Juan Cole posted a great blog entry on the perils of voting for John McCain today on his always interesting blog, "Informed Comment". (As Aidan Monaghan points out in this blog entry, Obama has issues too, but not for the strawman reasons that McCain spouts in his public comments. As far as Clinton goes, a vote for Hillary is a vote for the Clinton dynasty, and all the baggage it entails.)

I would like to enhance Cole's blog entry with a couple segments from the 1995 documentary, "Dealing With the Demon". In the first segment, the human toll of drug trafficking is depicted. Cole refers to one million heroin addicts in Pakistan as a result of supporting the Mujahidin in Afghanistan, this documentary segment claims two million. The number is probably even higher now, as the sheer quantity of opium harvested in Afghanistan has skyrocketed. (This first segment is also interesting because an NBC news report from 1986 clearly explains how the Reagan adminstration had decided to supply the Mujahidin with Stingers and according to "one administration source, the CIA would be responsible for training the guerillas in their use". Oops! The official line these days is that the CIA never directly trained the Afghan Arabs.)

The second segment continues with an examination of the interconnected CIA, ISI, and drug trafficking warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Both segments feature commentary from a sorely missed expert on Pakistani affairs, Dr. Eqbal Ahmed. The second segment features a brief comment from fromer DEA agent, Michael Levine. (There is a lot more background on the history of the opium trade in the full one hour episode you can view/download here.)

I disagree with Cole about the use of the term "blow-back" as he uses it, because contrary to conventional wisdom, it doesn't appear that contact with the Mujahidin was ever actually severed by Western interests after the Soviets left Afghanistan. Covert use of the Mujahidin was carried unbroken through the Clinton adminstration, as documented here by Nafeez Ahmed, and here by Michel Chossudovsky.

Peter Dale Scott addresses the Santa Cruz Media Strategy Summit, January 26, 2008.

In the above video, Peter Dale Scott talks about the futility of engaging with a system that offers no real choice, referencing Gore Vidal, who has said, in various ways, "We only have one political party in the U.S., and that is the property party, which essentially is corporate America, which has two right wings, one called Republican and one called Democrat. I can't say I like either of them."

In his book, (which he quotes from in the video), The Road to 9/11, Scott points out that real change in this country is not going to come from the top down. In other words, substituting one representative of the Property Party for another is not going to change anything. Real change in this country will come from the bottom-up, through the networking efforts of grass-roots activists and media activism that currently has its home on the internet. A real, workable coalition is needed, engaging the divided voting public. Scott writes that what we need "is a movement, like that of Solidarity in Poland, that unites the various elements in civil society instead of setting them against each other. I suspect that left and right, by discarding preconceptions and learning more about those whom they presume to be adversaries, could discover that they may have more in common than they believe." (The Road to 9/11, p.250)

An Infowars reader asked Barack Obama about 9/11. He gave a disappointing "mistakes were made" type answer:

Democrat Presidential frontrunner Senator Barack Obama has responded to a question posed by an Infowars reader regarding government complicity in the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks.

Three months after the reader sent Obama a correspondence outlining her great concern that criminal elements of the government were directly complicit in the attacks, the Senator sent the following response via email, which was then forwarded to us:

Dear Penny:

Thank you for contacting me regarding your belief that the U.S. government was complicit in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. I appreciate hearing your passionate views on this matter.