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A Cabal of Criminality

By Manuel Valenzuela

12/02/05 "ICH" -- -- The disaster in Iraq has continued to regress with the same velocity and intensity as when it first started, raging onwards in a classical resistance, guerilla-style form of urban warfare that usually befalls occupying invaders of alien lands, yet as 2005 ends and 2006 gets set to begin, in the minds of millions of Americans finally out of the hypnotic, denial-laced clouds of 9/11, the time has finally arrived to show ever-increasing animosity to a war that was lost the moment the first American boots entered Iraq. Nobody, after all, likes a loser, and nobody jumps on the bandwagon of a so-called superpower nation being bled, of both blood and treasure, by a resistance with one-billionth the financial resources and military might – though possessing much more intelligence and patience – of the nation it is slowly and calculatingly hemorrhaging.

Iraq is now, and always has been, a quagmire that has turned into a suffocating and inextricable tar pit for American forces, where the inevitable defeat of George Bush’s policy combines with the greatest strategic disaster in American history, where the total miscalculation of war and mismanagement of peace has resulted in the collapse of Middle East stability, making America and the world less safe, not more, where wet dreams of imperial domination, fused with delusions of grandeur have helped build a monolithic wall of bad karma that will take decades to tear down.

Iraq, like Vietnam before it, has served to remind us that, like the war on communism, the war on terror is but a charade, a fear engendering escapade, designed to control populations and empower the elite, unleashing fear onto the citizenry while delivering enormous profit to the military-industrial complex. Using Arab men as bogeymen, hidden in the shadows, without faces, countries and, with the help of Hollywood and the corporate media, with a growing brutal reputation, dark skinned Muslims replaced white Soviet Reds as the new American enemy, the new cash cow granting the government and military industrial complex a new generation of destructive war from which to bleed the American taxpayer dry, providing misallocation of resources to the former and enormous profit to the latter.

What the Iraq/Bush war shows the world is how a Cabal of Criminality, numbering less than a few hundred individuals, can bamboozle a nation into a war whose ramifications on our future we cannot yet fully comprehend. The Bush war, the single-greatest blunder in America’s foreign policy history, was spawned by greed-addicted corporatists and treasonous neoconartists, presstitute lackeys and political hacks, placed in charge of US foreign policy and the propaganda acting as corporate media, easily in control of a nitwit, ignorant puppet, possessing his bully pulpit from which to spew the fabrications and manipulations needed to con America. Delusional, incompetent, dangerous and trapped in bubbles of naked grandeur, expecting fictional flowers and candy to flow from Iraqis expected to greet Americans as liberators, the Cabal of Criminality had no qualms sacrificing thousands of American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, for greed, power, profit, wealth and ego.

Through lies, deceit, fear-mongering, immorality, chicanery and criminality a group of a few hundred people led America into war, using the new Pearl Harbor, 9/11, with its plethora of highly charged emotions and fragile psyches, to launch a war they thought would be only the first of many, using Iraq as a beachhead to invade Iran and Syria. Suffocating inside the clouds of 9/11, blinded to reality and captured by delusion, America’s normally stable citizenry was mobilized to seek revenge through war, was conditioned to hate through scapegoats, was silenced by fear and intimidation, was brainwashed to blindly follow through incessant propaganda, jingoism and Madison Avenue style marketing.

In short, Americans were used, enslaved to the dictates of power, branded as sheeple, not people, our emotions of hatred, vengeance, fear and justice used against us, making us impotent conduits of crime and murder. Complicit we became in the delusional game played by the Cabal of Criminality, where the death of 3000 people became the key to unlocking the gates of war upon Mesopotamia. The plan had been set in motion, the new Pearl Harbor was allowed to bear fruit, the cataclysmic event needed to enrage the people and grease up the machines of war would not be stopped.

With each passing year, with each passing month the Iraq/Bush war has descended more and more into chaos, a battle defined by the resistance, not the US army. Using the most sophisticated weaponry money can buy, with the most modern technologies, possessing incalculable financial resources, American forces find themselves losing to an enemy that fights against occupation and for freedom. The resistance is homegrown, composed of fathers and sons, daughters and mothers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers and cousins, all fighting an invading army they see as the catalyst of death, mass murder, burnings, maimings, intolerable suffering and cruel and inhumane collective punishment. The resistance has increased exponentially – and will not diminish until American forces are expelled – with every death, maiming, destroyed home, rape, imprisonment, shooting and act of collective punishment upon the Iraqi people, with every death of a son, father, mother or daughter.

