The United States Of Cognitive Dissonace

Joe Lauria, Consortium News, September 29, 2015:

There was stunned silence in the General Assembly Hall on Monday as U.S. President Barack Obama warned leaders against falling back to pre-United Nations days, in which strong nations imposed their will by force against the weak. There was apparent disbelief as he said it was Russia and China that wanted a "return to the rules that applied for most of human history and that pre-date this institution."

These ancient rules included the "belief that power is a zero-sum game; that might makes right; that strong states must impose their will on weaker ones; that the rights of individuals don't matter; and that in a time of rapid change, order must be imposed by force."

The silence in the chamber came because everything Obama ascribed to others perfectly describes U.S. behavior from the end of the Second World War until today.

Since 1945, the U.S. has participated in dozens of documented invasions and overthrows of sovereign governments that resisted U.S. hegemony — the strongest nation imposing its will militarily on the weak.

In addition to that link, which runs only to 1999, read Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. One blogger's review of that book is here.

Bob Dylan: Bootleg Series, Volume 12: The Cutting Edge: 1965-1966: 2, 6, And 18 CD Sets

Info:

An 18CD Collector's Edition of The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12 will be available exclusively on bobdylan.com. Limited to a worldwide pressing of only 5,000 copies, this 18CD edition will include every note recorded during the 1965-1966 sessions, every alternate take and alternate lyric. All previously unreleased recordings have been mixed, utilizing the original studio tracking tapes as the source, eliminating unwanted 1960s-era studio processing and artifice. The 18CD edition includes Dylan's original nine mono 45 RPM singles released during the time period, packaged in newly created picture sleeves featuring global images from the era. The limited edition includes rare hotel room recordings from the Savoy Hotel in London (May 4, 1965), the North British Station Hotel in Glasgow (May 13, 1966) and a Denver, Colorado hotel (March 12, 1966) as well as a strip of original film cels from "Don't Look Back."

Track Listing:

Disc 1
1. Love Minus Zero/No Limit – Take 1 (1/13/1965) Breakdown.
2. Love Minus Zero/No Limit – Take 2 (1/13/1965) Complete.
3. I’ll Keep It With Mine – Take 1 (1/13/1965) Released on Biograph, 1985.
4. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – Take 1 (1/13/1965) Released on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7, 2005.
5. Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream – Take 1 (1/13/1965) Fragment. Released on Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.
6. Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream – Take 2 (1/13/1965) Complete.
7. She Belongs To Me – Take 1 (1/13/1965) Complete.
8. Subterranean Homesick Blues – Take 1 (1/13/1965) Released on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3, 1991.
9. Outlaw Blues – Take 1 (1/13/1965) Complete.
10. On The Road Again – Take 1 (1/13/1965) Complete.
11. Farewell Angelina – Take 1 (1/13/1965) Released on Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3, 1991.
12. If You Gotta Go, Go Now – Take 1 (1/13/1965) Complete.
13. You Don’t Have to Do That – Take 1 (1/13/1965) Incomplete.
14. California – Take 1 (1/13/1965) Complete.
15. Love Minus Zero/No Limit – Take 3 remake (1/13/1965) Complete.
16. She Belongs To Me – Take 2 remake (1/13/1965) Complete.
17. Outlaw Blues – Take 1 remake (1/13/1965) False start.
18. Outlaw Blues – Take 2 remake (1/13/1965) Complete.
19. Love Minus Zero/No Limit – Take 1 remake (1/14/1965) Complete.
20. Love Minus Zero/No Limit – Take 2 remake (1/14/1965) Released on Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.
21. Love Minus Zero/No Limit – (1/14/1965) Insert.
22. Subterranean Homesick Blues – Take 1 remake (1/14/1965) Complete.
23. Subterranean Homesick Blues – Take 2 remake (1/14/1965) False start.
24. Subterranean Homesick Blues – Take 3 remake (1/14/1965) Released on Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.
25. Outlaw Blues – Take 1 remake (1/14/1965) False start.
26. Outlaw Blues – Take 2 remake (1/14/1965) Fragment/breakdown.
27. Outlaw Blues – Take 3 remake (1/14/1965) Released on Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.

Disc 2
1. She Belongs To Me – Take 1 remake (1/14/1965) Complete.
2. She Belongs To Me – Take 2 remake (1/14/1965) Released on Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.
3. Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream – Take 1 (1/14/1965) False start.
4. Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream – Take 2 (1/14/1965) Released on Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.
5. On The Road Again – Take 1 (1/14/1965) False start.
6. On The Road Again – Take 2 (1/14/1965) Complete.
7. On The Road Again – Take 3 (1/14/1965) False start.
8. On The Road Again – Take 4 (1/14/1965) Complete.
9. Maggie’s Farm – Take 1 (1/15/1965) Released on Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.
10. On The Road Again – Take 1 remake (1/15/1965) Complete.
11. On The Road Again – Takes 2-6 remake (1/15/1965) False starts/complete.
12. On The Road Again – Take 7 remake (1/15/1965) Complete.
13. On The Road Again – Takes 8-9 remake (1/15/1965) False starts.
14. On The Road Again – Take 11 remake (1/15/1965) False start.
15. On The Road Again – Take 12 remake (1/15/1965) False start.
16. On The Road Again – Take 13 remake (1/15/1965) Released on Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.
17. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – Take 1 (1/15/1965) False start.
18. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – Take 2 (1/15/1965) Released on Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.
19. Gates Of Eden – Take 1 (1/15/1965) Released on Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.
20. Mr. Tambourine Man – Takes 1-2 (1/15/1965) False starts.
21. Mr. Tambourine Man – Take 3 (1/15/1965) Breakdown.
22. Mr. Tambourine Man – Takes 4-5 (1/15/1965) Breakdown.
23. Mr. Tambourine Man – Take 6 (1/15/1965) Released on Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.
24. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – Take 1 remake (1/15/1965) Released on Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.

Disc 3
1. If You Gotta Go, Go Now – Take 1 (1/15/1965) Complete.
2. If You Gotta Go, Go Now – Take 2 (1/15/1965) Complete.
3. If You Gotta Go, Go Now – Take 3 (1/15/1965) Complete.
4. If You Gotta Go, Go Now – Take 4 (1/15/1965) Released on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3, 1991.
5. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Take 1 (6/15/1965) Complete.
6. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Takes 2-3 (6/15/1965) Fragments.
7. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Take 4 (6/15/1965) Breakdown.
8. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Takes 5 (6/15/1965) False start.
9. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Takes 6 (6/15/1965) Breakdown.
10. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Take 7 (6/15/1965) Insert.
11. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Take 8 (6/15/1965) Complete.
12. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Take 9 (6/15/1965) Released on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7, 2005.
13. Sitting On A Barbed-Wire Fence – Take 1 (6/15/1965) Rehearsal and breakdown.
14. Sitting On A Barbed-Wire Fence – Take 2 (6/15/1965) Complete.
15. Sitting On A Barbed-Wire Fence – Take 3 (6/15/1965) Released on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3, 1991.
16. Sitting On A Barbed-Wire Fence – Take 2 (6/15/1965) Edited version. Complete.
17. It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Take 1 remake (6/15/1965) Released on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3, 1991.
18. Sitting On A Barbed-Wire Fence – Takes 4-5 (6/15/1965) False starts.
19. Sitting On A Barbed-Wire Fence – Take 6 (6/15/1965) Complete.
20. Like A Rolling Stone – Takes 1-3 (6/15/1965) Rehearsal.
21. Like A Rolling Stone – Take 4 (6/15/1965) Rehearsal. Partially released on The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3, 1991.
22. Like A Rolling Stone – Take 5 (6/15/1965) Breakdown.

Disc 4
1. Like A Rolling Stone – Rehearsal remake (6/16/1965) Rehearsal.
2. Like A Rolling Stone – Take 1 remake (6/16/1965) Rehearsal.
3. Like A Rolling Stone – Takes 2-3 remake (6/16/1965) False starts.
4. Like A Rolling Stone – Take 4 remake (6/16/1965) Released on Highway 61 Revisited, 1965.
5. Like A Rolling Stone – Take 5 remake (6/16/1965) Rehearsal.
6. Like A Rolling Stone – Take 6 remake (6/16/1965) False start.
7. Like A Rolling Stone – Take 8 remake (6/16/1965) Breakdown.
8. Like A Rolling Stone – Takes 9-10 remake (6/16/1965) False starts.
9. Like A Rolling Stone – Take 11 remake (6/16/1965) Complete.
10. Like A Rolling Stone – Take 12 remake (6/16/1965) False start.
11. Like A Rolling Stone – Take 13 remake (6/16/1965) Breakdown.
12. Like A Rolling Stone – Take 14 remake (6/16/1965) False start.
13. Like A Rolling Stone – Take 15 remake (6/16/1965) Breakdown.
14. Like A Rolling Stone – (6/16/1965) Master take, guitar.
15. Like A Rolling Stone – (6/16/1965) Master take, vocals, guitar (BD).
16. Like A Rolling Stone – (6/16/1965) Master take, piano, bass.
17. Like A Rolling Stone – (6/16/1965) Master take, drums, organ.

Disc 5
1. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Take 1 (7/29/1965) Breakdown.
2. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Take 2 (7/29/1965) False start.
3. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Take 3 (7/29/1965) Incomplete.
4. Tombstone Blues – Take 1 (7/29/1965) Complete.
5. Tombstone Blues – Takes 2-3 (7/29/1965) False starts.
6. Tombstone Blues – Take 4 (7/29/1965) Complete.
7. Tombstone Blues – Takes 5-7 (7/29/1965) False starts, rehearsal.
8. Tombstone Blues – Take 9 (7/29/1965) Released on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7, 2005.
9. Tombstone Blues – Take 10 (7/29/1965) False start.
10. Tombstone Blues – Take 11 (7/29/1965) Breakdown.
11. Tombstone Blues – Take 12 (7/29/1965) Released on Highway 61 Revisited, 1965.
12. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Take 1 (7/29/1965) Complete.
13. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Take 2 (7/29/1965) False start.
14. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Take 3 (7/29/1965) Complete.
15. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry – Take 4 (7/29/1965) Released on Highway 61 Revisited, 1965.
16. Positively 4th Street – Takes 1-3 (7/29/1965) False starts.
17. Positively 4th Street – Take 4 (7/29/1965) Complete.
18. Positively 4th Street – Take 5 (7/29/1965) Complete.
19. Positively 4th Street – Take 6 (7/29/1965) Breakdown.
20. Positively 4th Street – Take 7 (7/29/1965) Breakdown.
21. Positively 4th Street – Take 8 (7/29/1965) Breakdown.
22. Positively 4th Street – Take 10 (7/29/1965) Breakdown.
23. Positively 4th Street – Take 12 (7/29/1965) Released as a single, 1965.

