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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

Meanwhile, this week we learned (by the hand of an editorial in The Los Angeles Times) that, “the biggest beneficiary (of the business of war) has been Blackwater USA, a private security firm with powerful political and personnel ties to an administration that has awarded it more than $1 billion in contracts since 2002.”

By Pablo Ouziel

10/1/07

October 2nd will mark the birth anniversary of Human Rights Activist, Mahatma Gandhi and for the first time, the United Nations is officially proclaiming this day to be the International Day of Non-violence. Hopefully, on this day we can all spare a little of our time to reflect on how little we have all understood Mahatma Gandhi’s message; after all everyday we seem to plunge into a worse state of affairs and drift away farther from Gandhi’s respectable message; “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”

I wonder what it means to have an International Non-violence day. Does it mean that American soldiers, UN ‘peacekeepers’, NATO Forces, the Israeli military and Blackwater USA will put down their weapons for the day and reflect on the horrors that they are committing in the vague name of an international war on ‘terror’? Does it mean that they will all continue killing as a few peaceful marchers around the world proclaim in total sanity, that the insanity that prevails is making it hard for peace-loving humans to coexist with this madness? Or does it mean that the United Nations will clamp down on the killings perpetrated by the permanent members of its own security council?

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

An Open Letter to the New Generation of Military Officers Serving and Protecting Our Nation

By Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, ret., National Commander, The Patriots

9/14/07

“The Nuremberg Principles says that we in the military have not only the right, but also the DUTY to refuse an illegal order. It was on this basis that we executed Nazi officers who were ‘only carrying out their orders’… The Constitution which we are sworn to uphold says that treaties entered into by the United States are the ‘highest law of the land,’ equivalent to the Constitution itself. Accordingly, we in the military are sworn to uphold treaty law, including the United Nations charter and the Geneva Convention… Based on the above, I contend that should some civilian order you to initiate a nuclear attack on Iran (for example), you are duty-bound to refuse that order. I might also suggest that you should consider whether the circumstances demand that you arrest whoever gave the order as a war criminal.”

Dear Comrades in Arms,

You are facing challenges in 2007 that we of previous generations never dreamed of. I’m just an old fighter pilot (101 combat missions in Vietnam , F-4 Phantom, Phu Cat, 1969-1970) who’s now a disabled veteran with terminal cancer from Agent Orange. Our mailing list (over 22,000) includes veterans from all branches of the service, all political parties, and all parts of the political spectrum. We are Republicans and Democrats, Greens and Libertarians, Constitutionists and Reformers, and a good many Independents. What unites us is our desire for a government that (1) follows the Constitution, (2) honors the truth, and (3) serves the people.

We see our government going down the wrong path, all too often ignoring military advice, and heading us toward great danger. And we look to you who still serve as the best hope for protecting our nation from disaster.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Brian Bogart

9/12/07

You know your country’s “democratic” leadership and rationale for war are in trouble when the anointed most-evil enemy makes more sense than they do.

Although for all we know Bin Laden’s “annual message to Americans” originated below Dick Cheney’s office where Bin Laden is living in luxury chained to a pool table, its contents ring with refreshing logic relative to what usually passes for truth in and around the White House.

Analyzing his message alongside bipartisan excuses for war—and juxtaposed with President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower’s keep-an-eye-on-the-defense-industry speech of January 1961—only Bin Laden’s words and Eisenhower’s warnings stand up to current United States Department of Defense statistics.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Gary Corseri

9/5/07

“Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other.”

–Henry David Thoreau

“It is better to be almost right than precisely wrong.”

–Warren Buffet

“Can we all just get along?”

–Rodney King

How well Thoreau, our best philosopher and political thinker, would have “gotten along” with Buffet, our Empire’s investor-sans pareil, is a matter for speculative fiction, but I suspect the open-minded Naturalist would have endorsed the financier’s caveat against overweening pride in one’s own judgment. Not only must we look before we leap, but, once sure-footed on the other side, we must also look behind to inspect the ground we’ve covered, and to assure ourselves we’re not about to topple backwards.

We are fast approaching one of those “benchmark” moments of back-looking which are becoming noisome, ritualistic affairs of hearty self-congratulation, vacuous critiques, and paralytic inaction. The Empire has lost its rudder in the quicksand of Iraq, and neither General Petraeus’s upcoming, indubitably rosy, assessments nor the General Accounting Office’s countervailing grade of “F” will extricate that rudder any time soon. Congress will balk, Cheney will snarl, and the “dogs of war” we unleashed nearly five years ago will continue to ravage that once-prosperous land that had the misfortune to fall for a dictator we supported.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

BY GARY CORSERI

8/23/07

There was a point we were drifting towards;
There was a place we were seeking.
We called it: The Home of Sublime Understanding,
The Quality of Differences Subtly Restored.

