Blase's Blog

FINAL COMMENTARY

It has been a privilege to speak to you during the Evening News for many years. However, KPFK has a new policy stating that programmers with an existing program will not also have a scheduled commentary.

While I do not want to interfere with your church attendance on Sundays, I do want you to know that my program, WORLD FOCUS, will continue to air every Sunday morning from 10:00 to 11:00 AM. This Sunday I am privileged to have Jeremy Scahill author of best selling, Blackwater: the Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." Jeremy is a Polk Award-winning investigative journalist.

My second guest will be Dahr Jamail, an unembedded independent journalist who reports from Iraq and who is also the author of a new book, Beyond the Green Zone. Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times calls this book, "International journalism at its best."

My commentaries for Pacifica Radio are now published in two books. The first book is called Guerrillas of Peace on the Air. These are Pacifica radio commentaries and my personal reports on International Direct Action for Justice and Peace. This book begins with commentaries from January of 1996 through April of 1998.

My second book of Pacifica commentaries is called Common Sense for the Twenty-First Century. This book includes commentaries from November of 2001 to April of 2004 and it also includes my Pacifica interviews with Chalmers Johnson, Reverend James Lawson, and Jonathan Schell.

These books are available at the Office of the Americas which has produced these Pacifica Commentaries by way of KPFK. You can reach us at 323/852-9808.

These books of Pacifica commentaries are also available at Amazon.com. My third book of Pacifica commentaries will be published in the spring of 2008. It will be titled, Civilization is Possible and will also include interviews with Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Greg Palast, and Peter Laufer.

These commentaries, while recorded during the dates mentioned, deal with topics which are truly timeless.

So, my friends, I want to thank you for listening to these commentaries during the KPFK news for these many years and ask you to tune in on Sundays at 10:00 AM to listen to my program, WORLD FOCUS.


This is Blase Bonpane.

In a new era of planetary consciousness, nut case fanatics in and out of government must receive the same indictment for plotting the bombing of Tehran as they would receive for plotting the bombing of Chicago. We in the United States don't have any more of a right to live than anyone else on the planet.

And at this moment of crisis who are the people closest to the trigger of a nuclear holocaust?

According to Michael Weinstein, the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the highest levels of the Air Force, Air Force Academy as well as other branches of the military's highest brass are riddled with cult-like members of a warped, exclusionist and ersatz Christianity which Chris Hedges identifies in his book "AMERICAN FASCISTS, THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT AND THE WAR ON AMERICA."

Cadets are clearly and officially pressured into a mind set based on sheer fiction. When you think of it, how else can they be prepared to abolish millions of innocent lives unless such repulsive action can be sanctified as a Godly act?

In this very wide spread and illegally authorized cult the United Nations is deemed to be the Anti-Christ.

Sadly, the President and many of his cronies are in this same loop of nationalistic and fundamentalist religiosity. The very same style of demonization that hypnotized the Germans to accept the holocaust is now being directed to the world of Islam.

It remains our task to accept and understand the Anthropology which has given us a plethora of religions on this earth and to realize that the name of one's religion tells us little or nothing about their integrity.

How then can there be any planetary unity with such a wide variety of religions?

Actually it is entirely possible. We know people by the fruits of their lives, not by the name of their religion.

Rather than trying to convert others to rigid sectarian views, we must accept their non-theism, their atheism, agnosticism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or Animism. And within their enlightened consciousness they can begin to understand a universal and nonsectarian approach which is based on a conversion to peace, justice, joy, courage, endurance, love, compassion and repentance.

The conversion to these universally accepted virtues can unite the planet into one family of admirable diversity.

And this was the basis for the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1945.

Friends, it is clear that we are the realists and that our current political leadership is lost in a hopeless miasma of delusion.

And please listen to WORLD FOCUS at 10:00 AM on Sunday. My guest will be Colonel Ann Wright.

Much of the work of the Office of the Americas over the past twenty-four years has been trying to stop our government from killing people. The focus of our work is on the foreign policy of the United States. We have found that policy to be dictatorial and counterproductive. The daily outrages of the current administration have reached a state of intolerability.

We firmly believe that our nation must go through an exercise of international repentance. Over a space of time we have been responsible for far more unnecessary deaths than the Third Reich. But Germany has gone through a long and effective period of national repentance. The horrors of The Fuehrer's rule are now forbidden by law.

