Determination

DETERMINATION:

“If you hear the dogs, keep going.
If you see the torches in the woods, keep going.
If there’s shouting after you, keep going.
Don’t ever stop. Keep going.
If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.”
― Harriet Tubman

Native American – Honoring our Ancestors, Culture Spirituality: A Place In US History

Cross posted from Native American – Honoring Our Ancestors, Culture & Spirituality

Native American – Honoring our Ancestors, Culture & Spirituality

Mt. Rushmore – The Faces of Disgrace to Native & Indigenous Peoples

Mt. Rushmore is a desecration of our Sacred Mother Earth and a slap in the face of Lakota peoples everywhere. Documents have stated that Mt. Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota is a shrine to democracy. As you read further, you will find that American was founded on the blood and lives of Native peoples. We question what type of democracy this shrine represents.

Those four faces carved on stolen Native lands supposedly represent the four most notable presidents in United States history. With their ideals and values defined through the study of Iroquois society, America’s founding fathers are indebted to the Lakota and all Native peoples for their mere existence.

The four founding forefathers, whose faces are so intricately carved into the rock all shared the same common characteristics. All four valued white supremacy and promoted the extirpation of Native society. Extirpation means: to become extinct. Extinction means that a species (Natives) have completely disappeared from the face of the earth i.e., GONE forever.

Our founding forefathers were staunchly anti-Indian advocates in that at one time or another, all four provided for the genocide against Native and Indigenous peoples of this hemisphere. Here they are:

George Washington…

In 1783, Washington’s anti-Indian sentiments were apparent in his comparisons of Indians with wolves: “Both being beast of prey, though they differ in shape”, he said. George Washington’s policies of extermination were realized in his troops behaviors following a defeat. Troops would skin the bodies of Iroquois “from the hips downward to make boot tops or leggings”. Indians who survived the attacks later re-named the nation’s first president as “Town Destroyer”. Approximately 28 of 30 Seneca towns had been destroyed within a five year period.

Thomas Jefferson…

In 1807, Thomas Jefferson instructed his War Department that, should any Indians resist against America stealing Indian lands, the Indian resistance must be met with “the hatchet”. Jefferson continued, “And…if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, ” he wrote, “we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi.” Jefferson, the slave owner, continued, “in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them”.

Abraham Lincoln…

In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution, by hanging, of 38 Dakota Sioux prisoners in Mankato, Minnesota. Most of those executed were spiritual men or political leaders of their tribe. None of them were responsible for committing the crimes they were accused of. This one act is deemed as the “Largest Mass Execution in U.S. History.”

Theodore Roosevelt…

The fourth face you see carved on that rock is America’s 1st twentieth century president, an alleged American hero, and a Nobel peace prize recipient, Theodore Roosevelt. This Indian fighter firmly grasped the notion of Manifest Destiny saying that America’s extermination of the Indians and thefts of their lands “was ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable”. Roosevelt once said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth”.

The apathy displayed by these founding fathers symbolize the demoralization related to racial superiority. Scholars point toward this racial polarization as evidence of the existence of Eugenics. Eugenics is a term for an old phenomena which asserts that Indian people should be exterminated because they are an inferior race of people.

Jefferson’s suggestion to pursue the Indians to complete extermination. Since they were uttered by one of America’s founding fathers, they conveniently have become lost to most historians in their insistent celebration of Jefferson’s wisdom and humanity.

Roosevelt feared that American upper classes were being replaced by the “unrestricted breeding” of inferior racial stocks, the “utterly shiftless”, and the “worthless”…..
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We Thank Native American – Honoring our Ancestors, Culture & Spirituality for permission to share their screeds. First Nation Indigenous People deserve a far greater share in US History than has been given via those who shaped our written history.

Those same people wrote history books, developed video, and promulgated a history that fit their beliefs systems, paradigm and their views of life. Life that excludes equality for people of color and in many ways excludes equality for women. 

We offer an example of privilege that was the core of the framers of the US Constitution. We have excerpted from an article that aims to show just how elitist and insensitive were the framers of the Constitution   If you wish to view the linked article you will find additional comment about African-Americans, Jews, Moslems, poor whites. These are very different groups for different screeds. we have omitted those groups. The Progressive Influence wishes to remain in the realm of the Native Americans – Honoring Our Ancestors and  Spirituality screed.

Equal Rights for Some

Excerpt

During and after the American Revolution, when the rich white men were writing theDeclaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, many people who were not rich, or white, or men thought maybe this was their chance to get equal rights too. They wrote to the men who were writing the Constitution and asked them to give women, and black people, and poor people, Jews, and Native Americans equal rights with rich white men. These people did win some rights for themselves, but they couldn’t get equal rights with rich white men. 

