This is Joan Jerkovich and welcome to my show. We are all very concerned about the bombing in Boston at the Boston Marathon. It got me into thinking about “why”. Some people were talking in the news reports that they were happy that suspect number two was captured alive. Maybe some of the people who were traumatized by this can hear some of the “why”. Why did these two young men decide to pull off this mass murder?

This blog is taken from “The Joan Jerkovich Show” radio transcript and edited for easier reading. Listen to the Podcast and post your COMMENTS at https://joanjerkovich.com/2013/04/30/why-mass-murderers-kill-telling-baby-mama-got-girl-pregnant-man-abused-by-girlfriend/

I’m titling this piece “Why Mass Murderers Kill”. The quick and easy answers that I found are usually revenge, envy, or rejection. Let’s look a little bit deeper into that and, let me tell you, I’ve researched a number of scholarly research articles about this and pulled out some facts to share.

One of them came from Knoll, writing in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law titled “The Pseudo-Commando Mass Murderer – Part One – The Psychology of Revenge and Obliteration”. This author-researcher is calling this pseudo-commando type of mass murderer, the one who likes to kill in public during the daytime, the ones who do plan their carnage well in advance. They’re the ones who show up with a powerful arsenal of weapons. These type of perpetrators have no escape planned and expect to be killed during the incident.

This isn’t necessarily true of the bombers that we saw in Boston, but many of these mass murderers; the shooters at Columbine, at Newtown, and even in Aurora oftentimes not only commit the murders but then commit suicide.

So what are these murderers driven by? They’re driven by really strong feelings of anger and resentment. Many of these perpetrators believe that they are being personally persecuted and that they’re grossly mistreated in some way. They have this mass murder in mind in order to have their own personal agenda of payback.

Another researcher, Mullen, writes in “Behavioral Sciences in the Law” an article titled “The Autogenic (self generated) Massacre”. He was able to review five cases even though a lot of these do commit suicide, but in these 5 cases they happened to survive.

He found that most of them are almost stereotypical and had a lot of common traits. The perpetrators themselves had a common trait of social and psychological disabilities. They’re often times very isolated loners who are bullied in childhood. They rarely establish themselves in effective work roles as adults. When you think about the personality traits, as the author says, what these people have in common is that they oftentimes are marked by suspicious personalities, they’re very obsessional, and they have feelings of grandiosity. They also harbor feelings of being persecuted against and oftentimes might even become somewhat delusional (which is a true psychiatric disorder in my opinion). Here’s their intent: their intention is to kill as many people as they can and then kill themselves. They don’t expect there to be survivors. Mullen was lucky to find five survivors to actually study in depth.

There were several research articles that talked about looking at these perpetrators and maybe even doing a test for sociopathy. I’m not going to get into a lot about the criteria associated with sociopathy because I do want you to go back to my website, joanjerkovich.com. I did a complete video interview, a very in-depth study, with a counselor who was on Nancy Grace at one time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZZ3hEWHAIg

The risk factors associated with sociopathy, or psychopathy, is someone who comes from a family with a history of abuse or ineffective parenting having a history and childhood of setting fires, hurting animals, being sadistic, self-centered, and most importantly they lack compassion and lack empathy.

Several of the authors mention this as if you could have taken these mass murderers and given them this sociopathy test and they would have scored high in this category.  This would be one way of maybe predicting future behavior. Then again, as we can imagine, that would be quite a task to undertake and we have personal rights to be concerned about.

Let’s go back to the researcher Knoll who wrote in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, where he writes, that some of these mass murderers take special steps to send out one piece of final communication to the public or the news media. He’s making a case that these really need to be scrutinized carefully.

Let me go back quickly and say that all of these pieces I’m quoting from were written before the Boston bombing. As we know, there has been some information coming out about what those two perpetrators either said or posted on Facebook…those are real clues to what might be their motivation, and their next steps in these areas of perpetrating these acts of violence against the public.  Watching for any of these and having a heads-up alert for any of these types of communication might have helped us identify these violent offenders before their violent acts take place.

He talks to about these revenge fantasies that many of these pseudo-commandos have. They have this horrifically, mortally wounded self-esteem and ultimately that enables them to commit these mass murders and suicides.

I have to add this other piece of research here because of the debate over gun laws and especially over the background checks, mostly to kind of see if we can not only keep the criminals out but someone who might be mentally unstable. This was by a Phillips and printed in the “Virtual Mentor” predicting the risk of future dangerousness. He says this dangerousness is not always the result of mental illness. Many individuals who commit violent or aggressive acts often do so for reasons completely unrelated to their mental state, and the vast majority of violent people do not have any kind of mental illness whatsoever.

We have this very small portion of the violent people in our society that might also be mentally ill. Let’s really think about that when we are trying to cull out the mentally ill people for a violent attack, although I do think it’s very critical to not get guns in the hands of those who are possibly suicidal. He goes on to say that violence is not a diagnosis. It is not a disease and the potential to do harm is not actually a symptom or sign of mental illness but it must be a central consideration when we’re assessing someone who might be potentially dangerous in the future.

I really like this piece put up by J. Reid Meloy, who is a PhD Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, and president of Forensis, Inc. Forensis, Inc. is a nonprofit organization dedicated to forensic psychiatry and psychological research. He put up several blogs in the Oxford University Press in September, 2012. This would’ve been before the Newtown incident even occurred. I’m going to go through some of those blogs and the Newtown timing will be critical, with one of them being relative to weapons used in these mass murderers… in particular, assault rifles. He starts the blog by saying, For the past fifteen years, my colleagues and I have conducted research on mass murder.

Myth number one: they snap. Research on this shows that these mass murderers don’t just snap, on a whim, and perpetrate this violence. They actually do a lot of research, a lot of planning, a lot of preparation… for days, weeks, and even months. This becomes like a fantasy that they’ve been incubating in their mind for years. It starts the clock, when they finally come to the point, where they have enough detailed preparations, that they actually are ready to carry through. However, there’s no evidence that they actually have a high state of emotional arousal when the killings occurred. Witnesses who have seen the mass murderers who survived, talked about them being cool and calm, and very deliberate… lacking in complete emotion, relative to the violence that has happened.

For example, when we see a video of the Boston bombers or any of these other perpetrators taken into police custody, they’re like blank slates. They’re not very emotional and they’re certainly not showing any remorse.

Myth number two: They can easily be divided into psychopaths, psychotics, and depressives. I talked about sociopathy earlier, but he’s saying this is very complex. Their motivations are complex. Their psychopathology, if they have it, is very complex. One thing they have is self-centeredness. They are also very grandiose and have a lack of empathy. They’re chronically indifferent toward others and very detached from their emotional life as well. This would stand to reason that when we find them and catch up with them, they’re just kind of blank slates. They don’t seem to care, one way or the other, that they killed people, blew their legs off, and changed their lives forever. They just don’t have it in them to even feel that…

Myth number three: Incidents of mass murder are increasing. This author says, “No. It’s a very rare phenomenon and it’s neither increasing nor decreasing in the US.”

