Iran's PsyWar Psych

The Iranian government is conducting an information operation to convince the West that an invasion of the Islamic Republic would not be easy going. Iran, apparently anticipating an American invasion, has quietly been restructuring its military and testing a new military doctrine that calls for a decentralized, Iraqi-style guerrilla campaign against an invading force...

"It's probably a smart policy for the Iranian leadership to get this out in order to convince the U.S. military that they are ready for guerrilla resistance from the get-go," said Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.

"They know they can't repulse our air strikes -- we can strike from a long distance making it hard to shoot us down -- so the only thing they can do in that case is move assets to secret locations," he said.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies dismissed the reports of the Iranian military acquiring new capabilities, saying it has been training in asymmetric tactics for years.

Iranian war planners expect that the first step taken by an invading force would be to occupy the oil-rich Khuzestan region, secure the sensitive Strait of Hormuz and cut off the Iranian military's oil supply.

Foreign diplomats who monitor Iran's army say that Iran's leadership has acknowledged it stands little chance of defeating U.S. armed forces with conventional military doctrine...

The shift in focus to guerrilla warfare against an occupying army in the aftermath of a successful invasion mirrors developments in Iraq, where a triumphant U.S. military campaign has been followed by three years of slow, indecisive struggle with insurgent and terrorist forces.

Kilo This - Pound That

Last year the Royal Swedish Navy's diesel-electric attack submarine Gotland managed to snap several pictures of the 9th NIMITZ - class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan during a wargames exercise in the Pacific Ocean, effectively "sinking" the aircraft carrier. The wargames exercise was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the US fleet against diesel-electric submarines, which some have noted as severely lacking.

The Iranians have 3 Soviet built (perhaps 5) kilo class submarines with diesel-electric propulsion systems similar to, though somewhat less advanced, than the Swedish Navy's Gotland class submarines.

In the fall of 2000, the Royal Swedish Navy's submarine HMS Halland (also Gotland Class) swept the board in exercises with Spanish and French naval units in the Atlantic. Futhermore, she also defeated the USS Houston a Los Angeles-class nuclear attack from the USA.


It appears that Iran might be in possession of shkval torpedo technology, according to recent claims emanating from Tehran.



Iranian Kilo class diesel-electric submarines operating in the unique marine milieu of the Persian Gulf might pose a significant challenge to full spectrum dominance ambitions and USN security concerns given certain asymmetric pecularities in US submarine technology and tactics. If Iranian Kilo class submarines are fitted with Shkval torpedo technology then the prospect of successful suicide attacks against extremely high value targets as the Nimitz must be a factor of pivotal consideration.

It is therefor of some noteworthiness that the USN has been engaged in intense exercises with the Swedish Navy's diesel-electric submarine Gotland for the past year, developing capabilities to counter the threats posed by similar diesel-electric submarines. The timing, intensity, and specific nature of the training regimin might be considered interesting when assessing US schedules and designs for Iran.

Timetable: Gotland & San Diego
Sweden has long held joint exercises with US forces, including submarine warfare and rescue exercises. In 2004, the Swedish Government decided to deepen that cooperation on the Naval front so as to further develop both nations' capabilities in submarine operations.


On March 21 2005, Rear Admiral John J Waikwicz, head of ASW COMMAND signed an agreement with Sweden for lease of the submarine Gotland and a crew of 36 servicepersons. The Gotland is to be stationed in San Diego.

On May 10 2005, the Gotland is readied for transport to San Diego.

On May 8 2006, the Gotland is drydocked for maintenance. This is the second drydock of its Sand Diego stay.

On May 11 2006, a letter home from the crew of the Gotland is published. It cursively describes some of the exercises they have engaged in during their year in San Diego.

It would seem that the Iranian Kilo class submarines might not pose a problem of the same dignity to the USN as they most recently and surely did. Thanks Meatballs!

Meanwhile, the bedwetting paranoiacs over at LGF continue to deride Sweden as a land of treachery with a government soft on the so-called War on Terror simply because Sweden has often taken mild-mannered issue with Israel's rather horrendous stewardship of the occupied territories.

As always, the likes of LGF are as loud and shrill as they are almost always completely wrong in their racist and vicious rantings. But such are the pitfalls of being born and raised as an incontinent whiner. Thank goodness for super absorbent adult diapers. Now where the heck are my industrial strength earplugs?

U.S. Intelligence "Trolling" Through Iranian Financial Holdings Abroad

Economic warfare, in the form of sanctions that may drive up the cost of oil worldwide, are being put into place against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

U.S. intelligence agencies have spent months trolling through the personal accounts of Iranian leaders in foreign banks, analyzing Iranian financial systems and transactions and assessing how the government does its banking. They have calculated the amount of foreign investment at stake and even which charities have connections to the Tehran government...

The plan is designed to curtail the financial freedom of every Iranian official, individual and entity the Bush administration considers connected not only to nuclear enrichment efforts but to terrorism, government corruption, suppression of religious or democratic freedom, and violence in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories. It would restrict the Tehran government's access to foreign currency and global markets, shut its overseas accounts and freeze assets held in Europe and Asia.

The United States, which has imposed unilateral sanctions on Iran for nearly three decades, would shoulder few of the costs of its ambitious new proposal. But internal U.S. assessments suggest that the sanctions could not hurt Tehran without causing significant economic pain for Washington's friends. That calculation has made the plan a difficult sell, especially in capitals such as Rome and Tokyo, which import significant quantities of Iranian oil.

In an effort to minimize financial risks, the plan does not include oil or trade embargoes. But, according to a Treasury Department assessment, it could jolt world oil prices nonetheless if Iran responds by limiting exports. The internal assessment also predicts additional economic repercussions for Western allies, such as trade loss, and adverse effects for the Iranian people as their government is squeezed out of global markets and foreign banks stop taking their business...

