The U.S. Military/Industrial/Foundation/Media Complex's war to install a new regime in Afghanistan was apparently planned by the U.S. Air Force's Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation military research think-tank many months before September 2001. And various U.S. Establishment Foundations have been helping to fund the RAND Corporation war-planning think-tank in recent years. The Ford Foundation gave a 0,000 grant to the RAND Corporation in 1998, for instance. The Rockefeller Foundation gave a 0,000 grant to the RAND Corporation in 1996. And the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation gave the RAND Corporation war-planning think-tank a .6 million grant in 1995. Carlyle Group Investor George Soros's Open Society Institute also gave the RAND military research thin-tank a 3,000 grant in 1998.

Bush Administration Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sat on the RAND board of trustees between 1977 and 2001. Bush Administration National Security Affairs Director Condoleezza Rice sat on the RAND board of trustees between 1991 and 1997, at the same time she sat on the board of trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York foundation. And the former UNOCAL consultant who is now the Special Assistant to the President that's responsible for setting-up a post-Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, apparently drew up the recently-implemented Afghan war strategy while working for RAND in Santa Monica, California a few years ago.

For more info about RAND's Project Air Force Project, you can check out its web site at www.rand.org

While I'm no fan of RAND overall (I was pretty involved in the Coalition Against RAND Expansion in the late 80s & early 90s), it's important to realize that it has changed significantly since the days when it was totally a cog in the military industrial complex and nothing more. There's little doubt that its original involvement in nuclear war planning was not just immoral, but a violation of international law--and I wouldn't be surprised if some of its programs still would qualify as criminal.

However, the end of the Cold War greatly accelerated its diversification, which had already been underway for some time. The grants mentioned in this article could be for any number of other purposes. For example, RAND has done studies that clearly show that 3-strikes-style super-punitive approaches to fighting crime are ridiculously overpriced compared to prevention & rehabilitation oriented approaches. The fact that such studies come from a place like RAND actually makes them more impactful.

So, in short, it's up to us to raise the level of accuracy and criticism, not to descend to the mud-slinging, guilt-by-association (or even just imagination) that increasingly dominates the corporate media.

More signal. Less noise.