Myth number four: Banning assault weapons will lower the frequency of mass murder. Meloy writes that the most popular weapon chosen by mass murderers is a 9 mm pistol, oftentimes a Glock, but they usually do bring two or three firearms to the scene. Assault weapons, such as the AR 15 and AK-47, are generally not utilized. Remember though, this was written before the Newtown massacre, where the bushmaster that was used in that incident, did fall under the 1994 assault weapons ban legislation. This author had made the case that it’s no surprise that between 1994-2004 when that ban was in effect that there was no decrease in the average number of mass murders per year in the US.

More study needs to be done because this type of weapon was used in Newtown Connecticut with the killing of the young children.

Myth number five: Psychotic individuals cannot plan in a precise and methodical manner. They say the majority of adult mass murderers are psychotic which means they have broken with reality and perceive the world in an idiosyncratic and often paranoid way. So, yes, they can plan and carry this out in a methodical manner.

Myth number six: It must be the drugs that they’re abusing. It is very true that the violence that occurs in the general population most often does involve drug use and particularly alcohol, but in mass murderers, drugs are minimally used. They think that’s because the mass murderer doesn’t want drugs to cloud their consciousness at the time. It would mess with their planning and preparation and their goal of getting this carried out…their goal is often to maximize their casualty rates. Research has found two cases where the mass murder actually used therapeutic amounts of an illicit drug to help him remain calm during the shooting.

I’m going to wrap up this piece by talking about the final myth, number seven, that mass murder can be predicted and can be prevented. This author says…it’s not going to happen. It’s too rare, and as I mentioned earlier there are too many of the murderers who commit suicide, so we can’t study them after the fact. There’s also the concern that we can infringe on individual rights and freedoms by trying to profile everybody. We already have that issue in our society.

There is one thing that this author holds out as a little piece of hope that he says can probably mitigate the risk of such events. That is that all of us have a responsibility to pay attention to the behaviors of people we see and hear. These mass murderers oftentimes give us warning signs, such as leaking their intent to others, or posting something on the Internet that might raise concerns. It can be very overt, like “I’m going to kill my supervisor tomorrow at work”. Or it can be covert, such as “don’t come to work tomorrow, you’re my friend, but watch the news you might see me there”.

Our logical reaction should be initially that it doesn’t feel quite right, or something in your gut is telling you to tell somebody in a position of authority. The truth is, most of us, even if we feel that gut reaction, don’t do that. We need to start alerting the authorities.

There are people out there that suffer the guilt of feeling that something was wrong. They knew something was up with a suspicious person and didn’t speak up. Can you imagine the survivors’ guilt you would feel if you knew you could’ve averted a tragedy? The author writes that sometimes we will say, “I just didn’t think he was serious”.  Don’t just use this rationale of passivity.  Trust your emotional reactions. Trust the anxiety you feel. Trust the wariness and fear and report it to law enforcement and let them do their job of investigating.

I actually got to talk with someone, not from the bombing at the Boston Marathon, but someone who was in the crowd that escaped in a panic when shots were fired by gang members at the 4/20 event in Denver Colorado. This person was shook up. It really brings to mind that we not only have care and concern for the people who were killed, the people who lost family members, those that were wounded and injured, but also those that are injured from a psychological stance by being bystanders at these tragic events.

I heard some news reports of people that said they walked up to people at the Boston bombing wanting to provide help and they just couldn’t stop because they saw limbs that had been blown off. They were thinking how unqualified they were to be there and left the scene. There is a huge trauma involved with that as well.

So, what do we do with the people who have been so traumatized by being in the proximity or even directly involved with these acts of violence?

If you follow me on my website then you know that once a day I put up a life coaching question. One of these questions was from someone who was a witness to the Aurora shooting. They were saying that every time they looked at the news and saw anything about Boston, or see something about Newtown, the traumatic event just all comes back to them. They are almost re-traumatized. When I addressed this person I told them this question was out of the realm of life coaching. If they’re this severely affected by this then they may want to consider professional help.

However, I did put up some information that I reprinted from the Mayo Clinic website on post traumatic stress disorder, as we often call it PTSD, and this info very specifically states when to see a doctor. The Mayo Clinic said that it’s normal to have a wide range of feelings and emotions after a traumatic event. You might experience fear and anxiety, lack of focus, sadness, changes in how well you sleep or how much you eat, and crying spells that catch you off guard. You might even have nightmares or be unable to stop thinking about the event. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a post traumatic stress disorder, but if you’re having these disturbing thoughts and feelings for more than a month, or if their severe or you’re having trouble getting your life back under control, talk to your healthcare professional and get treatment as soon as possible. You can see that information on my website at JoanJerkovich.com.

https://joanjerkovich.com/2013/04/18/joan-jerkovich-bcc-your-life-coach-2/

If there’s any take away from today’s show it’s that I want all of us to be very aware that if we see something or hear something that we think is dangerous or someone who is unstable then please report it to the authorities and let them do their job of checking it out. Let’s also be mindful of the people who witnessed these types of traumatic events and the symptoms they may incur from post traumatic stress disorder. If we see or know someone with PTSD symptoms and they don’t get better, like it said in the Mayo Clinic posting, and it persists for over a month, encourage them to get help. Help them get to their doctor or other healthcare professional.

My best friend’s husband is cheating on her.  I’ve never liked the guy and suspected he could do something like this, but now I have proof.  He’s such scum, I’m so disgusted with him.  I know she’ll be crushed when she finds out, but should I tell her?  I know she doesn’t know. 

This is a challenging question and I’m going to invite commenters to jump in with their opinions…here goes my best attempt…

Short and sweet, the answer to should you tell her is “No”.  Believe it or not, some women don’t want to know that their husbands are cheating.  Maybe they sense that something is wrong, but aren’t ready to hear the truth.  Maybe they don’t like sex and have an understanding that their husband will have his dalliances and she will look the other way.  Across the ages, married women have “allowed” their husbands to have mistresses, so long as he continues to support her and the children financially.  Personally, I say kick him to the curb, but to each his own…

My opinion to not tell may be skewed, because I had this very situation years ago with one of my best friends.  I’d been hearing from her about her husband and his girl-friend.  My red-flag intuition went up, but she seemed to have no concerns over their “friendship” and seemed to almost be encouraging this relationship (my friend didn’t like to have sex with her husband).  Then, I had the occasion to see her husband and his girl-friend at a party.  My friend wasn’t there with her husband and I witnessed this woman flirting all over him and sitting on his lap!  I promptly told my friend what I saw and to this day I don’t think she wanted to hear it.  I felt she was more concerned over the public display and how it would look to others in the community, than his involvement with the other woman.