America is the cause and the effect of the resistance, the reason Iraqis fight, whether carrying AK-47’s or giving logistical support. Whether planting improvised explosive devices or acting as eyes and ears infiltrating the Green Zone, Iraqis see America as the enemy, yet one more imperial invading army thinking itself blessed by providence to claim the lands of the Fertile Crescent. A guerilla army cannot function without the support of the citizenry, and neither can the success the resistance is having against American forces. With every Iraqi death a dozen more resistance fighters join the battle, with every Iraqi death or American crime the hatred grows and calls for vengeance beckon. Trapped inside a vicious cycle of violence begetting violence, American forces have been their own worst enemy. Each year the resistance grows stronger, more sophisticated, more dangerous, learning, improving, evolving, and becoming ever more destructive. America’s presence and prolonged occupation of Iraq will only exacerbate an already volatile vortex of violence.

Yet to the Cabal of Criminality lurking and slithering in the halls of power the lives of thousands of America’s young mean not a thing. Tens of thousands have returned maimed, burned or scarred not only physically, but mentally as well, changed, altered, innocence lost, wickedness spawned. Tens of thousands will forever linger in the purgatory that their mind has become, lost among the ghosts of the innocents they killed, maimed, raped or tortured, haunted by the visions of death they saw and the realities of war they were forced to endure, and confront. Burning inside their minds Hell has arisen, echoing the screams of the suffering and the drips of the blood they helped spill, hearing the cries of armless children, weeping widows and fatherless daughters. Hell on Earth, after all, lies with the demons of life lurking inside the crevices deep within the mind.

Trained to maim and kill without asking questions, robbed of their ability to think independently, taught to never question authority, always following orders, no matter how immoral or wicked the assignment, these oftentimes young, impressionable, easily conditioned soldiers are forced to confront the most evil endeavor of man, that thing called war, through the prism of human psychology, not of robotic understanding. The human animal becomes unleashed in war, untangled from most precepts of humanity, devoid of those virtues that contain us in peacetime. Raw emotion and animalistic passion are resurrected with the smell of burned flesh, the taste of blood, the adrenaline of self preservation. Quickly the human mind is forced to make of the enemy a creation of subhuman birth, transforming man and women into beast and monster, a perfect way for the human mind to release the remaining morsels of morality and accept crimes against fellow human beings.

The Cabal of Criminality has transformed American citizen soldiers into conduits of human evil, importing into Iraq tyranny, American style, replacing wickedness with wickedness, negative energy with negative energy. Thousands of normal, beautiful and otherwise decent human beings have been forced to commit heinous crimes against Iraqis for nothing but lies, greed and criminality. They have been forced to combat peoples fighting for freedom from occupation, freedom from tyranny, freedom to live in security and happiness. Fighting an entire population, killing over a hundred thousand people, destroying homes, lives and futures, unleashing hatred and animosity where none existed before, American forces have been forced to confront and oftentimes displace their own morality, replacing them with the principles of the Cabal of Criminality whose unscrupulous pathology bulldozes over anything and everything standing in their way, caring not an ounce for humanity, or for the effects their actions will one day have on future generations of Americans.

The ultimate victims of these principles, besides the Iraqi people, are American soldiers who upon returning to the safe shores of the United States find themselves transformed in mind and body, their personalities affected by what they saw, what they inflicted and were witness to. Many will return with the demons of war, of human wickedness embedded, forced to relieve stresses seen and experienced with lives that have been eroded by human violence. Tens of thousands damaged physically, missing arms and legs, some burned and scarred, others brain damaged beyond repair, yet it is those psychologically maimed that will have to struggle through marriages that no longer have meaning, through jobs that make no sense, through the normalcy of life that no longer exists. Divorce, unemployment, homelessness, addictions, abandonment, Hell on Earth, nightmares and lives forever altered are the mementos for many soldiers of the Iraq/Bush war, courtesy of the Cabal of Criminality.