Disc 6
1. Desolation Row – Take 1 (7/29/1965) Released on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7, 2005.
2. From A Buick 6 – Take 1 (7/30/1965) False start.
3. From A Buick 6 – Take 2 (7/30/1965) False start.
4. From A Buick 6 – Take 4 (7/30/1965) Accidentally released on the first pressing of Highway 61 Revisited, 1965.
5. From A Buick 6 – Take 5 (7/30/1965) Released on Highway 61 Revisited, 1965.
6. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Takes 1-4 (7/30/1965) False starts.
7. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 1 (7/30/1965) Complete.
8. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 2 (7/30/1965) False start.
9. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 3 (7/30/1965) Complete.
10. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 4 (7/30/1965) False start.
11. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 5 (7/30/1965) Complete.
12. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 6 (7/30/1965) Rehearsal/false start.
13. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 7 (7/30/1965) False start.
14. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 8 (7/30/1965) False start.
15. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Takes 10-11 (7/30/1965) False starts.
16. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 12 (7/30/1965) Complete.
17. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 14 (7/30/1965) Breakdown.
18. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 15 (7/30/1965) Breakdown.
19. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 17 (7/30/1965) Accidentally Released as B-side of first pressing of Positively 4th Street single.
20. Highway 61 Revisited – Take 1 (8/02/1965) False start.
21. Highway 61 Revisited – Take 2 (8/02/1965) False start.
22. Highway 61 Revisited – Take 3 (8/02/1965) Complete.
23. Highway 61 Revisited – Take 4 (8/02/1965) False start.
24. Highway 61 Revisited – Take 5 (8/02/1965) Complete.
25. Highway 61 Revisited – Take 5 (mis-slate) (8/02/1965) Complete.
26. Highway 61 Revisited – Take 6 (8/02/1965) Released on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7, 2005.
27. Highway 61 Revisited – Take 7 (8/02/1965) False start.
28. Highway 61 Revisited – Take 8 (8/02/1965) False start.
29. Highway 61 Revisited – Take 9 (8/02/1965) Released on Highway 61 Revisited, 1965.

Disc 7
1. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Take 1 (8/02/1965) Breakdown.
2. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Take 3 (8/02/1965) Complete.
3. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Take 4 (8/02/1965) Rehearsal.
4. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Take 5 (8/02/1965) Released on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7, 2005.
5. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Takes 9-10 (8/02/1965) Breakdown.
6. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Takes 11-12 (8/02/1965) False starts.
7. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Take 13 (8/02/1965) Complete.
8. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Takes 14-15 (8/02/1965) False starts.
9. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Take 16 (8/02/1965) Released on Highway 61 Revisited, 1965.
10. Queen Jane Approximately – Take 1 (8/02/1965) Rehearsal.
11. Queen Jane Approximately – Take 2 (8/02/1965) Complete.
12. Queen Jane Approximately – Take 3 (8/02/1965) False start.
13. Queen Jane Approximately – Take 4 (8/02/1965) False start.
14. Queen Jane Approximately – Take 5 (8/02/1965) Complete.
15. Queen Jane Approximately – Take 6 (8/02/1965) Complete.
16. Queen Jane Approximately – Take 7 (8/02/1965) Released on Highway 61 Revisited, 1965.
17. Ballad Of A Thin Man – Take 1 (8/02/1965) False start.
18. Ballad Of A Thin Man – Take 2 (8/02/1965) Breakdown.
19. Ballad Of A Thin Man – Take 3 (8/02/1965) Released on Highway 61 Revisited, 1965.
20. Ballad Of A Thin Man – Take 4 (8/02/1965) Insert.

Disc 8
1. Desolation Row – Takes 1-2 remake (8/02/1965) False start/breakdown.
2. Desolation Row – Take 3 remake (8/02/1965) Breakdown.
3. Desolation Row – Take 4 remake (8/02/1965) False start.
4. Desolation Row – Take 5 remake (8/02/1965) Complete.
5. Tombstone Blues – Take 1 (8/03/1965) Complete. Vocal overdub.
6. Tombstone Blues – Take 2 (8/03/1965) Complete. Vocal overdub.
7. Tombstone Blues – Take 3 (8/03/1965) Complete. Vocal overdub.
8. Desolation Row – Take 1 (8/04/1965) Rehearsal.
9. Desolation Row – Take 2 (8/04/1965) Rehearsal.
10. Desolation Row – Take 1 (8/04/1965) Complete (with insert).
11. Desolation Row – Take 5 (8/04/1965) Complete master without acoustic guitar overdub. Released on Highway 61 Revisited, 1965.
12. Desolation Row – Take 6 (8/04/1965) Guitar overdub.
13. Desolation Row – Take 7 (8/04/1965) Guitar overdub
14. Tombstone Blues – Take 1 (8/04/1965) Harmonica overdub.
15. Medicine Sunday – Take 1 (10/05/1965) Incomplete.
16. Medicine Sunday – Take 2 (10/05/1965) Incomplete.
17. Jet Pilot – Take 1 (10/05/1965) Released on Biograph, 1985.
18. I Wanna Be Your Lover – (10/05/1965) Rehearsal.
19. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 1 (10/05/1965) Fragment.
20. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 2 (10/05/1965) Fragment.

Disc 9
1. I Wanna Be Your Lover – Take 1 (10/05/1965) Fragment.
2. I Wanna Be Your Lover – Take 1 Edit 1 (10/05/1965) Complete.
3. I Wanna Be Your Lover – Take 1 Edit 2 (10/05/1965) Complete.
4. I Wanna Be Your Lover – Take 2 (10/05/1965) Complete.
5. I Wanna Be Your Lover – (10/05/1965) Rehearsal.
6. I Wanna Be Your Lover – Take 3 10/05/1965) Complete.
7. I Wanna Be Your Lover – Take 4 (10/05/1965) Complete.
8. I Wanna Be Your Lover – Take 5 (10/05/1965) Complete
9. I Wanna Be Your Lover – Take 6 (10/05/1965) Complete.
10. I Wanna Be Your Lover – Take 6 (mis-slate) (10/05/1965) Released on Biograph, 1985.
11. Instrumental – Take 1 (10/05/1965) Fragment.
12. Instrumental – Take 2 (10/05/1965) Complete.
13. Visions Of Johanna – Take 1 (11/30/1965) Rehearsal.
14. Visions Of Johanna – Take 2 (11/30/1965) Rehearsal.
15. Visions Of Johanna – Take 3 (11/30/1965) Rehearsal.
16. Visions Of Johanna – Take 4 (11/30/1965) Complete.
17. Visions Of Johanna – Take 5 (11/30/1965) Complete.
18. Visions Of Johanna – Take 6 (11/30/1965) Rehearsal.
19. Visions Of Johanna – Take 7 (11/30/1965) Complete.
20. Visions Of Johanna – Take 8 (11/30/1965) Released on The Bootleg Series, Vol.7, 2005.

Disc 10
1. Visions Of Johanna – Takes 9-12 (11/30/1965) False starts.
2. Visions Of Johanna – Take 13 (11/30/1965) Breakdown.
3. Visions Of Johanna – Take 14 (11/30/1965) Complete.
4. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 1 (11/30/1965) False start.
5. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 2 (11/30/1965) False start, rehearsal.
6. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 3 (11/30/1965) False start.
7. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 4 (11/30/1965) False start, rehearsal.
8. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 6 (11/30/1965) Complete.
9. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 7 (11/30/1965) Breakdown.
10. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 8 (11/30/1965) Complete.
11. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 9 (11/30/1965) False start.
12. Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? – Take 10 (11/30/1965) Released as a single in October, 1965.
13. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 1 (1/21/1966) Breakdown.
14. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 2 (1/21/1966) Rehearsal.
15. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 3 (1/21/1966) Breakdown.
16. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 4 (1/21/1966) Incomplete.
17. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 5 (1/21/1966) Rehearsal.
18. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 6 (1/21/1966) Complete.
19. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 7 (1/21/1966) False start.
20. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 8 (1/21/1966) Rehearsal.
21. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 9 (1/21/1966) Rehearsal.
22. She’s Your Lover Now – Takes 10-11 (1/21/1966) Rehearsal.
23. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 12 (1/21/1966) Rehearsal.
24. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 13 (1/21/1966) Rehearsal.

Disc 11
1. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 14 (1/21/1966) Breakdown.
2. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 15 (1/21/1966) Released on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3, 1991.
3. She’s Your Lover Now – (1/21/1966) Rehearsal.
4. She’s Your Lover Now – Take 16 (1/21/1966) Complete.
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Take 1 (1/25/1966) Released on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7, 2005.
6. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Take 2 (1/25/1966) Complete.
7. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Take 1 (1/25/1966) Rehearsal.
8. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Take 2 (1/25/1966) Rehearsal.
9. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Take 3 (1/25/1966) Fragment.
10. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Take 4 (1/25/1966) Rehearsal.
11. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Take 5 (1/25/1966) Rehearsal.
12. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Takes 6-8 (1/25/1966) Rehearsal.
13. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Take 9 (1/25/1966) Rehearsal.
14. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Takes 10-14 (1/25/1966) Rehearsal.
15. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Take 15 (1/25/1966) Complete.
16. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Takes 16-17 (1/25/1966) False starts.
17. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Take 18 (1/25/1966) Complete.
18. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – (1/25/1966) Rehearsal.
19. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Take 19 (1/25/1966) Complete.
20. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Takes 21-22 (1/25/1966) Breakdown.

