'Lemon Juice' Bruce

2012-01-21T20:28:00.000-08:00

The Confrontation with Iran: A Covert War
By Akbar E. Torbat
The purpose of the pressures on Iran is to change its leaders to those who will take orders from Washington. Continue

World Peace Hanging By A Thread

By Fidel Castro Ruz

The sheer tranquility with which the United States and civilized Europe carry out this campaign with incredible and systematic acts of terrorism is enough to shock anybody. Continue

Most Syrians Back President Assad
But You'd Never Know From Western Media

By Jonathan Steele

Assad's popularity, Arab League observers, US military involvement: all distorted in the west's propaganda war. Continue

Resist U.S. Imperialist War Threats On Iran

By Sara Flounders

There is growing apprehension that through miscalculation, deliberate provocation or a staged false flag operation, a U.S. war with Iran is imminent. Continue

Ecology and the Pathology of Capitalism

By Charles Sullivan

Contrary to everything we have been taught, there is no actual United States of America. The U.S. is an occupied territory that could more accurately be described as the Corporate States of America. Continue

The World War on Democracy

By John Pilger

That the most numerous victims of terrorism – western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. Continue

2012-01-13T02:40:00.000-08:00

War Plan Iran:
The US Finally Admits Its Criminal Bankruptcy

By Finian Cunningham

“Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No."

January 11, 2012 "Global Research" --

Officially, America is now bankrupt: financially, economically, politically – and morally. Its criminal aggression towards Iran is just one of many parts of a jigsaw that add up to a clear and grotesque picture of what the United States of America now represents in the 21st Century world.

The numbers and pictures for these constituent parts of this odious jigsaw puzzle are well known. But what has become glaringly clear is just how integrated the official image of the US now is. Bankrupt.

Terminally in debt, mass poverty at record levels, rampant militarism, draconian curbs on civil liberties, government by the rich for the rich, and lately the reactionary, debased cat-fight that passes for political debate among Republican contenders for the Presidency...

It is a sign of how depraved the American political mind has become when would-be presidents can so openly talk of conducting foreign policy in terms of unquestioned international aggression.

Of course, this kind of political and moral bankruptcy is not just confined to those seeking office. It is the coin of those who are already in office.

In a report in the New York Times Monday we have the startling admissions that, taken together, show that the US government should be certified as criminal (if further proof were needed) [1].

First we have the top US military man confirming that long-averred war plans against Iran are indeed going ahead.

The NYT: “When asked on [CBS’s] Face the Nation about the how difficult it would be to take out Iran’s nuclear ability in a military strike, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: ‘Well, I would rather not discuss the degree of difficulty and in any way encourage them to read anything into that. But I will say that my responsibility is to encourage the right degree of planning, to understand the risks associated with any kind of military option, in some cases to position assets, to provide those options in a timely fashion. And all those activities are going on.’” [Emphasis added]

In other words, the US is preparing for war.

Ironically, in the above lengthy article about the imminent opening of Iran’s second uranium enrichment plant at Qom, located under a mountain and impregnable from attack, the New York Times buries General Dempsey’s admission deep within the folds of its paragraphs perhaps in a bid to make it impregnable from attack by sane readers.

Granted, the bellicose talk from US Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama and his administration of all options on the table has become so routine that the editors at the NYT have probably become inured to criminal admissions and so don’t think them worth any higher prominence that a final paragraph.

But here is the second part of the equation that adds up to definite criminality.

In the same story, the New York Times quotes US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta making what should be a startling admission: that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons.

Panetta says: “Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.”

That Panetta finally admits what many people around the world know to be true, including American intelligence agencies in at least two US National Intelligence Estimates in 2007 and 2010 – that is, that Iran is not attempting to develop a nuclear weapon, should be a front-page headline.

Especially when taken together with the US General Dempsey’s disclosure that war plans are afoot.

From its own admission, therefore, the US government is pushing the world into possibly a World War III scenario on the basis of a totally spurious claim that even its own top brass do not believe.

Reflecting the bankruptcy that has corroded the US political establishment is the way that the New York Times – America’s self-styled premier newspaper – glides over these nuggets of self-indictment as if they were worthless banalities.

So if Iran is not even trying to develop a nuclear weapon, as Panetta now admits, what then is the criminal US warmongering predicated on?

