Sunday, July 27, 2008

From:

TomDispatch
a project of the Nation Institute

Tomdispatch.com is for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of our post-9/11 world and a clear sense of how our imperial globe actually works.
Read more about the site's founder and editor Tom Engelhardt and his guest authors.
Click here to e-mail Tom.

Having the "Best Military" Is Not Always a Good Thing

Reclaiming Our Citizen-Soldier Heritage

By William J. Astore

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Why is Gordon Brown Repeating a Mistranslation ?
By The Editor, Information Clearing House
The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has never called for Israel "to be wiped off the map". This has been confirmed by many Iranian language experts. That the mainstream media have repeated and echoed the original mistranslation from 2005 attests to their bias and hidden agenda.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20339.htm

'Wiped off the Map' – The Rumor of the Century
by Arash Norouzi

Across the world, a dangerous rumor has spread
that could have catastrophic implications.

According to legend,
Iran's president has threatened to destroy Israel,
or, to quote the misquote, "Israel must be wiped off the map."

Contrary to popular belief, this statement was never made.
The Real Power Behind the Throne-to-Be:

Barack Obama as the candidate promising change is revealing his true colors, much to the despair of anyone actually expecting any change.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/07/the-real-power-behind-the-throne-to-be/
Obama, The Prince Of Bait-And-Switch

By John Pilger
John Pilger describes the denigration of the of civilian casualties in colonial wars, and the anointing of Barack Obama, as he tours the battlefields, sounding more and more like George W. Bush.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20347.htm
The 25 Most Vicious Iraq War Profiteers

The Iraq war is many things to different people. It is called a strategic blunder and a monstrous injustice and sometimes even a patriotic mission, much to the chagrin of rational human beings.

For many big companies, however, the war is something far different: a lucrative cash-cow.

http://www.businesspundit.com/the-25-most-vicious-iraq-war-profiteers/
From International World Television - The Real News

Obama's excellent adventure

For the Pentagon, it's all about long term bases
view

Thursday, July 10, 2008

The Audacity of Imperial Airbrushing:
Barack Obama's Whitewashed History of U.S. Foreign Policy

By Paul Street

"In Obama's world view, as in that of his Harvard friend and former foreign policy adviser Samantha Power, American crimes generally don't exist. They didn't happen."
Denial is serious business.
"Candidate Obama's foreign policy pronouncements have been loaded with promises of future criminality under an Obama administration."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20257.htm
===
A People's History of American Empire

By Howard Zinn

Empire or Humanity?
What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me about the American Empire
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20258.htm

Sunday, July 06, 2008

US 'planned to test
nerve gas
on diggers'

By Ross Coulthart, SUNDAY

11:00 AEST Sat Jul 5 2008

SUNDAY website

Top secret US military plans to test deadly nerve gas by dropping it on soldiers in a remote Queensland rainforest during the Cold War have been uncovered in Australian Government archives.

Newly declassified Australian Defence Department and Prime Minister’s office files show that the United States was strongly pushing the Government for tests on Australian soil of two of the most deadly chemical weapons ever developed, VX and GB — better known as Sarin — nerve gas.

The plan, which is disclosed for the first time on tomorrow’s SUNDAY program on Nine, called for 200 mainly Australian combat troops to be aerially bombed and sprayed with the chemical weapons — with all but a handful of the soldiers to be kept in the dark about the "full details" of the tests.

A former senior official with then Prime Minister Harold Holt, Mr Peter Bailey, tells the program that as far as he knows the tests never went ahead but the planning was very advanced.

He admitted the whole operation was to be kept secret because use of such weapons was almost certainly illegal under international law at the time.

"The idea that we could actually… that the Australians could countenance such an activity is …unacceptable," University of NSW toxicologist Professor Chris Winder said.

He says even a fraction of a drop of either chemical on exposed skin could have been fatal and Cold War fears that communist Chinese or Russian attackers might have used such weapons in a third world war "doesn’t justify it now and I don’t think it justified it then".

The files show that in July 1962 the then-US defence secretary Robert McNamara wrote in secret to the Australian Defence Department suggesting joint testing of chemical weapons "on a classified basis without a public release by either country".

In early 1963 a survey team of Australian and US scientists reviewed sites in Australia for chemical warfare tests, suggesting the remote Iron Range rainforest near Lockhart River in far north Queensland as one such location.

The request caused consternation in Canberra, with senior Defence bureaucrats clearly opposed to the use of nerve gas, but, as former senior Prime Ministerial policy advisor Peter Bailey recalls: "I heard that many times in Cabinet meetings that if they weren’t pretty good and pretty faithful to the Americans we would be dumped.

"We had already been dumped with the British east of Suez pullout so ministers were pretty aware this was our one main support and the red peril thing was still in people’s minds."

In October 1964 the Americans pushed the request again, this time insisting that the public should be fed a "cover story" to conceal the real nature of the tests: the documents show the public was to be told the tests were to test equipment or land reclamation in a jungle environment.

Low-flying military aircraft and spraying was to be explained away with the false claim that low-risk herbicides and insecticides were to be used in the testing but the cover stories were clearly untrue — the real chemicals to be used were two of the most deadly man-made substances, VX and GB nerve gas.

Former Democrat Senator Lyn Allison, who became aware of the existence of references to secret chemical weapons tests in Australia during her support of sick former veterans of the Maralinga nuclear bomb tests, told SUNDAY that her own attempts to get the full story on what went on with proposed testing were rebuffed several years ago.

She said Government files on the issue were still classified even now and the revelations in the new documents obtained by SUNDAY underlined the need for the Defence Department to finally disclose all that went on during the Cold War.

"To understand that Australia was still prepared to consider this proposal because of its relationship with the US I think needs proper examination," Senator Allison told the program.

"So all those documents should be released, there shouldn’t be any pussy footing around — it’s time for us to know what went on."

SUNDAY’s expose of Australia’s secret planning for chemical warfare airs at 7.30am Sunday on Nine.

We, the Salt of the Earth, Take Precedence

By Paul Craig Roberts

The slaughtering of foreigners doesn’t seem to bother the American public. Americans take it for granted that Americans are superior and that American purposes, whatever they be, take precedence over the rights of other people to life and to a political existence independent of American hegemony.

Continue

'When John McCain was my captive'

By Andrew Harding
BBC News in Haiphong, Vietnam

So is Mr Duyet implying that that Senator McCain lied about his treatment at the Hanoi Hilton? -

"He did not tell the truth," he says.

Continue