Disc 12
1. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Take 23 (1/25/1966) Complete.
2. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – Take 24 (1/25/1966) Released on Blonde On Blonde, 1966.
3. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – (1/25/1966) Master take, guitar (BD) and organ.
4. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – (1/25/1966) Master take, vocal.
5. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – (1/25/1966) Master take, piano and drums.
6. One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) – (1/25/1966) Master take, guitar and bass.
7. Lunatic Princess – Take 1 (1/27/1966) Incomplete.
8. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Takes 1-2 (1/27/1966) False start, incomplete.
9. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – (1/27/1966) Insert.
10. I’ll Keep It With Mine – (no date listed) Rehearsal. Partially released on The Bootleg Series, Vol.1-3, 1991.
11. Fourth Time Around – Take 1 (2/14/1966) Rehearsal.
12. Fourth Time Around – Take 2 (2/14/1966) Breakdown.
13. Fourth Time Around – Takes 3-4 (2/14/1966) Rehearsal.
14. Fourth Time Around – Take 5 (2/14/1966) Complete.
15. Fourth Time Around – Takes 6-7 (2/14/1966) Rehearsal.
16. Fourth Time Around – Take 8 (2/14/1966) Rehearsal.
17. Fourth Time Around – Takes 9-10 (2/14/1966) False starts.

Disc 13
1. Fourth Time Around – Take 11 (2/14/1966) Complete.
2. Fourth Time Around – Takes 12-13 (2/14/1966) False starts.
3. Fourth Time Around – Takes 14-16 (2/14/1966) False starts.
4. Fourth Time Around – Takes 17-18 (2/14/1966) False starts.
5. Fourth Time Around – Take 19 (2/14/1966) Breakdown.
6. Fourth Time Around – Take 19 again (2/14/1966) Released on Blonde On Blonde, 1966.
7. Visions Of Johanna – Take 1 (2/14/1966) False start.
8. Visions Of Johanna – Take 2 (2/14/1966) Breakdown.
9. Visions Of Johanna – Take 3 (2/14/1966) False start.
10. Visions Of Johanna – Take 4 (2/14/1966) Released on Blonde On Blonde, 1966.
11. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Takes 1-2 (2/14/1966) Rehearsal.
12. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Take 3 (2/14/1966) Complete.
13. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Takes 4-5 (2/14/1966) Rehearsal.
14. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Take 6 (2/14/1966) Breakdown.
15. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Take 6 again (2/14/1966) Rehearsal.
16. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Take 8 (2/14/1966) Complete.
17. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Take 9 (2/14/1966) Breakdown.
18. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Take 10 (2/14/1966) False start.
19. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Take 11 (2/14/1966) Breakdown.
20. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Take 12 (2/14/1966) False start.
21. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Take 13 (2/14/1966) Complete.
22. I’ll Keep It With Mine (instrumental) – Take 1 (2/15/1966) Rehearsal.
23. I’ll Keep It With Mine (instrumental) – Take 2 (2/15/1966) Rehearsal.
24. I’ll Keep It With Mine (instrumental) – Take 3 (2/15/1966) Rehearsal.
25. I’ll Keep It With Mine (instrumental) – Take 4 (2/15/1966) Rehearsal.
26. I’ll Keep It With Mine (instrumental) – Take 5 (2/15/1966) Rehearsal.
27. I’ll Keep It With Mine (instrumental) – Takes 6-7 (2/15/1966) Rehearsal.
28. I’ll Keep It With Mine (instrumental) – Take 8 (2/15/1966) Rehearsal.
29. I’ll Keep It With Mine (instrumental) – Take 8 again (2/15/1966) Complete.
30. I’ll Keep It With Mine (instrumental) – Take 9 (2/15/1966) Complete.

Disc 14
1. Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands – Take 1 (2/16/1966) Complete.
2. Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands – Take 2 (2/16/1966) Rehearsal.
3. Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands – Take 3 (2/16/1966) Complete.
4. Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands – Take 4 (2/16/1966) Released on Blonde On Blonde, 1966.
5. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – Take 1 (2/17/1966) Rehearsal.
6. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – (2/17/1966) Rehearsal.
7. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – Take 1 (2/17/1966) Breakdown.
8. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – Takes 2-3 (2/17/1966) Rehearsal.
9. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – Take 4 (2/17/1966) Breakdown.
10. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – Take 4 (mis-slate) (2/17/1966) False start.
11. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – Take 5 (2/17/1966) Released on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7, 2005.
12. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – Takes 6-8 (2/17/1966) False starts.
13. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – Take 9 (2/17/1966) Breakdown.
14. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – Take 10 (2/17/1966) False start.
15. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – Takes 11-12 (2/17/1966) Breakdown.
16. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – Take 13 (2/17/1966) Breakdown.

Disc 15
1. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – Take 14 (2/17/1966) Complete.
2. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again – Take 15 (2/17/1966) Released on Blonde On Blonde, 1966.
3. Absolutely Sweet Marie – (3/07/1966) Rehearsal.
4. Absolutely Sweet Marie – Take 1 (3/07/1966) Complete.
5. Absolutely Sweet Marie – Take 2 (3/07/1966) False start.
6. Absolutely Sweet Marie – Take 3 (3/07/1966) Released on Blonde On Blonde, 1966.
7. Absolutely Sweet Marie – (3/07/1966) Insert.
8. Just Like A Woman – Take 1 (3/08/1966) Complete.
9. Just Like A Woman – Take 2 (3/08/1966) Complete.
10. Just Like A Woman – Take 3 (3/08/1966) Complete.
11. Just Like A Woman – Take 4 (3/08/1966) Complete.
12. Pledging My Time – Take 1 (3/08/1966) Breakdown.
13. Pledging My Time – (3/08/1966) Rehearsal.
14. Pledging My Time – Take 2 (3/08/1966) False start.
15. Pledging My Time – Take 3 (3/08/1966) Released on Blonde On Blonde, 1966.
16. Just Like A Woman – Take 5 (3/08/1966) False start.
17. Just Like A Woman – Take 6 (3/08/1966) Breakdown.

Disc 16
1. Just Like A Woman – Take 8 (3/08/1966) Complete.
2. Just Like A Woman – Takes 9-10 (3/08/1966) False start, breakdown.
3. Just Like A Woman – Takes 11-12 (3/08/1966) Rehearsal.
4. Just Like A Woman – Take 13 (3/08/1966) Breakdown.
5. Just Like A Woman – Takes 14-15 (3/08/1966) Rehearsal.
6. Just Like A Woman – Take 16 (3/08/1966) Complete.
7. Just Like A Woman – Take 17 (3/08/1966) Breakdown.
8. Just Like A Woman – Take 18 (3/08/1966) Released on Blonde On Blonde, 1966.
9. Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) – Take 1 (3/09/1966) Complete.
10. Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) – Take 2 (3/09/1966) Rehearsal.
11. Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) – Take 3 (3/09/1966) Rehearsal.
12. Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) – Take 4 (3/09/1966) Rehearsal.
13. Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) – Take 5 (3/09/1966) Breakdown.
14. Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) – Take 6 (3/09/1966) Released on Blonde on Blonde, 1966.
15. Temporary Like Achilles – Take 1 (3/09/1966) Complete.
16. Temporary Like Achilles – Take 2 (3/09/1966) False start
17. Temporary Like Achilles – Take 3 (3/09/1966) Complete.
18. Temporary Like Achilles – Take 4 (3/09/1966) Released on Blonde On Blonde, 1966.
19. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 – (3/10/1966) Rehearsal.
20. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 – Take 1 (3/10/1966) Released on Blonde On Blonde, 1966.

Disc 17
1. Obviously Five Believers – Take 1 (3/10/1966) False start.
2. Obviously Five Believers – Take 2 (3/10/1966) Breakdown.
3. Obviously Five Believers – Take 3 (3/10/1966) Complete.
4. Obviously Five Believers – Take 4 (3/10/1966) Released on Blonde On Blonde, 1966.
5. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat – Take 1 (3/10/1966) Released on Blonde On Blonde, 1966.
6. I Want You – (3/10/1966) Rehearsal.
7. I Want You – Take 1 (3/10/1966) Complete.
8. I Want You – Take 2 (3/10/1966) Breakdown.
9. I Want You – Take 3 (3/10/1966) Rehearsal, false start.
10. I Want You – Take 4 (3/10/1966) Complete.
11. I Want You – Take 5 (3/10/1966) Released on Blonde On Blonde, 1966.
12. I Want You – Take 5b (3/10/1966) Insert, guitar overdub.

Disc 18
1. Remember Me – (5/04/1965) Savoy Hotel, London.
2. More And More – (5/04/1965) Savoy Hotel, London.
3. Blues Stay Away From Me – (5/04/1965) Savoy Hotel, London.
4. Weary Blues From Waitin’ – (5/04/1965) Savoy Hotel, London.
5. Lost Highway – (5/04/65) Savoy Hotel, London.
6. I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry – (5/04/1965) Savoy Hotel, London.
7. Young But Daily Growing – (5/04/1965) Savoy Hotel, London.
8. Wild Mountain Thyme – (5/04/1965) Savoy Hotel, London.
9. I Can’t Leave Her Behind [1] – (5/13/1966) North British Station Hotel, Glasgow, Scotland.
10. I Can’t Leave Her Behind [2] – (5/13/1966) North British Station Hotel, Glasgow, Scotland.
11. On A Rainy Afternoon – (5/13/1966) North British Station Hotel, Glasgow, Scotland.
12. If I Was A King [1] – (5/13/1966) North British Station Hotel, Glasgow, Scotland.
13. If I Was A King [2] – (5/13/1966) North British Station Hotel, Glasgow, Scotland.
14. What Kind Of Friend Is This – (5/13/1966) North British Station Hotel, Glasgow, Scotland.
15. Positively Van Gogh [1] – (3/12/1966) Denver, Colorado Hotel Room.
16. Positively Van Gogh [2] – (3/12/1966) Denver, Colorado Hotel Room.
17. Positively Van Gogh [3] – (3/12/1966) Denver, Colorado Hotel Room.
18. Don’t Tell Him, Tell Me – (3/12/1966) Denver, Colorado Hotel Room.
19. If You Want My Love – (3/12/1966) Denver, Colorado Hotel Room.
20. Just Like A Woman – (3/12/1966) Denver, Colorado Hotel Room.
21. Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands – (3/12/1966) Denver, Colorado Hotel Room.

Ultimate Classic Rock:

The next installment of the Bob Dylan's heralded Bootleg Series will focus on the development of his electric sound in two crucial years during the '60s.

The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12, due on Nov. 6, includes early demos, alternative versions and outtakes from a period that saw Dylan release Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Those sessions produced signature tracks including "Like a Rolling Stone," "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and "Visions of Johanna."

"At the beginning, most songs were fairly shapeless," Dylan sideman Al Kooper says in the new issue of Rolling Stone, which will be available Friday. "Only little by little did they come together."