Unofficially, the real reason is imperialist rivalry with other powers (Russian and China in particular) in the energy-rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia regions, and the attempt to engineer “regime change” in Iran to one that is pliant with Washington’s geopolitical designs.

Officially, for what it is worth, it seems now that the US is not happy even with the mere suspicion that Iran maybe, just maybe, one day capable of developing nuclear capability.

This is where facts can be helpful.

As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the legal right to develop nuclear capability for civilian purposes.

This is what Iran has consistently said it is doing and what countless UN inspections of facilities over many years, including the new plant at Qom, have verified.

The enrichment of uranium constitutes “nuclear capability” and is an essential part of harnessing nuclear energy for civilian energy. Iran should be congratulated for this achievement given years of gratuitous sanctions by the US its Western allies.

But the way the US government and its Western allies put it, Iran’s legitimate nuclear capability is made to sound like a diabolical threat.

Panetta again: “But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that’s what concerns us.”

There you have it. The United States can drop nuclear weapons on civilians, possess up to 10,000 nuclear warheads, supply its allies illegally with such weapons and continue to violate the purpose of the NPT by not disarming its nuclear arsenal – yet if a country uses the provisions of the NPT legitimately to pursue nuclear capability then it is reviled and made a target for an illegal war of aggression, most probably with nuclear weapons.

This is depravity-turned-foreign policy – emanating from supposedly the most democratic government in the world.

In that way, the unseemly Republican Party cat-fight between Romney et al is but a symptom of the chronically bankrupt body politic that is American government in the 21st Century.

Finian Cunningham is Global Research’s Middle East and East Africa correspondent

cunninghamfinian@gmail.com

Notes

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/world/middleeast/iran-will-soon-move-uranium-work-underground-official-says.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2&pagewanted=all

Click to read the original article, and read/post comments

2012-01-10T01:30:00.000-08:00

A New Reserve Currency to Challenge the Dollar?

What’s Really Going on in The Straits of Hormuz.

By David Malone

The stand off is as much with China and its allies as it is specifically with Iran...

Continue

Iraq: A Country in Shambles

By Dahr Jamail

The state of the economy in Iraq is a disaster. Yet this irony is highlighted by the fact that Iraq has proven oil reserves third only behind Saudi Arabia and Iran - hence one would expect it to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world... Continue

Iran: It's Déjà Vu All Over Again

By Aijaz Zaka Syed

Little seems to change in Washington no matter who is in the White House — a Bible-thumping gunslinger with an endless wish list of regime change or a messianic rhetorician, who earned himself a Nobel Peace Prize in his first year in office by promising all sorts of Yes-We-Cans to all sorts of folks... Continue

2012-01-06T21:04:00.000-08:00

Promoting War on Iran

By Stephen Lendman

In June 2009, a Brookings Institution report titled, "Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran" was a regime change policy paper...

Iran poses no belligerent or terrorist threat. In contrast, America, key NATO partners and Israel are global menaces.

Initiating war on Iran and/or Syria could be catastrophic, especially if nuclear weapons are used. Yet major media scoundrels promote it, mindless of the potential consequences.

Nonetheless, more war in 2012 is likely because Washington, Britain, France, and Israel want it, no matter the risks...

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

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Never Forget
Iraq. Began with big lies. Ending with big lies

By William Blum

... No matter ... drum roll, please ... Stand tall American GI hero! And don't even think of ever apologizing or paying any reparations. Iraq is forced by Washington to continue paying reparations to Kuwait for Iraq's invasion in 1990 (an invasion instigated in no small measure by the United States).

And — deep breath here! — Vietnam has been compensating the United States. Since 1997 Hanoi has been paying off about $145 million in debts left by the defeated South Vietnamese government for American food and infrastructure aid. Thus, Hanoi is reimbursing the United States for part of the cost of the war waged against it.

(William Blum, Rogue State, p.304)...

William Blum is the author of:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Continue

2011-12-17T02:03:00.000-08:00

Obama at Fort Bragg:
A Hypocritical Embrace of a Criminal War

By Bill Van Auken

President Barack Obama used his speech to US troops at Fort Bragg, to embrace the nine-year war in Iraq that he had ostensibly opposed and to declare the destruction of the country a “success.” Continue

NATO Troops on Syrian Border?
By RT - Sibel Edmonds, exposes what is going on around Syria. Click to watch the video interview

Why Do They Hate Us?