The Cabal of Criminality and America

Through every lie, distortion, deception and crime that led America to war a pillar of American greatness has been lost, slowly eroding the foundations upon which a great nation once stood. A beacon of hope and human rights for billions of human beings for decades, the United States now has a sitting Vice President espousing torture, rendition and the destruction of due process. For years portending to fight the “Evil Empire’s” network of gulags, today America has its own gulag network throughout the vast reaches of Earth, torturing and murdering human beings, keeping hidden its atrocities, its activities, its lies. Proclaiming the Bush war as a means of cleansing Iraq of tyranny, America has nonetheless imported tyranny under the rubric of new blood and methods. Torture, rape, false imprisonment, white phosphorus, depleted uranium, collective punishment, mass murder, assassinations, insecurity, suffering and disappearances have become the hallmark of Iraq during American occupation.

A nation once admired and adored, the light that attracted freedom and democracy, has been extinguished in the minds of billions. The hypocrisy of America’s foreign policy can be seen worldwide, even if it still blinds hundreds of millions within its borders. Destroying Iraq and its culture only to help rebuild it; supporting the devastating apartheid and collective punishment of Palestinians by Israel; maintaining in power corrupt kings and despots in the Middle East, robbing hundreds of millions of the same freedom and democracy proclaimed for Iraq; labeling as a threat and as dictator a democratically elected leader in Venezuela when the last two American presidential elections have been filled with fraud and controversy, whose only crimes has been helping out the people of his nation through oil revenues sought by American corporations; calling as corrupt members of foreign governments and of international organizations when America’s Congress and Bush’s Administration is filled to the rafters with corruption and cronies and the most unscrupulous politicians known to exist, transforming America’s government into the bordello of the elite and the whorehouse of the corporatist few.

America proclaims to stand with the world but in reality trounces treaties and protocols and has become a rogue nation acting solely for its own corporate interests. Where once America’s Presidents were welcome to foreign lands with open arms, flowers and candy, today only hatred and anger await George Bush, with streets filled with protests and loathing, forcing him to travel in a vacuum, surrounded by an army of armed bodyguards, made to confront the animosity on the street of every country and city he visits, having become the laughingstock of the public in the open and of politicians in private.

The new America, born in sin and arrogance, delusional in Manifest Destiny, bred in overabundant gluttony, consumerist and materialist, fathered by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the Cabal of Criminality, a country flocked by sheeple, ignorant and conditioned, indifferent to a world growing up around it, living delusions of empire and of omnipotence, building hatred against it and its policies throughout the planet, slowly dumbing down its citizens, losing its edge in the sciences and arts, producing a nation of acquiescent automatons brainwashed to never question authority and always faithfully follow the crimes of governance.

The new America would rather spend $500 billion a year on the military industrial complex, and an additional $200-300 billion for the Iraq/Bush war instead of on education, healthcare, Katrina, homelessness, enlightenment, equality and infrastructure, in the process condemning tomorrow’s adults to a nation without wisdom, vision and equality. The new America is producer and consumer, from cradle to grave, where slave wages abound for the working class and tax breaks thrive for the wealthy, creating a growing gap between haves and have nots, between the educated and the rest of us.

The new America is a nation never reared or disciplined, possessing the attention span of ten second sound bites and the naiveté of always placing blind faith in corrupt and incompetent leadership, a land living for the present, not the future, forgetting lessons from the past, its people programmed to seek the fictions, perfections and fantasies of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, millions of its citizens doped up on pharmaceutical drugs, depressed when reality triumphs over fiction, when real life eclipses dumbed down fantasy.

America is a country lacking the wisdom of older civilizations that comes with centuries of existence, having become the bully of the world, a rogue nation ignorant of other lands and cultures, possessing a government that acts on animal instinct, not reason, ready at a moments notice to destroy the world’s great cultures, with millions of its inhabitants conditioned from birth to the commands of corporate television, becoming the twenty-first century’s version of the “good Germans” of yesteryear, eager to cheer upon the war crimes being committed in their name, ready to celebrate the destruction of culture and the maiming of spirit, marching in lock step to the tunes of their manipulated hatred and thirst for dark-skinned blood.