(T)he impact on U.S. allies could be steep as well. A Treasury Department memo recently predicted that Britain, which does not import Iranian oil, faces a low level of financial risk if it agrees to implement the sanctions plan. Germany, which imports 1 percent of its oil from Iran, and France, which gets 6 percent, are deemed at medium financial risk, whereas Italy and Japan would be taking the largest risks. The assessment is considered internally "an initial -- first blush -- estimate based on each country's overall volume of exports to Iran, dependence on Iranian oil and degree of investment in Iran oil projects," according to the Treasury memo.


The tendency of U.S. punitive initiatives abroad to backfire on the American people is unrecognized only by the administration in Washington.

If (more likely, when) the Iran economic and military gambit blows up in the face of U.S. interests, Bush and his enablers will stand there with a straight face and tell everyone that nobody thought [enter ensuing catastrophe] could happen.

Blair Caved To U.S. Pressure To Change Speech

The London Sunday Telegraph is reporting that British Prime Minister Tony Blair yielded to White House pressure to harden his stance against Iran in a speech delivered on Friday at Georgetown University.

Blair was also compelled to modify his words on global warming and on whether an American should continue to permanently hold the position of head of the World Bank.

Tony Blair made significant changes to one of his most important foreign policy speeches after bowing to American objections, The Sunday Telegraph has learned...

Objections by President George W Bush's inner circle played a key role in the alterations, which were made just before Mr Blair delivered his landmark address at Georgetown University in Washington, on Friday, British sources have revealed.

Only three hours before the speech was delivered, Downing Street officials were briefing journalists that the Prime Minister would stress that "change should not be imposed" on Iran, reflecting the British view that bombing or invading Iran is not a realistic option.

American officials had insisted, however, that the possibility of military action remained "on the table", arguing that this helped to exert maximum pressure on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

By the time he made his speech, Mr Blair had significantly bowed to the American position, claiming "I am not saying we should impose change" and leaving the door open for a military attack.

He also backed away from a planned demand for a change in the running of the world's biggest financial institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The Prime Minister originally intended to spell out a plan for Europe and the United States to give up their exclusive rights to install their own nationals as heads of the bank and the IMF respectively.

This would help to persuade smaller nations to give up their effective right to choose the United Nations secretary general, in favour of a move to install a leading international figure. Instead, Mr Blair's speech glossed over the issues, merely citing a "powerful case for reform".

Another planned section was intended to take a tough line on global warming and the Kyoto Treaty, which Washington still has not signed.

In the event, Mr Blair merely claimed: "We must act on climate change", but did not go into detail. At this point, as a mobile telephone rang in the audience, he even made a joke about American interference. "I hope that isn't the White House telling me they don't agree with that," he said. "They act very quickly, these guys."


The White House interfering with an address by the British Prime Minister is the final proof that the "special relationship" between the United States and Great Britain under Bush has a quite different meaning than previously understood by defense (Br. defence) and security cognoscenti since WWII.

Persian Pretexts - Safe For Go

Iran offered in 2003 to accept peace with Israel and cut off material assistance to Palestinian armed groups and to pressure them to halt terrorist attacks within Israel's 1967 borders, according to a secret Iranian proposal to the United States.

The Iranian proposal also offered to accept much tighter controls by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in exchange for "full access to peaceful nuclear technology". It offered "full cooperation with IAEA based on Iranian adoption of all relevant instruments (93+2 and all further IAEA protocols)".

[I]n 2003, Bush refused to allow any response to the Iranian offer to negotiate an agreement that would have accepted the existence of Israel. Flynt Leverett, then the senior specialist on the Middle East on the National Security Council staff, recalled in an interview that it was "literally a few days" between the receipt of the Iranian proposal and the dispatch of a message to the Swiss ambassador expressing displeasure that he had forwarded it to Washington. Asia Times Online

Welcome Time

Rupert Murdoch's London-based newspaper, is launching a U.S. edition June 6 after seeing large increases in Times Online readership in the U.S.

One year ago, an employee within the highest circle of British government leaked to the Times of London a memo that was to become known as the Downing Street memo. It proves that everything the Bush administration said about the Iraq invasion was a lie. Heard much detail despite it being widely reported in the rest of the world for over a year now?

The Downing Street memo contains minutes from a meeting of Tony Blair's war cabinet, held in July of 2002. In the meeting, two of Blair's top officials report on discussions just held in Washington with officials at the most senior levels of the Bush administration.

The memo shows unequivocally that the Bush administration had decided by July 2002, at the latest, to invade Iraq and that "...the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy"

Based on the disturbing Downing Street memo revelations, 89 members of Congress sent a letter to president Bush to demand an immediate explanation. Heard much back on that yet?

Welcome to New York, Times of London.

The MacBeth Deke

...the photographs, seized by the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), show many victims shot at close range in the head and chest, execution-style, according to sources who have seen them. One image shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer. Both have been shot dead. More at The Independent

Sorry Protein Wisdom. Well syntaxed but predictably wrong again. Fear doth contort perceptions but where would your clan of whining cowers be without them.

Info-Op you.

The Yellow 101st Fighting Keyboard Squadron

We posted a comment over in Fearpiss country a few days ago, as rendered here per your convenience. The faithful bedwetters came out in full indignant force, swinging with their kevlarized Gumbies and flack jacketed Websters. Our java based fear meters at SMC were swamped. Go check out the yellow maelstrom. It's funny and they are definitely not without syntactic talents. We posted as M1 or Meatball One.