“After the War,” we assured one another:
The War to Make Living Safe for the Living;
The War we have been breathing since birth—and before.

But the War never ended.
Its sand filled our mouths with reproachable sorrows.
It was mother and father, sister and brother;
Priest and rabbi, preacher and imam.

The Causes lay under a quilt of stars.
And numerous corpses clawed the hard ground.

The politicians hallowed the ground.
The various preachers hallowed the ground.
Children placed wreaths on hallowed ground.
Great monuments were built on hallowed ground.
They gleamed in the sun.
Patterned, colored cloths, called flags, flapped
Over hallowed ground.
The band played anthems over hallowed ground.

And we forgot:
There was a point we were drifting towards;
There was a place we were seeking;
We called it: The Home of Sublime Understanding,
The Quality of Differences Subtly Restored.

Gary Corseri is a senior contributing editor of Cyrano’sJournalOnline. His work has appeared at ThomasPaine’sCorner, The New York Times, Village Voice, PBS-Atlanta, GlobalResearch, ThirdWorldTraveler, OpEdNews, MyLeftWing, WorldProutAssembly, PalestineChronicle, TeleSurTV, IslamOnline and over 200 other venues. His books include Manifestations (edited) and A Fine Excess. He can be contacted at .

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Vi Ransel

8/14/07 

Military.
Idolatry.
Hellfire missile.
Incendiary.

Jet fuel
polystyrene gel
fire bomb.
Napalm.
Disguised as
MK-77 Mod-5

laid down by Cobras
sweeping in low,
almost hidden
in smoke exploding
from artillery
in mushroom clouds
carrying pieces
which ignite
before they strike ground
in a screen of fire
inextinguishable by water

pyre

dedicated

to

MOLOCH

Military idolatry.
This rain of fire
fell on the city.

The men, the women
and the children struck
began to burn in a coating
of white phosphorous.
Bodies, clothes largely intact,
skin dissolved, caramelized,
some still in their beds,
in fact, human remains
the consistency of leather
bore the mark of Cain,
the obscene burn signature
of
MOLOCH
melting
flesh to the bone,
groaning,
moaning,

MOLOCH

Fire bomb.
Napalm.
White phosphorous incendiaries.
Military idolatry.

MOLOCH

in the Bible
an idol
of the Ammonites

MOLOCH

to whom children
were righteously sacrificed

by
burning.

“You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that
you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter
who does it or says it.”

— Malcolm X

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As Greek mythology has it, the powerful are frequently defeated by their own hubris, and that’s precisely what we are witnessing today. Our rotten-to-the-core, usurping plutocracy has become so overtly and arrogantly corrupt that our patience has now reached its generous limit, and the membrane of America’s collective consciousness is about to burst. This will result in a significant restructuring of our socioeconomic and political environments, we hope (and must make sure) for the better. Considering what is at stake in the world today, Cyrano’s Journal and Thomas Paine’s Corner want to accelerate the arrival of that new day, and its promise of a new, truly well organized, kind, and honest civilization.
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Patrice Greanville, Editor in Chief, Cyrano’s Journal Online

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to  

By Emily Spence

8/10/07

It is easy to be discouraged with the peace movement. It is easy to want to walk or run away, especially so when progress seems so slow to stop war activities anywhere in the world.

Ironically, the first day that I joined the peace moment was the same one that I most desperately wanted to run away. I, literally, wanted to flee with every part of my being, but somehow managed to sit still instead.

At the time, I was five years old. I was sitting on a bench at a Quaker Meeting. I remember the drop dead silence surrounding the deeply inward-dwelling people all around me. I remember the contrast that the occasional trilling bird in the shrubbery outside the window made and the merry splash of intermittent sunshine on the floor opposed to the overall dimness of the room. Then I heard the room’s door open followed by a muted shuffle of feet.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Adam Engel