Women:

In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, who was one of the men writing the Constitution, to ask him “in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies.” But even though John Adams loved his wife very much and asked her for advice all the time, he answered, ” As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh…We know better than to repeal our masculine systems,” (see the letter here) and he did not include any rights for women in the Constitution. Abigail tried again, “I can not say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives” (see the letter here). Mercy Otis Warren also tried to improve the legal position of women. But women could not vote until 1920, or be elected as President or as Senators or anything else. 

Excerpt

Native Americans:

Like women and black people, Native Americans were not allowed to vote in the first hundred years of the United States government. John Adams was surprised to find that, because the Declaration of Independence said all men were created equal, even “Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.” (see the letter here) The Constitution (Article I, section 2) says that “Indians not taxed” should not even be counted in the census at all. The men who wrote the Constitution thought that Native Americans belonged to their own group, and were not part of the United States at all: they were not American citizens. Native American men did not get the right to vote until 1889, and then only if they left their tribes and lived like white men. It was 1924 before tribal Indians could vote.

Is there any wonderment about the accurate portrayal of the NAHOANS screed? The framers of the Constitution literally set the stage for “Manifest Destiny” that consumed many whites in the early nation and facilitated absolute and unyielding genocide against First Nation Native Americans. We at the TPI refuse to use the words “Founding Fathers” for one simple fact. Of the 79 members of the Continental Congress, 16 owned slaves and four of that sixteen became US Presidents.  There is no room for ‘Founding Fathers’ In our vernacular. True fathers or patriarchs do not own human beings and they do not practice genocide against a People.

Eagle Chief (Letakos-Lesa) Pawnee

“In the beginning of all things, wisdom and knowledge were with the animals, for Tirawa, the One Above, did not speak directly to man. He sent certain animals to tell men that he showed himself through the beast, and that from them, and from the stars and the sun and moon should man learn.. all things tell of Tirawa. 

All things in the world are two. In our minds we are two, good and evil. With our eyes we see two things, things that are fair and things that are ugly…. We have the right hand that strikes and makes for evil, and we have the left hand full of kindness, near the heart. One foot may lead us to an evil way, the other foot may lead us to a good. So are all things two, all two.”

Bush’s CIA Black Ops Torture Chambers in 54 Countries!

        

 Iraq War a personal vendetta, that cost the nation so much!

Huffington Post is reporting the Bush Administration in response to the 9/11 attacks interwove a spider web like network of torture facilities in 54 countries across the globe. Unbelievable as it is, some countries that housed CIA Black Ops “extraordinary rendition” torture chambers include Syria, Libya  and Egypt. 

An IKONOS satellite image   of a facility near Kabul,  Afghanistan taken on July  17, 2003. A Washington  Post on November 2, 2005  refers to this facility as the  largest CIA covert prison in  Afghanistan, code-named  the Salt Pit (Reuters / Space  Imaging Middle East)

Am I mistaken or has the US become a willing supporter of overthrowing governments in all three countries.  The US may not have initiated the Arab Spring (as far as we know), but the US has without question provided overt support to rebels in each country.  I recall a time when The Reagan Administration shared chemical weapons know-how with Saddam Hussein.  

Canadian Maher Arar holds up a shirt that he says he wore during his detention in Syria as he addresses a European Parliament hearing on allegations that the CIA used European countries for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners, in Brussels, March 23, 2006. Arar was sent to Syria for interrogation after being arrested at a New York airport in 2002 (Reuters / Francois Lenoir)

The “Geo-political” enemy during that period was Iran. Just over a decade later, Bush “W” was perpetrating Shock and Awe behind a fabricated WMD war crusade. Why is our government seemingly more often than not on the wrong side of international conflict?

The Bush Administration has no historic match for being on the wrong side of international conflict and of late International Law. The Reagan Administration comes close, but Reagan may have redeemed his legacy via his work with Gorbachev and the Soviet leader’s  dismantling the Soviet Union. Recent reports of US activities against Al Qaeda includes details of the Bush CIA “Black Ops” operations. An astounding number of countries provided facilities, possibly torture perpetrators, and covered for US violations of International Law. Our government violated International Laws it used to conduct war-crimes trials and executions in World War II.

Yesterday’s Huffington Post piece evolves around a recently released Open Society Foundation (OSF) Report. Before perusing the report, should you so chose, let’s take a journey down George Bush’s personal crusade to war.  Wars that provided no-bid contracts to Dick Cheney’s former Halliburton while wasting thousands of lives and ruined our economy. Cheney, via his Halliburton holdings, may have earned millions ($) from the wars? The Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan and Bush’s ‘give-away’ tax cuts for the nations wealthy, drove the nation to the edge of financial collapse. A really quick look at our staggering deficit and its  contributing factors tells all.

