In the face of such a first strike policy, is perhaps not surprising then that the US has ensured that enriched uranium and plutonium, even at weapon�s grade levels, is not regulated worldwide by the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEA). The US government just recently put on the table in Geneva a Fissile Materials Cut-Off Treaty, a treaty whose purpose is ostensibly to ban the production of weapons grade materials as a step towards global disarmament. But the US proposal for the treaty shrugs, ignores the hundreds of tons of weapons grade fissile materials already in existence, and says that verification is impossible. Excuse me, when I was involved in SALT I and SALT II negotiations over nuclear missile reductions, Reagan didn�t say verification couldn�t be accomplished. He set the US to the task of figuring out how to do it. Yankee know-how figured out how to build the atomic bomb in a few years during WWII. The US hasn�t figured out how to control nuclear technology and its proliferation because it hasn�t seriously tried. It is too busy using the threat of nuclear war to advance its stated neo-con objective of full spectrum dominance of the world (see �.).
The IAEA cleared Iran of charges that it diverted uranium from peaceful to weapons use through enrichment. Yet Iran is still tarred with the same brush of suspicion that erroneously tarred Iraq. Even the US administration has been forced to admit no WMD were found in Iraq, that it went to war based on false intelligence. In fact, the Downing Street Memo reveals that both the US and UK knew the intelligence did not justify the war and purposely hid that truth from the public. It is not the Iraqis nor the Iranians that are sitting armed to the gills with long range nuclear missiles and saying that they have a right to use them when and where they want unilaterally without UN approval, it is my own country, the United Satanists of America, I mean, the United States of America. Please excuse my Freudian slip, but I thought Christ said �Turn the other cheek� not �Kill until there is nothing moving left to kill�.
Nelson Mandela said publicly, with respect to the US�s action in the Middle East;
�What I am condemning is that one power � is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust�. He also attacked the United States�s record on human rights, criticizing the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagaski in World War II. �Because they decided to kill innocent people in Japan, who are still suffering from that, who are they now to pretend that they are the policeman of the world?...� he asked. �lf there is a country which has committed unspeakable atrocities, it is the United States of America...They don�t care for human beings.� http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/America/Mandela_Blasts_Bush.html) .
After Mai Lai, Abu Gharib, and the recent killings of pregnant women and children in Iraq by US Marines, it would be hard to dispute Mandela�s statement. Instead of being ashamed of their pro-war, pro-torture proclivities, some members of the US administration have justified this callous disregard for human rights;
�John Yoo publicly argued there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of a child of a suspect in custody � including by crushing that child�s testicles. This came out in response to a question in a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel.
What is particularly chilling and revealing about this is that John Yoo was a key architect post-9/11 Bush Administration legal policy. As a deputy assistant to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, John Yoo authored a number of legal memos arguing for unlimited presidential powers to order torture of captive suspects, and to declare war anytime, any where, and on anyone the President deemed a threat.� (See http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11488.htm )
Once upon a time, the international community boycotted investments in South Africa to not be complicit with apartheid. Yet, the injuries and deaths rained down by war are much worse. The damage to the human genome through the use of depleted uranium (which is still one third as radioactive as uranium and has a half life of 4.5 million years) in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia is already irreversible. How can people invest in a country that reserves the right to pre-emptively annihilate the species� DNA and the planet itself? Why have not economic sanctions been imposed on it already?
We can not live in a secure world without getting to global nuclear disarmament�nuclear weapons are just too dangerous! The risk of annihilation is cumulative and will result in catastrophe unless we bring the risk down to zero. The US government is speaking with forked-tongue when it complains about other countries that might possibly be enriching uranium or plutonium, while it stockpiles of hundreds of tons of enriched weapons-grade fissile materials. These enriched products in nuclear weapons states, US, Russia, France, China, and the UK, are not even regulated by the International Atomic Energy Agency and properly accounted for to keep them out of the hands of terrorists. Are our own politicians intelligent and unfailingly kind enough to be trusted to play games with our future? We need a real effort towards non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Why is the US administration making a loophole for India that would allow it to avoid inspections of any nuclear facilities that they want exempted? Rational thinking demands that we have across the board strict accounting of all stockpiles of fissile materials internationally. So far we do not even have accounting system as good as an average bookkeeper working for the local Seven-Eleven convenience store to prevent the theft of M&Ms. That is truly a disgrace. It is time to get serious and demand a strict accounting of fissile materials from Congress and the White House, and to put an end to its first strike pre-emptive nuclear war policy.