Expected highlights include Bob Dylan's early attempt at a plugged-in version of "Mr. Tambourine Man," months prior to the Byrds crafted a breakout hit with it. A take on "Visions of Johanna" includes alternate lyrics. And the whirlwind sessions for "Like a Rolling Stone" are comprehensively explored.

There are also early Blonde on Blonde tracks featuring future members of the Band, recorded before Dylan changed direction and decided to use a group of Nashville musicians. Those sessions differed greatly from the more loosely organized Highway 61 Revisited, said Kooper, who unexpectedly found himself sitting in on organ for "Like a Rolling Stone."

The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12 will be available in three different editions: an economical two-disc size, an expanded six-disc version and a massive 18-disc package, which includes, among other things, sessions for "Like a Rolling Stone."

Two snips can be heard here.

6-CD Track Listing (from Amazon UK)

Disc 1
1  Love Minus Zero / No Limit (Take 1, Breakdown)
2  Love Minus Zero / No Limit (Take 2, Acoustic)
3  Love Minus Zero / No Limit (Take 3 Remake, Complete)
4  Love Minus Zero / No Limit (Take 1 Remake, Complete)
5  I'll Keep It with Mine (Take 1, Piano Demo)
6  It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Take 1)
7  Bob Dylan's 115th Dream (Take 1, Fragment)
8  Bob Dylan's 115th Dream (Take 2, Complete)
9  She Belongs to Me (Take 1, Solo Acoustic)
10  She Belongs to Me (Take 2 Remake, Complete)
11  She Belongs to Me (Take 1 Remake, Complete)
12  Subterranean Homesick Blues (Take 1)
13  Subterranean Homesick Blues (Take 1, Alternate Take)
14  Outlaw Blues (Take 1, Complete)
15  Outlaw Blues (Take 2, Alternate Take)
16  On the Road Again (Take 1, Complete)
17  On the Road Again (Take 4, Alternate Take)
18  On the Road Again (Take 1 Remake, Complete)
19  On the Road Again (Take 7 Remake, Complete)
20  Farewell, Angelina (Take 1, Solo Acoustic)
21  If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Take 1, Complete)
22  If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Take 2, Alternate Take)
23  You Don't Have to Do That (Take 1, Solo Acoustic)
  
Disc 2
1  California (Take 1, Solo Acoustic)
2  It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) (Take 1, False Start)
3  Mr. Tambourine Man (Takes 1-2, False Starts)
4  Mr. Tambourine Man (Take 3 with Band, Incomplete)
5  It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry (Take 1, Complete)
6  It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry (Take 8, Alternate Take)
7  It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry (Take 3, Incomplete)
8  It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry (Take 3 Remake, Complete)
9  Sitting On a Barbed Wire Fence (Take 2)
10  Tombstone Blues (Take 1, Alternate Take)
11  Tombstone Blues (Take 9)
12  Positively 4th Street (Takes 1-3, False Starts)
13  Positively 4th Street (Take 4, Complete)
14  Positively 4th Street (Take 5, Alternate Take)
15  Desolation Row (Take 1, Alternate Take)
16  Desolation Row (Take 2, Piano Demo)
17  Desolation Row (Take 5 Remake, Complete)
18  From a Buick 6 (Take 1, False Start)
19  From a Buick 6 (Take 4)
  
Disc 3
1  Like a Rolling Stone (Takes 1-3, Rehearsal)
2  Like a Rolling Stone (Take 4, Rehearsal)
3  Like a Rolling Stone (Take 5, Rehearsal)
4  Like a Rolling Stone (Rehearsal Remake)
5  Like a Rolling Stone (Take 1 Remake, Rehearsal)
6  Like a Rolling Stone (Takes 2-3 Remake, False Starts)
7  Like a Rolling Stone (Take 4 Remake)
8  Like a Rolling Stone (Take 5 Remake, Rehearsal)
9  Like a Rolling Stone (Take 6 Remake, False Start)
10  Like a Rolling Stone (Take 8 Remake, Breakdown)
11  Like a Rolling Stone (Takes 9-10 Remake, False Starts)
12  Like a Rolling Stone (Take 11, Alternate Take)
13  Like a Rolling Stone (Take 12 Remake, False Start)
14  Like a Rolling Stone (Take 13 Remake, Breakdown)
15  Like a Rolling Stone (Take 14 Remake, False Start)
16  Like a Rolling Stone (Take 15 Remake, Breakdown)
17  Like a Rolling Stone (Master Take, Guitar)
18  Like a Rolling Stone (Master Take, Vocals, Guitar)
19  Like a Rolling Stone (Master Take, Piano, Bass)
20  Like a Rolling Stone (Master Take, Drums, Organ)
  
Disc 4
1  Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? (Take 1, Alternate Take)
2  Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? (Take 17)
3  Highway 61 Revisited (Take 3, Alternate Take)
4  Highway 61 Revisited (Take 5, Complete)
5  Highway 61 Revisited (Take 7, False Start)
6  Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (Take 1, Breakdown)
7  Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (Take 3, Rehearsal)
8  Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (Take 13, Complete)
9  Queen Jane Approximately (Take 2, Complete)
10  Queen Jane Approximately (Take 5, Alternate Take)
11  Ballad of a Thin Man (Take 2, Breakdown)
12  Medicine Sunday (Take 1)
13  Jet Pilot (Take 1)
14  I Wanna Be Your Lover (Take 1, Fragment)
15  I Wanna Be Your Lover (Take 6, Complete)
16  Instrumental (Take 2, Complete)
17  Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? (Take 6, Complete)
18  Visions of Johanna (Take 1, Rehearsal)
19  Visions of Johanna (Take 5, Rehearsal)
  
Disc 5
1  Visions of Johanna (Take 7, Complete)
2  Visions of Johanna (Take 8)
3  Visions of Johanna (Take 14, Complete)
4  She's Your Lover Now (Take 1, Breakdown)
5  She's Your Lover Now (Take 6, Rehearsal)
6  She's Your Lover Now (Take 15)
7  She's Your Lover Now (Take 16, Complete)
8  One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) (Take 2, Rehearsal)
9  One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) (Take 4, Rehearsal)
10  One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) (Take 19, Alternate Take)
11  Lunatic Princess (Take 1)
12  Fourth Time Around (Take 11, Complete)
13  Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Take 3, Complete)
14  Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Take 8, Alternate Take)
15  Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (Take 1, Rehearsal and Finished Track)
  
Disc 6
1  Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (Take 1, Rehearsal)
2  Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (Rehearsal)
3  Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (Take 5)
4  Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (Take 13, Alternate Take)
5  Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (Take 14, Complete)
6  Absolutely Sweet Marie (Take 1, Alternate Take)
7  Just Like a Woman (Take 1, Complete)
8  Just Like a Woman (Take 4, Alternate Take)
9  Just Like a Woman (Take 8, Complete)
10  Pledging My Time (Take 1, Alternate Take)
11  Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine) (Take 1, Complete)
12  Temporary Like Achilles (Take 3, Complete)
13  Obviously Five Believers (Take 3, Complete)
14  I Want You (Take 4, Alternate Take)
15  Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (Take 1, Complete)

I can't wait for the official announcement, which I hope will spell out exactly what is included in the 18-disc set.

Socialism

Chris Hedges, What It Means to Be a Socialist:

You cannot be a socialist and an imperialist. You cannot, as Bernie Sanders has done, support the Obama administration's wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen and be a socialist. You cannot, as Sanders has done, vote for every military appropriations bill, including every bill and resolution that empowers and sanctions Israel to carry out its slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people, and be a socialist. And you cannot laud, as Sanders has done, military contractors because they bring jobs to your state. Sanders may have the rhetoric of inequality down, but he is a full-fledged member of the Democratic Caucus, which kneels before the war industry and their lobbyists. And no genuine grass-roots movement will ever be born within the bowels of the Democratic Party establishment, which is currently attempting to shut down Sanders to make sure its anointed candidate is the nominee. No elected official dares to challenge any weapons system, no matter how costly or redundant. And Sanders, who votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time, steers clear of confronting the master of war. ...

If you will not call for an arms embargo along with the boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, you are not a socialist. If you will not demand we dismantle our military establishment, which is managing the government's wholesale surveillance of every citizen and storing all our personal information in perpetuity in government computer banks, and if you will not abolish the for-profit arms industry, you are not a socialist. If you will not call for the prosecution of those leaders, including George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who engage in aggressive acts of pre-emptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal act, you are not a socialist. If you will not stand with the oppressed across the globe you are not a socialist. Socialists do not pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is convenient to support. Socialists understand that you stand with all the oppressed or none of the oppressed, that this is a global fight for life against global corporate tyranny. ...

I cannot promise you we will win. I cannot promise you we will even survive as a species. But I can promise you that an open and sustained defiance of global capitalism and the merchants of death, along with the building of a socialist movement, is our only hope. ... Resistance is not about what we achieve, but about what it allows us to become. In the end, I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.

Death Merchant #54: Apocalypse U.S.A.!

VXB-2L6 - it's the most deadly nerve gas ever invented. In the hands of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi it could spell death for millions of Americans.

The mad Muslim strongman has sent a crack team of Libyan terrorists and East German spies to America to carry out his plan: the poisoning of the atmosphere above the east coast of the US. If the scheme succeeds there will be twenty-five million corpses - from New York to the nation's capitol - and the world will rock as World War III breaks out.

Only Richard Camellion stands to stop Qaddafi's lust for blood - but the Death Merchant's search and destroy mission is turning into a deadly game of cat and mouse with the terrorist team.

***

In Apocalypse, U.S.A.!, author Joseph Rosenberger once again makes Muammar Qaddafi the bad guy (see DM #s 49 and 50, in which Rosenberger referred to him as "Kaddafi"). This time, the Libyan dictator's weapon against the U.S. is nerve gas ... with a name like a Canadian postal code!

When we first see Richard "Death Merchant" Camellion at the CIA's "Black Station" near Keasbey, New Jersey, he is dressed in a "tan heather turtleneck, redwood corduroy slacks, and Padmore chukka boots", eating from a sack of carob-coated sunflower seeds. Camellion has teamed up with a variety of agents, including Hannibal Llewellyn "H.L." Kartz, who is a totally ruthless nihilist and "an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler". (Rosenberger describes nihilists as people who "have no loyalties, no culture, no religious faith, and consider themselves a law unto themselves". Which sounds not unlike the Death Merchant.)

Naturally, Kartz is a guy who runs his mouth, so he gets to litter the narrative with his conservative rants, including one with broadsides against Billy Graham, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the "leftwing trash" who protest the U.S.'s nuclear arms build-up. And while Camellion "couldn't have cared less about the pinheads in the federal government ... much of what [Kartz] said was the truth".