We must follow the example of Germany's repentance. The list of terror tactics developed by the presidential imposter George Bush must be codified as federal offenses. Yes, this includes so-called preventative war, rendition, torture and most certainly one of its ugliest forms called water boarding. Any aspiring public servant who cannot identify water boarding as torture is unqualified for office and most especially for the office of Attorney General...thank you for your interest Judge Michael Mukasey, you are incompetent and morally challenged.

And in a new era of repentance, a list of required Federal Crimes will be forthcoming. Any plot of citizens or office holders to bomb another nation should be taken as seriously as a plot to attack our own country.

All people intending to go into public service should be required to take a course in Civics 101. This would help them to understand that they are seeking to become a servant of the people, not a Godfather of organized crime.

The current brood of nut case neo-cons conspiring to attack Iran should all be arrested for their intent to foster terror against civilians.

We at the Office of the Americas, together with a massive and like-minded international movement for justice and peace, are dedicated to confronting the daily outrages in which we live. You are the people who make this critical work possible.

We look ahead to a new era of planetary justice and peace. Join us on Sunday, November 11, at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica as the Office of the Americas honors Peace Activist Frank Dorrel, Academy Award winner Paul Haggis and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh. KPFK is a media sponsor of this event.

A Call to the Supreme Court

We had hoped that the new Democratic Congress would help us to end the war in Iraq. They have not. They have even seemed unmoved and frequently supportive of a planned suicide mission on Iran. In view of this impasse we are turning to what we consider the most powerful branch of government, the Supreme Court. Here is a letter coming from the Office of the Americas to that court:

We are writing with a sense of urgency on behalf of the people of the United States and the sovereign state of Iran.

Our President and Vice President appear to be in the process of conspiring to commit an illegal war against the people of Iran. Such aggression would mean the likelihood that innocent millions will die and possibly result in attacks on the United States. An overwhelming majority of our citizens do not support the current occupation of Iraq and most certainly would not support an attack on Iran.

The plan seems to include the following:

The United States and Israel will strike at Iran. Iran will respond immediately with strikes on Israel, and Iraq. In the wake of such a disaster there is a real possibility of Israel and the United States resorting to nuclear weapons. China and Russia will come to the aid of Iran. The President has recently made reference to World War III. His plans for Iran could actually give us World War III.

The President stated our need, "to defend Europe against the emerging Iranian threat."

But Europe does not share his concern.

Mr. Fareed Zakaria, former editor of Foreign Affairs concluded, "the American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality."

As we review Article III, section 2 of the Constitution we can see the broad powers of the Jurisdiction of the Supreme Court regarding:

Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party; --to Controversies between two or more States;...or between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States.

This imminent crisis requires a full exercise of the power of Judicial Review regarding the conduct of the President and Vice President at this critical moment in history. Indeed the legacy of this Supreme Court will be determined by its action on this matter of utmost importance. The lives of our citizens and citizens of the international community are in the balance. We are urgently asking for your cooperation.

Friends, we are also asking that willing individuals file at the Supreme Court for an injunction against military action. This is the legal remedy to stop an action before something terrible and irrevocable happens.

Put Out the Fire

One dinky DC-10 is available to attempt to put out fires on the West Coast of the United States. Hundreds of manned and unmanned aircraft are ready for a mass murder of Iranian citizens.

It seems we have a problem of values here. We are completely unprepared for disasters here at home while we create endless and unnecessary disasters overseas.

Apparently we have a toxic group of individuals who are happy with the flames in Iraq and anxious to see Iran on fire. The profundity of racism we see in this group seems to prefer the destruction of the cradle of civilization over the saving of thousands of homes in the Southland. We could easily have a fleet of fire dousing DC-10s that could have saved thousands of homes in a few hours if we simply put aside our global warring.

The stench of neo-Nazi racism arrives this week at the University of Southern California. It is called Islamo-fascism Awareness Week. The program is dedicated to hate and fear as it perfectly mirrors the tone of Germany in the 30's. One of the distinguished guests at the university for Islamo-fascism awareness Week is Ann Coulter who says we should invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.

Indeed we are fortunate that Islamo-fascism Awareness Week came at a time when Southern California is burning. Let this remind the racist perpetrators of Islamo-fascist Week that their position as represented by our corporate designed foreign policy has made Iraq into a hell on earth as they now are drooling to do the same in Iran. The corporate mind, not being human, has no concern for any human values.