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• You know your friend, without giving it too much thought; do you think she’d want you to tell her?
• Do you feel the personal need to tell her, as in, if you don’t you will feel that you are not being true to yourself?
• What might the consequences to your friendship be to either telling her, or not telling her?
• How can you be there for her during this difficult time and those to come?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily and share your COMMENTS at www.joanjerkovich.com  

Last week’s questions for you to read and comment on:

• Overslept, Lost Job
• Work with Ex
• Friend Stealing
• Finish Writing Book
• Losing Weight

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  She gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.  Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com 

Listen to “The Joan Jerkovich Show” weekends @9am on 910 KINA

This is the show that a lot of the conservative Republicans who follow Fox News have been waiting for me to put up. If you followed me through with my piece called, “Hubris: the Selling of the Iraq War” by the Bush Administration, you’ll find that this commentary I have today follows in line with the fact that in the wake of 9/11, Congress has given far too much authority or Executive Power to the office of president.

This blog is taken from “The Joan Jerkovich Show” radio transcript and edited for easier reading. Listen to the Podcast and post your COMMENTS at https://joanjerkovich.com/2013/04/20/criticism-of-obama-drone-policy-local-doctor-responds-to-elected-official-using-n-word-420-weed-day-chill-musician/

As President Obama promised, in his State of the Union address in January, that he was going to engage with Congress on the targeting of terrorists, to make sure that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and to the world. So, has he kept true to his promise?

As reported by Albert R. Hunt, a Bloomberg columnist, back in 2008, then presidential candidate, Barack Obama was unsparing in his criticism of President George W. Bush’s antiterrorism policies. He condemned the torture and the infamous detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and certainly the lack of transparency and congressional oversight, calling it something of a dubious legal framework and the blow-back that was spawning more terrorists and diminishing US standing in the world.

Yet, here we are under Obama’s administration, and there are serious questions on these very same issues… the same issues he was critical of the Bush administration for.

The one area in the Obama administration that is being most closely scrutinized, over the transparency issue, is under his drone policy.  Since his administration, the use of drones has increased seven-fold and caused the deaths of thousands of suspected terrorists and at least hundreds of civilians in Pakistan and Yemen. In most other countries, there is an overwhelming opposition and resentment toward the United States for these drone strikes.

We may have a monopoly on these weapons at the time being, but it’s being said that this is not going to last, because dozens of other countries, including Russia and China, are rushing in to develop armed drones. The Council on Foreign Relations Report warns that if the US doesn’t establish a coherent legal and policy rationale for its use of drones, they could become an unregulated, unaccountable vehicle for states to deploy lethal force with impunity. Kind of scary…

I know that some of you are critical of Rachel Maddow and MSNBC, and the reporting that she does. Michael Isikoff was the one that talked about the last piece I did on, “Hubris, the Selling of the Iraq War.” On her show, Michael Isikoff shared some breaking news that he’d had at NBC, where he revealed a leaked white paper from the Department of Justice outlining the legal case for using drones to kill American citizens, if they are senior operational leaders in Al Qaeda or in another terrorist organization, even if they have not been convicted of a crime.

This 16-page memo provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama Administrations, as he calls it, most secretive and controversial policies. One of the reasons I wanted to put up a show about this is because some of my liberal friends have privately talked to me about their very concerns on how Obama is handling this…

In my research, one of the most compelling pieces I saw on this, was an interview that Bill Moyers did with, “Moyers and Company,” with Vicki Divoll and Vincent Warren. These are two experts on civil liberties during wartime. They talked about the ethics and the legality of drone strikes, and these very targeted killings that we’re seeing happening, in countries we’re not even at war with. This interview went up on February 1, 2013 and I’m going to embed that in a video at JoanJerkovich.com. I have to encourage you to watch the full interview because I’m going to be paraphrasing and hitting some highlights of this interview. I don’t want you to take anything out of context:

https://joanjerkovich.com/2013/04/20/bill-moyers-with-vicki-divoll-and-vincent-warren-talk-about-obamas-drone-policy/

Bill Moyers is asking both of them, “Do you think that President Obama is fighting the War on Terror within the rule of law?” Vincent Warren replied, “I do not. In fact, I know that he is not.” Vicki DiVoll said, “I’m concerned that he may not be, but I’m not going to go quite so far as to say that he is not following the rule of law. I think his lawyers have told him that he is and he believes them.”

Divoll goes on to tell us how this actual program of targeted killing works. The Pentagon and the CIA nominate people to be on the list and it goes through what the White House promises is a very rigorous process of review to determine if those people should or should not be on the list. Finally, it makes it to the president, and President Obama has the final say on who or who is not on the list.

In talking about the concerns over this transparency issue, Vincent Warren was saying that the problem is that the only thing we ever know about the counter-intelligence that they’re collecting, has been what the government has been forced to say, or what journalists have been able to find out, or maybe even forced, through litigation work, from humans rights organizations such as his.

This is frightening because Vicki says there are US citizens who have been put on the same hit lists… the same targeted killing list of high value target lists that foreigners have.

So far, that we know of, three US citizens have been killed. With regards to the killing of US citizens, our drones did kill a United States citizen, born in Mexico, Anwar al-Awlaki. Then two weeks later, his 16-year-old American-born son was also killed by a drone while having dinner in an outdoor café with his cousin. In that attack, the person they were actually looking to target, reportedly was not found among the dead.

Like Vincent Warren said, the 16-year-old was a US citizen, born in Colorado. He went to Yemen with his family in 2002. As a US citizen, don’t we all have a right not to be summarily killed by our government without a trial? Without due process? He goes on to say that under international law there is no legal justification for targeting people without any meaningful purpose. There are rules that have been established in terms of the “law of war” that keep governments from just dropping bombs randomly in different countries… countries that are not even at war.

The second piece that he mentions is the constitutional issue and they talk quite a bit about this in the interview… that we certainly cannot and should not, live in a country where the US is targeting it’s own citizens for killing, without any due process at all. So as he says, we’ve simply moved from the Bush Administration, where we started out with detention in Guantánamo, without charge or trial, and now we’re in the Obama Administration “era of killing,” without charge or trial.

This is where I agree with what Vicki Divoll says: “War is difficult under all circumstances” and she says, “They’re the ones, Presidents’ Bush and Obama, who want to call it war… because it enhances their own powers by doing so.