The book is not 40 pages old before Kartz takes part in an epic argument about Israeli aggression towards the Palestinians. (It's been hard to determine Rosenberger's personal stance on this issue, since he seems to flip-flop when bringing it up in recent DM books. In this volume, he's clearly anti-Israel.)

Ever since the Sikorsky Sea Stallion had lifted off from the naval station, Kartz had been in a heated debate with Daren Givens over Israel, Kartz maintaining that the Israelis were ruthless assassins who murdered innocent Arabs, men, women, and children—that "There are many thoughtful Jews—in Israel and in the U.S.—who feel that the wrong damn bunch is running Israel these days, whipping up hatred for the Arabs that is more typical of the most primitive political systems of the Middle East and not at all characteristic of the hopes of the majority of Zionists who struggled to establish and build Israel."

Sergeant Givens, a young, husky blond who was pro-Israel, maintained stoutly that the Israelis—"They're three million surrounded by one hundred million"—had a moral right to defend themselves, that "What the hell do you think we Americans would do if the Mexes were firing at us from across the Texas border? You know what we'd do! We'd go into chili-land and make short work of the greasers!"

Neither Camellion nor Captain Glen W. Griffith, the commander of the ten SEAL Force 1 antiterrorist commandos, intervened. Why should they? Kartz and Givens were grown men. Besides, the loud discussion—with Kartz moving his arms like the blades of a windmill in a strong wind—within the partially soundproof chopper took the minds of the other men off the deadly danger into which they were flying.

"You don't seem to consider what Yasir Arafat and the PLO have sworn to do!" Givens yelled at Kartz, who was sitting across the aisle. "Push every Israeli into the sea. And that means kill every Israeli! It was the PLO that blew up a busfull of Israeli children. What the hell do you expect the Israelis to do, send the sonsabitches a thank-you note?"

"Don't worry! The Israelis got even," sneered Kartz. "Last summer when they invaded Lebanon, they killed ten thousand civilians and created more than half a million homeless refugees. They even used cluster bombs on civilians. This doesn't surprise anyone who knows Ariel Sharon, who led the Israeli force. He's a tyrant who intimidates even that little runt Begin!"

"I think Sharon is a damned good general," ground out Givens. "He sure beat the piss out of the PLO and the Syrians."

"He's also a sadist. He's the joker who ordered his troops to snuff twelve Arabs in retaliation for the murder of an Israeli woman and her two children. After twelve were gunned down, Sadist Sharon still wasn't satisfied, so he had forty-six Arab houses blown up while the Arabs were still inside. Sixty-nine Arabs were killed, most of them women and children.1 Need I say more about Israel's defense minister?"

"Make your point! Make your point!"

"I'm saying that what happened months ago in Lebanon can easily be understood when one realizes that Begin and Sharon believe that pure violence can destroy an idea and terrorize a people—in this case the Palestinians."

Sergeant Givens thought for a moment and hooked his thumbs over the pouched cartridge belt around his waist. Then he said, "I suppose you'll say next that the PLO hasn't been killing innocent Israelis! What about that?"

"I didn't say that," growled Kartz. "Hell yes the Arabs knock off Israelis—and that's murder. But they don't kill on the scale that the Israelis kill. Killing is Menachem Begin's trademark! His savage record goes all the way back to the 1940s, when a group of prominent American Jews wrote a letter protesting Begin's visit to the U.S. He was then the leader of some Jewish party in Palestine. I forget the magazine the letter appeared in.2 But it was Begin and his terrorist group that blew up the King David Hotel—almost a hundred: people were killed—and ordered terrorist assaults on Arab villages, including the massacre at Dar Yasin."3

All this time, Pini Hilleli had stayed out of the discussion between Kartz and Sergeant Givens. Now he said, unexpectedly, "As a former Israeli, sergeant, I can tell you that he's right about Begin. Only several years ago, Begin wrote in an Israeli magazine that the slaughter at Dar Yasin was not only justified but necessary, that without it there would never have been a state of Israel!"

"Exactly," Kartz said with satisfaction. "And now Begin and Sharon—his chief 'hit man'—are slaughtering thousands of Arab civilians to crush the Palestinian spirit, the same kind of spirit that fires up Zionists like them."

"Begin's logic is really fascinating," Hilleli said, grinning as if he were about to tell a joke. "If an Israeli shoots up Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock Mosque and kills Arabs—well, he's crazy. But no nation bombed Israel for it! On the other hand, if an Arab gunman kills an Israeli, then U.S. supplied Israeli bombers rain cluster-bomb death on Lebanon. No insult intended toward you men, but the biggest suckers are you Americans!"

Kartz's grin was from ear to ear.

Sergeant Givens made an angry face. "How do you figure that?"

"Look what Begin did right after his army finished with blowing hell out of Lebanon. He flew to Washington and demanded that the record 1980 two-and-a-half billion-dollar aid to Israel be upped to three billion. Begin makes you American taxpayers pay twice—first for Israel's brutal assault on Lebanon and then for the relief of Lebanon's suffering people. You should ask your Congress who runs this nation—Begin or the Reagan administration?"

1 True—this took place in 1953.

2 True. On December 4, 1948, the New York Times ran a letter signed by twenty-eight of America's most respected Jews, including Albert Einstein, Sidney Hook, and Rabbi Jessurun Cardozo. The letter protested the visit of Menachem Begin, then leader of the Herut party, described as "closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties." The signers were worried that Begin would collect money and support, thus creating the impression that "a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel." The signers cited Begin's terrorist acts and espousal of "ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority." (Italics mine.) [Rosenberger used italics on the three quotes]

3 True. The massacre occurred April 10, 1948. Dar Yasin was an Arab village whose residents lived on good terms with Jews. But Begin's Irgun terrorists wanted to occupy Dar Yasin for strategic purposes. The terrorists, led by Begin, attacked with rifles, machine guns, grenades, and even cutlasses—later seen dripping with blood. Some 241 men, women, and children were butchered. Twenty men were led off in chains and actually paraded like cattle through Jerusalem's Jewish sector, then lined up against a wall and shot. Begin later bragged that the horror at Dar Yasin caused seven hundred thousand Arabs to flee Palestine. British historian Arnold Toynbee had something else to say. He said the mass murders were "comparable to crimes committed against Jews by the Nazis."

In his attempt to kill millions of Americans with deadly nerve gas, Qaddafi has teamed up with the SSD, the East German Security Service - and three American businessmen. After weighing the pros and cons, Camellion decides to kidnap Keith Griesbeck, a wealthy Atlanta businessman who has "international connections". Camellion et al. hijack a tractor trailer delivering 23 tons of scrap metal to Big Benny Laczko's scrapyard, where Griesbeck (an old friend of Benny's) has lunch every Thursday at noon. The attempted kidnapping of Griesbeck is spread out over five chapters and the book is nearly half-over when the Death Merchant and his men lift off from the scrapyard in a helicopter with their prize.

When questioned, Griesbeck tells them he thought the Qaddafi deal was for neutron bomb secrets. He  mentions his contact - and so the Death Merchant decides to black-bag that guy. That leads to a shootout in a former brick-making factory in Brooklyn. Three East Germans are taken prisoner and they quickly blab about the Prinz Rupert, a ship that is carrying the nerve gas. It sets up a showdown with the Death Merchant and twenty SEAL commandos rappelling from two helicopters onto the enemy ship. They make their way through the vessel, killing everyone in their path. Why don't they simply sink the ship and send the nerve gas to the bottom of the ocean? Because Uncle Sam wants to grab the deadly gas and add it to its own chemical weapon stockpile!

Throughout the book, Rosenberger touches on his usual political and social topics. While there is no talk in this book of the Death Merchant being able to seeing human auras - and tell by their colours which people have been marked by the Cosmic Lord of Death - there is a small bit about the angels mentioned in the Book of Genesis as actually being extraterrestrials.

And, of course, Rosenberger has Camellion muse about the end of human civilization, which the author has mentioned many times will occur before the year 2000 (this volume was published in March 1983):

Camellion suddenly thought of another irony, this one involving the mighty of the world. In reality, their power was zero! Cosmic forces were in motion, forces that would utterly transform world society within the next seventeen years, in the form of a catastrophe never before seen by modern man—One that is impossible for the average man to even conceive. Men can never face up to what they think is total oblivion!

There would be a literal shifting of the axis of the earth, and the planet would be tilted at a new angle so that the sun and the moon would appear to move in different orbits in the sky—Unless Michel de Notredame is wrong! Well, he's been right on target for hundreds of years.10

The tilt of the earth would come during World War III—a nuclear holocaust—and usher in a new age, one of peace, one that would last for a thousand years, from A.D. 2000 to A.D. 3000, after which there would be a new horror, a new evil. Only this time man would not be fooled; he would be prepared, having developed a higher spiritual consciousness. At the end of the year A.D. 7000 there would be a universal conflagration in which earth would be destroyed. The planet would vanish in fire and smoke because its purpose will have been served, the material sphere no longer needed to support the physical body of man. By then, man will have left his material body and will have become pure spirit, as he was intended to be.

10 This is Nostradamus, the only truly accurate seer the world has ever known. Here is the actual quatrain in which he predicts the change of position of the sun and the moon. Only a tilting of the earth on its axis could effect such a change. The "twentieth year" is the year 2000.

The grand twentieth year ends, also the position of the moon.
It will hold a different monarchy in the sky for another 7,000 years.
Then the sun, too, will be tired of its place.
And at that time will my prophecies for the world be ended.

Late in the book, fighting for their lives aboard the Prinz Rupert, Camellion and his force engage in some "savage eyeball-to-eyeball combat"!

"Like Raid, it kills bugs dead!" [Camellion] snarled and pulled the trigger of the AMP. The Alaskan boomed and Erich Bamberger's face and head disappeared in a flash of bones, blood, and brain that tried to shoot to the sky but made it only to the ceiling. He let the empty MAC-10 SMG drop from his left hand and, at the same time he slammed Siegfried Feuermann across the face with the long barrel of the AMP, let Horst Erzkinner have a left-legged Shito-Ryu Mae Geri Kekomi front thrust kick, a grand slam that wrapped the German's stomach around his spine and crushed vital blood vessels and arteries in the abdominal region. There was never any redemption from such a kill kick. Looking as if his features had been frozen by a blast of liquid air, the dying Erzkinner fell back and started to sag, eyes wide, arms quivering.

