Iraq: One Winter Soldier's Tale...My Choking Hand...

In the spring of 2008, a conference was held on the outskirts of Washington, DC. Entitled Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, it harkened back to the Winter Soldier testimonies held three decades ago during the Vietnam War. Of the testimonies we filmed, this one, by Iraq War vet Jon Michael Turner, was the most compelling and intense:

Watch Video Here:

- Garland McLaurin ( "Iraq: One Winter Soldier's Tale" Spring, 2008).

Donald Rumsfeld: Memo To Self...The Dire Consequences Of Fear...

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda offshore."
- 43rd President George W. Bush (President Participates in Social Security Conversation in Greece Athena High School Athena Performing Arts Center, Greece, New York 5.24.2005).

Click On Document To ENLARGE:

-Donald Rumsfeld's Memo To Self, US Secretary of Defense (2001-2006). Forced Resignation on 12.18.2006, Eight months after the above memo was written. (The Archives of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff, Pentagon's Military Analyst Program, 4.18.2006) .

"If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us."
- 41st President George H.W. Bush ( Reportedly to journalist Sarah McClendon, 12.1992).

VIDEO: The Future? Now You Know...

WATCH VIDEO HERE: "Shift Happens"
(Running Time: 6 min.)

-Michael Arnold, ( "Shift Happens", Originally a PowerPoint presentation by Karl Fisch, Director of Technology for Arapahoe High School,Centennial, Colorado, 2007. Image: William Smellie (1697-1763). Library. Engraving shows the gravid uterus when labor is somewhat advanced, A Sett of Anatomical Tables, with Explanations and an Abridgement, of the Practice of Midwifery. London printed: [s.n.], 1754. University of Virginia, Historical Collections: Claude Moore Health Sciences).

Survival Fear: How To Motivate the Electorate? Artificially Induce Psychosis...

"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear."

-General Douglas MacArthur (Speech, 5.15.1951)

"Survival Fear is imaginary, but it still exists as a conditioned reaction, not a calculated and considered judgement. It is a memory still close to the surface. It was used by Nazi Germany to infer, through poster propaganda, that the Russians were barbarians. For the Nazis it was a blatant use of the fear of barbarism to strengthen the war effort. The United States used this fear in the belief that it was the democratic inheritor of the Greeks and the Communists were barbarians to be contained in a ring of military alliances.

"The sheer historical impetus of the collective survival fear is the politician's principal tool for motivating the electorate. Economic survival now means affluence, not the continuance of existence. This new political fiction has meant that politicians now engage in `foreign country bashing' or exhortations to raise the GNP in the face of foreign competition. Fiscal policies and economic aggrandizement have become the measure of successful governance. National governments now protect the individual from (barbarian) economic forces. Economic invasion has replaced armed invasion as the principal reason for political sovereignty and national power. The fear of possible loss of income allows politicians to assure the majority of voters that it will protect and enhance their income, - thereby justifying their power."

-Leslie Forbes ( "Forming Tribalized Communities" Chapter II: Ending The Tyranny Survival of Fear, 2006 .)

INTERVIEW: Ron Paul, Ph.D, RE: Election 2008, Democratic & Republican Candidates:

"There really is no choice there, they (McCain, Obama, Clinton) all belong to the same group, they are beholden to the military industrial complex and the medical industry, the media industry, the whole works, the banking industry. The rhetoric is different but they're all after power and there is not going to be a lot of difference. Obama offers a false "revolution" in that he speaks constantly of change but at the heart of it represents a continuation of the same political system. If we have an Obama Presidency we're not suddenly going to have an ethical foreign policy, the same forces will still have their control."

He went on to explain that the debate should not be over which of the three remaining candidates to pick, rather it should be over whether we want to continue to allow the politics they espouse to rule the roost or whether we want to change the country, restore the constitution and return to sound money.

In response to the revelations that the Congressman was a topic of concern amongst elites at the recent Trilateral Commission meeting in Washington, Dr. Paul was not surprised:

"What you're telling me explains that it isn't the Republicans running the show or the Democrats, but it's the powerful special interests, the elites who control both parties, you know the Trilateral people and others, they're the ones who are afraid of our ideas because they would be very intimidated by a gold standard or a non interventionist foreign policy where we're not policing the world."It's more dangerous than ever because up 'til now, for the last hundred years, they have controlled everything through economic power and the Federal Reserve, the banks and the budgetary process, but when that fails and the dollar fails and even their own system is challenged then they don't have the financial community that can hold us together."

