"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness." -- William O. Douglass

This site exists to document the facts and commentaries surrounding the March 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States under the leadership of President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisors. It begins as far back as 1920, with the division of the Middle East in the interests of the West and its oil corporations (the so-called Seven Sisters); the site actually traces it back as far as 1897 and the infamously unnecessary Spanish-American War, used to extend American hegemony throughout Central America and parts of the Pacific. It continues to this day, with new material being added as it becomes available in the press. In addition, the site attempts to document the various assaults on American civil liberties and at least a selection of the crimes and perfidies committed upon other nations by US conservative and corporate interests. The invasion of Iraq and the passing of the USA Patriot Act, among other perfidies, all serve the same ends.

I have come to believe that almost nothing we have been told by either the Bush or Blair administrations concerning Iraq, Afghanistan, or the 9/11 terrorist attacks is true. (This has now been proven, though a large percentage of US and British citizens still do not accept the facts.) A country, Iraq, has been invaded and conquered, victim of a "preemptive strike" unprecedented in American history, and not seen since Germany's blitzkriegs in Western Europe that preceded World War II. Lies have been piled upon misinformation, half-truths, exaggerations, and fabricated evidence. The media, when it hasn't willingly gone along with the two administrations' machinations (and in America, the mainstream media is all too willing to serve as the government's Ministry of Propaganda, with a few notable exceptions), has been either misled, coddled, or coerced into presenting the "correct" information and little, if any, dissenting views. In America, dissent has been muzzled, ridiculed, and met with interference from governmental institutions. Soldiers and their families have been punished for speaking their minds; their e-mails and letters have been censored, their tours of duty lengthened, their salaries and benefits cut. Innocent citizens have been jailed, sometimes without benefit of Constitutional due process, and denied access to legal representation and family members. An extralegal concentration camp has been set up in Cuba, with torture being allowed to extract information and confessions from the hundreds of Iraqi, Afghani, and other foreign citizens being forcibly incarcerated without the benefit of treatment according to US law or the Geneva Convention. (Some of the "detainees" are as young as 13 years old.) Other detention facilities exist in Iraq and Afghanistan, and perhaps elsewhere; the government also actively "farms out" prisoners to other countries who will willingly torture these prisoners for American benefit. Unconstitutional legislation has been rammed through the US Congress giving the Bush administration sweeping powers of surveillance and incarceration that is specifically proscribed by two hundred years of previous American law. As more and more information comes out concerning the illegality and duplicity of American and British machinations, the American government in particular is bent on further violence, planning more military strikes against governments in Iran, Palestine, and possibly North Korea.

I believe that the entire charade is part and parcel of an overarching strategy by American neoconservatives and their corporate cohorts to gain control of the Middle Eastern oil supplies and secure those supplies for their own benefit. I don't subscribe to the usual conspiracy theories, but I do believe that a conspiracy of sorts has been functioning since the oil companies succeeded in taking control of the Middle East oil fields after World War I. (I don't believe in an X-Files conspiracy of powerful, focused men and women working through the generations to secure their ends; I think we're talking about fits and starts, with the loosely termed "neocons" and their predecessors taking advantage of events as best they could, sometimes failing miserably, sometimes succeeding beyond their expectations. I don't envision a "spider web" with one comic-book villain or group of corporate/political movers and shakers at the center; rather, I envision something far more loose and less organized -- until after Watergate, when the underpinnings of what Hillary Clinton termed "the vast right-wing conspiracy" began to take true root.) I believe that the forcible impression of George W. Bush as President of the United States gave the neoconservatives the chance they have been waiting for since the fall of the Soviet Union to exert their own brand of global hegemony over that area of the world, and by extension, dominate the world's energy markets. Of course, the realities of the situation are far more complex than a simple oil grab, but I believe that is a large part of the thinking behind Bush's foreign policy and particularly his administration's policies in the Middle East.

Most dispassionate observers believe that George W. Bush has been an abject failure as a President. Under his administration, America's economy has plunged into a nightmare of deficit spending, horrendous domestic spending cutbacks, rampant unenployment, expansive and unaffordable tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens (both private and corporate), and an almost lawless environment for corporate interests to do as they please, profiteering and power-gathering with no thought towards the welfare of the average American (much less the rest of the world), the health of the environment, national and international law, or anything else except their own greed and powerlust. But in a way I disagree.

By their own standards, this administration and its supporters have enjoyed tremendous success. The Bush administration has succeeded in gutting Constitutional protections of free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and a whole range of privacy rights. It has succeeded in accelerating the trend of concentration of economic wealth and power into the hands of a small number of "oligarchs" in a manner never before seen in American history. It has succeeded in annexing an entire Middle Eastern country, rich in oil, and exerts near-complete control over that country; it will continue to do so as long as it can. It has succeeded in thwarting the will of the United Nations, and has had some success in defying that body in the pursuit of its own goals. (In early 2005, the administration will make its feelings about the UN clear, by nominating John Bolton, a man who advocates the elimination of the UN, as the US ambassador to that body.) It has made a mockery of international law and conventions. It has succeeded in corralling the mainstream media into performing like trained seals, reporting only what is authorized and glorifying the "accomplishments" of this President and his colleagues while ignoring, papering over, or debunking its failures and felonies; the vast majority of American media outlets is now owned by a handful of conservative corporations. It has succeeded in all but completely negating the opposition of the Democratic party, suborning, buying off, cowing, and threatening Democrats into becoming a mere shadow of a "loyal opposition." It has succeeded in freeing the largest corporations from any legal, social, and economic restraints, allowing them to function unfettered in almost every area of the globe with impunity, so that they function almost as sovereign yet lawless extra-governmental entities of their own, answerable to no one except their own internal leadership and controlling vast resources of money, political, social, and economic power without governmental oversight of any sort. By their lights, this administration has experienced five years and more of almost unalloyed success/

I wish this was as crazy and paranoid as it sounds. But as the facts documented in this site will show, it is not. America and the entire world stands poised on the brink of a general meltdown of democracy and freedom, as a relatively small, but immensely powerful, clique of governmental and corporate interests conspire to render the entire concept of "government" irrelevant, and the idea of a free and empowered citizenry in any country rendered moot and powerless. We are on the threshold of the imposition of a global dictatorship not dreamed of in the most extravagent of Third Reich fantasies: not of a mere government, but of a shadowy group of corporate and governmental entities that intends to transcend constitutions, laws, and nations to wield power and influence on a scale never before seen in human history. If this trend continues, nations will become irrelevant and the needs and desires of the vast majority of ordinary humans will become nothing. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" will become a figment of past imagination; the citizens of the world will become unwitting slaves of a vast corporate-government megalith that serves nothing but the needs and desires of a powerful few. We will all become workers in a global sweatshop.

The only way to combat this is through the knowledge and resistance of the individual. This Web site is one of many efforts throughout the world to disseminate information that shows what actually happened before, during, and after the events of recent memory. Knowledge enables action. Action can lead to freedom.

You may dismiss the entire section above as mere ranting. That is your prerogative. However, I would invite you to examine the material presented in the rest of this site, check the sources, do your own research, and draw your own conclusions. You may not come to the same apocalyptic conclusions that I have, but I don't think you can read through the following without coming to the conclusion that something vast and terrifying is afoot. At that point, you can decide what, if any, actions you need to take as an individual, as a citizen of your nation, and as a citizen of the world. It's your call and your decision.

"I don't have a problem with the existence of the right, but the right has a problem with my existence." -- Steve Earle, quoted in Editor and Publisher