That pesky Bush-Hitler thing
By Marc Ash
Jan.6— Here we go again. Another bone-head with a Bush-Hitler
analogy. How many times have we told folks this? Bush is not Hitler,
Bush is not Hitler, Bush is not Hitler. Holy cow, this is getting really
frustrating. Why won’t this thing die?
Just because his grandfather Prescott Bush financed Hitler’s rise
to power, do they think that means George W. Bush has Nazi tendencies?
That’s absurd. Is it fair to say that just because the US government
had to step in and shut down Prescott Bush’s Union Banking Corporation
operations in New York in 1942, under the Trading With the Enemy Act,
that this Bush should be viewed with caution and skepticism? That’s
just silly.
And who are these bloody Europeans who keep comparing Bush to Hitler?
Take that German Justice Minister, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, who compared
Bush’s dealings on Iraq to those of Hitler. That really takes the
cake, now doesn’t it? What do the Germans know of Hitler anyway?
Why should they feel empowered to warn the world of such impending dangers?
Why couldn’t they just shut-up and help us kill the Iraqis?
The worst has to be Newsweek’s Poland bureau. The story they published
titled “The Bush Family and Nazis” was completely out of left
field. Who cares that the story states “The Bush family reaped
the benefits of slave labor in the Auschwitz concentration camp?”
The important thing here is that George W. Bush is very patriotic. Republican
National Convention Chairman Ed Gillespie is right. His boy George is
clean, that’s right, clean as a whistle. No skulls or bones in
his closet for sure.
This thing has to stop right now. New rules: If you are a journalist
and you talk about Bush and Hitler, you’re fired on the spot, no
ifs, ands, or buts. If you are an official and you try it, you will
be forced to resign — you’re done. And for all of you trouble-makers
out there who want to keep it up on your own, we can keep track of you
with the PATRIOT Act.
Source: truthout
White terror in the USA
By Glen Ford and Peter Gamble
The Bush men decorate our holidays in Homeland Security yellow, orange
and red, while demonizing Islamic green as the color of the most implacable
foes of Western civilization. Yet official silence conspires to hide
genocidal maniacs in our midst who have sworn to erase the Black presence
from the landscape of the United States: White Terror.
Tens of thousands of members of a racist legion operate openly in every
corner of the nation; men, women, juveniles, extended families, cells,
gangs, churches, clans, militias, border armies, all engaged in what
they consider to be a war to the death against non-white America.
George Bush and John Ashcroft don’t want you to hear about White
Terror, understandably fearing that the lyrics of white supremacy strike
the same racial chords as the Pirates’ own War on Terror theme,
itself a rearrangement of the many martial tunes written throughout
American history in praise of Manifest Destiny. Less than a decade ago
Timothy McVeigh’s band of terrorists got carried away with the
logic of America as a White Man’s Country, and may have cost the
Republicans the White House in 1996.
That’s why the Homeland Security colors didn’t change in May
of this year, when federal agents arrested a white racist couple dealing
in weapons of mass destruction in a small town near Tyler, Texas. The
feds seized a cyanide bomb capable of unleashing a deadly poison cloud,
chemicals and components for additional WMDs, gas masks, 100 conventional
bombs, an arsenal of automatic weapons, silencers, and half a million
rounds of ammunition.
The bust went unreported last Spring, although George Bush was said
to have been regularly briefed about the ongoing investigation. Finally,
the Dallas-Fort Worth CBS affiliate broke the story on Nov. 26, when
longtime militiaman and traveling gun merchant William J. Krar and his
common-law wife pled guilty to possession of a chemical bomb and lesser
charges.
Local Channel 11 news producer Todd Bensman thought he had a huge national
story on his hands, but CBS refused to pick up his report. “I guess
they didn’t think it was important enough,” Bensman told David
Neiwert, a Seattle-based journalist who has covered right-wing terrorism
since 1978. In fact, the national news blackout was near-total, as reported
online by The Memory Hole.
The only media that saw fit to report about this terrorist plot within
the US were a few newspapers and TV stations in Texas. The Web-based
news outlet WorldNetDaily ran a story about it, but Google News shows
that there hasn’t been a word in the New York Times, Washington
Post, LA Times, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, or any other big media outlet.