Muttering oaths in German, Hans Fischer grabbed Camellion's right wrist with his left hand and tried a right-handed sword chop aimed at the left side of the Death Merchant's face. Concurrently, another SSD agent rushed in from behind Camellion, intending to turn the back of his head to mush with the barrel of an empty Czech Skorpion machine pistol. Instinct and the rush of air against his back warned Camellion of the attack coming at him from the rear. Camellion exploded into action. An Ushiro Keage Geri rear snap kick with his left leg caught Alfred Groner Heine five inches below where his last meal rested and made the SSD officer think his small intestine had collided with a buzz saw. Tasting the bile that jumped up in his throat, he tried to fight the waves of agony flowing throughout his body. Losing the battle, he found himself falling backward and vaguely sensed that someone was reaching out for him. Heine couldn't have fallen into worse hands.

"Stupid! You're breathing my air," snarled H.L. Kartz. His arms flashed out in the beginning of a commando neck-breaker. His left forearm went over Heine's throat, his fingers fastening to the top of his right arm. As his left arm tightened, his right hand went to the left side of Heine's head and pressed mightily to the right. Snap! Crackle! Pop! Heine's neck snapped a few seconds after the Death Merchant used a left-handed Ippon Nukite one-finger spear thrust that caught Hans Fischer in the right side of his neck, the intense agony forcing the East German to release his hold on the Death Merchant's right wrist. Camellion could then have easily put a bullet into Fischer. But why waste a bullet on a piece of slime?

"If brains were made of leather, you wouldn't have enough to saddle a flea," laughed Camellion, who then killed the SSD man by slamming the barrel of the AMP against his left temple. ...

A man who lived life in one long gleeful rage, H.L. Kartz was having one of the prime times of his life. Like Camellion, Kartz had eyes in the back of his head and a built-in sensor that could detect personal danger from all sides. A roundhouse kick to Edwin Hemholtz's lower chest wrecked the man's xiphoid process, the fingerlike tab of cartilage hanging off the lowermost edge of the sternum, or breast bone. This is the insertion of the rectus abdominus muscle on the sternum. Any severe blow that strikes the xiphoid process while traveling upward at an angle toward the heart causes severe bruising to the liver, stomach, and heart, resulting in unconsciousness and even death. In the case of Hemholtz, Kartz's expertly delivered kick caused instant unconsciousness. The German was still falling when Kartz killed him with a right Chungdan ap chagi middle front snap-kick to the side of the neck.

While the ending of Apocalypse, U.S.A.! has plenty of the intricate fighting scenes and exquisitely-described gore that we expect from Rosenberger, it's a weak finish because Camellion snuffs out the murderous plot before it really has a chance to get off the ground. And Rosenberger relegates the discovery of the nerve gas on board the Prinz Rupert to an aside in the "Aftermath".

Etc.:

"[Camellion] could shoot the balls off a bee at a hundred feet." (page 16)

"Camellion could have shot the butt off a bee at a hundred feet." (page 84)

The "hawk-eyed" Death Merchant, "who could have seen a flea fly in a foggy field".

"[T]he road was deserted, the glow of the streetlights falling only on ice and snow and loneliness."

"Go kiss a hair brush."

"The well-dressed Keith Griesbeck looked so confused that the Death Merchant assumed it would have taken him two hours to watch '60 Minutes'".

"'And especially to hold off the police,' finished the Death Merchant, speaking with the sharpness of a construction boss rebuking a steel riveter who complains he's afraid of heights."

"A thin, cold wind blew snow around their legs, and there was an uncanny suggestion of invisible pipes playing an evil tune, one that suggested the terrible sadness that could only come from a city of lonely corpses."

"'You know how it is,' Kartz growled. 'Cast your bread upon the waters and you'll get a soggy sandwich every time.'"

"'I'll be happy when we're on deck,' said another man. 'Getting down the ladder is going to be more difficult than a Sioux manhood ritual.'"

"Dimirrel weighed 194 pounds and was as strong as two young camels in their prime".

"There was another reason, the biggest of all: he immensely enjoyed what he was doing. He was not alone in his love of excitement. Kartz and Chatters, Hilleli and—to a certain extent—the SEAL commandos were the kind of men fascinated by death-dealing machinery. All very normal—for them. Normal because there are those men and women who love danger, who find violence and death fascinating. Some become professional mercenaries. Or stuntmen. Or drive racing cars. Always they live in the fast lane, skating barefoooted on the cutting edge of life's razor blade."

In The Last 14 Years

While I do not agree with everything Tom Engelhardt writes below - the idea that Bush & Co. could not have imagined the horror of 9/11 has been proven wrong over and over (in fact, Engelhardt's mention of a "new Pearl Harbor" later in the essay puts the lie to that earlier claim); in fact, the U.S. was that very morning running several military exercises that mimicked exactly what occurred in New York and Washington - I think his essay deserves a wide audience.

When things evolve day-by-day (and many of those things are not reported widely), it becomes hard to grasp the totality of the change. Looking back over 14 years, it is astonishing how much the death and destruction and the evisceration of human rights caused by the United States has become a normal part of our lives.

Mantra for 9/11: Exceptional Pain Dispensed by the Indispensable Nation
By Tom Engelhardt

Fourteen years later and do you even believe it? Did we actually live it? Are we still living it? And how improbable is that?

Fourteen years of wars, interventions, assassinations, torture, kidnappings, black sites, the growth of the American national security state to monumental proportions, and the spread of Islamic extremism across much of the Greater Middle East and Africa. Fourteen years of astronomical expense, bombing campaigns galore, and a military-first foreign policy of repeated defeats, disappointments, and disasters. Fourteen years of a culture of fear in America, of endless alarms and warnings, as well as dire predictions of terrorist attacks. Fourteen years of the burial of American democracy (or rather its recreation as a billionaire's playground and a source of spectacle and entertainment but not governance). Fourteen years of the spread of secrecy, the classification of every document in sight, the fierce prosecution of whistleblowers, and a faith-based urge to keep Americans "secure" by leaving them in the dark about what their government is doing. Fourteen years of the demobilization of the citizenry. Fourteen years of the rise of the warrior corporation, the transformation of war and intelligence gathering into profit-making activities, and the flocking of countless private contractors to the Pentagon, the NSA, the CIA, and too many other parts of the national security state to keep track of. Fourteen years of our wars coming home in the form of PTSD, the militarization of the police, and the spread of war-zone technology like drones and stingrays to the "homeland." Fourteen years of that un-American word "homeland." Fourteen years of the expansion of surveillance of every kind and of the development of a global surveillance system whose reach -- from foreign leaders to tribal groups in the backlands of the planet -- would have stunned those running the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. Fourteen years of the financial starvation of America's infrastructure and still not a single mile of high-speed rail built anywhere in the country. Fourteen years in which to launch Afghan War 2.0, Iraq Wars 2.0 and 3.0, and Syria War 1.0. Fourteen years, that is, of the improbable made probable.

Fourteen years later, thanks a heap, Osama bin Laden. With a small number of supporters, $400,000-$500,000, and 19 suicidal hijackers, most of them Saudis, you pulled off a geopolitical magic trick of the first order. Think of it as wizardry from the theater of darkness. In the process, you did "change everything" or at least enough of everything to matter. Or rather, you goaded us into doing what you had neither the resources nor the ability to do. So let's give credit where it's due. Psychologically speaking, the 9/11 attacks represented precision targeting of a kind American leaders would only dream of in the years to follow. I have no idea how, but you clearly understood us so much better than we understood you or, for that matter, ourselves. You knew just which buttons of ours to push so that we would essentially carry out the rest of your plan for you. While you sat back and waited in Abbottabad, we followed the blueprints for your dreams and desires as if you had planned it and, in the process, made the world a significantly different (and significantly grimmer) place.

Fourteen years later, we don't even grasp what we did.

Fourteen years later, the improbability of it all still staggers the imagination, starting with those vast shards of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, the real-world equivalent of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand in the original Planet of the Apes. With lower Manhattan still burning and the air acrid with destruction, they seemed like evidence of a culture that had undergone its own apocalyptic moment and come out the other side unrecognizably transformed. To believe the coverage of the time, Americans had experienced Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima combined. We were planet Earth's ultimate victims and downtown New York was "Ground Zero," a phrase previously reserved for places where nuclear explosions had occurred. We were instantly the world's greatest victim and greatest survivor, and it was taken for granted that the world's most fulfilling sense of revenge would be ours. 9/11 came to be seen as an assault on everything innocent and good and triumphant about us, the ultimate they-hate-our-freedoms moment and, Osama, it worked. You spooked this country into 14 years of giving any dumb or horrifying act or idea or law or intrusion into our lives or curtailment of our rights a get-out-of-jail-free pass. You loosed not just your dogs of war, but ours, which was exactly what you needed to bring chaos to the Muslim world.

Fourteen years later, let me remind you of just how totally improbable 9/11 was and how ragingly clueless we all were on that day. George W. Bush (and cohorts) couldn't even take it in when, on August 6, 2001, the president was given a daily intelligence briefing titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." The NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, which had many of the pieces of the bin Laden puzzle in their hands, still couldn't imagine it. And believe me, even when it was happening, I could hardly grasp it. I was doing exercises in my bedroom with the TV going when I first heard the news of a plane hitting the World Trade Center and saw the initial shots of a smoking tower. And I remember my immediate thought: just like the B-25 that almost took out the Empire State Building back in 1945. Terrorists bringing down the World Trade Center? Please. Al-Qaeda? You must be kidding. Later, when two planes had struck in New York and another had taken out part of the Pentagon, and it was obvious that it wasn't an accident, I had an even more ludicrous thought. It occurred to me that the unexpected vulnerability of Americans living in a land largely protected from the chaos so much of the world experiences might open us up to the pain of others in a new way. Dream on. All it opened us up to was bringing pain to others.