Behind The Blinds

A regular .Mil reader sent us a link to the following take on Protein Wisdom's tussle with SMC's M1. The writer managed to say what we only wish we imagined to formulate:

But I ask now, what indeed is a “psy-op” or “info-op” or just plain bullshit anymore these days? In this age where the doors to psychological manipulation have been swung open as wide as can be, where anyone with the money, know-how or impetus can learn the techniques honed down to the level of the very sheen of what it looks like to have a soul and be able to prick it and make whatever is left of the soul bleed — who is fooling who? Or is the fooling simply another feature of the vortex which is what an intentional global conflagration of crime looks like? The official government “ops-men” thus being nothing more than another player at the table. Let the dead bury the dead and all that.

When fair is foul and foul fair, what more is there for a centralized psy-op firm to do besides reap the bounty of what it hath sown? Dunne IV

Pravda Redux

Bloomberg reports that the "Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin ordered a probe of dozens of television stations.

Although the number of media formats and outlets has exploded in recent years, television remains the dominant news source in the United States. More than three-quarters of U.S. adults rely on local TV news, and more than 70 percent turn to network TV or cable news on a daily or near-daily basis, according to a January 2006 Harris Poll. The quality and integrity of television reporting thus significantly impacts the public's ability to evaluate everything from consumer products to medical services to government policies.


To reach this audience—and to add a veneer of credibility to clients' messages—the public relations industry uses video news releases (VNRs). VNRs are pre-packaged "news" segments and additional footage created by broadcast PR firms, or by publicists within corporations or government agencies.


VNRs are designed to be seamlessly integrated into newscasts, and are freely provided to TV stations. Although the accompanying information sent to TV stations identifies the clients behind the VNRs, nothing in the material for broadcast does.

Without strong disclosure requirements and the attention and action of TV station personnel, viewers cannot know when the news segment they're watching was bought and paid for by the very subjects of that "report." (CMD)

Timing Is Everything When Staging MacBeth

Timing really is everything in the performing arts and especially when staging a MacBeth known for its propensity to jinx any of its principals. The timing of this production was on the money however.

Somehow though, the Mackers often finally end up getting whacked and sacked - and we are not referring to Jesse. He was a given.

They should have used a skinny-assed stammerer named Jesse Scott instead of a MacBeth out of respect for the jinx. So we're guessing that what goes around in this info-op will probably come back around and head all the way home. Sloppy per arrogance - perhaps. But then again, that still remains to be seen and even so, by then we will all have shuffled on and only the immediate damage of the hit will be what is remembered and feared - or celebrated. And really, that's all that counts.

Two separate investigations, one NCIS and one by an Army General, have turned up evidence of war crimes committed by a small number of Marines in the Iraqi city of Haditha and subsequent attempts to cover up the misconduct, according to U.S. officials. EFFWIT has this base covered, as usual.

Sound familiar?

Mackers, Backers, Detractors, Attackers - A Scottish Play

As a followup to our previous coverage of the Jesse MacBeth video, we've posted a comment we left yesterday at another blog. We found the blog with its original post and trailing comments perfectly suitable to illustrate the very point we set out to make.

This video is definitely a must see as Goldstein's entertaining post and its trailing comments are a must read.

The MacBeth Op's been run like a classic info-op, setting up a strawman with which to mine against the return to areas of inquiry harbouring legitimate claims and grievances. It's 101 stuff right out of one of my skullduggerous freshman textbooks.

Most of the responses here prove my point and are the very reactions sought after per operational design. It's successes like this, as demonstrated by your unrestrained glee of solving the puzzle, that makes info-ops like this so entertainingly rewarding to work with. Your very exposé, and its limited depth of comprehension, comprises the actual honeytrap.

Those that take unbridled pride in the inevitable expostion of an enigma designed for easy elucidation, and draw far reaching and boistrous conclusions about the validity of everything else critical, are in fact the honeytrapped - not the reasonably gullible that originally clung to MacBeth's revelatory promise.

Judging by the blog's post and the ensuing comments I dare say that most everyone here now has sticky feet.

Thanks for making this line of work so easy for my successors.

Black Or White Or None Of The Above - Rove To The End

Our offshore chips are still on Leopold and a pending indictment of Rove.

Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin is a former narcolawyer and hardly the most likely ambassador of veracity and ethical behaviour. Luskin has a track record of offering up contradictory statements on behalf of his clients. If he's making denials then we're betting they are denials qualified by Orwellian hairsplitting the likes of claims by the Adminstration that the government isn't spying on ordinary Americans. We might do well by remembering who we are dealing with here.

Besides arguing a case before the Supreme Court with a gold earring, Luskin represented Stephen Saccoccia and accepted payment in the form of gold bars and Swiss wire transfers. Saccoccia is a convicted money-launderer who laundered money for several Columbian drug cartels.

What we have before us is a brazen mini-infoOp run by Rove and Luskin. But Leopold ain't fooled.
Perhaps Rove is in the process of copping a plea and rolling on some skullduggerous folks*, but that would only make matters all the merrier. (*Original text post-linked on May 28)

The One And Only Recipe For Swedish Meatballs In This Whole Wide And Wild World Of Ours

Over half of all the visits tracked at SMC come from anticipative gourmands and gourmets entering swedish meatballs recipe or some appended variant thereof (tasty, delicious, hubby-pleasing, spicy, gay, Neo-Con, bondage, hypoallergenic, IKEA, frozen, microwave, forbidden, big, succulent...) into their favorite search engines. What a monumental disappointment they were in for upon arriving here at SMC!


To date, SMC has only published one post with a recipe resulting in something marginally edible. The post referenced a company selling some carcinogenic concoction it claimed would result in perfect meatballs when added to ground beef and stirred. Goodness me!

So finally, here it is. Here's the one and only recipe in the world for authentic Swedish Meatballs. All other claimant recipes are shams and the unenlightened works of primitive imposters for the hungry and bewildered.