December 16, 2011 "Counterpunch"
by DAVE LINDORFF

Even as President Obama and War Secretary Leon Panetta announce the “end” of the Iraq War, a US “covert war” against Iran, as the National Journal put it in a December 4 article, has already begun.

This secret war–at least secret from the American people–is being conducted in part directly by the US, as evidenced by the advanced American RQ-170 Sentinel stealth surveillance drone just recently downed–apparently by sophisticated electronic countermeasures that allowed the taking control of, and landing of the vehicle–by Iran.

Also conducted in part of proxies, including the Iranian anti-government terrorist organization MEK (for Mujahideen-e Khalq), and of course Israel’s Mossad, this dirty covert war has led to an escalating string of acts of terror inside Iran, including a campaign of assassination against Iranian nuclear scientists, and bombings of Iranian military installations.

Not content to simply engage in such illegal hostilities against a sovereign nation that has not threatened the U.S., and that in fact has not invaded another country in some 200 years, President Obama had the effrontery to demand that the Iranians return the spy drone that they had captured!

Imagine for a moment if an Iranian, or some other nation’s, robot spy plane had been captured or shot down over U.S. territory. Imagine the official response if the nation that owned that plane were to demand its return! First of all, Congressmembers, probably almost unanimously, would be clamoring for the US to launch an attack on whatever company launched the spy plane. But the reaction to a demand to return such a device would be truly explosive! The audacity!

Actually, you don’t need to imagine. Look at the right-wing media and the official US government response to the arrest of two men in New York accused of the hard-to-believe conspiracy of planning, allegedly at the direction of Iranian
government sources, to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. Forget about proving that this far-fetched alleged plot was real at all, and not just another creation of some FBI informant/provocateur, or whether Iran was really behind it even if it was. There were open calls for bombing Iran immediately!

President Obama, meanwhile, keeps saying that “all options are on the table” for dealing with what the US government alleges is an Iranian campaign to develop nuclear weapons — itself a very dubious claim. And to back up that threat, the US has actually delivered huge non-nuclear “bunker busting” bombs to Israel, a country which has openly been discussing plans to attack Iran.

These are all war crimes under the UN charter and actual acts of war.

But that’s just Iran.

The US is already at war with Pakistan, too, this country’s nominal ally in the war against Afghanistan’s Taliban. Two weeks ago, American planes, ground forces and helicopters attacked two Pakistani border posts, killing several dozen Pakistani troops. There is considerable evidence that these attacks were deliberate, though the US is claiming lamely that its forces had “incorrect coordinates” that led to the fatal attacks.

Sure.

These days the US doesn’t just rely on Garman GPS devices for its attacks. It sends in drones with high-rez cameras and knows exactly what and who it is killing before it pulls the trigger.

Meanwhile, we’ve been killing people in Yemen for years with planes sent from offshore aircraft carriers, and using missile-firing Predator drones.

In Latin America, American military “trainers” are fighting a war against leftist forces in Columbia, the CIA is supporting opposition groups seeking to oust the elected governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and other countries, and the US Justice Department is shipping weapons into drug-war-torn Mexico and helping to launder Mexican drug money back in the US.

There are credible charges that the US has also been supporting the latest protests against the Vladimir Putin government in Russia (even as our own Homeland Security and “Justice” Departments coordinate violent police crackdowns on the Occupy protests here at home against our own government’s craven support of the corrupt banks that have been wrecking the US and global economies).

And we Americans wonder: “Why do they hate us?”

If real people around the world weren’t dying from all this criminal US behavior, and if real people here in America weren’t suffering because of all the trillions of dollars being wasted over the years on military spending, spying, covert destabilization campaigns and overt war-making, it would all be laughable.

But real people are dying and are suffering and there is nothing to laugh about.

Someday there will come a reckoning for the US, as there came a reckoning for Rome, for the British Empire, for the German Reich and for the USSR. A hollowed-out country like the this one, which is under-funding education, health care, infrastructure investment, research, and environmental protection, while its governing class steadily disenfranchises, disempowers, and impoverishes the public while systematically taking away their right to protest, is ultimately doomed.

It’s just a question of time, and of course a matter of how it happens.

If we’re lucky, the dramatic awakening that began with the Occupy Movement in September will continue to spread and grow until an enraged public rises up en masse and evicts the entire corrupt gang from Washington, replacing them with genuine representatives of the people and a new commitment to true democratic governance.