The US spends about half of its GDP on military expenditures according to the American Friends Service Committee. Yet it is very vulnerable to disruption of its command and control centers through an attack on its satellites. So, all that money does little to effectively protect the United States from attack. In fact, there is nothing except the sanity and kindness of the Russians and the Chinese that is keeping us alive in this nuclear era. Instead of relying on that restraint on their parts, as wonderful as it has been, we should take the threat against us out of their hands by negotiating to get all these WMD off the planet. We have already outlawed chemical and biological weapons, though much could be done to strengthen those treaties, so we can outlaw nuclear weapons too. Why hasn�t the US jumped on the bandwagon for global nuclear disarmament like other sane countries have done?
Is it because they want the threat of nuclear war hanging over your head to control your actions? The US got soldiers to volunteer for dismemberment and death in Iraq by citing the threat of WMD. What was obtained was oil, defense contracts for Carlyle Defense Industries (originally owned by Bushs and Bin Ladens), and unbid reconstruction contracts for Halliburton ( Cheney was CEO of and has financially profited ). So they have used that threat of WMD to enrich themselves personally. This is a clear conflict of interests. In the case of my own California representative to the House of Representatives, Duke Cunningham, who was on the Defense Appropriation committee, bids were granted to defense contractors that the Pentagon didn�t even want the services of and those contractors had each of their employees contribute the maximum allowable to the Republican Party coffers. It was a straight-line fix of taxpayer�s monies into the pockets of corrupt politicians, paying for their fancy houses, vacations, and swimming pools.
Recall for a moment the Savings and Loan Scandal of the 1980�s which stole about 16,000 USD per taxpayer out of the federal coffers. Ex-CIA officer Al Martin, in his book The Conspirators said that he was involved in writing a lot of the scams of that Iran-Contra Era. The basic scam, he said, was to go to the banks and ask them to make an unsecured loan to help �our boys in Central America stem the red tide in Nicaragua�. After all Nicaragua was about to invade the US, Reagan said. So the inadequately regulated Savings and Loans did what the CIA requested until they collapsed. In Martin�s book, he quotes Ollie North who was one of his bosses as being crushed under the knowledge that only 3% of all the assets collected for the Contras went to them. The rest of the money disappeared into the pockets of politicians. He then quotes Bush, Sr. as saying that if the people of the United States knew what we had done �they would lynch us�. It should be noted that Bush Senior was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (1976�1977), Chairman of the First International Bank in Houston (1977�1980), and the 43rd Vice President of the United States under President Ronald Reagan (1981�1989), and then President (1989�1993). As a result of that fear of being lynched, Martin says that contingency plans were made that included having massive prison facilities ready around the country in case they needed to arrest all of Congress, the journalists, and intelligentsia. In fact, there are currently 800 prisons in the US that have guards waiting ready to be used and Halliburton has the contract (http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2006/210206_b_Halliburton.htm ). In addition, Operation Sledgehammer was a plan whereby Ollie North would stage a fake coup against the administration if the corruption became known so that they could still be in power with just a surface make-over. This kind of shadow government that retained the reins of power regardless of surface appearance first came to my attention during the Iran Contra hearings while Reagan was still in power. Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii was in charge of those hearings�his nephew told me that the hearings were about to uncover this when the Congressmen decided it could too disillusion the US public. So they covered it up by going into closed session instead of correcting the problem. That was the moment in which the United States ceased to be a democracy. The next contingency plan that Martin discusses in his book had to do with how to make sure that the reins of power would not be loosed if the corruption came to light. It was called Operation Orpheus and Al Martin was briefed on it directly by Ollie North. That plan called for a �limited nuclear exchange� between the US and another country, such as Russia or China, in order to call for and impose Martial Law in the US. Al Martin asked Ollie, �How many people would be expended in such an operation?�
Ollie North replied �It is just a number, it doesn�t matter.�
But Martin persisted and asked again, whereupon Ollie said �Somewhere around 50-70 million people in the US.�
Al Martin goes on to say that Ollie went to the USSR not long afterwards and thought that he made such an arrangement. He also talks in his book about the US selling China nuclear missiles out of Edgewell Arsenals at a fraction of their true cost. He said that these missiles thus were paid for by the US taxpayers. They ended up getting pointed at the US, not surprisingly given Operation Orpheus.
I can attest to the fact that the US did indeed sell completely operational long range nuclear missiles to China in the late 1980�s. It was a fact that made me very mad because the year before the US had asked me to recover a nuclear detonator that the Chinese had stolen from a Michigan plant and I had risked my life to recover it. So I was not a happy camper to find out that against all rational national security concerns, the administration had arranged the sale complete with nuclear payload. Certainly, this was what the nuclear non-proliferation treaty was meant to prevent.
Anyone who asserts that I am harming US national security by my actions, should consider whether it is in the national security of the US to have global disarmament versus having long range nuclear missiles pointed at it just to ensure the continued monopoly of corrupt power in control.