Fourteen years later, don't you still find it improbable that George W. Bush and company used those murderous acts and the nearly 3,000 resulting deaths as an excuse to try to make the world theirs? It took them no time at all to decide to launch a "Global War on Terror" in up to 60 countries. It took them next to no time to begin dreaming of the establishment of a future Pax Americana in the Middle East, followed by the sort of global imperium that had previously been conjured up only by cackling bad guys in James Bond films. Don't you find it strange, looking back, just how quickly 9/11 set their brains aflame? Don't you find it curious that the Bush administration's top officials were quite so infatuated by the U.S. military? Doesn't it still strike you as odd that they had such blind faith in that military's supposedly limitless powers to do essentially anything and be "the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known"? Don't you still find it eerie that, amid the wreckage of the Pentagon, the initial orders our secretary of defense gave his aides were to come up with plans for striking Iraq, even though he was already convinced that al-Qaeda had launched the attack? ("'Go massive,' an aide's notes quote him as saying. 'Sweep it all up. Things related and not.'") Don't you think "and not" sums up the era to come? Don't you find it curious that, in the rubble of those towers, plans not just to pay Osama bin Laden back, but to turn Afghanistan, Iraq, and possibly Iran -- "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran" -- into American protectorates were already being imagined?

Fourteen years later, how probable was it that the country then universally considered the planet's "sole superpower," openly challenged only by tiny numbers of jihadist extremists, with a military better funded than the next 10 to 13 forces combined (most of whom were allies anyway), and whose technological skills were, as they say, to die for would win no wars, defeat no enemies, and successfully complete no occupations? What were the odds? If, on September 12, 2001, someone had given you half-reasonable odds on a U.S. military winning streak in the Greater Middle East, don't tell me you wouldn't have slapped some money on the table.

Fourteen years later, don't you find it improbable that the U.S. military has been unable to extricate itself from Iraq and Afghanistan, its two major wars of this century, despite having officially left one of those countries in 2011 (only to head back again in the late summer of 2014) and having endlessly announced the conclusion of its operations in the other (only to ratchet them up again)?

Fourteen years later, don't you find it improbable that Washington's post-9/11 policies in the Middle East helped lead to the establishment of the Islamic State's "caliphate" in parts of fractured Iraq and Syria and to a movement of almost unparalleled extremism that has successfully "franchised" itself out from Libya to Nigeria to Afghanistan? If, on September 12, 2001, you had predicted such a possibility, who wouldn't have thought you mad?

Fourteen years later, don't you find it improbable that the U.S. has gone into the business of robotic assassination big time; that (despite Watergate-era legal prohibitions on such acts), we are now the Terminators of Planet Earth, not its John Connors; that the president is openly and proudly an assassin-in-chief with his own global "kill list"; that we have endlessly targeted the backlands of the planet with our (Grim) Reaper and Predator (thank you Hollywood!) drones armed with Hellfire missiles; and that Washington has regularly knocked off women and children while searching for militant leaders and their generic followers? And don't you find it odd that all of this has been done in the name of wiping out the terrorists and their movements, despite the fact that wherever our drones strike, those movements seem to gain in strength and power?

Fourteen years later, don't you find it improbable that our "war on terror" has so regularly devolved into a war of and for terror; that our methods, including the targeted killings of numerous leaders and "lieutenants" of militant groups have visibly promoted, not blunted, the spread of Islamic extremism; and that, despite this, Washington has generally not recalibrated its actions in any meaningful way?

Fourteen years later, isn't it possible to think of 9/11 as a mass grave into which significant aspects of American life as we knew it have been shoveled? Of course, the changes that came, especially those reinforcing the most oppressive aspects of state power, didn't arrive out of the blue like those hijacked planes. Who, after all, could dismiss the size and power of the national security state and the military-industrial complex before those 19 men with box cutters arrived on the scene? Who could deny that, packed into the Patriot Act (passed largely unread by Congress in October 2001) was a wish list of pre-9/11 law enforcement and right-wing hobbyhorses? Who could deny that the top officials of the Bush administration and their neocon supporters had long been thinking about how to leverage "U.S. military supremacy" into a Pax Americana-style new world order or that they had been dreaming of "a new Pearl Harbor" which might speed up the process? It was, however, only thanks to Osama bin Laden, that they -- and we -- were shuttled into the most improbable of all centuries, the twenty-first.

Fourteen years later, the 9/11 attacks and the thousands of innocents killed represent international criminality and immorality of the first order. On that, Americans are clear, but -- most improbable of all -- no one in Washington has yet taken the slightest responsibility for blowing a hole through the Middle East, loosing mayhem across significant swathes of the planet, or helping release the forces that would create the first true terrorist state of modern history; nor has anyone in any official capacity taken responsibility for creating the conditions that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, possibly a million or more people, turned many in the Greater Middle East into internal or external refugees, destroyed nations, and brought unbelievable pain to countless human beings. In these years, no act -- not of torture, nor murder, nor the illegal offshore imprisonment of innocent people, nor death delivered from the air or the ground, nor the slaughter of wedding parties, nor the killing of children -- has blunted the sense among Americans that we live in an "exceptional" and "indispensable" country of staggering goodness and innocence.

Fourteen years later, how improbable is that?

9/11 & Iraq: Remembering How We Were Lied Into War

Published one year ago, still vital and relevant.

9/11 & Iraq: Remembering How We Were Lied Into War
By Will Porter, The Art Of Not Being Governed (September 11, 2014)

Since the cataclysmic events that took place on the morning of September 11th 2001, an extended series of consequences have unfolded with an alarming rapidity. Between vast escalations of military activity abroad, the passing of draconian laws, like the Patriot Act and the NDAA, the instituting of the Department of Homeland Security, and the ramping up of domestic spy programs through the NSA, 9/11 has served as a catalyst for a radical change in how America conducts itself, both at home and around the world. In the weeks and months following the incident, the American people were bombarded with a veritable hurricane of bold-faced lies and assertions based on dubious "intelligence". Before they could begin to wrap their heads around the significance of the events taking place around them, their government had already set plans into motion to wage a decades-long military conflict in the Middle East, a conflict which rages at full force to this day. In fact, recent developments in Iraq regarding the Islamic State militant group, or ISIS, elevate the issue of the 2003 Iraq War to the utmost importance.

Among the general populace, a widely-accepted narrative has developed which attempts to make sense of all that has happened since September 11th. Very broadly, the narrative contends that Islamic extremists have declared war on the United States, and this alone serves to explain and justify the long string of wars that have been waged in the name of the global "War on Terrorism" ever since. What's most surprising about the public narrative is that it offers almost no explanation at all of how or why Iraq was implicated in the 2001 terror attacks on New York and DC. At best, the accepted storyline suggests only a vague connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, or the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Any substantial explanation of this tie, however, has seemingly fallen away into the ethereal memory hole of American historical conscience.

Of all the oft-repeated talking points which comprise the terror war narrative, the question of the highest importance almost always goes unasked: why exactly did the United States wage war against Iraq in the first place? It is extremely peculiar that the largest-scale, most significant conflict to date in the war on terrorism has no widely-understood explanation. Those who have paid the highest price to initiate this war, the American people, seem to be the least informed on the matter. It is because of this lack of understanding regarding Iraq in particular that the terror war was ever able to get underway, and, indeed, build up a seemingly unstoppable momentum.

On this 13th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, and in light of the recent escalation of hostilities in Iraq related to the Islamic State, it is vital to return to these basic questions. How did this happen? Who was involved? What connections, if any, existed between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers? What justifications were given to go into Iraq in the first place? After more than a decade, the American people still cannot provide firm answers to such questions. To understand the broader war on terror, and how it came to dominate American foreign policy, it is necessary to fill in the blanks of the official narrative, as well as overturn some of the prevailing falsehoods about Iraq and its connection to 9/11.

In basic terms, the official US government justification for the Iraq War goes something like this: Saddam Hussein was a supporter of not only the 9/11 hijackers, but of terrorism in general. On top of this connection is the somewhat separate claim that Hussein was actively pursuing "weapons of mass destruction," using "mobile bio-weapons labs," and "aluminum tubes" for centrifuges in his reconstituted nuclear weapons program. Attempts were also made to link the lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohammad Atta, to Iraqi intelligence in an alleged meeting in Prague. Later, additional allegations derived from "Israeli security sources" assert that an Iraqi agent furnished Atta with an "anthrax flask" at the same meeting. This anthrax was, in turn, said to be related to the September 2001 anthrax-letter attacks targeting media outlets as well as Senators Patrick Leahy and Thomas Daschle (who both, coincidentally, happened to oppose the invasion of Iraq). This "anthrax in Prague" story was touted as solid proof of Iraqi complicity with the 9/11 attackers. Finally, but no less important, we have the documents, discovered by an Italian intelligence agency, which were claimed to prove Saddam's attempt to procure 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger.

As we shall see, absolutely none of this has any resemblance to truth or reality. Through a complex network of government officials—primarily connected to the Pentagon, and the office of VP Cheney—media pundits and journalists—such as Judith Miller and others at the New York Times, also the neocon PNAC crowd at the Weekly Standard—as well as foreign sources—Iraqi ex-pats and Israeli intelligence—the Iraq War was set off without a hitch, built upon a grand web of deception.

An important link in this chain of lies is the Pentagon-created Office of Special Plans. This agency, indeed, lies at the very heart of the War Party push to invade Iraq. Through this office, established in 2002 by Donald Rumsfeld and directed by Abram Shulsky, "intelligence" was funneled into important or influential places, such as the office of Vice President Cheney via his Chief of Staff, Louis "Scooter" Libby, and leaked to Bill Kristol's neocon rag, the Weekly Standard. Also heavily involved in the OSP's activities were neocon underlings Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, whose prior informal intelligence operations were officially codified in the creation of the OSP. The information disseminated from this office was carefully cherry-picked and highly exaggerated, with much of it gleaned from Iraqi expat group the Iraqi National Congress (INC), led by Ahmed Chalabi, the War Party's' loyal sock puppet in the long series of US-Iraq conflicts.

Chalabi, the darling of the neocons, was selected by administration war hawks as early as the Gulf War to lead the Iraqi political march to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Exiled from Iraq, and a convicted bank fraudster, Chalabi weaseled his way into high positions in the post-Saddam Iraqi state after helping the Bush Administration successfully bamboozle their way into war. Later on, it was discovered that he'd realigned his loyalties to betray the War Party, but it was Chalabi and his INC who provided many of the sources of intelligence which were vital in the push for invasion. For example, in a New York Times piece by Judith Miller, she cites a meeting, set up by the INC, with an "Iraqi defector," claiming there to be "renovations at sites for chemical and nuclear arms" in Saddam's Iraq. In the end, nothing about the "aluminum tubes," the "arms sites," the "mobile weapons labs" turned out to be true. These particular lies, among others, are officially debunked by a 2004 Senate Report (download PDF in link). None of the information used to bolster the WMD claims held any weight, and a large portion of the US intelligence community had said so all along. While it remains remotely possible this was all an accident, a result of mistaken intelligence, it seems much more likely that it was, instead, intelligence deliberately concocted in order to send the nation (back) to war, to finish the job started in the 1991 Gulf War.