8/3/07

Tooth Fairy hit my place first, alone. We jumped her, nab her teeth and coins. She was fast. Poof: gone. Chrystal Night, the night’s special, droll erotic spider, dolled up spectacular… “it’s more of a religious event than a mere psycho-sexual social ‘coming out,” she said. Like a Bat Mitsvah sort of or First Communion with…that sort of thing.” Adding, “I’m here, I’m willing, I’m ready surely able to please someone fuck me — I’m not this way at all.” The girl with me said “That’s okay.” A real kid. Ms. Ocean would be 52 at least, by now. Noam Chomsky wore his baseball cap and Bono promised to set himself on fire in protest of himself. So cold outside despite touted benefits of global warming. Constant chill of wars and lies. Flip talk about money, property, rights, and medicines no one, except a very few people, actually owns. Closing in on me choking me — tell me, can YOU breath? Roomier laying beside Mom on the silk just before the final call for visitors to scram so they could close the box — all living visitors leave NOW — and screw the lid on drop her down forever, cover her with mud forever, dark forever. Good-bye. Still. At least the dead can breathe. Let’s sing:

Oh, the dead creep toward us
like worms, like worms
we’re alright, we’re alright
we’re all right, right, right
but what, I say what what
what will the worms eat
now the dead have
risen risen risen
from their mental
prison, prison, prison

A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO OUR READERS.

For over two years now, Thomas Paine’s Corner has been a powerful and unwavering voice for a courageous and badly needed agenda for change. We have consistently delivered hard-hitting and insightful commentary, polemics, and analysis in our persistent efforts to persuade, educate, and inspire, and serve as a discriminating but generous platform for voices from many points of view with one thing in common: their spiritual honesty and quality of thinking.
•
Aside from the caliber of its content, Thomas Paine’s Corner’s strength is that there are no advertisers or corporations to exercise de facto censorship or orchestrate our agenda. We aim to keep it that way and we need your help!
•
As a semi-autonomous section of the multi-faceted, thoroughly comprehensive, and highly prestigious Cyrano’s Journal Online, we share Cyrano’s passion for winning the battle of communications against systemic lies, an act which is essential to attaining social and environmental justice. To help us achieve that goal, Cyrano’s Journal, besides its regular editorial pages, intends to begin producing editorial videos to expose the lack of proper context, ahistoricalism, excessive over-emphasis on inane events, and outright lies the corporate media, and in particular television, present to you and your family as a steady diet of pernicious intellectual junk food. This will be an expensive under-taking and there will be no grants forthcoming from the likes of the American Enterprise Institute, the Coors or Heritage Foundation. You can be sure of that!
•
As Greek mythology has it, the powerful are frequently defeated by their own hubris, and that’s precisely what we are witnessing today. Our rotten-to-the-core, usurping plutocracy has become so overtly and arrogantly corrupt that our patience has now reached its generous limit, and the membrane of America’s collective consciousness is about to burst. This will result in a significant restructuring of our socioeconomic and political environments, we hope (and must make sure) for the better. Considering what is at stake in the world today, Cyrano’s Journal and Thomas Paine’s Corner want to accelerate the arrival of that new day, and its promise of a new, truly well organized, kind, and honest civilization.
•
Assisting us in our cause is as simple as clicking on the PayPal button below and exercising the power of your wallet. No matter how large or how small, we thank you in advance for your donation! If you are serious about our struggle for a new society, please don’t put it off. Let us hear from you today.
•

Jason Miller
Associate Editor, Cyrano’s Journal Online, and Editorial Director, Thomas Paine’s Corner.
Patrice Greanville, Editor in Chief, Cyrano’s Journal Online

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Pablo Ouziel

8/2/07

In the 1994 drama film based on a novel by Winston Groom, the world was captivated by a simple man called Forrest Gump and his journey through life. In a famous scene, he starts running and he explains his reasons for running in the following way: ” That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run. So I ran to the end of the road… to the end of town… across Greenbow County… across Alabama… clear to the ocean. When I got to another ocean, I figured, since I’d gone this far, I might as well just turn back, keep right on going.”

Forrest Gump was running because of a broken heart, and along the way thousands of people began to join him; one man with a broken heart and a whole march for hope was started. Those were the days, at least in the movies.

Back to reality, on July 25th the International Herald Tribune ran a piece titled; “Teens march across America in lonely opposition to war.” The article talked about nineteen year old Ashley Casale and eighteen year old Michael Israel who started their 3,000-mile walk from San Francisco to Washington opposing the war in Iraq and hoping that others would join them. The pair did pick up a third marcher, nineteen year old Tom Garrett, but the masses were absent; What happened to them? What happened to all those Americans opposing the war?

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BY CHALMERS JOHNSON

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration’s policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term — and lost. What people don’t agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy — or remedies — ought to be.

The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.

If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: “None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances…. The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them.”

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