Vincent mentions that right now, we’ve killed almost as many people in the last 10 years with drones, as Al Qaeda killed here in New York on 9/11. There is not a country, in the world, that believes that these US drone attacks we are waging on other countries, that we are not even at war with, is the right and sustainable solution for us as a country. There’s certainly a cry of concern going out that talks about the fact that these drone strikes might be simply radicalizing people who otherwise might not of been so radical. So there’s a concern here that maybe we’re just making this problem bigger.

In his interview, Bill Moyers asked Vicki about the recently published op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Who says you can kill Americans, Mr. President?”… Pretty controversial title.

So he says, well, what are we talking about here, Vicki? She says, “The issue is that there are legal memoranda in the Department of Justice that explain in great detail the legal support that Obama believes he has for conducting this program, but the Justice Department won’t release them and he, Obama, won’t order them to be released… even though he, himself, released the very same type of memos about President Bush’s program.”

“So, Obama, tell us what your legal theory is? Congress isn’t doing anything. The courts are having trouble doing anything. You’re the only one who knows what your legal theory is. So tell us what it is. Make it transparent to all of us, so that we can decide and we can scrutinize whether it is actually right or not.”

Vincent Warren jumps in here. He talks about the democracy that we have, and the problems that can occur in saying that when we talk about the legal justifications, we’re now in an era where even the government’s interpretation of law becomes something aiken to a state secret.

That’s kind of true. How much of this should be kept secret for intelligence reasons and what is open and should be open to the public? We have to go through all these legal hurdles to get the government to articulate their legal theory, by which they have the justification for, let’s say, their drone policy. He is saying that is probably one of the deepest problems that you can find in a democracy.

Vicki weighs in saying, “So all we have, is a president interpreting his own powers and the limits on his own powers, and that is not the way it’s supposed to work. We need more oversight.”

At this part of the interview, Bill Moyers jumped in and was very critical of the Bush administration in saying, you know, isn’t Obama doing exactly the same thing? But here, Vicki jumped in and said: The Bush Administration’s actions in all of these areas was that, and his stance on it, was that the rule of law didn’t apply to him. That if Congress enacts a law and says, ‘don’t do that,’ why, he could do it anyway. She says, and of course, she’s defending Obama here, that President Obama does not subscribe to that theory. She felt that if Congress passed a law tomorrow that said, “you may not target with drones,” she believed he (Obama) would obey that law. The problem is, Congress isn’t doing that.

So who do we look to? Vicki looks to Congress but as Bill Moyers says, “Who’s going to push Congress if the Democrats are skeptical about taking on their own White House, and they want to cooperate with the White House, and the Republicans are voting on the other side?

Vicki says, “The media. The American people. The voters. It’s not a perfect system.” This is where Vincent jumps in and says, “I agree with Vicki, that there is really a fourth branch of government here, and that is the one that is probably the most important.”  He’s talking about the American people, the American voters. Vicki jumps in and says, “Yes, and they have been too quiet.”

I do think we have been too quiet on this issue. I’m going to leave you with what Vincent said. He said, “You should never ever trust that the government is being completely and totally honest about the mistakes that it’s making. And the stakes are just so high for both the law and our foreign-policy, and for civilians targeted in a killing program.”

The American citizens, that fourth branch of the government, need to speak up and need to hold this administration accountable…

I want to finish up with some of the legal concerns of the Obama drone policies. I talked about Vincent Warren who was on the Bill Moyer’s show. He said the problem we’re going to have in the next four years is narrowing the gap between what the law says and what the law should be in order for us to be safe, secure, and free citizens within this country and to treat other countries and other people around the world with the same amount of respect. Narrowing the gap between what’s legal and what’s just is the big battle.

Vickie jumps in and says we really need Congress to step up and do its job, which is to conduct oversight of this president and all presidents in the presidency, not just President Obama, in order to get some of these issues addressed. They talk about how it’s a golden opportunity because there’s a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president. It would be much harder if you had a Republican president because it looks so partisan. She must have been feeling a bit conciliatory over this interview about President Obama because she said that, in fairness to President Obama, presidents don’t like to acknowledge the giving up of power, no president does. On their watch they don’t want to be the guy that shrunk the job.

I do think that the Senate, in particular, because it’s still Democratic, has a golden opportunity to get some of these things back under control, so that when the next president comes in we’ll have some laws and some standards that we can follow.

That is my personal hope for this very process.

In closing I want to tell you what Vincent Warren said. He says, “I firmly believe that President Obama is our best chance for the foreseeable future to do exactly what Vicki’s talking about, which would be to shrink that pie of presidential power (I said this earlier) he’s inherited from George Bush and Bush took more than anybody else. If he doesn’t do that, then the next president will have more power than the previous two and we’ll be back on the show in four years about how we slipped even more and there’s more egregious policies. We’ll be looking at the ramifications for those policies. I want to see that change and it’s going to take people here in this country to be able to make that happen.”

I can see my Fox News listeners out there being those very ones to rally the cry for transparency…Thanks for joining me on “The Joan Jerkovich Show”!

Welcome to the Joan Jerkovich Show.  I’m going to be presenting that much-awaited final segment on the documentary film Hubris: Selling the Iraq War. Seems I’ve had quite a few listeners who don’t like to hear anything derogatory about the Republican Party. If you hold on with me and you come back to listen next week, I want to talk about the abuses that I see going on with the Presidential Executive Power within the Obama Administration.  Later in my show I to have more to say on just that.

This blog is taken from “The Joan Jerkovich Show” radio transcript and edited for easier reading. Listen to the Podcast and post your COMMENTS at https://joanjerkovich.com/2013/04/13/hubris-part-3-elected-official-uses-n-word-actor-tyrese-allen-comments-musician-staying-off-drugs/  

Starting back in with the commentary on Hubris, as you remember I talked about Paul Wolfowitz. From 2001 to 2005 during the George W. Bush administration he was a US Deputy Secretary of Defense reporting to the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld…I want this segment to focus on some of why and how. How did it happen that we ended up in a war with Iraq based on faulty intelligence? Well, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were two of the kingpins running this propaganda machine. It was their idea initially, which was rejected by the then Secretary of State Colin Powell, to try and tie in Iraq to the Al Qaeda 9/11 attacks.

As I found in a Wikipedia article, commenting about the journalist John Kampfner, Mr. Kampfner said that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz held secret meetings about opening up a second front against Saddam. Powell was excluded (from these meetings). They created in these meetings a policy that would later be dubbed “The Bush Doctrine” that centered on a preemption (preemptive war) and the war on Iraq. They saw this as an opportunity to root out hostile regimes in the Middle East and to implant American interpretations of democracy and free markets from Iraq to Iran and Saudi Arabia.

I’ve done a lot of research trying to find out what the motivation was of these key players in taking us into this war…This journalist (Kampfner) also reported that Wolfowitz saw a liberated Iraq as both the paradigm and the linchpin for future interventions. Of course, the job of finding those weapons of mass destruction and providing actual justification for the attack, was going to fall to the intelligence service agencies.