The Congressman spoke of the dangers of an elitist system that is beginning to lose its firm grip on the country:

"The danger is that instead of just resorting to manipulating the economy behind the scenes, all of a sudden to hold things together they have to become more authoritarian. But to me this is a tremendous opportunity because up til now the American people have been very complacent. If they start wanting to tax and control the internet and going after radio talk show hosts, that's when we'll be in big trouble, because fortunately we do still live in a good country and it's worth saving... as bad as things are we don't yet live in a totalitarian state, although that is what we fear and that is why we have to be alert and vigilant because if they move quickly to get rid of our ability to communicate then we're in big trouble."

The Congressman also responded to the news this week that a recording of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been discovered in which he says that another attack on America would act as a "correction" to the public's lack of enthusiasm for the neo-con agenda.

"I think that is the way they do think, I don't think they plan every event but boy when there is an opportunity do they jump at it. They had planned for a long time on the PATRIOT Act but they had to wait for the right time, they had planned for a long time to invade Iraq. They wait for opportunities, they help create them, they manipulate and do whatever is necessary."

"We need to be realistic, we can't challenge the system, even if we come close to controlling a delegation, they bend the rules or break the rules or ignore the rules, and they run rough shod over you, but that doesn't mean that it should diminish our enthusiasm because what really counts are our ideas which are more powerful than all the shenanigans that they pull."

-Steve Watson (Interview w/ Ron Paul: "Obama Presidency Will Not Bring Change-All Three Remaining Candidates Beholden to the Military Industrial Complex", InfoWars.Net, 5.21.2008. Image: Iraq Pod Poster,Fork Screw Graphics, 2006).

HISTORY: Celebrity Body Snatching: Charlie Chaplin's Stolen Body Found...

"The coffin containing the body of Charlie Chaplin - missing since his grave was robbed 11 weeks ago - has been found. It was dug up from a field about a mile away from the Chaplin home in Corsier near Lausanne, Switzerland. The legendary comedian died on Christmas Day last year, aged 88. He was buried two days later in the village of Corsier in the hills above Lake Geneva.

"Charlie would have thought it ridiculous."
-Lady Oona Chaplin

Swiss police have arrested two men - a Pole aged 24 and a Bulgarian aged 38 - and say they have confessed to stealing the coffin and reburying it. Names of the accused have not been released, but police say they are both motor mechanics. They were traced after police kept a watch on 200 phone kiosks and tapped the Chaplins' phone after the family received ransom demands of £400,000 for return of the body after it went missing in March. Sir Charles' 51-year-old widow, Lady Oona Chaplin, refused to pay up saying: "Charlie would have thought it ridiculous." In further calls the kidnappers made threats to harm her two youngest children.

The family kept silent about the ransom demands and various rumours circulated about the missing coffin. One Hollywood report suggested it had been dug up because Sir Charles was a Jew buried in a gentile cemetery. Lady Chaplin, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill inherited about £12m after the death of her husband. The couple and their eight children have been living in Lausanne since 1952. A spokesman for the Chaplins said: "The family is very happy and relieved that this ordeal is over." Superintendent Gabriel Cettou, the head of the Geneva police, said the two men would be charged with attempted extortion and disturbing the peace of the dead.

-BBC News (On This Day, 5.17.1978. Image: Charlie Chaplin's Exhumed Coffin, 1978).

Donald Rumsfeld: "The Psychological Patterns Are Wearing Off..."

"Shocking excerpts of confidential recordings recently released under the Freedom of Information Act feature former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talking with top military analysts about how a flagging Neo-Con political agenda could be successfully restored with the aid of another terrorist attack on America. The tape also includes a conversation where Rumsfeld and the military analysts agree on the possible necessity of installing a brutal dictator in Iraq to oversee U.S. interests.

The tapes were released as part of the investigation into the Pentagon's "message force multipliers" program in which top military analysts were hired to propagandize for the Iraq war in the corporate media. In attendance at the valedictory luncheon Rumsfeld hosted on December 12, 2006 were David L. Grange, Donald W. Sheppard, James Marks, Rick Francona, Wayne Downing, and Robert H. Scales, Jr. among others.