If we’re not so lucky, this nation is likely to slide into global irrelevance — a backward relic of faded glory, a place where Chinese, Brazilian and European firms will invest to take advantage of our cheap, uneducated labor to produce goods to sell back in their own countries. Such an economic slide would of course not occur without violent conflicts and struggles over ever diminishing wealth and resources.

By then off course, if our government continues on its present course of militarily meddling in other nations, the US will be almost universally loathed and, in stead of being manipulated into fears of nonexistent threats to our “safety,” we Americans will finally have reason to genuinely fear the actions of other, more powerful, nations, which will find the temptation to compete in meddling in the affairs of what remains of the United States irresistible.

Why They Hate Us in Iraq

Reading the New York Times, an American might have been excused for wondering why Iraqis, and especially the people of Fallujah, would be so happy to see American occupying troops leaving the country at the end of this month and of nine years of war against their country that they were actually celebrating.

The Times made it sound as though Fallujah deserved what happened to it. As the article published Dec. 15 notes dryly, American forces in 2004 twice attacked this largest city in Anbar Province to “pacify” it (there’s a political euphemism for you!) after insurgents there in March of 2004 captured four US “contractors” driving through the city, burned their bodies, and strung them up on a bridge over the Euphrates River.

First of all, let’s also dispense with the euphemistic term “contractors,” which is meant to bring to mind the image of a couple of overweight construction workers. In Iraq, and especially in lawless areas like Anbar at that time, “contractor” means “mercenary,” and we now know that mercenaries in Iraq (and in Afghanistan) were and are a lawless, bloodthirsty, group of former US military personnel and vicious thugs from various foreign fascist states like Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, apartheid South Africa and elsewhere, who have killed countless numbers of civilians in Iraq and elsewhere, operating outside of any government monitoring or legal constraints for “security firms” like Blackwater (now Xe) and DynCorp.

What actually happened in Fallujah though, was that because of Pentagon and US media-stoked domestic public outrage at the treatment of the four captured mercenaries, 20,000 US Marines were sent in to the city to level it and to slaughter its male inhabitants in an example of the kind of massive war crime tactic once popular with the Nazi Wehrmacht in World War II, where it was known as “collective punishment.”

The Nazis used to burn down villages, particularly in Eastern Europe and the USSR, if even one shot was fired at them. But taking things much further in Iraq, US forces encircled Fallujah, a city of 300,000, in November, 2004, and ordered all non-combatants out of the area. Women and children were allowed to leave through checkpoints, but no males of “combat age”–which was illegally set, according to reports, at the age of 11, or by some accounts, at 14.

In either case, the whole thing was criminal. Under Geneva Conventions signed by the US, first of all all civilians are required to be granted free passage to escape from any field of battle or impending battle, and secondly, under those same Conventions, all children under the age of 18 are to be protected from war, not considered combatants. Even those who are found armed or captured while fighting are to be treated not as combatants, but as victims.

Instead of obeying the laws of war (which once approved by the Senate have the force of law under the US Constitution), US forces trapped all males in the city, including old men and young boys, and then went in with assault rifles, cannons, ground attack planes, helicopter and fixed-wing gunships, and with illegal weapons and weapons that cause mass deaths such as white phosphorus bombs, napalm, anti-personnel shells and depleted uranium shells.

US forces basically killed everything that moved in numbers ranging upward of 6000 (In contrast the UN is expressing horror that the government in Syria has killed 5000 people in its crackdown on a democracy movement there). There were accounts of people being shot in the river as they tried to swim away from the city, of hospitals being raided and ambulances bombed, and there were even videos of seriously wounded and unarmed Iraqi fighters being coldly executed by Marines.

What was done to Fallujah was as vile, evil and criminal a campaign of retribution and vengeance, exercised against enemy fighters and trapped civilians alike, as anything Hitler’s SS ever engaged in.

The Times article made no mention about any of this — an exercise in censorship and propaganda made all the more outrageous because the atrocity was well reported at the time it happened by the paper’s own excellent war reporter, Dexter Filkins.

Knowing what really happened, and what the US military really did in Fallujah, would make much more understandable to Americans why the end of US occupation of Iraq has been greeted with a “festival” atmosphere in the still recovering city of Fallujah.