What exclusively defines a Swedish Meatball is not its precise ingredients. It isn't the circumference or the spherical symmetry of the balls either (though something approximating a ball is never entirely wrong.)

The sole defining factors of what comprises genuine Swedish Meatballs is who is doing the rolling, and for what reason the rolling is being perpetrated. These very factors are also what makes Swedish Meatballs so uniquely enjoyable. This is also the reason why bona fide Swedish Meatballs are as hard to come by as they are enthrallingly pleasurable to consume.

The roller of Swedish Meatballs must unequivocally prepare the Meatballs out of a saturating sense of unconditional love and deep admiration for the targeted eater as well as harbor an unadulterated desire to please when pleasure is not demanded or even expected. Congruent to this, Swedish Meatballs must never be prepared per dictate of the eater but only per adoring inspiration of the roller.

There you have it. Preparing and receiving Swedish Meatballs is that simple while being that unattainable for many by way of the doting artistry inherent its preparation. Tofu, curry, chopped liver, or ground organic beef and shredded shallots - it doesn't matter what's thrown into the mixing bowl. All that stuff is of a technical nature and technicians are a dime a dozen.

A Swedish Meatball is all about the art of good living and anyone who has never made or received the great gift of a Swedish Meatball or two has never been in shooting range of the life worth living. And that really is too bad.

Operation Enduring Terror

Jessie Macbeth, A Former Army Ranger And Iraq War Veteran,Tells All In This 20 Minute Video
A Must See! *(see update May 26 below)

Requires Quicktime

Update: We've received a claim that the video is fake. No substantiating evidence was provided by the claimant, merely a claim hitherto as void of substantiating evidence as it is pasionate in its plausible claims. SMC has requested evidence to corroborate the claim and has no doubt it will soon arrive.

Now why would anyone want to create a fake video of this nature?
And why would anyone want to claim the video is fake?

These are important hypothetical queries offering many interesting answers. The bottom line in this case?
It's your call but SMC thinks we know the answer and it will come soon.
HINT: What you want to believe is the prime clue to what the bottom line is.

Update. This just in (May 24)

IVAW Statement on MacBeth Video

Iraq Veterans Against the War recently learned of a video
interview with Jesse MacBeth that directs viewers to IVAW’s
website and phone number. IVAW was not made aware of the
creation of this video program and our input on it was never
sought by its producers. Jesse MacBeth is not a spokesperson
for IVAW and any claims made by MacBeth about his service
have not been verified. We are currently investigating these
claims and will have a full statement pending its resolution.

This just keeps getting better. We told you this video is a must see.

* Update May 26. The Video link is now dead.

Flank You So Much - PsyWar Op Hurricane Hugo

After a brief hiatus, Big Oil's interests are back in charge of what happens in the Middle East. The Administration now diligently serves Big Oil where they had once crazily served the Neo-Con's and their revolutionary plans aimed at the flat out destruction of OPEC and the dumping of world oil prices. Big Oil and family friends didn't like that. Israel thought it lovely though.

The revised and present US policy towards Iraq is to keep oil prices high and climbing as high as our consumption habits will tolerate by way of maintaining an unstable and chaotic Iraq until the day we manage to install an Iraqi regime that will nationalize its oil resources and facilities in a manner friendly to the desires of OPEC, Saudi Arabia, Big Oil, and US debt financing needs via the inflow of Treasury bond loyal petro-dollars.

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is not interested in lending the US the petro-dollars Venezuela earns form its oil sales. Hugo wants to keep much of that money at home and in Latin America at large to further the region's economic development.

Hugo, the overwhelmingly elected Boss of Venezuela, does not want to lend his petro-dollars to the present Bush Administration and its Big Oil backers so they can finance further global oil-choke operations to drive up oil prices further. Chavez is content with oil prices somewhat above the 30 dollars a barrel it costs him to extract his oil. He does not believe however that oil prices at present levels are good for anyone but the destructively greedy.

The Bush Administration and Big Oil couldn't disagree more than they do with Hugo though Clinton signed a deal with Chavez to work for oil prices closer to Chavez's 30 dollar floor than Bush's 75 dollar and rising ceiling. Of course Bush tore up that democracy threatening deal as soon as he and his chainsaw took office.


Venezuela is now targeted by Washington for an intense period of active destabilization operations for this very and only reason.

Of course Washington will never portray their designs on Venezuela as being of the origin of maintaining high oil prices and support for petro-dollar financed and dependent deficit spending. They didn't admit as much for Iraq (and still don't) and they are apparently not doing so for Iran. Instead we are going to be hearing a lot more about what a lunatic Hugo Chavez is and what dangerous freedom hating revolutionaries his fellow Latin American statesmen are for pursuing the same path of Hugo when they prioritize their populations' welfare before the welfare of the Bush Administration's influential honchos and handholding sheiks.

Concurrent to the pretexting of the oil-choking operation under full swing against Iran, we will soon be the target of yet another psychological warfare campaign aimed at securing the US population's fervent belief that Latin America represents a colossal threat to American security interests as defined by the well serving so-called War On Terror

Condoleeza Rice recently claimed that Venezuela has virtually ceased "its cooperation in the world war on terrorism."

According to the Pentagon, the US military is presently conducting operations in the Caribbean with 6,500 soldiers, several aircraft carriers, F-16 fighter planes, and nuclear submarines with the objective to "confront unconventional threats such as drug and human trafficking."

Venezuela is to be added to the list of nations that the US will reserve the right to attack first in "preventive" strikes in accordance with the new National Security Strategy document presented by George W. Bush on March 16 this year.

So little time yet so many psychological warfare campaigns waged against the US domestic population to keep track of.

Well at least the Administration makes no credible secret of who their true enemy is. You really have to hand it to them for that show of honesty if not for anything else.


NSA You!