The most extraordinary exchange takes place when Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong bemoans shrinking political support for Neo-Con war plans on Capitol Hill and suggests that sympathy for the Bush administration's agenda will only be achieved after a new terror attack. Rumsfeld agrees that the psychological impact of 9/11 is wearing off and the "behavior pattern" of citizens in both the U.S. and Europe suggests that they are unconcerned about the threat of terror:

DELONG: "Politically, what are the challenges because you're not going to have a lot of sympathetic ears up there until it [a terror attack] happens.

RUMSFELD: That's what I was just going to say. This President's pretty much a victim of success. We haven't had an attack in five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it's not surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment. The same thing's in Europe, there's a low threat perception. The correction for that, I suppose, is an attack. And when that happens, then everyone gets energized for another [inaudible] and it's a shame we don't have the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats...the lethality, the carnage, that can be imposed on our society is so real and so present and so serious that you'd think we'd be able to understand it, but as a society, the longer you get away from 9/11, the less...the less..."

VIOLETPLANET SAYS: Notice the reverse psychology in his choice of words and phrasing. He uses negative words for positive actions and positive words for negative actions. He's one slick, sick mad-hatter.

CLICK HERE For Audio Tape Recording

-Paul Joseph Watson ( Rumsfeld "On Tape: Terror Attack Could Restore Neo-Con Agenda: Former Defense Secretary's Conversation with Military Analysts on Political Problems - "The Correction For That...Is An Attack," Prison Planet, 5.16.08. Image: Donald Rumsfeld Riding His Unicycle, 1970s).

Albert Einstein: On God...A Product Of Human Weakness...

"In 1954, Einstein wrote the following letter to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book "Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt." Bought by a private collector in 1955, the German-language letter will be auctioned on May 15th by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair, England and is estimated to sell for 16K. In it, Einstein rejects the idea that the Jews are God's "chosen people" and clarifies his views during this time on God, organized religion and his own Jewish faith:

ABRIDGED
"... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual 'props' and 'rationalisation' in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things. With friendly thanks and best wishes

Yours, A. Einstein"

" In Einstein's later years he referred to a "cosmic religious feeling" that permeated and sustained his scientific work. In 1954, a year before his death, he spoke of wishing to "experience the universe as a single cosmic whole". He was also fond of using religious flourishes, in 1926 declaring that "He [God] does not throw dice" when referring to randomness thrown up by quantum theory. His position on God has been widely misrepresented by people on both sides of the atheism/religion divide but he always resisted easy stereotyping on the subject.

Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

-Albert Einstein (Abridged Letter translated to English from German. Content is a response to Eric Gutkind re: his newly published book, "Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt", 1.3.1954. Excerpted Additional Text by James Randerson, " Childish Superstition", Guardian UK News 5.13.2008. Image: Gustave Doré (1832-83) "Ascension". The most popular and successful French book illustrator of the mid 19th century. Doré became very widely known for his illustrations to such books as Dante's Inferno (1861), Don Quixote (1862), and the Bible (1866).

John D. Rockefeller: According To The Dictates Of His Conscience...

"On April 30th, reporters flocked to the penthouse suite of a Midtown Manhattan hotel where fifteen representatives of the Rockefeller Dynasty were holding court. There, the Rockefellers chastised oil giant Exxon-Mobil for failing to invest in “alternative energy” sources, invoking their own moral authority as Exxon-Mobil’s longest standing shareholders.

Family spokesperson Neva Rockefeller Goodwin sanctimoniously recalled the memory of her great grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil and originator of the family fortune. “Part of John D. Rockefeller’s genius was in recognizing early the need and opportunity for a transition to a better, cheaper and cleaner fuel.”

The corporate media obediently described the Rockefellers as concerned environmentalists. The New York Times ran the headline, “Can Rockefeller Heirs Turn Exxon Greener?” News outlets quoted freely from the Rockefellers’ press release, which described John D. Rockefeller as “one of the first major philanthropists in the U.S. and the World” and the family’s Rockefeller Foundation’s mission as "promoting the well-being of mankind throughout the world.”