DAVE LINDORFF is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new Project-Censored Award-winning independent online alternative newspaper. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.

50 Economic Numbers From 2011
That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe

By Economic Collapse

Most Americans have no idea just how bad our economic decline has been or how much trouble we are going to be in if we don't make dramatic changes immediately.

Continue

When Corporations Rule the World
Banker Occupation and Europain

By Stephen Lendman

Over half the world's largest economies are corporations. Financial ones controlling the power of money are most dominant. Continue

2011-12-17T01:36:00.000-08:00

No Justice for Bradley Manning

The US government has made an example of Bradley Manning to prevent others from challenging the American empire.

By Charles Davis

December 16, 2011 "Al Jazeera" - - Washington, DC -

Private Bradley Manning was just 22 years old when he allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of US State Department cables and video evidence of war crimes to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. For that act of courage that revealed to the world the true face of the American empire, he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.

After waiting more than 18 months, half of which he spent in torturous solitary confinement that he was only removed from after an international outcry and the resignation of a top State Department official, Manning is finally getting a shot at justice - if we can think of a military court as justice - when his case moves to the pre-trial hearing phase this Friday.

But whether Manning is ultimately found guilty or not is beside the point: All one needs to know about American justice is that if he had murdered civilians and desecrated their corpses - if he had the moral capacity to commit war crimes, not the audacity to expose them - he'd be better off today.

Indeed, if Manning had merely murdered the nameless, faceless "other", as his Army colleagues on the notorious Afghan "Kill Team" did, he would not have had his right to a speedy trial blatantly violated.

If Manning had intentionally killed unarmed civilians, posed for pictures with their dead bodies and slashed their fingers off as souvenirs, he would not have had his guilt publicly pronounced by his own commander-in-chief, President Barack Obama, months before he so much as saw the inside of a military court.

If he had killed poor foreigners instead of exposing their deaths, he might even stand a chance of getting out of prison while still a young man.

This isn't really a head-scratching development. While killing unarmed civilians for sport may not be officially sanctioned policy, it doesn't threaten the functioning of the war machine as much as a soldier standing up and refusing to be complicit in mass murder. From the perspective of a Washington establishment much more concerned with maintaining hegemony than its humanity, the former - murder - is much less troubling a precedent than the latter.

And so the US government is making an example of Manning, lest any other cogs in the machine start thinking about listening to their consciences instead of their commanders.

Other young soldiers thinking of telling the truth about America's wars must by now have surely gotten the message: if you see something, don't say something. Meanwhile, Manning couldn't be faulted for wondering why he did not just take a cue from his commander-in-chief and kill some innocent foreigners like a good American boy. Instead of facing a lifetime in prison, he might have been up for a medal.

Had Manning - instead of exposing the crime - been the one pulling the trigger in the US Apache helicopter that in 2007 murdered at least a dozen unarmed people in Baghdad, he wouldn't be facing any legal consequences for his actions.

Had Manning authorised a 2009 missile strike in Yemen that killed 14 women and 21 children, instead of releasing the State Department cable that acknowledges responsibility for the killings, we wouldn't even know his name.

But Manning didn't kill anybody.

Rather, he was outraged by the killing he saw all around him and angered at the complicity of his higher-ups who weren't prepared to do a damn thing about.

So, the system having failed to ensure accountability, Manning took it upon himself to share the inconvenient facts his government was withholding from the world.

"I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy", he explained in a chat with hacker-turned-informant Adrian Lamo.

As an Army intelligence analyst, Manning witnessed firsthand the American empire in action - and it changed him. "I don't believe in good guys versus bad guys anymore", he lamented, "only a plethora of states acting in self-interest".

Confronted with the reality of institutional evil, Manning risked his career - and his freedom - in order to expose everything from mass murder and child rape in Afghanistan to US support for brutal dictators across North Africa and the Middle East.

His actions were heroic, and Amnesty International has even credited them as the spark for jump-starting the Arab Spring. And yet a president who proclaims his commitment to transparency while on the campaign trail is determined to go down as the one whose administration mentally tortured, prosecuted and jailed the most famous whistle-blower in half-a-century.

Colonel Ann Wright, a former top State Department official who resigned in protest of the 2003 Iraq war, says Manning's treatment at the hands of the Obama administration is an outrage that is at odds with the norms of military justice.