Official skepticism toward Bush Administration claims of Saddam's weapons, as well as his ties to terror is illustrated in a leaked secret UK intelligence document showing high-ranking UK officials expressing concern over whether the US government was "fixing" intelligence around a pro-war policy, rather than a policy around intelligence. This appears to be precisely what occurred. Additionally, before, during, and after the war, a multitude of intelligence sources, as well as journalists, conveyed skepticism toward the dubious claims of weapons and ties to terror. There certainly were dissenting voices in the lead up to the war; these voices simply went unheeded and unheard, at least until after the invasion. The mainstream media chose, instead, to create an echo chamber for the flurry of false claims emanating from the tightly-knit group of neo-conservatives in high office and positions of public influence.

Also proven false in the 2004 Senate Report are the allegations of Saddam attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium from the Nigerian government in 1999-2000. The documents passed along from Italian intelligence, in fact, turned out to be crude forgeries! By 2002, the CIA, among other agencies, expressed doubts about the information contained in the documents, yet this didn't stop President Bush from invoking it in his State of the Union address of January 2003! Indeed, the CIA's skepticism, at every turn, was either discounted or completely circumnavigated in order to push this particular piece of intelligence. Of extreme intrigue is the evidence seeming to prove a connection between Pentagon (and OSP) officials, Ahmed Chalabi, and the Italian intelligence agency, SISME, who initially produced the Niger documents. It suggests that here, too, the same cabal of neo-conservative war hawks were involved in the dissemination, and possibly even the creation, of this fabricated piece of intelligence, all coordinated during meetings held in Rome.

Finally—for sake of space-limitations here I cannot fully elaborate—it should also be noted that the more recent scandal involving the controversial outing of undercover agent Valerie Plame has heavy ties to her and her husband's investigations of the forged Niger documents in the run-up to the Iraq War. One might speculate that their Niger investigations probed too close to the truth, rubbing those in power the wrong way.

Another key example of botched intelligence is the claim of the meeting in Prague between Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence, as well as the later attempt to link this meeting with the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks—a secondary result of which was to help along the passage of the totalitarian US Patriot Act. The Prague meeting was initially reported by Czech officials, although there were many conflicting accounts where different Czech officials claimed the opposite. An interesting parenthetical note, when Dick Cheney cited these reports in a TV interview to confirm the 9/11-Iraq tie, he refers to "Czechoslovakia," a country which had no longer existed since Czech-Slovak split in 1993. This certainly could have been a simple slip of the tongue, but it seems quite strange that, assuming Cheney himself had seen the Czech report, that it'd be fresh enough in his mind to at least get the country's name right! Nevertheless, a 2006 Select Committee on Intelligence report repeats the conclusion made among US intelligence circles that the Prague meeting was dubious at best, definitely not solid enough base an invasion on. Since this meeting likely never occurred, there is no need to provide further evidence to disprove the claim, sourced from "Israeli security," that a flask full of anthrax was given to Atta during the meeting.

Aside from the Prague-anthrax connection, further attempts were made to link the anthrax-letter attacks to both the 9/11 hijackers and, again, to Iraq. The letters themselves contained messages that were deliberately suggestive of hijacker involvement, proclaiming "09-11-01, this is next," adding "Death to America, death to Israel" for dramatic flair. Certain journalists made a big, evidence-free ruckus over the potential Iraq and/or 9/11 hijacker connection, yet nothing ever came of it. Despite the massive FBI probe into the case, no definitive answers were ever provided as to who was responsible. The total incompetency of the FBI, however, didn't stop independent journalists from delving into the case themselves. From these investigations came a series of very strange discoveries, not the least of which was the fact that the weaponized anthrax strains used in the letter-attacks originated in US Army labs! Although two different people were selected as "fall-men," the baseless accusations against neither of them stuck. The second of the two, one Dr. Ayaad Assaad, an Egyptian-American scientist, worked at the Fort Detrick facility from which samples of anthrax, among other dangerous biological compounds, went missing years before the letter-attacks. In seemingly unrelated events at Fort Detrick, Dr. Assaad's colleagues, primarily a group of researchers led by a man named Phillip Zack, engaged in bizarre and juvenile harassments directed against him. This same Phillip Zack was a suspect in a 1992 internal Army inquiry, thought to be making unauthorized access, by cover of night, to a biological compounds lab, where pathogens like anthrax, Ebola, and the Hanta virus had gone missing.

Moreover, in late September 2001, an anonymous letter sent to military-police officials in Quantico, Virginia alleged that Dr. Assaad was behind a terrorist plot to use biological agents in the United States. This accusatory letter was sent after the anthrax-letters were mailed, but before they were discovered to contain anthrax. This suggests that some third-party, somebody other than Dr. Assaad, had foreknowledge of the attacks. Tying things together, in the missive accusing Assaad it is also stated that the author had formerly worked with him, demonstrating fairly extensive knowledge of Assaad's career at USAMRIID.

Although the true culprits of the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks remain a mystery, this highly peculiar series of events seems to suggest there is much more to the story than simply a second act of terrorism perpetrated by the same group responsible for the 9/11 attacks. One might speculate that this Phillip Zack, or somebody closely related, had a hand in the anthrax-letters, based on his unauthorized access to pathogens labs, his clear hatred for Dr. Assaad, and the strange letter sent by an alleged former colleague of Assaad's, ascribing the guilt to him. There is more to be said about this story, but the important point here is that despite almost zero solid evidence pointing to Iraq, nor to the 9/11 hijackers, the Bush Administration was more than willing to use such an event as a pretext for war.

In the end, most of the high-ranking US officials involved in kicking off the Iraq invasion have subsequently come out to admit there were no WMDs, and no ties between Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. While they admit they made mistakes, most of them, unbelievably, deny they ever made claims about nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. They also deny ever asserting there were ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Needless to say, there are mountains of direct evidence proving without a shadow of a doubt that these people are complete liars, guilty of the highest crimes against humanity imaginable.

The Iraq War quagmire is often blamed on faulty intelligence alone, and for some of the people involved this may well be true. However, the absolutely damning ties between the neocon cabal responsible for the war, and the Israeli foreign policy apparatus might persuade one to think otherwise. There is a long and extensive history of neo-conservative groups'—such as the American Enterprise Institute, and the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)—involvement in the crafting of both Israeli and American policy, as well as garnering immense tax-dollar support for the Israeli state. Perhaps this is best illustrated in a 1996 Israeli policy paper entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," authored by, among others, neocon figurehead Richard Perle and crony Douglas Feith. Here they outline a detailed plan to destabilize and break apart various Arab nations, seen as threats by the Israeli defense establishment. In the "Clean Break" papers, next to countries like Syria, Lebanon, and Iran (countries the US has, coincidentally, taken an increasingly aggressive posture toward), Iraq is said to be target number-one, with the removal of Saddam Hussein from power a top priority. Indeed, for many years, long before 9/11, this very same group of hardline Israel-firsters sought to influence American policy toward war with Iraq, in large part to serve Israeli interests (alongside military-industrial concerns). To these neocons, American and Israeli security interests are one in the same, certainly including the aggressive Zionism which characterizes Israeli policy, both domestic and foreign.

This incestuous neocon-Israeli involvement in the crafting of state-policy should, of course, come as no surprise. This is a well-known phenomenon, not any sort of nutty conspiracy fringe. Israel not only has long-standing ties with influential conservative movers-and-shakers in the foreign policy field, but also a history of deceptive and outright murderous behavior all around. From the decades of military occupation of the Palestinian people, to Israeli spying on American institutions, to multiple cases of Israeli theft of sensitive US intelligence-related secrets (and actual uranium in the 1950s, to build nuclear bombs with), to their deliberate sinking of the USS Liberty, Israel has quite a dark history indeed. Much more controversial is the evidence linking Israeli intelligence to the 9/11 attacks themselves! This issue is surrounded by a high degree of taboo, but one should never let such nonsensical concerns get in the way of historical understanding and intellectual honesty. If one is able to accept the notion that military conflicts are almost always based on lies and propaganda, it shouldn't be such a leap to suggest that governments also deliberately stage events to create pretexts for war. Again, books-worth could be said about this particular issue, but for sake of brevity it will be left here. This author can't encourage enough an independent examination of the evidence and sources provided throughout the present work; they are due a thorough and critical examination.

I have hardly even begun to broach the voluminous content of the Iraq War chronicles, but this short review should alone serve to prove the case. The United States government, or rather a militant clique within its most powerful and influential agencies, sent this nation to war with a largely disarmed and impoverished adversary. Between the 1990s sanctions, which killed 500,000 children, and the war launched in '03, over one million people have been killed, with many more millions displaced, their homes in ruin and their lives destroyed.

Let us never forget how easily this happened, as we are faced with yet another attempt to send troops to Iraq. For almost a half-century now, the United States has constantly intervened in Iraq, and to what avail? Of all the trillions of dollars, the millions of lives, the rivers of blood poured into Iraq, it has only given rise to the most brutal, out of control problem to date: the Islamic State. ISIS, as they are called, are currently rampaging across Iraq and Syria, taking entire swaths of territory and proclaiming the establishment of a long-sought Islamic Caliphate in the Levant region.

As the United States, with its regional allies the Turks and Saudis, continues to funnel material support to the anti-Assad rebels in Syria, they fund and back precisely the same people they claim to oppose in Iraq. The anti-Assad rebels and the pro-caliphate militants are, in many cases, the very same people. Considering these issues, it is long, long, overdue that the American people and, less likely, the politicians who craft US policy, reexamine the issue of Iraq, and the long-standing practice of US foreign intervention in general. If 50 years of failed policy and its resulting blowback can't teach us this lesson, I truly do not know what ever will.

For any hope to avoid future bloodshed and destruction, it is vital that we remember the past, that we return to history in order to inform our knowledge of the present and the future. On this 13th anniversary of the most horrific example of blowback this country has ever seen, let us never forget Iraq.

*A special thank you is reserved for independent researcher, author, and filmmaker Ryan Dawson. Both his film "War by Deception" and his personal correspondence proved indespensible in the course of writing this piece. Another thanks goes out to Scott Horton, whose radio show exposed me to a vast amount of the journalism sourced here.