The family fable concocted above warrants a rebuttal. Standard Oil was the world’s first oil monopoly, and Rockefeller’s greed was insatiable. Indeed, the Rockefeller family legacy is deeply entangled with the U.S.’ current reliance on oil and automobiles. Moreover, the family’s “philanthropic” pursuits include a peculiar preoccupation with lowering the birth rates of the world’s black and brown populations throughout the twentieth century—highlighting the absurdity of their claim to be promoting the well being of humankind. Mainstream journalists could easily uncover these unsavory aspects of the family history but instead report the Rockefellers’self-sanitized version, with all its glaring omissions.

Indeed, the family’s selective memory of its patriarch, John D. Rockefeller, as a saintly philanthropist stands in sharp contrast to his role as a nineteenth-century robber baron. “God gave me my money,” he said. “Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.”

Rockefeller’s conscience apparently did not dictate paying his employees more than a starvation wage. His admirers praise him for making gasoline affordable to average Americans, and he did indeed aim to produce large amounts of "cheap and good" gasoline for mass consumption, successfully lowering the price of gas from 58 cents to 8 cents a gallon. But he achieved this goal through ruthless union busting, hiring his own private militias to crush workers who dared to go on strike to demand higher wages.

The private armies of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Rockefeller was a cutthroat capitalist who built his oil monopoly in the decades after the Civil War using methods more in keeping with the bribery, blackmail and back stabbing of a mafia family than an honest entrepreneur. As he once proclaimed, "I would rather earn 1 percent off of 100 people's efforts than 100 percent of my own efforts.” This credo made him the richest man in the world.

As he quietly bought up his smaller oil competitors with these methods, Rockefeller entered into secret—and illegal—agreements with railroad magnates that gave discounts as off-the books rebates to his growing oil monopoly, easily driving smaller refiners out of business. By 1879, Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of the oil refining business in the U.S. When the Supreme Court finally forced Rockefeller to formally disband Standard Oil as a monopoly trust in 1911, the damage was done. Indeed, the breakup doubled the value of his stock and gave birth to oil conglomerates Esso and Mobil (now Exxon-Mobil), Arco and Amoco (now BP), Pennzoil (now Shell), Chevron and Conoco. Rockefeller spent his remaining decades playing golf.

John D. Rockefeller’s descendents have happily carried on in the robber baron’s tradition, alongside a public relations machine that routinely airbrushes the family history.

By design, the Rockefellers have received no blame for their pivotal role in destroying the vast trolley car system that dominated U.S. cities before the 1940s, thereby increasing city dwellers’ dependency on automobiles and gas-fueled bus lines. Yet the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil of California joined General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum to form the National City Lines holding company, which bought out and dismantled more than 100 trolley systems in 45 major cities between 1936 and 1950.

In 1949, these corporate defendants were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize transportation services. Indeed, the corporations behind National City Lines were each fined just $5,000—while each of their directors paid a mere $1 fine—a small price to pay for the windfall in profits they all enjoyed in the decades that followed. Congress offered up tax dollars to build the enormous highway infrastructure that encouraged automobile travel in the 1950s, while federal investment in mass transit and train systems languished. As Noam Chomsky noted, “By the mid-1960s, one out of six business enterprises was directly dependent on the motor vehicle industry.”

No Rockefeller family history would be complete without highlighting their central role in shaping twentieth century population control policy, aimed explicitly at curbing birth rates among the non-Caucasian poor. Beginning in 1910, Rockefeller money flowed into organizations such as the Race Betterment Foundation and the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association, which spearheaded the eugenics movement—the “science” of “improving heredity.” These organizations, also funded by the upstanding Carnegie, Harriman and Kellogg families, sponsored academics claiming that those at the top of the social ladder had proven their racial superiority, while those at the bottom were biologically incapable of success.

The eugenics movement encouraged the “superior” races to marry each other and have lots of children, while promoting forced sterilization, racial segregation and deportation of immigrants of those deemed “unfit” to reproduce. The “superior” races so admired by the eugenics movement were “Nordic,” with blond hair and blue eyes, and the movement soon gained an admirer in Adolph Hitler. In 1924’s "Mein Kampf," Hitler noted, "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."

By the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation was already providing hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund eugenics research in Germany; in 1929 alone, $317,000 of Rockefeller money went to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, according to Edwin Black, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003. Although the Rockefellers had withdrawn all funding to German research by the onset of the Second World War in 1939, Black argued, “By that time, the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.”