America is a land where the corruption endemic in Washington is easily forgotten, where complacency of convenience leads to complicity of criminality, where the pilfering of so-called billions of dollars in Iraqi reconstruction funds and misappropriation of billions of dollars in Iraqi aid and oil revenues by Bush and Cheney cronies and fraudsters is ignored, quickly forgotten by a populace suddenly enthralled by the next adaptation of sensationalist and mind numbing corporate media designed to distract and quickly make forget.

The Cabal of Criminality is the epitome of an America decades in the making, of a land no longer able to see the awesome spectacle of the dawn of a new day, of a nation on the decline, steadily guiding itself towards inevitable implosion. The Cabal of Criminality is the epitome of gluttony, of arrogance, greed and the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar, of crony capitalism and debauched democracy, of absolute power corrupting absolutely, a representation of what we have become, or of what we have allowed into our midst. The degenerate landfill that Washington has become, full of feces-saturated flies roaming atop governance, corruption having become their sustenance, robbing the nation blind, bending over to the sodomizing power of the corporate world, is at once both the anomaly of honor and integrity and the putrid sewer rotting the nation whole. This city, once thought the pinnacle of modern civilization, has become the cesspool ecosystem for the species called the Cabal of Criminality.

The Cabal of Criminality Exposed

The Cabal of Criminality has transformed the land of the free and the home of the brave, helping degenerate it from sea to shining sea, creating the mirror image of that which we detest the most, smearing our name with the torture devices and procedures of Abu Ghraib, the dehumanizing conditions at Guantanamo and the clandestine crime committed in all of America’s newfound gulags. They have shown the world America’s true colors of terrorism, from chemical warfare and Agent Orange in Vietnam to the use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium in Iraq to the sponsorship and training of thieves, dictators and murderers now roaming the planet.

This is the same Cabal of Criminality, it must be recalled, that supported Saddam Hussein in his massacres against Kurds, Shia and during his chemical warfare campaign against Iran, using mostly American made weapons. This is the same Cabal that once green lighted the rise of autocratic dictators throughout the world, severely damaging the cherished principles of human rights, freedom and democracy they now hypocritically parade at every public relations stunt. This is the same Cabal that supported Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, helping arm and financially assisting his mujahedeen against the Soviets, calling them freedom fighters then but terrorists now.

Knowing perfectly well that the Bush war is only creating thousands more hatred-filled terrorists throughout the Muslim world, the Cabal of Criminality nonetheless continues to destroy, massacre and bomb, hoping enough enemies are created, and enough blowback boomerangs back, to sustain a decades long excuse for perpetual war and thus, perpetual profit, wealth and power. These individuals, a minute minority of the American population, eagerly await the next attack on American soil, willing to sacrifice innocent human beings in furtherance of their sinister, nefarious goals. To them, the American people are pawns, nothing short of collateral damage needed to manipulate the emotions of the masses and maintain, and expand, an immoral war without purpose, based on fictional charades and clever marketing techniques borrowed from past criminal regimes.

The Cabal of Criminality have accelerated the arrival of fascism onto our shores, mutating government with the tentacles of corporatist power, embedding their miscreant hacks, cronies and lackeys throughout once sacrosanct halls of power. They have succeeded in saturating our television monitors with pure propaganda and distraction-filled, dumbed-down programming, deploying their presstitutes in the media to manipulate, control and condition the people.

It is almost impossible to comprehend how a couple of hundred miscreants could hijack America’s government, its media, institutions and foreign policy, attaining in a few years, thanks to the new Pearl Harbor, long held goals to launch human evil throughout the globe. It is difficult to realize that a few hundred human beings could deceive an entire nation of 300 million citizens, using lies, manipulations and the powers of the corporate media to march us straight into a condemned war from where no good outcome can rise. A handful of criminals, thieves and murderers, thugs and gangsters, greed-infested warmongers, have helped condemn America and the world to years of insecurity and instability for what has been done cannot soon be alleviated or forgotten.

Throughout the planet innocent people are dying every day thanks to the workings of the Cabal of Criminality, whether by a suicide bombing or by economic genocide or by market colonialism or by state-sponsored terror. The policies of the Cabal affect all corners of Earth, becoming a contagious virus in some nations and a death sentence in others, whether under the guise of free trade, neoliberalism or of fighting the fictional “war on terror.” To this elite group it does not matter that Sub-Saharan Africans die by the millions every year because of AIDS, or that billions living in the Third World linger in perpetual poverty, destiny calling upon them to be born and die in an Earthly Purgatory of suffering.