He's been treated "as if he were an enemy combatant in Guantanamo", she says. "His past treatment while in pre-trial confinement and the lack of compliance with the norms of the military legal system of a 'speedy' trial . . . reeks of 18 months of intimidation, retribution and retaliation."

"It's clear the military and those tasked with Manning's case are working hard to make an example of him", says Nathan Fuller, an activist with the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Like many, he suspects Manning's treatment has at least in part been an attempt to get him to implicate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. But even if the Obama administration can't get that, "they're more than happy to use his case to send a message to potential whistle-blowers everywhere".

Politicians aren't the only ones who can send a message. This weekend, activists from around the country, including those involved in the Occupy movement in nearby Washington, DC, will be rallying outside Maryland's Fort Meade, where the pre-trial hearings in Manning's case are being conducted. The hope is that they can convince President Obama and his military brass that punishing a whistle-blower goes against the wishes of the American public. The question is whether that's true - and whether the political establishment really cares.

Charles Davis is an activist and writer who splits his time between Washington, DC, and Nicaragua. He is a contributor to the newswire Inter Press Service and his work has aired on public radio stations across the United States. To read more of his work, visit his website.

2011-12-14T01:02:00.000-08:00

America's Covert War Against Iran
Do 'All Options' Mean Nukes?

By Tom Burghardt
December 13, 2011 "Antifascist Calling"

Legendary investigative journalist I.F. Stone famously observed: "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.". . .

Click to continue to the complete article, and read/post comments

Remembering His-Story - Iran Attack Next?

By Bruce K. Gagnon

This map tells the whole story. Each star represents a U.S. military base. In the middle, in blue, is Iran. Iran has no military bases outside its borders. Just north of Iran is Georgia that has essentially become a U.S./NATO base. Turkey belongs to NATO. Iran has been checkmated. North of Georgia is Russia. Can there be any wonder why Russia is so alarmed about an attack on Iran?

Imagine if we saw a map of the U.S. with Russian or Chinese military bases throughout Canada and Mexico along with their warships just off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The American people would be going ballistic. But when we do it to others, no one even blinks an eye.

Following the recent spy drone fiasco over Iran the U.S. has been working hard to justify these flights. In an Associated Press story yesterday it was reported that the covert operations in play are "much bigger than people appreciate," said Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser under George W. Bush. . .

But after looking at this map where does the danger really lie? Iran is actually no danger to anyone. The real danger is that the U.S./NATO/Israel have their itchy fingers on the war trigger and could attack at any time. . . .

Continue

2011-12-02T08:02:00.000-08:00

Rights group urges Bush's arrest during tour

Amnesty says Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia have an "obligation" to bring former US president "to justice".

Amnesty has called on African authorities to arrest Bush during his visit for 'crimes under international law' [Reuters]

A human rights organisation has urged Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia to arrest and prosecute former US president George Bush for violating international torture laws during his African tour this week.

"International law requires that there be no safe haven for those responsible for torture"

- Matt Pollard,
Amnesty's senior legal adviser

Amnesty International said the three nations have an obligation to arrest Bush under international law during his tour of these countries from Monday to promote efforts to fight cervical and breast cancers.

"Amnesty International recognises the value of raising awareness about cervical and breast cancer in Africa, the stated aim of the visit, but this cannot lessen the damage to the fight against torture caused by allowing someone who has admitted to authorising water-boarding to travel without facing the consequences prescribed by law," the group said in a statement on Thursday.

"All countries to which George W Bush travels have an obligation to bring him to justice for his role in torture," Matt Pollard, Amnesty's senior legal adviser, said.

'Responsible for torture'

"International law requires that there be no safe haven for those responsible for torture; Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia must seize this opportunity to fulfil their obligations and end the impunity George W Bush has so far enjoyed."

Amnesty made a similar appeal to Canada in October when Bush visited British Columbia for an economic summit.

The group claimed Bush authorised the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and "waterboarding" on detainees held in secret by the Central Intelligence Agency between 2002 and 2009.

Amnesty's case relies on the public record, US documents obtained through access to information requests, Bush's own memoir and a Red Cross report critical of the US's war on terror policies.

Amnesty cites several instances of alleged torture of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval facility, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, by the US military.