Then Tomorrow - Plame It On The Whispers

The Swinging Twenties
It's the 1920s and oil company representatives sit in a hotel room in Brussels and draw a fat red line around Iraq on a map of the Middle East. Oil is not to come out of Iraq. If oil flows out of Iraq are not curtailed then the price of oil on world markets will collapse.

Millennium Machinations - 323 vs. 101
Two secret and competing (and somewhat conflicting) plans for the Middle East are drawn up in the shadows and will turn out to set off a hidden policy war in the coming years between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists" on the other side.

Plan One - The Neo-Con Revolutionaries For Lenin

The Neo-Cons plan to radically transform the Middle East with US military force and in the process break up OPEC and destroy Saudi Arabia. Cheap oil will flow and kill the power of Arab states while leveraging Israel's powers to project further influence in the region. The Neo-Cons plan to smash open regional markets for US corporations to make aggressive inroads.

Bush has yet to take office and Neo-Cons are busy at work on what will become a 101 page plan intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the OPEC cartel through massive increases in production above OPEC quotas. The Neo-Con plan details the breaking up of Iraq's nationalized petroleum resources and facilities, and by the theft of Iraq’s oil by privatization the plan promises the allure of plummeting world oil prices.

Plan Two - The Big Oil Pragmatists

Bush takes office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US, and Big Oil companies and their consultants work out of the James Baker Institute. They are beginning to draft a 323 page plan in coordination with a secret committee out of the Council Of Foreign Relations.

The plan is to control Iraq enough to ensure that Iraq enhances its relationship with OPEC. The plan entails securing the power of Saudi Arabia and OPEC to promote high oil prices and ensure the continued inflow of petro-dollars into the US economy.

In direct opposition to the Neo-Con plan, Big Oil calls for the creation of an Iraqi state-owned oil company favored by the US oil industry that will cooperate and strengthen OPEC to stabilize oil prices at high levels and ensure their access to the region's oil whereas privatization would threaten it. The US State Department supports the plan and its design for a forced coup d'Etat where the 82nd Airborne is sent in and replaces Saddam with a new dictator and a new mustache, keeping the Baathists in power. Colin Powell supports the plan. Fast in. Fast out.

Nowhere in the drafting of any of these plans is George W Bush present. He is just to be the useful idiot. The front-man. Or the fall guy if fate should have it so. End of story.

911 Policy Coup d'Etat
With the traumatic events of 911 the Neo-Cons seize control of policy. The Big Oil and State Department plan is trumped by the Neo-Con plan. The Neo-Cons make hurried efforts to enact their revolutionary 101 page plan. The only obstacle that remains is to secure the fake excuse for invading Iraq. The US population has to be convinced that going to war with Iraq is necessary without revealing the real reason for going to war.

The Downing Street Memos - Voila

Meetings are held 8 months (July 2002) before the predetermined invasion of Iraq between the highest officials of the US and British governments. Notes are taken of the attending officials' private conversations. These notes make up the two and a half page Downing Street Memo.

The Downing Street memo reveals officials attempting to figure out what the publicly declared reason for the war should be. The memo documents the officials' struggle to concoct ideas on how to convince their populations that the war is absolutely unavoidable and absolutely necessary for reasons other than those in any of the competing plans for Iraq. The officials discuss pretexts such as self defense and humanitarian relief.

One particularly creative plan involves staging some incident that would manipulate the UN to approve the war. This plan suggests demanding that Saddam accepts inspectors on the assumption that he will refuse. When he refuses the UN will then provide the US sufficient cover to attack Iraq. Sound familiar in the present context of Iran? Suckered you once and they can sucker punch you again.

Such is the basic outline of the planned charades. The decision to attack Iraq came first. The discussion on how to justify it came later.

Ensuant to this, a massive psychological warfare campaign waged by the US government against its own population was kicked off, one similar if not nearly identical to the psychological warfare campaign presently being waged by the Bush Administration against Americans to procure sufficient support to attack and destabilize Iran.

Musical Chairs For Spooks – NSA For You
Subsequently, we've witnessed revelations of vicious attacks on anyone who sought to deconstruct the faked justification for the war and blow the cover off of the pretext. When WMDs obviously weren't found it set off intense smear attempts and cycles of lies by the Administration to beat down anyone of inherent credibility who challenged the blatant lie that was the official story and attempt to explain that Iraq was invaded per design instead of per necessity.

When the administration found itself terribly on the defensive in the summer of 2003 and the fake yellow cake story was disintegrating, the yellow cake story was still included in the President's SOTU address even though the Administration knew with complete certainty that the story was completely bogus. Such was their desperation to puff up public support for a war based on secret agendas. And such was the desperation that led them to retaliate against Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame. And as such was their desperation that they had the audacity to blame the CIA for bad intelligence when in fact the Administration had taken perfectly good and actionable intelligence and politicized it into a state of utter corruption so the Administration could wage its pretexting psychological warfare campaign against the US domestic front.

The CIA did not stand idly by this attack on their professional efficacy.

The CIA began to leak information embarrassing to the Administration. The Administration decided to plug the leaks at the CIA that threatened to publicly topple its false pretexts for going to war and reveal its true reasons for invading Iraq. They installed Porter.

The subsequent firing of Porter Goss from the CIA and the recent nomination of Hayden to take his place are directly related to the secret reasons for the invasion of Iraq and the lies told to sell it at home where the tax revenue and bodies to fund it would come from .

We reported earlier that the Goss (and Foggo) sackings were part of a counter-coup at the CIA. Goss’ sole purpose at the CIA was to stop the flow of leaks beginning in the summer of 2003 in the wake of the failure to discover the non-existent WMDs and the rising insurgency that were damaging to the Administration.