The Cabal of Criminality cares nothing for 45 million Americans without healthcare, nor for the millions of socially engineered children poor, undereducated and malnourished, sentenced to become the next generation of slave labor, or the millions made homeless by the evils of twenty-first century American capitalism. Returning veterans of the Bush war, whether damaged mentally, physically, financially or socio-economically, are quickly dispatched aside and forgotten by the same Cabal that sent them to Iraq to act both as cannon fodder and as operators for the instruments of death in furtherance of corporate aggrandizement, hidden from cameras and the public’s attention, seen more as liabilities to the continuance of war than as the heroes they rightly are, in the end becoming yet one more group of casualties, sent to kill and be killed for nothing but greed, profit, wealth, ego and power.

The names of those comprising the Cabal of Criminality are well known, as are most of their faces. They are traitors to humanity and America, thieves and murderers empowered by the corruption of the system and the silent passivity of the masses. They are war criminals, espousing torture, the use of chemical weapons, collective punishment, assassinations, carpet bombing, the use of depleted uranium (clandestine nuclear war), false imprisonment and the use of gulags. They have murdered over 100,000 Iraqis, over 2,000 American soldiers, all the while ruining the lives of countless more.

Tyranny is their calling card; the suppression of freedom and democracy at home and abroad the means by which they retain power. To them dissent is unpatriotic, protest is subversive, debate to their decisions treasonous. Dividing a nation is a tool of expediency; using religion and ignorance to build their base, brew hatred and stir anger is part of doing business. In their worldview, the truth is the enemy, slavery is freedom, war is peace, ignorance is strength and reality is what they decide it to be.

Driven by greed, these armchair chicken hawks, lacking the wisdom that comes with experience, march other people’s children into immoral war, becoming warmongers trapped inside their own bubble, living in delusion, not able to see reality. These Mayberry Machiavelli’s are amateur dictators living the wet dreams of long since dead princes and kings, trying to resurrect fiefdoms, kingdoms and empires, sustaining their bubble-filled egos with the addiction to temporary power. Desperately wanting to leave a legacy they have bumbled, stumbled and made their ingrained imbecility known through their litany of failures, becoming a laughingstock to those who know and to those who will read the future words of historians.

Yet even in the face of constant failure the Cabal of Criminality persists, for their kind tramples of anything to retain power. They are liars, connivers, fraudsters and embezzlers, the worst of the human condition, laying waste, through their policies and control mechanisms, to millions of human energies around the planet. For they are a dangerous and vicious animal, capable of anything when cornered and trapped, sleazy and unscrupulous, caring not an ounce for the consequences to their actions. They have much destruction and carnage yet to unleash, for in their actions can be seen the madness of fools, the inherent callousness of psychopathic tendencies. If left powerful and strong there is no predicting what their next move might be.

Quite simply, they belong in a tribunal, tried for crimes against humanity and against the planet, rotting away inside the dark cells at The Hague or in Abu Ghraib, imprisoned for the world entire to see, finally made to stop their madness, given a taste of their own medicine, forced to contemplate the deviousness of their actions and the results of their existence.

They are the Cabal of Criminality, a mere asterisk to history if dealt with right. They stand guilty of war crimes, international crimes, crimes against humanity and the planet. They are guilty of treason, becoming traitors to America, its citizens and what we stand for, our principles, our values and our futures. These vultures, however, will in most likelihood never see the inside of a cell, much less a tribunal, continuing to pillage and destroy the beauty of mankind, for years to come condemning us ever closer to the inevitable annihilation of our civilization.

For they are the Cabal of Criminality, not knowing, not caring and not understanding that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, that for every Iraqi resistance fighter killed a dozen more take his place, that negative energy always boomerangs back, that karma is a powerful bitch and that, in the end, the truth always rises from the ashes of lies to shed light on a new, glorious day

Manuel Valenzuela <manuel@valenzuelas.net> is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current events observer, Internet columnist and author of "Echoes in the Wind", a novel now published by Authorhouse.com.