The cases include that of Abu Zubaydah - also known as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husain and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described 9/11 mastermind, both arrested in Pakistan. The two men were waterboarded a total of 266 times from 2002 to 2003, according to the CIA inspector general, cited by Amnesty.

Amnesty calls on Canada to arrest George Bush

Human rights organisation says Canada must prosecute former US president during October visit for "authorising torture". ( 12-Oct-2011 )

Time to revisit the case of George W. Bush?

Rights group seeks Bush 'torture' inquiry

The Decade of 9/11: war without end

War crimes good, exposing them bad

FROM: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2011/12/2011121171023774738.html

2011-11-30T06:11:00.000-08:00

Occupy Wall Street (OWS):
Too Big to Fail

Posted: 2011/11/29 From: Mathaba

An idea whose time has come resonates globally.
The masses in the western bankrupt states that bombed Libya for 8 months to destroy People's Power (Jamahiriya) there, are now calling for the same as what the Libyans had: power and wealth in their hands.

by Stephen Lendman

Unknown Snipers and Western Backed Regime Change
Death Squads in the Service of Western Intelligence

By Gearóid Ó Colmáin

The Western powers are the masters of discourse, who own the means of communication. The Arab Spring has been the most horrifying example of the wanton abuse of this power. Continue

The Folly of Sanctions

By Ron Paul

November 29, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --

Many people have the misconception that sanctions are an effective means to encourage a change of behavior in another country without war.

However, imposing sanctions and blockades are not only an act of war according to international law, they are most often the first step toward a real war starting with a bombing campaign.

Sanctions were the first step in our wars against Iraq and Libya, and now more sanctions planned against Syria and Iran are leading down the same destructive path.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) latest report, just out this month, there is no evidence that Iran has diverted enriched uranium from the peaceful and lawful generation of power toward building a nuclear weapon.

According to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has every right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes...

We should be clear about this: sanctions against Iran are definite steps toward a US attack. Already we see US warships approaching the region, moving dangerously close to Syrian waters.

The tougher sanctions currently under consideration would disrupt global trade and undermine the US economy, which in turn harms our national security. . .

This race to war against Iran and Syria is both foolhardy and dangerous.

UN Report on Syria:
Based on Witness Accounts..... OUTSIDE of Syria

By Tony Cartalucci

Humanitarian concerns "dressing up" the military conquest of Syria. Continue

Target Iran: Washington's Countdown to War

By Tom Burghardt

The Iranian people know what it means to earn the enmity of the global godfather. Continue

Obama Fulfilling the Neocon Dream
Mass Regime Change in Muslim World?

Glenn Greenwald

In October, 2007, Gen. Wesley Clark gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco (seven-minute excerpt in the video below) in which he denounced what he called “a policy coup” engineered by neocons in the wake of 9/11.

After recounting how a Pentagon source had told him weeks after 9/11 of the Pentagon’s plan to attack Iraq notwithstanding its non-involvement in 9/11, this is how Clark described the aspirations of the “coup” being plotted by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and what he called “a half dozen other collaborators from the Project for the New American Century”:

Six weeks later, I saw the same officer, and asked: “Why haven’t we attacked Iraq? Are we still going to attack Iraq?”

He said: “Sir, it’s worse than that. He said – he pulled up a piece of paper off his desk – he said:
“I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office. It says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years – we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”

U.S. Intervention in the Middle East

By ICH

This partial chronology of U.S. intervention in the Middle East illustrates the lengths to which the U.S. power structure has gone to gain and maintain U.S. domination of the Middle East--a region considered key to the U.S.'s standing as an imperialist world power. Continue

Dead Afghan Kids Still Not Newsworthy

By Peter Hart

November 29, 2011 "Fair" --

Back in March, we wondered when U.S. corporate news outlets would find U.S./NATO killing of Afghan kids newsworthy. Back then, it was nine children killed in a March 1 airstrike. This resulted in two network news stories on the evening or morning newscasts, and two brief references on the PBS NewsHour.

On November 25, the New York Times reported--on page 12--that six children were killed in one attack in southern Afghanistan on November 23. This news was, as best I can tell, not reported on ABC, CBS, NBC or the PBS NewsHour.

There were, on the other hand, several pieces about U.S. soldiers eating Thanksgiving dinners.