According to Kampfner, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believe that while the established security services did have a role to play, they were just too bureaucratic and too traditional in their thinking. As a result, they came in and set up what was known as the “cabal”, a cell of eight or nine analysts in a new special office called “the office of special plans (OSP)” based in the US Defense Department. This new office of intelligence became President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible connection to Al Qaeda and possible possession of weapons of mass destruction.

In later history it was the actions of this very intelligence group that they pulled together, the OSP, that led to many of those accusations of the Bush administration actually “fixing” the intelligence to support their policy and his own agenda. This was also used to influence the congressional vote to go to war.

Okay, so maybe they want to bring democracy and free markets to the Middle East, but one other conjecture of why they wanted to start this war, and this is really a sad and sickening thought, is that operations in the war in Afghanistan were actually winding down. Let’s talk about following the war making money machine. Is that possibly a reason why we were drawn into another conflict?

Even though we have this somewhat sketchy intelligence, the administration starts pushing hard for Congress to take quick action against Saddam. Sen. Tom Daschle, the Democratic majority leader, even said the president made the point that there was “an urgency” to taking action, and that it couldn’t wait, and he got very animated. He used, uncharacteristically, profanity and used the middle finger to demonstrate Saddam Hussein’s disdain for the United States and for him personally.

When I heard that, I had to wonder if this is something of a personal vendetta for Bush? We do know that his father HW Bush was criticized for not finishing the job by taking out Saddam Hussein.

Was then-President Bush’s motivation for going into war with Iraq based on his belief that Saddam Hussein had called for the assassination of his father? I heard one journalist make a comment saying, “I love my father too but sending all these people to war to avenge their own father…very few of us have that power… and I think none of us in our country should.”

Based on this hurry up mode that the Bush administration had everybody in, the Senate intelligence committee did request that a national intelligence estimate, which is a comprehensive summary of the intelligence evidence, be compiled.  The NIE’s are routinely delivered on intelligence issues, yet this being one of the most grave matters our country might undertake…sending our servicemen to war…they pulled this together in only three weeks. This (NIE) is something the CIA normally would put together in months. So, with this hurry up attitude, not only did they pull it together in just a few short weeks, but it was delivered to Congress for them to review just days before the congressional vote for war.

Here is the really scary bombshell. In October 2002 the congressional vote came out 373 “yes” votes to go to war to 156 “no”.  Of those votes, Michael Isikoff, as you know as the co-author of the book “Hubris:  Selling the Iraq War”, said that as far as his investigation could tell only about half a dozen of the US senators accessed that NIE report that is kept in a classified vault. He went on to say that, otherwise, if they had read the report, they would have seen that it was filled with dissents, meaning dissenting opinions on whether there were actually weapons of mass destruction.

How did Colin Powell, who was called the most trusted US warrior of the time, weigh in on all of this? He was the one that was slated to give the speech to sell this war to the United Nations. Well, for one, Colin Powell called the contacts with Al Qaeda and 9/11 BS. He wanted it out of his speech. He wasn’t going to represent the United States to the UN unless he had what he felt was clear credible information from solid intelligence. He pretty much shot this right back to the CIA director Tenet (George Tenet). According to the film, it only took minutes for Tenet to show up on Powell’s doorstep. He was explosive in saying that, Yes, we do have an operative who has admitted to us that there are these contacts, so put it back in the speech!

Powell moved forward, convinced that the CIA knew something that he didn’t know and believed what Tenet was telling him. Powell’s 90-minute speech was presented to the UN and later he admitted that the intelligence that was submitted to him was not solid.

One of the most wrenching parts of this whole film was when Walter Jones, who was the Republican congressman from North Carolina, said that one of the most serious responsibilities a Congress person has is to cast a vote to send a young man or woman to war to die. He is quoted as saying in the film, “I probably would have done myself a favor by being better informed than listening to the administration. We were two months out from an election and no one wants to be viewed as weak on national security.  In my heart, I knew that a “No” to the authority for the president was the right vote, but yet, I was not strong enough to vote my conscience.” He went on to say, “I was more concerned about the politics of my decision rather than what is right and what is wrong.  I prayed to God many times that he would forgive me for sending his children into a war that never had to happen.”

The vote passes and President George W. Bush has the free hand to take us into war with Iraq.  In March 2003, the military invades Iraq. Soon after, we saw the quick conquest of Bush on the aircraft carrier declaring victory.  Soon after that, everything dissolved into chaos.  After 19 months of scouring the country no weapons of mass destruction were found. The information that we would go in and find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction did not come true.

Why did I put up this piece on “Hubris:  Selling the Iraq War”? Let me put these numbers out as a reminder: casualties of US soldiers are at 4,486, wounded 32,021, and Iraq civilians (which must not be forgotten) are over 100,000.

Do I have concerns that our elected congressmen did not do their job in voting for this war? Yes I do. Do I have concerns that any administration can take on too much Presidential Executive Power and abuse that? Absolutely.

I want to go on into the final segment of my show today and tell you some of what I’m researching for next week regarding the concerns I have over President Obama and his administration doing the very thing he was critical of his predecessor for, which is overusing and overstepping his presidential authority.  No president in any administration should be allowed to do this without oversight, especially where the lives of people, not just in the United States, but in the world, are concerned.

This is part two of my commentary on the film “Hubris – Selling the Iraq war”. This documentary film looks deep into the workings of the Bush administration, to see how they began their propaganda machine, to sell the American people on going into war with Iraq.

This blog is taken from The Joan Jerkovich Show radio transcript and edited for easier reading. For audio, listen on podcast or iTunes at https://joanjerkovich.com/

What I’m going to focus on is the military intelligence that was gathered in the lead up to this war, and basically, how this film debunks it. There were stories about a photo, and then there was a detainee. There was someone named Curveball. There were the aluminum tubes and then there was the purchase of the yellowcake uranium ore. All of these were debunked in this film.

Let’s talk about the photo. It was thought to supposedly be a meeting between one of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda hijack leaders and a high ranking Iraqi intelligence officer. This was never made public. As the intelligence operative working at the time said, it couldn’t be the correct person in the photo, because the man you’re talking about (the Al Qaeda leader) is a man of slight stature, unlike the man in the photograph.

As Mark Rossini, who worked at the time with the former terrorism task force said, “that’s not the man in the photographs,” but he sent it to the lab anyway. He believed that this piece of intelligence had been debunked and was put to rest.

So, imagine his surprise when he was watching television and saw VP Cheney on Meet the Press. Cheney was saying it had been “pretty well confirmed” that he (the “supposed” Al Qaeda leader in the photo) did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service.

