nuts for the US to contront Iran over the need for nuclear energy while pretending that the US is not the primary proliferator of both nuclear technologies and the weapons of death. Safe nuclear energy as well as many forms of renewalbe solar and wind energy, and portable energy such as hydrogen from water using a renewable energy to make it effective, are all with us now.
Bottom line: this book should be in every educational program that seeks to understand solutions, and this book should be required reading for everyone that respects “Inconvenient Truth.” This book is the book you read after you agree with Al Gore, and recognize that he is summarizing, very eloquently, the problem, without actually providing any solutions.
Winston Churchill, God-Father of the English-speaking peoples, is smiling down at Allan Yeomans, the author and self-financed publisher of this volume–he's fighting the real war for our future, rather than the false war against terrorism.
A book like this would normally sell for US$75 or so, but the author, as a public service, ordered it to be priced close to cost plus Amazon commision plus shipping from Australia, and only recently found a US distributor so the book could be listed in the world's single greatest library catalog, Amazon.com.
Major Contribution That Congress is NOT Paying Attention To,
March 4, 2007
Stephen Flynn
This is a major contribution to national security & prosperity that is being actively ignored by Congress. We must all buy the book and force the issue. HR 1 from the House purports to implement the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission but does so in a shoddy, incomplete, and largely anti-democratic fashion, imposing the secret stovepipe model of one-way federal to state communications, without any respect (or understanding) of what this author recommends instead, which is to add the public to the loop, and also create localized means of facilitating communications among all the leaders–county government, law enforcement, business, academic, labor, religious, etc.
This book is every bit as good-even better–than the author's first book, “America the Vulnerable,” which I reviewed and rated very highly. I recommend that both be bought, and then waved in every public meeting possible.
The major leap forward in this book is the juxtaposition of localized resilience to disaster of any kind (not just terrorism), with the very pointed and strong dismay about how we are wasting $700 billion a year on a heavy-metal military to fight (and anger) people overseas, while spending less than $70 million a year on key infrastructure and homeland defense needs. While the Department of Homeland Defense now has roughly $36 billion a year (perhaps even more), they are giving waste, fraud, and mismanagement a completely new meaning, taking pathological irrelevance to new heights. This is especially true of their antiquated approach to intelligence and not sharing information nor being receptive to bottom up non-secret information.
I especially respect the author's detailed cataloguing of our infrastructure vulnerabilities that are of our own making. Badly patched dams, high-rises built on sand, hospitals with no excess capacity, power grids over 50 years old that a single tree can bring down, waterways that are broken, and that if broken any more cannot deliver coal to run power plants essential to Middle American commerce, the list goes on. Especially frightening in the concept of the firestorm, which I first encountered in the 1980's when a newspaper looked at the NYC water mains, most built in the 1920's (that's the nineteen TWENTIES). If they break in a certain way, and a fire starts, NYC gets burned to the ground.
The author is gifted as both a former Coast Guard officer, and as a serious and articulate scholar that has done his homework. Especially valuable to me was his citation of a 2005 series of studies done by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), in which our Nation received 4 C's, 10 D's, and one Incomplete. That alone is grounds for the impeachment and dismissal of every Governor and every Senator and every Congressman. These people are not minding the public interest in a substantive sustainable way.
I have the word “holistic” written in my notes. This author provides in this book both a “big picture” and a whole range of vignettes that drive home the fact that the devil is in the details, and no one, at the Federal or the State levels, with a handful of exceptions, is actually minding the public interest.
He offers specific recommendations for the local level including improved webcam surveillance of ports and waterfronts, a bigger COPS II program, infrastructure committees with weight, a tax on the wealthiest beneficiaries of the public infrastructure, and his older recommendation from the first book, pushing cargo inspections overseas and incentivizing those that comply with Green Lanes that save hundred of thousands in ship and crew time.
Two success stories are Project Impact, and the Disaster Resistant Business (DRB) Program.
The Coast Guard is under-funded in all respects and I agree with this. As one who designed, with Norman Polmar and Ron O'Rourke, the 450-ship Navy for global coverage, I absolutely agree that we can afford to scrap plans for more nuclear carriers and B-2 bombers, and instead fund the resilience and disaster relief and waterway safety needs of the Coast Guard.
The author concludes that our top priority should not be a heavy-metal military global war, but rather a focus on being able to weather the age of terrorism (that I would add, Bush-Cheney have done more to exacerbate than anyone else–Cheney started this war, not Bin Laden, and Larry Silverstein murdered most of those who died at the World Trade Center, not Bin Laden. For these two individuals to not have been indicted, along with Rudy “scoop and dump” Guliani, tells me that our entire government is corrupt and inattentive to the public interest. It is time to either reconstitute the entire government, or break up into the “Nine Nations” and stop giving Washington money to waste on Dick Cheney's favorite crime syndicates).
The author ends very persuasively with the admonition that the Federal Government is totally out of date and unable to shift from stovepipe secrecy to networked information sharing and shared bottom up resilient decision making. He recommends that we begin at the home and neighborhood level, and then work up to the village, county, and state level. He does not suggest what can be done to beat the Federal government back into affordable utility.