The Administration that had faked intelligence per politicized corruption of perfectly good reports found themselves precariously vulnerable to charges of fraud and high crimes so they blamed the CIA. The CIA countered by leaking to counter these false charges and defend itself. Porter was installed to stop these leaks. Key professionals at the CIA began resigning en masse. The fight back against Porter was so effective that he had to be replaced if the war on the CIA was to be successful. The Administration truly fears the CIA. The Aministration and the CIA are about as close as you can get to presently sworn enemies.

Now the administration is looking for someone else to take over where Goss and the Administration got counter-couped. The Administration wants a man to run their errands and shut the CIA up from disclosing lie-denuding facts that will expose the Administration’s high crimes and threaten the interests that bolster them up. Make no mistake though - the CIA isn't leaking to bring you the truth. They are leaking to use you and partial truths to save themselves. There is a slight difference.

Hayden has been directly associated with the NSA's Catch All program (video file) and is darkly entrenched in the Administration's pocket per way of his criminal activities at the NSA run on behalf of his Administration task masters and his love of a comfortable pension over his respect for the Constitution he once swore to defend. At his NSA post, Hayden managed to implement a reign of terror to ensure that the Catch All program and its anti-American spin-off applications would not be leaked by employees frustrated with the crimes they were being tasked to perpetrate against America, its constitution, and its citizens.

Now Hayden is being brought in to shut up the CIA and keep you from learning the truth about the true reasons the Administration went to war and to prevent the CIA from leaking what it knows about the full extent of Hayden's Catch All program and its affiliate abuses.

Hayden is the man we are to trust when he explains why the Administration is driving the aggressive collection of data on all Americans. Hayden is the man who’s one and only job now is to keep Americans from learning the truth – about anything.

Iraq Down – Big Oil’s Counter-Coup
Though the Neo-Con plan for Iraq held sway at first, it was soon bitch slapped down by Big Oil. The Neo-Con plan to destroy OPEC was rapidly threatening to destroy Big Oil's interests.

This shift in the game plan from the 101 page plan to the 323 page plan for Iraq came after the invasion of Iraq.

The Neo-Con plans to sell off Iraq's oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped instigate the insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces. If your children or friends died over in Iraq then you know the name of one of the fellas to blame – Wolfowitz now demoted to the World Bank.

Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme. Mr. Carroll told Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003, that there was to be no privatization of Iraqi oil resources or facilities.

Big oil loves OPEC because OPEC keeps oil prices inflated and that benefits all oil companies in the world – Arab and American alike.

With Big Oil counter-couping the Neo-Cons on Iraq, the Iraq war has transitioned to become one to prevent Iraqi oil from reaching the market instead of a war to destroy OPEC and dump oil prices. Thus we see the secret in-country strategy to stoke and maintain Iraq in a state of
perpetual chaos. Special operation forces are quite adept at this particular game. The goal is clear and the tactics are the stuff of text books and have been reported by SMC under the headings of Conflate & Conflagrate.

Big Oil's and the State Department’s plan serves to truncate Iraq’s petro-dollar influence and, per purposeful design, to jack up oil prices. The industry-favored plan that was first pushed aside by the Neo-Con's policy coup and implementation of their plan after 911 had been stopped by the counter insurgency of…Big Oil. Big Oil is back in charge and they love the mess in the Middle East and would like to see more of it.

If there were to be a sell off of Iraqi petroleum assets per the Neo-Con privatization scheme then the big oil companies knew they would never get anything. The goodies always go to the cronies of the likes of a Chalabi - or whoever else is in power in the country. So, the oil companies did not want to be locked out. They weren't going to go along with it. Plus, they didn't like the Neo-Con idea that if there was privatization, and production would be ramped up, OPEC would be destroyed, oil prices would fall apart, and that would be the end of record profits for the oil companies. Weasely Wolfowitz was sent packing to the World Bank.

Now the best thing that Big Oil can have is a paralyzed Middle East where as little oil as possible leaves the region except from those nations that promise to pump their petrodollars back into the US and work to ensure high oil prices. Iran is not one of these nations. Neither is Venezuela.

Iran First - Then Hugo the Boss
We don't have to force the Middle East to sell us their oil. They have to sell it and our money will do just fine. But we do want to force whoever gets our oil money to pump it back into the US.

The Saudi boys are good for holding hands with and they also pump the cash they get from selling us jacked up oil right back into the US by buying Treasury bonds that fund the debt accrued by the Administration’s spending spree. These dollars coming back as loans are what are known as petrodollars. Get it?

You pay inflated gas prices and the Saudis lend back most of that windfall. Once here, that money goes to tax breaks for the rich, government contracts to defense contractors, and the purchase of debt instruments to finance the Administration's deficit driving giveaways to their friendlies. And all the while naively pandering political science experts hopeful of landing a good looking consultancy job with the Administration pass off bullshit ivory bunker justifications and explanations for the raging lies and secret agendas at hand, hoping to soon afford a Volvo upgrade and summer vacation in Florence with their families.

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez offered Bush oil at a third of current prices but Chavez wanted to keep the earnings in Latin America instead of pumping it like the Saudis back into the US where the petro-dollars are passed on as tax breaks, military contracts, and debt financing Treasury bonds. Chavez wants to develop his country instead of line the pockets of mega-wealthy interests.

Withholding oil is nada. Withholding petro-dollars is open warfare on the Bush Administration and its backing interests. This is why the Bush Administration hates Hugo Chavez and tried to stop him.

As we reported earlier, on June 1st Hugo is going to ask OPEC to recognize Venezuela has more oil than Saudi Arabia. As long as oil is 30 dollars a barrel it’s extractable for Hugo. Hugo offered to sell oil cheap if a deal could be cut providing a floor price that ensures extraction but keeps the price low enough to save us from the destructive force of oil at 75 dollars.