Rossini said he remembered watching this sitting in his den at his home in Washington DC. He was looking at the TV screen and thinking, “what did I just hear?” For the first time in his life, he said, he actually threw something at the television screen. He could not believe what he had just heard VP Cheney say.

Then there was the story of the detainee’s confession made under extreme torture. In the film, Condoleezza Rice is telling us that, “We have intelligence saying that Iraq did provide training to Al Qaeda in chemical weapons development”.

Now, where did this intelligence come from? There was an Al Qaeda commander who was actually first detained and questioned by the FBI using what they called their “standard techniques”. However, the CIA wanted more out of this captive, and when their “standard techniques” didn’t produce the statements they were looking for, this detainee was sent to Egypt and turned over to what they called “one of the most brutal” intelligence agencies in the world…We don’t even want to know what that really means.

Not surprising, within weeks he came up with a story that he had never told the FBI under the “standard techniques”…that Saddam was, in fact, training Al Qaeda in chemical and biological weapons.

From the outset, the intelligence community had doubts about his claim. They questioned his truthfulness and thought that some of the information he was giving was fabricated. Their hesitance to believe his confession was validated when, after the invasion, he recanted his story, the very one that was extracted by the brutal Egyptian intelligence agency. Another piece of intelligence debunked.

Then we get thrown the real curveball, no, “Curveball” is his name. He’s Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who was actually a source from the German government, an intelligence operative, who talked about how Hussein was building a mobile biological weapons facility meant to avoid detection. He was an Iraqi engineer who was then living in Germany, but claimed he worked in Saddam’s mobile weapons labs, the ones that were used to develop these weapons of mass destruction we were so desperately looking for.

Valerie Plame-Wilson, a former covert CIA operations officer, knew Curveball and knew that he was a known fabricator, a known liar. She said that he could not be relied upon. His intelligence, as she said, was stamped “do not disseminate this information, it is useless”. His claims were debunked when in 2011 he admitted to lying. He said that he would lie again or do whatever was possible against Hussein, or the “old regime”. as he called it.

So, here we are and, already, we have this poorly handled intelligence that now became the heart of the case the Bush administration was using for war against Iraq…

VP Cheney was out in full force pushing his propaganda machine. In August 2002, in a speech to veterans in Nashville, he said there is “No doubt” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and there was “No doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, our allies, and against us”.

It’s interesting when you watch this film and see General Anthony Zinni, who was then commander of the US Central command, seated up on the stage just off to the side from where Cheney was speaking. General Zinni says that upon hearing Cheney say this, he literally bolted (in his seat), saying, “It was such a shock. It was a total shock.” He says, “I couldn’t believe the vice president was saying this. In doing work with the CIA on Iraq, and the weapons of mass destruction at Langley, and through all the briefings, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was any ongoing program.”

Just two short weeks after that speech Cheney again was on Meet the Press where he said, “but we do know with absolute certainty that he is using his procurement system, to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium, in order to build a nuclear weapon”.

So what is Cheney talking about here? I mentioned aluminum tubes. Let’s talk about aluminum tubes. These are used to make uranium for nuclear weapons, but the Energy Department sent their own scientists out to evaluate the actual tubes that were being procured by Iraq. They concluded that these could not be used to build a nuclear weapon, but instead were being purchased by Iraq to build conventional weapons.

This is where I think all of this gets really sketchy…The CIA came in and disagreed with the scientists, and claimed that they (the aluminum tubes) are being used for production of nuclear weapons. Of course, that was the position that the White House wanted to embrace, so they did. That was the answer they were looking for. What is it with the collusion between the CIA and the White House? Well, more on that later.

Let’s get down to more of the faulty intelligence that we heard on the road to Iraq. Let’s talk about the yellowcake uranium ore.

There was a big hullabaloo in the Defense Department that Iraq was purchasing mass quantities of this ore. There were documents that were found showing all these purchases. Again, the military intelligence operatives dug into these and found them to be forgeries.

When they went to Dick Cheney and reported to him that these were forgeries, he ordered the CIA to dig deeper. So, the CIA sent ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was Senior Director for Africa, which is where they were purchasing from, and he went and did a thorough evaluation. He concluded that those purchases did not happen and could not have happened.

You heard me mention the name Valerie Plame-Wilson earlier, the former covert CIA operations officer? Well, guess who she was married to? That very US diplomat, Joseph Wilson, who went into Niger to see if this had actually happened…this purchase of uranium. She became a household name because, in July 2003, she was outed by administration officials as part of an effort to discredit her husband, for publicly criticizing the handling of this very intelligence about the supposed effort by the Iraqis to purchase uranium from Niger.

In one piece I was reading, she (Plame-Wilson) discussed the pressure that CIA analysts came under to “tow the White House line”…I talked in my earlier piece about the “winds of war” that were being blown about by the Bush-Cheney administration. The “winds of war” were basically looking at all of the people in intelligence, the people in the administration, and some of them in the media to “tow the line with their agenda”. In this piece Ms. Wilson was quoted as saying, “speak to the people that felt the direct pressure”.

She went on to talk about how VP Cheney and his Chief of Staff Scooter Libby would come to the CIA headquarters during the run-up to the war. She was quoted as saying, “when you have a vice president and his Chief of Staff digesting raw intelligence and coming to their own conclusions, they who are not intelligence professionals, the whole system is bound to be skewed.”

I’m going to head to a break with one of the most distressing pieces of this whole story. I have to quote directly from Michael Isikoff, who was one of the co-authors of the book “Hubris”, where he talked about the incident of torture…

They had the high-ranking Al Qaeda figure, that was captured and then rendered over by the CIA in early 2002 to Egypt, where he was subjected to torture, beating, a mock burial and, “God knows what else” he says. “This is the very detainee, you remember, that came up with that story under torture saying that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in chemical and biological weapons. There was the connection they were looking for between 9/11 and Iraq. Still, no one in the US intelligence community actually believes that. In fact, the CIA internally wrote an assessment concluding that this very fact was fabricated, saying that much of this confession under torture was a fabrication.”

Suddenly, in September 2002, the White House started using the claim that Iraq was training Al Qaeda in poisons and gases, entirely based on this detainee’s tortured confession. Debunked again, as after the war the detainee with the confession was returned to US custody where he recanted the whole thing. It’s not surprising that he said he made it up because the Egyptians were torturing him.

As Isikoff said in his postscript to the story, this prisoner of war was never turned over for a military tribunal, but instead he was turned over to the henchmen in Libya, who days after being visited by human rights watch, found him hanging from his neck inside a Libyan prison. His family believes he was murdered to cover up the true story of what actually happened.

This is what Michael Isikoff said in relation to whether this murder was a cover-up, “We’ll never know the answer to that but we do know, with certainty, that an American president, used bogus intelligence, from a tortured detainee, to make a false claim to the American public and to the world.”