On the side of humanity, however, we congratulate Ted Glick who organized a convergence on the U.S. Capitol Building this week to protest the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The theme was, "No War, No Warming." Ted and 60 other patriots were arrested in acts of non-violent civil disobedience.

And now it is our turn to come out on this Saturday, October 27. We will meet at noon at Olympic and Broadway and March to the Federal Building. Our troops must come home from Iraq and Afghanistan now and there must be no war in Iran and then we can begin a program of disaster preparedness in the United States.

God Made Me Do It

Have you ever wondered how people can adjust to genocide? Our citizens have made such adjustments on numerous occasions. There was a spirit of Manifest Destiny as we conducted genocide against the indigenous people of this hemisphere in the 18th and 19th centuries. We declared ourselves called by God to rule from sea to sea.

Then there was the terrible swift sword of the civil war which gloried in the death of 600,000 Americans among the small population of our country in the 1860's. We never have lost so many citizens as in the Civil War.

In the Spanish American War, President McKinley informed us that we were going to Christianize the enemy. He seemed to have forgotten that the enemy was already Christian.

Oh yes, World War One was the war to end all wars. As that mindless slaughter concluded, some intelligent people formed a League of Nations. But our warfare state Senate destroyed the League by 1920 and opened the way for a Second World War, the most calamitous event in the history of the world. Had there been a functional League of Nations there would have been no World War II. The intelligent people came back again once again after World War II and established a United Nations to end the scourge of war forever. But with our power as victors in World War II we decided to use the UN as a weapon for conquest and we manipulated a war with Korea as a United Nations Action. Our citizens were carefully propagandized to translate the word communist as, "OK to Kill."

The OK to kill definition was so successful that we used it to conduct genocide in Indo China and Latin America. As the Soviet Union collapsed, a new word was coined, "terrorist." Starting with Ronald Reagan this word became the battle cry for new wars in Central America. And when we were actually struck by terrorists in 2001 we immediately attacked a nation that had never attacked us, Afghanistan. This error was compounded by an attack on Iraq which our head of state has attempted to blame for the 9/11 tragedy. In one of his recent speeches we heard the word Al Qaeda mentioned ninety-five times. Bush clearly had purposely tried to confuse our people by calling the Iraqi resistance, Al Qaeda.

And as our long standing addiction to war continues, the women and men in the armed services are discovering the criminality of this administration. Washington Post reporter Dana Priest recently said in an interview that she believed the US military would revolt and refuse to fly missions against Iran if the White House issued such orders. A score of Generals have spoken against this endless war. General William Odom former director of the NSA said, "The invasion of Iraq, I believe, will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.

With plans for war with Iran on the table, we must organize mightily that the ancient myth of Manifest Destiny will die on the sands of Iraq.

Who Do We Call?

Would anyone have the 911 number to call? Criminality is rampant in the current administration of the United States.

The Chief Executive is lying through his teeth about no torture as we routinely practice horrendous forms of torture. It's true the Congress can and should impeach. But the Congress has passed away and is effectively not in session. The Supreme Court is on an early "long winter's nap".

Well then, do we contact the Attorney General to report such crimes? Should we call the FBI? The local police? The CIA?

Certainly many public officials have been arrested while in office; Governors, Mayors, members of Congress and state assemblies. There is no problem with such arrests.

But here we have the Chief Executive and his cronies clearly out of control. Are they to be exempt as they wantonly break national and international laws?

Millions of people are saying no, they are not exempt, as we observe thousands of daily vigils throughout the United States as well as dozens of major mass mobilizations.

But the criminality goes on as if there were some divine right of kings in our land. And now the justice and peace movement in the United States has taken a creative approach; leading Americans are asking our military to refuse orders to attack Iran.

This is an effort to create a kind of coalition that makes history.

Soldiers know the horrors of war, death, severed limbs, blindness and mental illness. They have seen the genocide in Iraq and they are not apt to romanticize about its repetition in Iran. A Pentagon consultant told Seymour Hersh, "There is a war about the war going on inside the building."

So while mindless thugs are doing everything possible to create an illegal war with Iran, elements within our military establishment are in opposition to another armed disaster.

We are not asking the Pentagon for a military coup in the United States. On the contrary, we are asking them to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. They do not need to show any loyalty to international crime.