In March of 2003, the Buddhist Peace Group became interested in the
'The Project for a New American Century' (PNAC). This interest culminated in a series
of public study sessions that we offered in September.
As a result of our initial explorations it quickly became apparent to us that any attempt to truly understand this document would require answers to various questions: Who were the signatories of the document? What role do they play in the current Bush administration? Where did these people come from? Is this remarkable document a singular event in history, or does PNAC have precursors? Is it part of a wider plan? If so, how can that plan be characterized?
As it turns out, many of the key players in the current administration also played roles in more than one of the previous administrations - the administrations not only of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, but also of Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower. Associated with this tight-knit group of career bureaucrats who are specialists in government, defense,
espionage, and international banking, is a lineage of ideologues that supports this group. It wends its way back through the 20th century to the days in which the 'Cold War' was being fashioned by the likes of Robert Lovett, in the period between 1946 (after dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and 1949 (the year that the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb).
It is useful to think of the 'Cold War' as the prototype for the current War on Terrorism, the
template that those in power are using to create the socalled War on Terror.
A lot of this was not as clear to us when we began our study as it is now. It became clear only in the course of trying to develop answers to the questions above. The first step was to do a cursory background check on individual PNAC signatories and current figures in the Bush administration. Since many played roles in more than one of the previous administrations this approach led, almost immediately, to a desire to map out the key players in all of these administrations, and their relationships.
Could information gleened from the internet be used to do this? Various lists were already available: lists of presidents and the years they served, lists of defense secretaries, lists of CIA directors, and so on. But none of these lists all appeared in one place, on one page - and so, in investigating any one person or topic, one had to continually flip pages, between one source and the other. It would be better to have all of the information on one page - for quick and easy reference. A page that could quickly reveal, for instance, that in addition to being the current Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld was also the secretary of defense under Ford in the years 1975 to 77 and that the director of the CIA at that time was George H.W. Bush. Such a thing could be a handy, practical reference guide.
In addition, doing internet searches on hundreds of individuals (PNAC signatories and administration
players) was time consuming: on many of these individuals there was TOO MUCH information available on the
internet, a wealth of information AND disinformation that made what we were looking for too difficult to find. Would
it save time to routinize certain search parameters, that trial and error had shown to be most helpful,
into code that would be activated by a simple click on the individual's name?
Were there any existing databases or web-based tools that would facilitate searches? A clickable-flip down list of
PNAC signatories was available at pnacrevealed.com. It connected each name to a bio connected to that person - all one had to do was click. But there was only one bio, and it was a more or less 'official' biography, which presented what the individual wanted to present - telling us precious little about what we were interested in knowing. Could the same mechanism (a clickable flip-down list) be utilized, by one click , to
do an advanced google search that would inspect ONLY certain keywords on pages, say, from the alternative press? - such pages were likely to have the KIND of information we were looking for. All one had to do was create code that would initiate such a search automatically by clicking on the name (a procedure sometimes described as a 'google hack').
Furthermore, couldn't these two functions - the 'reference guide' function and the 'name-clickable searches' function - be combined in one 'search/research tool'? Yes, that seemed possible. And although the product that you see
here is far from perfect and does not do everything that one can now imagine such a page doing, it did prove very helpful in connecting the dots, and generated a number of startling discoveries. It saved time and was exciting to use. Although this tool was not originally intended for use by others, I have decided to offer it here for the benefit of anyone who might find this approach helpful.
John Fudjack
PNAC workshop SYNOPSIS:
For the upcoming workshop entitled "The Project for a New American Century Study: Grounding Action in Research,"
which will be offered at Confronting the Politics of Fear: a People's Assembly on November 15, 2003 by the Buddhist Peace Group.
The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) is a
90 page document that outlines the
neoconservative 'defense' vision, which now
dominates U.S. foreign policy. Published in
September of 2000 - two months before the
presidential election, and a full year before the
events of 9/11 - it was commissioned by several
individuals who later came to play key roles in
the Bush administration: Rumsfeld, Cheney,
Wolfowitz and others.
"It's the scariest document I've ever read in my
life," said Dr. Helen Caldicott. "This is the new
Mein Kampf. Only Hitler did not have nuclear
weapons." Long before Bush took office the
document unabashedly declared that nothing short
of a "new Pearl Harbor" could be effective in
quickly promoting the neocon vision of global rule
articulated in its pages. It identified Iraq,
Iran, Syria and Korea as targets of future U.S.
aggression, and admitted that the removal of
Saddam Hussein would never be the primary
objective in a U.S. occupation of Iraq. And much
more. Yet this story remains the most
under-reported one this year!