If you missed part one of my commentary on the documentary “Hubris – Selling the Iraq War” go to my website https://joanjerkovich.com/ for the Podcast and transcript.

That’s part two of my commentary on the film documentary “Hubris: Selling the Iraq War” and next week, when I come up with part three, I talk about some of the “why”, some of the “spin”, some of the “sleight-of-hand”, or shall I say “sleight-of-word” that was used by the Bush administration to sell the American public into going into war with Iraq.

Losing weight has always been a challenge for me.  I lose then gain it back in short order and sometimes gain even more back than I lost when I started.  Two years ago I worked a plan and got down to my goal weight and kept it off, but the past 4 months I started gaining back what I lost.  I know what I need to do to get back on track, go back to doing what worked for me before, but I really can’t get started and stick with it.  I don’t have that same motivation.

Geesh, I wish I could find this elusive thing called motivation and bottle it!  I’d be a gazillionaire!  Finding motivation, especially where weight loss is concerned, is tough.  We love to eat; eating tastes good; it feels good.  Often, it soothes over that rough day.  Damn, why can’t they make zero calorie cookies! I think there is something genetically mutated in those people who don’t like to eat and are content to crunch on raw vegetables all day. Don’t you? If they had lived in prehistoric times, they’d have all died out.  Why then, do we have to put up with their skinny bodies as that unattainable target we’re all supposed to strive for?…oh, how I digress…

Take an honest look at your eating habits to determine what small changes you can make to control your eating.  Also, take an honest look at your daily activity and map out a plan for adding more movement in to your day.  Decreasing calories and increasing activity is, and always will be, the gold standard for weight loss.  Start with small steps, and watch them grow to bigger steps and bigger success! Make your plan for weight loss as unique as you are. Here’s to your all-powerful, all-wonderful, uniqueness!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• What helped you motivate the last time you successfully lost weight?
• What lifestyle changes to decrease calories did you make that helped you lose weight?
• What lifestyle changes to increase activity did you make that helped you lose weight?
• How was your thinking about your weight different when you were staying on track to now when you’re lacking motivation?

Link to Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily at www.joanjerkovich.com  and share your COMMENTS!

• Aurora Shooting Witness trauma with Boston
• Like to quit 14 year job
• Can’t trust after Foster Care
• Socially awkward as homeschooled
• Take parents in home vs. Assisted Living
• Upset team lost Final Four
• 80-year-old seeks daughters respect

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  She gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.  Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com 

Listen to “The Joan Jerkovich Show” weekends @9am on 910 KINA

I love my Dad, but my husband and I have had it with his drug addiction.  We were letting him live with us to help him out. He relapsed again, so we kicked him out.  Now I can’t bring myself to take his calls or talk to him.  How can I be there for him while setting limits for myself?

Setting limits is necessary when dealing with an addicted family member, so you needed to kick him out if he was disrupting your own family life.  Don’t allow yourself to go down the path of feeling guilty over that one, nor over not taking his calls for the time being.  You sound angry, and rightfully so, if his pattern has been to relapse “again”.  That said, I’m sure you realize that relapse is a part of addiction, so expect more relapses on his journey toward recovery.  In trying to be there for him, start with deciding on your personal limits.  Make your own health and well being your number one priority.  This is tough stuff you’ve been dealt!

Unleash your Personal Power!

Ask yourself these Life Coaching questions:

• What boundaries do you need to set in your relationship with your Dad?
• What time frame do you set for yourself to start implementing these boundaries?
• What can you do to support him that will not leave you feeling “put-out”?
• What does he do that makes you the angriest?
• How can you minimize your involvement in that part of his life?
• What do you have to do to take care of yourself in this situation?

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily at www.joanjerkovich.com

MON:  Addicted Dad

TUE:   Dying, leave children with abusive ex

WED:  Sex with husband (Video Answer)

THU:   Sold business, now what

FRI:     Boyfriend cheated

SAT:    80-year-old mother fights with daughter

SUN:  My team lost (in the Final Four) and I’m still upset

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  

Joan gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.

Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com

 

The MSNBC documentary called Hubris: Selling the Iraq War exposes how the Bush administration essentially convinced the American people that we needed to invade Iraq in 2003.   This documentary, as narrated by Rachel Maddow, was taken from the best-selling book of the same name written by Michael Isikoff, NBC News National Investigative Correspondent, and co-authored with David Corn, also a MSNBC contributor and the Washington Bureau Chief of Mother Jones.

This blog is taken from The Joan Jerkovich Show radio transcript and edited for easier reading.  

Link to declassified documents with a bullet point that says “Start a War?” (A Must See!) and link to the show Podcast or iTunes @  https://joanjerkovich.com/

This film was sobering. I would have to say it was difficult to watch and difficult to assimilate because the facts that were talked about in this documentary are based on unclassified documents of what was happening within the Bush administration as we led up to the war in Iraq.

If you follow my show, it seems like not too long ago, I made the comment that every war starts with propaganda.  The war against Iraq was, at least, “sold” to the American people by the most powerful men in US politics at the time.  This is an unusual war for the United States because it was a war of aggressive offense, not a defensive war effort, that had always historically been the path of the United States.  This war was sold to the American people as a what-if, or it might happen, or we never know, or we have to be protecting ourselves.  Not a true clear threat that was fully supported by (military) intelligence.  In fact, one could say that this war was actually initiated with faulty intelligence, that we all know eventually proved that there were no weapons of mass destruction.  We all know that now.

So, did these political architects of war know that the intelligence they were hanging their hats on was flawed, or let’s say incomplete, or maybe just inept? Or, were their decisions to pummel the American citizens with their “stink bombs” of propaganda…and I actually called them “stink bombs” because as you listen further to my opinion piece, you may actually feel the need to put on the boots that you go out to the pigpen with, to slop the hogs, because I promise you…you’ll be verbally walking through a knee-deep pile of manure.

Did these elected officials intentionally manipulate the facts that drove us into war?  If so, should they be tried for war crimes, or crimes against humanity as some have suggested? Do they owe the 4,400 American families who lost loved ones an apology? That’s not to mention the tens of thousands who were injured in this war or the 100,000+ Iraqi citizens who were also killed? But, no, there have been no apologies…and I doubt that there will be.

Who am I talking about here? Who was, so to speak, exposed in this documentary? According to Michael Isikoff, they were then-President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

So put on those hog slopping boots because here we go, here’s what happened…

This political power pack had Iraq on their radar for years.  They were intent on taking Saddam Hussein down and were, according to this documentary, just looking for that excuse with which they could sell their plan to the American public.  And when did they find it?  They found it with the 9/11 attacks.