Here is an abbreviated version of the ten recommendations at the end of the book:
1) Force Washington to build national resiliency at home
2) Put terrorism in the context of the other threats (see Wikipedia, “Ten Threats”)
3) Fix the infrastructure now
4) Inform the American people, they are our greatest asset
5) Tap the ingenuity and resources of the private sector
6) Do not underestimate the value of individual preparedness
7) Do not allow government to pretend the pandemic will not happen
8) Discourage construction along vulnerable coastlines and in flood plains
9) Properly fund and support local police and emergency responders
10) Promote the concept of resiliency as a global imperative.
The author's bottom line is clear: the Federal Government is in denial, and also ignorant. We can do better. Public anger needed NOW.
EDIT 10 Dec 07 to point to “Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator.” Costs $675 for an online copy, causes panic behind the scenes on Wall Street. Google for my review book review by the same title.
This book is as close to the “authorized biography” as one can get. Engineers and investors and competitors should go instead to “The Google Legacy” by Stephen E. Arnold, sold only by Infonortics UK (online). End users and third party developers are better off with any of the 50+ other books that focus on penetration testing, analytics, Google Earth, etcetera.
The book purports to be a revelation of secrets, but that is simply not true. This is a compilation of what anyone could have put together from enough coffee house conversations.
What jumps out at me is Google's potentially crippling addiction to advertising revenue, its failure to offer sense-making and visualization, and its extraordinary good luck in being able to draw the best talent from NASA, Microsoft, Bell Labs, etc.
I am impressed by what Google is doing in becoming a multi-lingual service, and eager to see when they can start offering multi-lingual search with translation on demand for micro-cash.
There is no denying the brilliance of the founders in using links as a form of citation analysis, but as anyone who has compared the results from a professional set of sites via Deep Web Technologies, with a Google search, the former is 10 to 1000 times better on any given serious topic.
The book is useful for insights into the founders, and especially Larry Page. One learns of his interest in transportation analytics, and in molecular biology and genetics.
I was surprised to learn that Jeff Bezos helped the founders in the beginning, but now I have the impression that Google does not play well with others, even those that helped them get started, and that is a shame.
“The Google Legacy” does a much better job on the technical strengths of Google (see also the briefing by Stephen E. Arnold in the Archives at OSS.Net), but this books does note the strength of Google in combining software innovation with scalable economic hardware.
Anecdotes include how Google Doodles emerged, the early use of focus groups, and the hiring of a brain surgeon to be the network manager. There is adequate mention of the 20% free play rule, but insufficient discussion what has emerged from that.
On page 143 the author, no doubt misled by whoever he interviewed, claims that “CIA agents use Google to track terrorist groups.” Baloney. Google has a “secret” relationship with CIA (the Office of Research & Development), and a test was done that produced a handful of “hits” all of which were worthless and most of which were severely dated.
Gmail foundered on privacy issues, as did Google's desktop search. The author is incorrect when he says that Google has added sufficient security. The fact is that the US Government is still finding restricted documents leaking out whenever they install Google Enterprise. I for one would never trust Google on my small business machines.
The author describes the division of responsibility among the founders and the CEO: Eric is operations and finance; Serge is policy, politics, and people; Larry is hiring, priorities, and physical space.
While the author describes the Google digital library projects, he fails to satisfy. .
Google's idea for satisfying publishers by using the content only to entice the reader to buy the book is either idiocy, or a subterfuge. Presumably Google knows that synthetic information is free of copyright, but they seem loath to take the easy step of offering footnotes or micro-text extracts for micro-cash. In this regard, they really should be merging with Amazon and the Internet Archive (Brewster Kahle) to create a world library that can be translated into all languages on demand, given for free to the five billion poor, and monetized by using Doug Englebart's Open Hypertextdocument System (OHS).
The book ends with a few pages of “tips” on how to use Google that are nowhere as good as Nancy Blachman et all “How to Do Everything with Google,” or Arno Reuser's briefing at OSS.Net on the open source intelligence system of the future.
I end the book with a small diagram that is NOT in the book, it is my own intellectual property, but it is a useful means of evaluating why Google is not as good as it could be. On a compass, SEARCH is West; SENSE-MAKING is North, SHARE is East, and Saving the World is SOUTH. Google sucks at three of the four, and that may be their epitaph.
I asked a very smart person why Google does not play well with others and is so slow to reach out (see the two images I have loaded to the book on Wikinomics) and he had a direct answer based on direct experience with the founders: “Young guys who made their first 100 million on their own ideas are not really interested in ‘not invented here.'” That's a real shame. If Google were to focus on rapidly offering the eighteen desktop functions that were defined by CIA in 1986 (CATALYST, see OSS.Net), using Drupal 5.0 as the foundation, in close alliance with STRONG ANGEL, not only could we bury Microsoft and ORACLE, but we could save the world in the time allowed, which is to say, in the next fifteen years.
Larry Brilliant (Director of Google.org) points out that pandemics have killed over 20 popes, kings, queens, and prime ministers. Google has the opposite problem–it's not willing to gain control of the planet by giving up control of the hub. I know for a fact that India is thinking about how to displace Google (even if their chief R&D guy is there–who knows, he may have gone native again), and I am earnestly dismayed that Google, Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and Amazon as well as IBM, CISCO, and Yahoo cannot get together with an anti-trust waiver similar to what was granted to the MCC with Bobby Inman and Doug Lenat. Time is a'wasting and time is the one thing we cannot replace nor buy.
Best Available Primer for Top Management,
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