Bill Clinton took the deal.When Bush came to office he ripped it up and kidnapped Hugo as part of a failed CIA led coup against Chavez.

The spit swapping friends of the Bush Administration do not like cheap oil.

The problem is that Chavez is trying to supplant the Saudis as running OPEC. The Bush family is linked up to big oil and the Saudis and they will not let Chavez or anybody else like Iran supplant them.

Formerly US Secretary of State, James Baker represent the Saudis against charges brought against them by American 911 families. James Baker represents Exxon Mobile. James Baker was instrumental in drafting Big Oil's 323 page plan for Iraq. James Baker keeps a little known private office inside the Bush White House. Exxon Mobile, after Enron, is the biggest life time donor to the Bush campaigns.

Because of the Bush wars, Exxon Mobile’s value of its reserves has gone up by 1 trillion dollars in value. Meanwhile, what’s happened to your wallet at the gas station or to your neighbors' kids in Iraq? You're paying through the nose so you can - pay even more through the nose and still believe all is well in Wonderland.

When Bush came in, oil was as low as 18 dollars a barrel.
He has since built up the price to over 70 dollars a barrel.

So far so good!

Iran Next. Then Hugo.

But first you.

(and I need a drink)

The Joy Of Syntactic Dysfunctionalism - NSA You

Big business and big government are in bed together to spy on you without your permission.

There is a law that is called the Stored Communications Act.

This act states that the telecoms cannot turn your records over to the government except in about half a dozen cases, none of which appear to apply in what we hitherto know of the NSA's Catch All program. We're not legal scholars at SMC but per way of the legal opinions conveyed to us by Ivy Leagued legal eagles we have come to understanding the pending legal situation in the following, albeit simplified, manner:

If there exists a court order, a warrant, a letter of consent from yourself, an ongoing process involving the government's enforcement of telemarketing laws, or an administrative subpoena then the government can demand that the telecoms turn over your records to them.

It might be worth noting that the NSA does not have subpoena powers.

From what little is still publically known about Catch All it does certainly appear that Federal law is indeed being violated.

President Bush said just the other day that the government is only targeting Al-Qaida. We know this much and that is that the President's statement is unequivocally and categorically false.

SMC broke the Catch All story long before it hit any other media. In the next few days SMC is planning to break what lies at the heart of the Catch All program. We plan to also break some of its hitherto unreported abuses.

For a summary of our previous postings on the program we have collected a few of them below.

We were first out of the box to break the story of the NSA's Catch All program back in February with this post.

We followed it up in our irreverently lazy fashion with this post.

We spotted the first public breaking of the story with this post.

And we continued to monitor further breaking developments with posts like this.

Of course we wouldn't be SMC if we didn't we sit and gestate on the Catch All story long before we broke it a mile ahead of the regular press. We had to be sure that what we were feeding you was the God honest truth - though we couldn't help but throw out the occasional teaser such as this post from last January.

But hey, don't think that means we are going to start proofreading our posts here at SMC in an anal retentive attempt to reel in all of our syntactic abberations, typos, and just outright cretinous misspellings.

That would quite simply kill all the joy of hanging around here. And a meatball just ain't a meatball anymore if it takes longer than 15 minutes to roll.

Dreams Of Happy Apartheid

Segregation in American education is worse than it's been at any time since 1968. Fewer black kids are attending integrated schools at any time since MLK was assassinated. A typical inner city school class looks exactly like a class of black kids in Mississippi 50 years ago.

Ironically it seems these days that if you want to see the worst school in any city you simply visit one name after MLK, Rosa Parks, or Thurgood Marshall. They will all be the most underfunded, most segregated, most overcrowded, and most academically failed schools in the area.

The legacy of Rosa Parks and MLK have been ripped apart and the media does all it can to avoid mentioning this. This is the same media that helped sell us Iraq and now Iran. They will pay lip service and deplore segregation on a national level but will never face up to it on their local level where an observable reality glaringly resides. At best they will call schools with many minorities diverse instead of calling them what they are - segregated.

With far too few exceptions, the responsible and influential media who orchestrate acceptable opinion on most issues of broad national interest refuse to name this reality and lack the guts to confront it. Apartheid is not acceptable lingo in the sensitive parlors of commercial media.

This Administration does indeed hate blacks and minorities. They will however employ them whenever and wherever they need an eagerly subservient fall guy to bullwark their racist and criminal activities from insight, oversight, and critique. As clever as this divisive tactic is cynical and old, this Administration knows that the racial card can be practically exploited to deflect and duck criticism per way of aggressive insinuation that any critique of a destructive policy and its chief functionary is not substantive but rather racist in origin. Unfortunately there appears to be no short supply of these Quislingesque sellouts to front for the war against America and its noble ideals.

As long as there are individuals that have defied leading dystopic trends and managed therein to carve out their own little contrarian success stories, there will be among them a trembling few that are willing to appease their visceral fears of the fragility of their own success by resorting to a zealotrous propensity to do everything and anything to avoid rocking the boat. They will even go as far as working for the very people who are doing everything comfortably possible to exasperate the very injustices that gave rise to their deforming fears.

Some will even work for the current Administration with the contorted hope that living with the jackal and doing much of its dirty work will save them from being shredded alive by it. Some lesser fortunate wannabe collaborationists will have to make do with cheering on this Administration from the sidelines of the blogosphere hoping to hold on to the scraps of comfort they've managed to amass. Fear certainly has a way of deforming many a man but such is the strangely poetic nature of fear. And such are some of its more bitter fruits.

Some media outlets flush out a conservative black journalist to sweeten the story of apartheid in today's education system. They find an apologist who will per talking point say that we don't need to talk about things like apartheid, total racial isolation, gross inequality in funding. Instead we need to concentrate on a couple of boutique schools in a particular city that suddenly are able to pump up their test scores. We need to replicate that on a larger scale (so we in effect can have happy apartheid).