By the 1930s, the wheels for forced sterilization were also in motion inside the U.S. Laws were enacted in 27 states in 1932, calling for compulsory sterilization of the “feeble-minded, insane, criminal, and physically defective.” In 1939, the Birth Control Federation of America, as historian Dorothy E. Roberts described,“planned a ‘Negro Project’ designed to limit reproduction by blacks ‘who still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear children properly."

1974, an Alabama court found that between 100,000 and 150,000 poor black teenagers had been sterilized in that state alone.

After WWII, population control agencies set their sights overseas. In the 1960s, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, heavily funded by the Rockefellers alongside the U.S. government, played a key role in a coercive sterilization programs targeting Third World populations. By 1968, one-third of women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico—still a U.S. colony—had been permanently sterilized, often without their knowledge or consent. Rockefeller-funded programs sterilized 40,000 women in Colombia between 1963 and 1965

The self-righteous claims of the current generation of Rockefellers must be viewed in this context. They have kept silent since the 1989 Exxon-Valdez Alaskan oil spill, even as Exxon-Mobil has refused to pay court-ordered compensation to the nearly 33,000 Alaskans who won a lawsuit against Exxon in 1994 for the company’s “reckless” behavior. Nor have they uttered a word of protest following news that growing numbers of employed workers across the U.S. are lining up at food pantries due to the skyrocketing price of food and gasoline. As Bill Bolling, founder of the Atlanta Community Food Bank, told CNN, "People are giving up buying groceries so that they can pay rent and put gas in the car."

Today’s Rockefellers praise Exxon-Mobil for its current status as the most profitable corporation in U.S. history, having raked in a record $40.6 billion in profits in 2007. They are merely watching out for their own parasitical futures."

-Sharon Smith ("Rockefeller Family Fables: The Self Righteous Rich", CounterPunch, 5.8.08 Image: American Eugenics Society Poster, 1926).

Percy & Denham: "Why Does God Always Take Pity On The Wicked?"

"Louisa Creed: I hate the dark. It frightens me.

Sister Theresa: It shouldn't, my dear. Don't you believe we're watched over?

Louisa Creed: Oh yes. But I'm never quite sure who's watching us.

Ellen Creed: Hell is like the kingdom of Heaven. It's within."

- Edward Percy & Reginald Denham, (LADIES IN RETIREMENT,1941). "Based on a famous murder case which took place at the end of the last century, this play has become one of the most successful and most frequently performed in the modern repertoire. An eerie atmosphere of mystery is evoked in a dark, lonely house on the marshes of the Thames estuary. The characters, presented with great psychological realism and the strong vein of earthy comedy invest the play with a liveliness unusual for such a genuinely horrifying murder play.

Adapted for the screen in 1941, directed by Charles Vidor (King's brother) and starring Ida Lupino, the New York Times described the film as “an exercise in slowly accumulating terror,” This comes mainly from George Barnes’s moody camerawork and the solid acting of the principal cast. Top honors go to Ida Lupino, a bold and strong-minded actress who became a prolific film and TV director in her own right starting in the late 1940s. Although in the stage version Ellen was sixty years old, Vidor gambled that 23-year old Lupino could look 40 with the right makeup and strong lighting to wash the softness from her face. It worked. Lupino seems almost ageless in the part, playing Ellen as a tightly coiled bundle of nerves, seething with determination beneath her generally calm appearance."-by Mikita Brottman and David Sterritt (Turner Classic Movies Review). Image: Ida Lupino, Publicity Shot, 1940s.

Albert Einstein: On The Infinite...

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
-Albert Einstein

Image: Einstein's Handwritten Formula On Blackboard. When Einstein came to Oxford in 1931, he was already an international celebrity. After one of his lectures the blackboard where he demonstrated his theories was preserved for posterity. (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. From the exhibit: Bye-Bye Blackboard From Einstein And Others, 2005).

VIDEO: James Pence "If I Were A Terrorist..."

WATCH VIDEO HERE: If I Were A Terrorist

-James Pence ( Running Time 1:25, 2008) Image: Nora Ligorano & Marshall Reese (Photo Exhibit: "Line Up," New York Public Library,11. 2007)

Harry S. Truman: Target Hiroshima...New Images Of U.S. Genocide In WWII

"We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.

