What lies beneath the recent National Intelligence Estimate revealing the truth beneath the lies of the Neocon warlords regarding the nuclear threat of Iran?

Those of us who follow the machinations of government know the intelligence community did everything it could outside of mutiny to reveal the deceptions that led to the invasion of Iraq before Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet folded on the eve of disaster. 

They not only failed to stop the war and occupation, they were compelled to sit on their hands while Cheney, Bush and company pinned the blame on the intelligence community for the fairy tales they deliberately concocted.

The intelligence community – even at the cost of abandoning their traditional “team player” role – will not walk down that path again.

Burn me once and it’s failure of intelligence; burn me twice and it’s a failure of intellect.

The NIE is a consensus of all sixteen intelligence agencies in the nation and the consensus holds (1) that this administration is dumb enough to launch yet another catastrophic war before the official War President leaves office and (2) that they will not hesitate to use the same strategy of manufactured intelligence and deception to accomplish it.

When Russian dissident and chess champion Garry Kasparov (recently jailed for leading a public protest of Russian policies) appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher, the host challenged him to explain why President Vladimir Putin remained popular with the Russian people.

Kasparov responded: How do you know?

It served as a reminder that we should always question what we are fed as factual information by corporate media. You cannot trust opinion polls in a police state any more than you can trust government-sanctioned media in a war zone.

In recent weeks a consensus seems to have formed within the mainstream that the surge of American troops has succeeded in reducing violence to a manageable level. Even among those who are ostensibly opposed to the war, the debate has shifted to the political front: whether the Iraqi government is achieving reconciliation.

In the pressure cooker of warfare, with the shadow of death lurking around every corner, in every alleyway, behind every closed door and on every open road, the lower survival functions of the brain override the cerebral and the limits of civilized behavior are pushed to the breaking point.

Under conditions of any war, every soldier must face a test. Under the conditions of a war stripped of any discernible moral grounding, the test is severe and the outcome is often gut wrenching.

A recent report by CBS News attempting to document the suicide rate among veterans of the war on terror uncovered a disturbing trend. In the year 2005 alone, there were an estimated 6,265 suicides among veterans of military service. Among 20-24 year olds, the suicide rate for 2004-2005 was estimated at some three times the rate for non-veterans.

A separate study found that veterans composed one quarter of all homeless people in the United States despite being only 11% of the general population (Associated Press 11/8/07).

Clearly, there is something profoundly disturbing about being a soldier in the war on terror.

Part One: Recognizing the Core Problem

In decades past, young men of my social upbringing spent Sundays under the hood of their cars. Roadster or station wagon, the car always needed work and we needed the car to pursue the American dream. The difficulty was: Every time we figured out how to fix one thing, something else would go wrong. We were not trained to look at the internal combustion engine as a complex, integrated system. We treated the symptom that would enable us to get through the day.

Modern vehicles with computer diagnostics have all but eliminated the culture of auto mechanics. If something goes awry, you find out in short order the root cause of the problem and correct it.

The problem of compulsive auto repair was solved by looking at the big picture, taking the grand view and treating the system as a whole rather than the symptoms.
 

The problem with Senator Hillary Clinton is not that she is a woman. I would love to support a woman for president – preferably a qualified black woman like Congresswoman Barbara Lee – but as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher instructs us, gender is not the decisive factor in selecting a national leader.

The problem with Senator Clinton is not that she is liberal. If Senator Clinton is liberal, then Rush Limbaugh is moderate. To the extent that Ms Clinton was an active participant in her husband’s administration, she was instrumental in evicting the left from mainstream politics. Like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did for the Labor Party in Britain, the Clintons redefined the Democratic Party by embracing corporate deregulation, cutting social services (welfare to workfare reform) and promoting international trade agreements that cut the heart out of organized labor.