Join us as we read brief excerpts from the
document, discuss who some of its 130 signatories
are, and explore some of the concepts, policies
and practices it is promoting. Let us share with
you why we've come to believe that those who are
promoting this vision are not simply a rogue
element who have somehow commandeered the White
House - but, rather, establishment elite whose
long careers are intimately interwined and deeply
rooted in past administrations, all the way back
to Nixon and before. Their political objectives
are consistent with a variety of highly
questionable U.S. policy threads that can be
traced back at least as far as the early 1940s,
when the 'Cold War' was being fashioned by a
likeminded and equally dangerous group of zealots.
HOW TO USE THIS PAGE (Technical Information):
This page has been tested in a few browsers; it works in Netscape 7.02, Netscape Communicator 4.73, and Internet Explorer 6.02. It requires that your browser be enabled for 'javascript', as javascript is used to generate the popup windows and to create the long google URLs from the search parameters supplied by the user through clicking on
names.
1) ABOUT MOUSEOVER ON AND MOUSEOVER OFF --
The purpose of the MOUSEOVER function is to quickly bring up pages in the
'pop-up' window by 'mousing over' links on the main page. The MOUSEOVER function has been disabled for MACs, because the MAC operating does not permit one to mouseover on the mainpage without
first clicking on it to bring 'focus' to it - thus defeating the intended purpose of the function.
If you are using Windows on a PC, however, the MOUSEOVER function is enabled.
Here's how it works. The front page can operate in two different modes depending on whether the MOUSEOVER ON button is checked or the MOUSOVER OFF button is checked. If the MOUSEOVER OFF button is checked you will have to click on the link to bring up the popup window with the requested page. If the MOUSEOVER ON button is checked, requested information will appear in the popup window by simply mousing over the link on the mainpage. With the MOUSOVER ON option you can therefore very quickly access pages - in order to scan who is in which administration, for example - but this requires a certain amount of dexterity with the mouse (if one wants to avoid bringing up unwanted pages). With a DSL or broadband connection, pages will appear almost instantaneously, simply by mousing over the links; with a dialup connection things may run slower. If you don't like the way this function works, simply don't turn it on.
2) HOW THE SEARCH FUNCTION WORKS --
Some of the links on these pages are ordinary links, links to another page - on this site, or some
other website. Most are 'search' links - specially programmed to send a long string of search parameters
to google or namebase. You can tell which is which by mousing over a link and looking at the destination
address (the URL) in the 'status bar' at the bottom of your browser (if your browser is set up that way).
The ordinary links will have an address like this:
http://buddhistpeacegroup.org/pnac/lovett.html
The special search links will have an address like this:
javascript:find('James','Byrnes')
When you have chosen either the first or second option in the flip-down search box at the top of
the page you are on, and then you click on a 'search link', a string of search parameters that have been specified especially for that link will be sent to google, and that will return a google 'result page' in the pop-up
window. At the top of that Google result page you will see the easy-to-understand 'plain English' version
of that string in the box to the left of the 'google search button'. In the box you will see
something like:
neocon OR bush OR wikipedia OR pnac OR cia OR atom OR nazi "Harry Truman"
That string tells google to search for the name "Harry Truman" plus any one of the
six other words.
You can manually subtract or add items to the list that appears in that box, and a new results page
will be generated if you then click on the 'search google' button. You can take
out 'neocon' and put in 'preemptive', for example, or add the name "George Walker", like this:
bush OR wikipedia OR pnac OR cia OR atom OR nazi "Harry Truman" "George Walker"
But be aware that google has a limit on how many parameters you can specify, so that
you will sometimes have to erase one or more keyword for every one you want to add.
You can also type in something like this:
"Harry Truman" "George Walker"
The quotes mean that what is INSIDE them are treated as one word. The above search will
find EITHER of the two full names. If you want to INSIST that both appear in the page you're looking
for, put a plus sign in front of each, like this:
+"Harry Truman" +"George Walker"
A minus sign means that the name with a minus in front should definitely NOT appear
on the pages you're searching for. If you're looking for a page on which the name
Harry Truman appears, but not the name Bush, you could search this way:
+"Harry Truman" -Bush
Many of the search links are programmed to combine the word(s) highlighted in the clickable link
with additional parameters. For example, in the William S. Cohen page,
when you click on the Brookings Institute link, a google search on 'Brookings Institute' AND 'William S. Cohen' will be initiated - for the purpose of exploring the relationship between the two.