It has been well documented that the day after the 9/11 attacks President George W. Bush went to the White House Situation Room and ordered the counter-terrorism director, Richard Clark, to look into an Iraq connection to the attacks. As Clark said in a later interview in 2004 on the Chris Matthews (MSNBC) Hardball Show, he said, (to the President)  “What I said, Mr. President, we will do that of course, but we’ve done it before, and rather recently, and the answer has always been no, and it’s likely to be no this time.”  He went on to say that President Bush didn’t like that answer and, “he got mad”.

Declassified meeting notes from the afternoon of 9/11showed that Donald Rumsfeld was tasking a top aide to find the best information fast, good enough to hit Saddam Hussein. He even asked the aide to get evidence from Paul Wolfowitz.

Now, Wolfowitz is mentioned quite prominently in this film.  It talks about how he had on his personal enemy list for two decades Saddam Hussein.  Even Donald Rumsfeld, in a later interview said, that he was the first person to mention looking for an Iraq connection to 9/11 at Camp David.

The film showed Mark Rossini, former terrorism task force, “We all looked at each other like, what are they talking about?  Who the hell…Saddam Hussein…Bin Laden hates him…he’s a heretic…there’s no connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda…”

Frequently, throughout this film, the intelligence operatives were aghast at what was going on…

So, the word went out to all the intelligence services, the CIA, the FBI, they were all put to task to find the connection between Al Qaeda in the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hussein.

Weapons inspectors were sent to search for weapons of mass destruction. Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq survey group said, “This just went on for years and at a certain point, unbeknownst to the weapons inspectors, or anyone else except Iraq, it turns out that we pretty much accounted for the full system, but we didn’t actually know that at the time”.

Regardless of the sketchy intelligence, the Bush-Cheney propaganda machine to go into war against Iraq began.  In January 2002, in Bush’s State of the Union address, he made the famous statement that said “States like these and their terrorist allies, constitute an Axis of Evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world” his “Axis of Evil” comment cued those on the inside that the Bush administration was pushing to invade Iraq.

There is a declassified memo from November 2001 that reveals that Donald Rumsfeld met, as early as then, with CentCom Cmdr. Tommy Franks to review plans for what he called the “decapitation” of the Iraqi government.  They wanted to discuss ideas on how to start a war…and I want you to go to my website www.joanjerkovich.com and see those actual documents.  Those declassified documents, because when you look at it and see that actual bullet point that says:  Start a War? Then the next one was one suggestion on how actually to create this, or have this happen, was again bullet pointed, and it says:  Dispute over WMD (weapons of mass destruction) inspections?  Visually seeing that is sobering.

As Paul Pillar, CIA National Intelligence Council said, “9/11 made it politically possible, for the first time, to persuade the American people to break a US tradition of not launching offensive wars”.

I want to leave with this one final comment from Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to Colin Powell at the time, where he said, “George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney would have gone to war with Iraq, and gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, even if there wasn’t any intelligence at all”.

Listen next week to Part 2 of my commentary on the documentary, Hubris: Selling the Iraq War.  I’m going to talk about the intelligence that prompted these officials to act.  Then, in Part 3, I hope to get into some of the “why”.  Why did this happen, how did this happen, and how can we protect our country from this happening again in the future?

 

 

Before you hit the enter button to post a comment on your favorite blog, social media, or online site, be forewarned that if your comment can be proven in a court of law to contain a libelous statement about an individual or business you can be sued for damages.

As the Internet has become an increasingly popular reporting and social media tool, libelous claims have risen.  Two criteria apply.  If your post can be proven false, and proven that it was published with the intention of harming that entity’s reputation, the offended party has a case against you.

The defense tool you hold is the truth.  If what you are posting is the absolute truth and can be proven to be so, your post, no matter how damaging to a person or businesses’ reputation, is not libel.  Keep in mind, however, that defending your comment as truth can be difficult and expensive and in any legal claim, your position of “truth” is not assured.

So what happens if you are posting “anonymously”?  If you don’t know it by now, you are not as anonymous as you might think.  Your identity can be traced.  Numerous court cases have forced Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) to provide information and the IP address of known offenders.

So, before you post that comment, listen to my podcast for answers to the following questions:

• Do you have to use a persons name to be sued?
• Can you also be sued if you just agreed with the libelous comment?
• What is the statute of limitations for online defamation?
• Can the ISP and host website also be sued for libel?
• My caller, a public figure in her community, was falsely accused of having an affair.  Does she plan to sue the commenter?

https://joanjerkovich.com/2013/02/02/online-defamation-anonymous-online-personal-attack-dating-in-2013-part-2/

The Joan Jerkovich Show

Weekends at 9am on 910 KINA

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The most successful ones are highly intelligent, multi-talented and ooze charm.  They have an uncanny way of making success look easy.  They are also liars, thieves and cheats.  They are con artists.

One con man, whose name we all recognize, is Charles Ponzi (1882-1949).  Historically considered to be one of the most adept swindlers, his scheme paid early investors returns from the money collected from later investors.  The Ponzi scheme is named after him.  It can be a profitable scheme for a crook, until the rollercoaster crashes to the end of its run…just as it did with Bernie Madoff.

Madoff ‘s Ponzi scheme eventually defrauded investors of an estimated 18 billion dollars.   In June, 2009, he was sentenced to 150 years in prison for his brand of white dollar crime.  His sons testified against him telling authorities that their father confessed to running his asset management firm as a massive Ponzi scheme, and quoted him as describing it as “one big lie”.

Another notable current day con artist is Frank Abagnale.  The movie “Catch Me if You Can” portrayed his life of stolen identities wherein he portrayed himself as eight separate scam identities including a pilot, attorney, and pediatrician where his self-serving ruse almost cost the life of a sick child.  He was prosecuted and incarcerated in multiple countries before serving just five years in the US prison system.   Since his release, he works as a consultant to the FBI and has made a living lecturing on identity theft.

When large-scale tragedies occur, the con artists are quickly on the trail.  Posing as a relative of one of the young victims in the Sandy Hook School shooting, a 37-year-old woman solicited money for the child’s funeral fund.  She was arrested by the FBI for profiting from this con.

Con Artists often get what they want, be it money, prestige or power.  If you are their target, they have no conscience about taking whatever they can from you.   Yet, while many of them are quite successful, we must not forget the innocent victims they leave in their wake.

Have you ever been the victim of a con artist?  How do you identify a con artist?  If you can see them coming, you can take action to protect yourself from becoming a victim.  Listen to my podcast on “Beat the Con Artists at their Own Game” and learn more about these toxic people.

https://joanjerkovich.com/2013/01/05/beat-the-con-artists-at-their-own-game-plateau-after-losing-50-pounds-concerned-boyfriend-abusing-son/