Update January 2012

Things I KNOW at this moment, as we enter this 2012 election year:

1.  I KNOW that the Citizens United Supreme Court decision must be stopped, whether it is by overturning or a Constitutional Amendment.  (See Senator Bernie Sanders site.)

2.  I KNOW that ALEC, the group exposed in 2011 that coordinates the writing of state laws to support business interests over the interests of citizens, must be further revealed constantly for its anti-democratic, anti-American work.

3.  I KNOW that natural gas fracking and its waste-water injecting are directly connected to the rise in earthquakes, especially in areas that have never had serious earthquakes, and that the industry is big and powerful and doesn't want us to realize this.

4.  I KNOW that the Republicans are attacking Barack Obama for the national debt, unemployment, overspending -- the whole economic problem in the U.S. -- and that is NOT HIS DOING.  He was not just stuck with an outrageous mess left by the Bush administration -- he (or whatever Democrat was sure to follow) was SET UP TO FAIL.  The policies of the Bush administration were designed to crash the government -- to destroy revenue, spend trillions on wars that were not included in the budget, defund and dismantle agencies that should have been protecting Americans, replace scientists with lobbyists.

5.  I KNOW that the actual failures of Barack Obama, the ones that have cost him the support of many who believed he would bring progressive change, are based on an election system that is funded by big money, which means ANYONE who gets elected is in debt to corporate interests.   See the movie The Candidate.

6.  I KNOW that electronic voting machines are not accurate and that we must return to paper ballots.

7.  I KNOW that increased protections against "voter fraud" are the result of Republican operatives looking for any way to decrease the number of Democrats voting.

8.  I KNOW that most of those who try to claim moral superiority and push anti-abortion policies repeatedly demonstrate that they are NOT "pro-life" after the children are born, by defunding programs that support the health and education of these children and their parents.

9.  I KNOW that the Neoconservatives who continue to create Republican policies are working with a philosophy that encourages lying to the public, creating ultimate enemies and dire conflicts, building a self-righteousness drenched in religion and patriotism -- all to distract and make money, to keep the masses manageable.

10.  I KNOW that the more we seek to know the truth, and to share it, the more we can create the communities, the country, the world we believe supports humanity.

That's what's on my mind, today.

********


P.S.  Sorry, but I'm not providing links.  Google away.

P.P.S.  I do recommend Brad Friedman, Greg Palast, Seymour Hersh, Mark Crispin Miller, and Bill Moyers, as sources of information, for starters.

Know Bush Facts #23 A and #23B

Based on the belief that the truth shall set you free:

Know Bush Fact #23 A

Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld received a letter from Amnesty International dated JANUARY 10, 2002 (with copies also sent to Secretary of State Colin Powell, FBI Director Robert Mueller, CIA Director George Tenet, and Commander in Chief General Tommy Franks), expressing concern over photographs showing Al-Qaeda suspects hooded while under guard by US troops, and pointing out that the United Nations Committee against Torture had condemned the hooding of suspects, and that such treatment is also covered by the Geneva Convention.

To research/verify, Google "Rumsfeld +hooding."

And #23 B

On September 11, 2001, Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was not in Washington D.C. He was out of the country with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, and William Luti, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Plans and Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, and four other like-minded advisors. They were "busy on unrelated missions in Europe and the Middle East."

Upon their return, Donald Rumsfeld commissioned a team, headed by that same Douglas Feith and William Luti, to scan and sort already-analyzed documents from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies to consider possible interpretations and angles of analysis that these agencies may have missed. Much of the information scanned had already been deemed "not credible" by the experienced intelligence agencies.

Eventually Rumsfeld’s team came to be named The Office of Special Plans.

Staffed by a tight group of like-minded neo-conservatives who advocated regime change in Iraq, the Office of Special Plans displaced the CIA and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency as Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al-Qaeda.

It was "the stovepipe" - a means of funneling upward directly to the White House and National Security Advisor selectively chosen intelligence to serve the ideological ends of the "neo-cons" in the Bush administration.

"They’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together,"

wrote retired Pentagon Middle East specialist, Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office of Undersecretary for Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

She found the work of the Office of Special Plans to be "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-option through deceit of a large segment of the Congress."
Which resulted in Congress giving Bush the authority to use military force against Iraq.

To research/verify, Google "Rumsfeld +Office of Special Plans".

- May 9, 2004