You must look very close towards the bottom of the chart to find any GREEN color. You must also look very  close towards the top of the chart to find the GOLD indicator . The salient point is all that sits between the two indicators. If you look at all between the gold and green, you have eight years of George Bush. ___________________________

March 18, 2003 ABC News…

Is Bush’s Iraq Stance Rooted in Revenge?

Just one month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — and only five days after the war in Afghanistan had begun — President Bush signaled his determination to confront Saddam Hussein next 

“There’s no question that the leader of Iraq is an evil man. After all, he gassed his own people. We know he’s been developing weapons of mass destruction. … And so we’re watching him very carefully. We’re watching him carefully,” Bush said in an Oct. 11, 2001, address. 

But the administration had its eye on Iraq long before 9/11.

Read more link in title above 

 

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The Independent.co.uk   ….in 2012 reported on an Iraq Engineer who eventually admitted that Saddam did not have WMD. His words were reported to have been written off by George Bush as follows, “We are going in”.

Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all

Defector tells how US officials ‘sexed up’ his fictions to make the 

case for 2003 invasion

JONATHAN OWEN SUNDAY 01 APRIL 2012

 

Excerpt 

“Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi’s lies used to justify the Iraq war 

He tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.” 

The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003. 

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him “we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, he simply replies: “Yes.” 

US officials “sexed up” Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell’s former chief of staff. “I brought the White House team in to do the graphics,” he says, adding how “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy”.

Read more linked in article title  _________________________ 

February 2003 Colin Powell presenting lies, embellishments and “sexed up” information and images to the United Nations 

  

The crusade for personal revenge took the United States and the world to the brink of economic catastrophe. And, led to 4500 US dead and 100,000 Iraqis dead. The number of maimed, disabled, and displaced for life, is still not an agreed upon statistic. _________________________

September 2007 Salon Dot Com

Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction

Salon exclusive: Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq.

BY SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL

Secretary of State Powell, in preparation for his presentation of evidence of Saddam’s WMD to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, spent days at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and had Tenet sit directly behind him as a sign of credibility. But Tenet, according to the sources, never told Powell about existing intelligence that there were no WMD, and Powell’s speech was later revealed to be a series of falsehoods. 

Both the French intelligence service and the CIA paid Sabri hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least $200,000 in the case of the CIA) to give them documents on Saddam’s WMD programs. “The information detailed that Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had fissile material, which they didn’t, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons,” one of the former CIA officers told me.  

On the eve of Sabri’s appearance at the United Nations in September 2002 to present Saddam’s case, the officer in charge of this operation met in New York with a “cutout” who had debriefed Sabri for the CIA. Then the officer flew to Washington, where he met with CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, who was “excited” about the report. Nonetheless, McLaughlin expressed his reservations. He said that Sabri’s information was at odds with “our best source.” That source was code-named “Curveball,” later exposed as a fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as a chemical engineer. 

The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. “Tenet told me he briefed the president personally,” said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush’s response was to call the information “the same old thing.” Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. “The president had no interest in the intelligence,” said the CIA officer. The other officer said, “Bush didn’t give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up.” 

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 “He had made up his mind”!!!!

Globalizing Torture

Huffington Post February  5, 2013

Extraordinary Rendition Report Finds More Than 50 Nations Involved In Global Torture Scheme

Posted: 02/04/2013 11:14 pm EST  |  Updated: 02/05/2013 11:24 am EST 
Excerpt

Although Bush administration officials said they never intentionally sent terrorism suspects abroad in order to be tortured, the countries where the prisoners seemed to end up — Egypt, Libya and Syria, among others — were known to utilize coercive interrogation techniques.

Extraordinary rendition was also a factor in one of the greatest intelligence blunders of the Bush years. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan national and top al Qaeda operative who was detained in Pakistan in late 2001, was later sent by the U.S. to Egypt. There, under the threat of torture, he alleged that Saddam Hussein had trained al Qaeda in biological and chemical warfare. He later withdrew the claim, but not before the U.S. invaded Iraq in part based on his faulty testimony.

Read more via linked title 

The secondary entrance of Romania’s National Registry Office for Classified Information (ORNISS) headquarters is seen in Bucharest, December 9, 2011. International media reported that between 2003 and 2006, the CIA operated a secret prison from the building’s basement. (Reuters / Stringer)

The OSF Report is a must read for any student of US History.   It is comprehensive, reads as unbiased, and most assuredly depicts a state of mind and of governance that forever changed perception of the United States (both internal and external perceptions). It is broken into detailed sections. Section IV (Page 29 through page 60) lists captives who were tortured throughout the course of the Black Ops program. Once he took office ,President Obama publicly declared the programs discontinued. We can only hope that is the case.