Anyway we "think" we have found the way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexico desert was startling - to put it mildly. Thirteen pounds of the explosive caused the complete disintegration of a steel tower 60 feet high, created a crater 6 feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter, knocked over a steel tower 1/2 mile away and knocked men down 10,000 yards away. The explosion was visible for more than 200 miles and audible for 40 miles and more.

This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.  He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I'm sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful..."

- Harry S. Truman, ( Truman's Personal Diary quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman New York: Harper and Row, 1980) pp. 55-56, 7.25.1945).

- Image: Photographer Unknown (The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institute Archives contains ten never-before-published photographs illustrating the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. These photographs, taken by an unknown Japanese photographer, were found in 1945 among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside Hiroshima by U.S. serviceman Robert L. Capp, who was attached to the occupation forces. Unlike most photos of the Hiroshima bombing, these dramatically convey the human as well as material destruction unleashed by the atomic bomb).  

The Robert L. Capp Collection Hiroshima Photographs Here

Excalibur & The Unseen Hand: MindWar

"MindWar is defined as "the deliberate aggressive convincing of all participants in a war that we will win that war."

 Propaganda the usual way:

"The terror of the Roman name will be such that the world shall know that, once a Roman army has laid siege to a city, nothing will move it - not the rigors of winter nor the weariness of the months and years - that it knows no end but victory and is ready, if a swift and sudden stroke will not serve, to preserve until that victory is achieved." - Titus Livius a.k.a Livy (59 BC–AD 17, The Early History of Rome Vol. 1-5).

MindWar:

"MindWar reverses this sequence. Psychological means for achieving victory-essentially through convincing the enemy that he really wants to bring his national policies into harmony with ours-are fashioned in support of basic political goals. The use of ordinary military force (bombs, bullets, etc.) is regarded as a last rsort in circumstances where MindWar by itself fails.

Essentially you overwhelm your enemy with argument. You seize control of all of the means by which his government and populace process information to make up their minds, and you adjust it so that those minds are made up as you desire.

The MindWar operative must know that he speaks the truth, and he must be personally committed to it. What he says is only a part of MindWar; the rest - and the test of its effectiveness - lies in the conviction he projects to his audience, in the rapport he establishes with it. In practice, however, the difference between MindWar and cynical or deceptive propaganda, from the perspective of the audience, is difficult if not impossible to perceive. The examples of Kennedy's ultimatum to Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Hitler's stance at Munich might be cited. A MindWar message does not have to fit conditions of abstract credibility as do PSYOP there; its source makes it credible.

Strategic MindWar must begin  the moment war is considered inevitable.  It must seek out the attention of the enemy nation through every available medium, and it must strike at the nation's potential soldiers before they put on their uniforms.  It is in their homes and their communities that they are most vulnerable to MindWar.

Was the United States defeated in the jungles of Vietnam, or was it defeated in the streets of American cities?

Like the sword Exalibur, we have to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have the courage and the integrity to enhance civilization with it.  If we do not accept Excalibur, the we relinquish our ability to "inspire" foreign cultures with our morality. If they then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level."

 MindWar states a whole truth that, if it does not now exist, will be forced into existence by the will of the United States.

-General Paul E. Vallely  (From PSYOP to Mindwar: The Psychology of Victory,  Headquarters, 7th Psychological Operations Group, United States Army Reserve, Presidio of San Francisco, CA, 1980).  The first President of the National Psychological Operations Association participant in the Pentagon military analyst program and a Fox News analyst.  In September 2003, he took part in a Pentagon-funded  tour of Iraq ... timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing." He later told the New York Times, "I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south." However, after returning he claimed on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes" show: "You can’t believe the progress." 

Vallely is also the Military Committee Chairman for the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Iran Policy Committee. He is co-author, with Thomas McInerney, of "Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror." In April 2008 America learned he had been one of a dozen "military analysts" recruited by the Pentagon to spread favorable views of the failing Iraq War via the news. General Valley is also a supporter of the Jerusalem Summit organization and an advocate of the organization's proposal to transfer Palestine to surrounding Arab countries as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He advocates military-led regime change in Iran, Syria and North Korea."  Image: Brainstorming by: Franck44).

Evil Little Men!