Why have the media decided that this is a non-story? It’s hard
to say, but we can say with certainty that if Muslims had been caught
with these weapons of mass destruction, fake IDs, gas masks, and books
on making explosives, it would’ve been front-page news for days.
The New York Times got around to the story on Dec. 13, not on the news
pages, but through a back door Op-Ed article titled Enemies at Home.
Daniel Levitas’ piece passed the Times’ blandness test. Americans
should question whether the Justice Department is making America’s
far-right fanatics a serious priority,Levitas wrote. And with the FBI
still struggling to get up to speed on the threat posed by Islamic extremists
abroad, it is questionable whether the agency has the manpower to keep
tabs on our distinctly American terror cells.
There is no accurate way of analyzing the budgets of the FBI, Justice
Department and Department of Homeland Security to discern how much attention
is being devoted to right-wing extremists. But in light of the FBI’s
poor record in keeping tabs on the militia movement before the 1995
Oklahoma City bombing, one wonders whether the agency has the will to
do so now.
What apologetic nonsense. The federal police are acting just like their
predecessors under J. Edgar Hoover, who for decades denied there was
such a thing as the Mafia. Hoover knew full well that the Italian-American
syndicate existed, since the Bureau had used gangsters countless times
as lethal instruments against leftists in the union movement. The FBI
was a friend to the Mafia until deep into the Sixties and -- the movie
Mississippi Burning notwithstanding -- sheltered and immunized far more
Klansmen than it ever arrested. The Bureau does as it is told, and it
has been instructed to hide White Terror from view.
Indeed, there are striking similarities between the FBI’s modus
operandi with the Ku Klux Klan in the Sixties and the Bureau’s
behavior towards today’s white terrorists; the feds watch, but
don’t do much of anything to stop them. There is no question that
the Aryan Nations, National Alliance, Christian Identity, various reconstituted
Klans, skinheads and hundreds of other homegrown Nazi organizations
have been heavily infiltrated by various law enforcement agencies. After
all, they are full of criminals of the kind that routinely trade evidence
for extended sojourns outside of prison. In addition, the American domestic
arms trade is a roadmap to the violent Right, a national grid full of
above-ground gun markets and fairs. All it takes is some cash to join
the circuit and meet the folks.
Terrorists with impunity
The feds met William Krar around the time of the Oklahoma City bombing.
According to the Nov. 26 television report from Dallas-Fort Worth:
In 1995, the ATF investigated Krar and another man on weapons charges.
The other suspect told authorities at the time that he and Krar shared
an abiding hatred of the federal government and had been planning to
bomb government facilities, court records show. But the suspect later
recanted the story about plotting terror attacks with Krar. Krar denied
the allegation and was not arrested, according to records.
There is little to indicate that the feds wanted to make anything stick
to Krar. On the day after 9/11, an employee at a New Hampshire storage
site where the weapons dealer kept his regional customers’ stock
reported Krar’s wicked anti-American remarks to the FBI, which
filed a report but did nothing!
When the feds finally moved on Krar and his companion in Noonday, Texas
a year and a half later, the arrest warrant said he was actively involved
in the militia movement and a good source of covert weaponry for white
supremacist and anti-government militia groups in New Hampshire, his
native state. How long had this been known to the FBI? Its a moot question,
since such activities were clearly not of great interest to the Bureau.
Four months after 9/11, in January 2002, the feds stumbled on Krar’s
network through no smarts of their own when a package meant for New
Jersey militiaman Edward Feltus was mistakenly delivered to a Staten
Island, New York address. The package contained more than five false
identification documents, including a North Dakota birth certificate,
a Social Security card, a Vermont birth certificate, a Defense Intelligence
Agency Identification card, and a United Nations Multinational Force
Identification card, said the East Texas US Attorney’s office.
But no attempt was made to halt Krar’s activities, which continued
until May of this year.