“ We also have to work, through, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, September 16, 2001

   

Information Sources:

Black Ops images above from: Defense Dot lk ; Huffignton Post,

Open Society Foundation: Link A, Link B;   Assembly Coe Dot Int

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” 

George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense, The Life of Reason, Vol.1, 

Alabama Conservative Talk-Radio Fiend-Nut Job Killed, Ethan Freed!

Cross posted from Smoking Hot Topics Dot Com.  (Smoking Hot Politics is just that “Smokin”.)

JIMMY LEE DYKES: AN AVID FAN OF CONSERVATIVE TALK RADIO

Posted February 5th, 2013 by Julie Driscoll  

The little boy, Ethan, is safe, rescued from his captivity at the hands of anti-government survivalist, Jimmy Lee Dykes.  And “conservative terrorist” Jimmy Lee Dykes is dead, shot in the head by the FBI as they stormed the bunker and rescued the boy.

As reported by Chelsea Hoffman of the Examiner, “. . . [N]eighbors say that Jimmy Lee Dykes was essentially a conservative extremist who played right wing talk radio most of the time. He was a paranoid and menacing individual who is accused by one neighbor of planning this entire abduction so he could demand a platform to rant his anti-government political opinions.” 

If Dykes, as is rumored, was an avid fan of conservative talk radio, what he’s been hearing could have fueled his desire to demand a platform by taking a 5-year-old hostage – and this is what he’s been hearing: 

Glenn Beck – He’s planning a community, known as Independence, USA, ” . . . [A] $2 billion, self-sufficient, libertarian city-cum-theme park that would mark ‘the rebirth of our nation through its own principles.’”  Free from the tyranny of “King Obama,” and free from the liberties he claims the government (and by that he means President Obama and Democrats in general) is stripping away. 

In that same vein, some people, including a dude who blogs under the name “Vernon”, have envisioned a secular community called the Citadel “where you know that residing in every single home in the neighborhood are people who think much as do you, respect most of the values as do you, and will not try to force any of their values on you or your children . . . has qualified Riflemen inside, ready to come to your aid at a moments notice, whether to help you change a tire, fix a problem, or cover your back in a firefight with an Enemy of Liberty . . . .”  Vernon also noted that “. . . Militia training will also have a unifying social aspect to it.”  In fact, Drudge reported on the Citadel under a blazing headline that read, GROUP TO BUILD ARMED NEIGHBORHOOD FORTRESS.”

As reported byTalking Points Memo, “The Citadel, as envisioned and advertised by its creators, is to be a walled community of 3,500 to 7,000 ‘patriotic American families’ who are ready for when The Shit Hits The Fan (TSHTF), i.e. the myriad potential society-collapsing disasters, either natural or man made, anticipated by preppers, survivalists, along with other fringe and breakaway strands of -ers and -ists. The Citadel is to be a place for people who want to be ‘removed and protected from peril in order to preserve ourselves, our posterity, and Liberty in the event of a national economic implosion.’ 

Someone like Jimmy Lee Dykes, who carefully planned his underground bunker and planted homemade bombs inside it, might well have been excited by these folks – and other survivalist and bunker mentality movements, including the American Prepper Network.  As reported by Salon, “The APN site talks often and explicitly about ‘The End of the World As We Know It,’ which it refer to as TEOTWAWKI.  And judging from the abundance of videos and blogs of self-identified preppers arming themselves while touting conspiracies about government, financial collapse and the apocalypse, it’s clear this isn’t strictly a peaceful movement of people hoarding canned goods.  Preppers don’t just stockpile nonperishables — they collect weapons . . . preppers believe having weapons is just as important as having enough water. They are also deeply suspicious of government overreach . . . .” 

In fact, the APN, along with other “survivalist” movements, routinely sound alarms about government infringement and the way to survive it, or revolt against it – largely centered around being well-armed. 

The right-wing survivalists and preppers and bunker mentality types, led by Glenn Beck and Wayne LaPierre and Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talking heads, have evolved from “preparedness” to fomenting revolution.  And although Jimmy Lee Dykes will reside for eternity at least six feet under, the fuel for his violent actions lives on.  Though one survivalist with an anti-government, anti-Obama bent was felled, others have already, no doubt, taken root and are evolving into another Jimmy Lee Dykes. 

The FBI had better keep its sharp-shooters sharp.

A special thank you to Julie at “Smoking Hot Politics” .