If a score suddenly goes up in a segregated school it will be a major front page story. If we only follow the Bush agenda and test kids incessantly, drill them all year for these tests, and hire private companies to prep them then all will be well. But the story of scores falling back down a few years later are seldom reported but in the most obscure corners of the same media. All these success stories are false promises endlessly recycled by the media to avoid the main truth: segregated schooling is the longest lasting failed experiment in U.S. social history.

Segregated schools have never been equal to the schools that serve the mainstream of America but such is the state of education in the nation today. Federal education policy and Bush's no child left behind seems to enjoy support from a big media constituency that appear spastically eager to tout the latest uptick in standardized test scores, particularly when they show a narrowing between white and non-white students, ie the achievement gap - while the broader the reality goes missing from their coverage. These headlines are the results of testing games and not learning games.

As is the case with Iraq, individual journalists are pressured to cover success stories within the box of a dismal failure. The President's delusional testing bill NCLB (No Child Left Behind or No Child Left Untested) is based on the psychotic belief that testing kids like hell is a nice substitue for equal opportunity and the blatant unfairness of apartheid.

Bush says his testing helps teachers learn where their students' weaknesses lie all the while the test results don't come back until the kids have moved on to the next grade. Bush's NCLB also forces teachers to teach to the tests.

Bush's solutions always seem to be akin to weighing hungry children instead of feeding them.

It all sounds a lot like the pretext of spreading democracy to Iraq while bringing security to America all the while this chronic failure of a man has actually done little more than endanger and traumatize America as never before while killing countless Iraqi civilians and embedding their living remains in an undisputed State of terror, chaos, and disease over which we have sole dictatorial reign under the cover of a dysfuntional local government of dubiously elected misfits.

And finally a question begs to be asked relevant to both Iraq, the apartheid of the U.S. education system, the synthetic crisis of Iran, and the industrial scale espionage on all of Americas citizens - why the hell do journalists and their outlets exist if not to afflict the comfortable and give comfort to the afflicted and provide the citizenry with the information it needs to make informed choices when attempting to elect their representatives?

Obviously the media knows that it can influence the preferences and opinions of its readers and they accordingly often make decisions not to enter areas that might antagonize its most privileged readers and the powers that be. Obviously these most privileged readers and power brokers are not synonomous with or representative of the majorities around and about them.

Too seldom do we get a chance to read about just that.

Obnoxious We Know - But Once Again, We Told You So

In the context of this breaking story out of Raw.....

We made a few flip calls late last year at SMC starting with the our announcement of the kickoff of a psychological warfare campaign waged by the Bush Administration against the U.S. population. We followed that up by nailing the date for the hit on Iran and listing some of the key pretexting characters, claims, and antics that would comprise the choreographed escalation to justifiable war with Iran. So far we are looking pretty darn good for go.


Below are excerpts from 2 of those previous SMC posts of great modesty:


Wednesday, Dec 14, 2005 First We Take Manhattan - Now We Do Iran
In my modest firm's quarterly newsletter from July 2002 we nailed the invasion of Iraq and got the date right by a month. Now we are confidently projecting the commencement of a full-scale airwar on Iran in Q2 of 2006.

Pundits claiming U.S. forces are stretched to their limits by present engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq and are in no position to venture into Persia have utterly missed the mark and most probably (certainly so - if they work for major media) are unwitting bit players in the obfuscation process mediated by coordinated information operations.

Below the media radar, low intensity war with Iran is already well underway setting the operational stage for the pending grand incursion. The Afghanistan flank appears to be primed for significant troop ( including Swedes) inflows Q1 2006 in preparation for the Iranian campaign. Iran has finally won their war against Iraq and we can't have that now, can we? Of course that would never be reason enough for what is on the horizon so for a most excellent primer on Grand Games of past about to come full circle, read Rudyard Kipling's Kim.

And while you're at it, have a soothing listen to the Real Politik classic hit by the Carpenters - We've Only Just Begun.


Friday, Dec 16, 2005 Hark The Herald Angels Singing
When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed the Holocaust was much ado about nada we saw the jump start of the major media campaign leg of the information operation underway to mould western eater opinion to support the full-scale air campaign against Iran next year. Immediately, choreographed and on cue, the big hitters came out with their synchronized talking points on Fox News like Ester Williams clones.

Kissinger (Unfortunately this link is now dead) let us know that any nation that talks crazy like that and has...er, wants, nuclear weapons can't be left unattended to. On another top venue at Fox, Bill O'Reilly's The Factor , Donny 'Dentures' Rumsfeld informed us later the same day that all would have gone according to plan in Messy-potamia if only the subversive Iranians hadn't meddled with the Iraqi Shia.

Now it should be noted that Donny never appears on The Factor despite incessant requests from Bill in the past so obviously something grandiose is in the wings. To get both carpet bombing Henry and the gesticulating pirate's skull on the same day was quite the slam dunk. To have President Bush batting for the tabula rasa of repentance as he fessed up on his WMD mistake in the same news cycle (faux-mistake as anyone in any intel commmunity will tell you), well that's just sorta overkill in confirming that a new and exciting blitz is on.

Of course the media campaign for creating a conducive opinion environment is just one part of the prep work on our way to slamming Iran from the skies although it still remains the single most important measure next to John Bolton working his magic on the United Nations. Had Bolton's nomination gone through faster we might have seen the leveling of Iran occurring much sooner. But June next year will do just fine too.

But for now, keep your ears tuned for soundbites from pundits and politicos incessantly expounding in chorus on how we can't have a wacko state like Iran possess nuclear technology that can be used to build a nuclear fire cracker. It's gonna be everywhere you care to prick up your ears.