The US Attorney’s statement claims that after the New Jersey package
turned up, a subsequent investigation discovered that Krar had accumulated
dangerous chemical weapons, an apparent reference to a Tennessee Highway
Patrol stop of Krar’s car a full year later, in January 2003. State
Police -- not federal agents -- found dangerous chemicals and a note
that appears to represent instructions for carrying out some kind of
covert operation, Channel 11 reported. It lists code words for cities
where meetings can take place at motels.
The cities where the conspirators would presumably meet were called
zones and included:
Chattanooga, Bristol, and Knoxville, Tennessee; Scranton and Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania;
Winchester and Roanoke, Virginia; Jackson, Mississippi; and Shreveport,
Louisiana.
The TV story continued that other codes appear to be warnings about
how close police might be to catching the plotters. “Lots of light
storms are predicted,”for instance, means “Move fast before
they look any harder. We have a limited window remaining.”
The FBI and other federal agencies had left the window open for mad
white bombers Krar and Bruey for two whole years, but you’d never
know it from the US Attorney’s press release. Through the cooperative
effort of the FBI, ATF, the Army CID, and the Criminal Investigative
Service, these defendants were identified and their activities pinpointed
and neutralized. We live in a safer world because of the efforts of
these agencies.”
Honest lawmen see things differently. Channel 11 warned that authorities
familiar with the case say more potentially deadly cyanide bombs may
be in circulation.
The Right rampages, again
The Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people in 1995, most of them white
and many of them children. For a time, the white public recoiled from
the harshest rhetoric of their race-crazed kin, and it appears that
many rank and file supremacists shrank away in shame, becoming inactive.
Bill Clinton’s political fortunes rose dramatically on the sea
change of public revulsion at the Right, and he defeated Bob Dole decisively
in the 1996 election. Thomas Sowell, Republican Uncle Tom Emeritus,
still complains about that period. The Oklahoma City bombing was immediately
blamed on conservative talk show hosts, even before the perpetrators
were known, Sowell wrote in a November, 2002 column, exaggerating as
usual.
However, as the William Krar saga indicates, at no time have federal
authorities treated white hate groups as clear and present dangers to
national security. The lethal threat to Black America failed to spur
Bill Clinton to any serious action against these very visible networks.
Krar kept selling his wares, and apparently grew more sophisticated
and deadly.
Then came September 11. Racism was back with volcanic vengeance, unbound
by any notions of shame as the Great Mobilizer of White Americans. The
horror of Oklahoma City had provided only a respite, after all. This
time, the Republicans are determined to ride the tidal wave of white
fear and hate to its ultimate, ordained destination: world conquest.
And there will be no reminders of the despised Tim McVeigh to break
the triumphalist spell; not if Attorney General Ashcroft can help it.
On the December 5 edition of Democracy Now! University of Texas journalism
professor Robert Jensen attempted to explain the silence over racists
armed with WMDs: “[C]ases like this of domestic terrorism, especially
when they involve white supremacist and conservative Christian groups,
don’t have any political value for an administration, especially
this particular administration,” said the professor. Therefore,
why if one were going to be crass and cynical, why would they highlight
this?
On the other hand, foreign terrorism and things connected to Arab, South
Asian and Muslim groups have value because they can be used to whip
up support for military interventions, which this administration is
very keen on.
Jensen understates the case. The Noonday, Texas WMD story was squashed
by the Bush administration with the active collaboration of editors
throughout the corporate media. The Dec. 10 issue of Intelligence Squad
got it just about right: Suddenly it becomes clear why John Ashcroft
isn’t going to make a big deal out of nailing these guys: they
are essentially a more extreme version of Ashcroft himself.
The Bush men conceal the existence of these terrorists, as if embarrassed
by their own kind.
Reporters at Channel 11 in Dallas-Fort Worth were told that federal
agents have served hundreds of subpoenas across the country in a domestic
terror investigation since May. Yet there have been no subsequent news
reports of such events and only three people are in custody: Krar, Bruey
and the New Jersey militiaman, Edward Feltus.
If the hundreds of persons suspected of terrorist activities were Arabs
or South Asians, we might assume they were locked away incommunicado
in the twilight Gulag created since Sept. 11. But these are white Americans
with special dispensation to engage in an ancient yet familiar rampage.
They can hide in plain sight, because nobody’s really looking.
Source: www.BlackCommentator.com