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald was one of the few commentators to write about the latest killings. As he observed:

We're trained simply to accept these incidents as though they carry no meaning: We're just supposed to chalk them up to regrettable accidents (oops), agree that they don’t compel a cessation to the war, and then get back to the glorious fighting.
Every time that happens, this just becomes more normalized, less worthy of notice. It's just like background noise:
Two families of children wiped out by an American missile (yawn: at least we don't target them on purpose like those evil Terrorists: we just keep killing them year after year after year without meaning to).
It's acceptable to make arguments that American wars should end because they're costing too much money or American lives or otherwise harming American strategic interests, but piles of corpses of innocent children are something only the shrill, shallow and unSerious--pacifists!--point to as though they have any meaning in terms of what should be done.
Continue

2011-11-28T07:23:00.000-08:00

Bankers Have Seized Europe
Goldman Sachs Has Taken Over

By Paul Craig Roberts

The European Union, just like everything else, is merely another scheme to concentrate wealth in a few hands at the expense of European citizens, who are destined, like Americans, to be the serfs of the 21st century. Continue

Tomgram:

Peter Van Buren, Thought Crime in Washington

By Peter Van Buren
Posted on November 27, 2011, Printed on November 28, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175472/

When I arrived at Zuccotti Prison one afternoon last week, the “park” was in its now-usual lockdown mode. No more tents. No library. No kitchen. No medical area. Just about 30 leftover protesters and perhaps 100 of New York’s finest as well as private-security types in neon-green vests in or around a dead space enclosed by more movable police fencing than you can imagine. To the once open plaza, there were now only two small entrances in the fencing on the side streets, and to pass through either you had to run a gauntlet of police and private security types.

The park itself was bare of anything whatsoever and, that day, parts of it had been cordoned off, theoretically for yet more cleaning, with the kind of yellow police tape that would normally surround a crime scene, which was exactly how it seemed. In fact, as I walked in, a young protestor was being arrested, evidently for the crime of lying down on a bench. (No sleeping, or even prospective sleeping, allowed -- except in jail!)

Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg’s police assault on the park, OWS has largely decamped for spaces unknown and for the future. Left behind was a grim tableau of our distinctly up-armored, post-9/11 American world. To take an obvious example, the “police” who so notoriously pepper-sprayed non-violent, seated students at UC Davis were just campus cops, who in my college years, the 1960s, still generally wore civvies, carried no weapons, and were tasked with seeing whether students had broken curfew or locked themselves out of their rooms. Now, around the country, they are armed with chemical weapons, Tasers, tear gas, side arms, you name it. Meanwhile, some police departments, militarizing at a rapid rate, have tank-like vehicles, and the first police surveillance drones are taking to the air in field tests and capable of being weaponized.

And keep in mind, when it comes to that pepper-spraying incident, we’re talking about sleepy Davis, California, and a campus once renowned for its agronomy school. Al-Qaeda? I don’t think so.

Still, terror is what now makes our American world work, the trains run more or less on time, and the money flow in. So why should we be surprised that, having ripped Zuccotti Park apart, destroyed books, gotten a rep for pepper-spraying and roughing up protesters (and reporters, too), the NYPD should propitiously announce the arrest of yet another “lone wolf” terrorist. And can anyone be shocked that we’re talking about a disturbed, moneyless individual -- he couldn’t even pay his cell phone bill, no less rent a place to live -- under surveillance for two years, and palling around with an NYPD “informant” who smoked marijuana with him and may have given him not only a place to build a bomb but encouragement in doing so.

It was a police-developed terror case that evidently so reeked of coaching even the FBI refused to get involved. And yet this was Mayor Bloomberg’s shining moment of last week, as the NYPD declared his home a “frozen” zone, the equivalent of declaring martial law around his house. And who was endangering him? An OWS “drum circle.” In the United States, increasingly, those in power no longer observe the law. Instead, they make it up to suit their needs. In the process, the streets where you demonstrate, as (New York’s mayor keeps telling us) is our “right,” are regularly transformed into yet more fenced-in, heavily surveilled Zuccotti Prisons.

This may not be a traditional police state (yet), but it is an increasingly militarized policed state in which the blue coats, armed to the teeth, act with remarkable impunity -- and all in the name of our safety from a bunch of doofuses or unhinged individuals that its “informants” often seem to fund, put through basic terror courses, and encourage in every way until they are arrested as “terrorists.” This is essentially a scam on the basis of which rights are regularly abridged or tossed out the window.

In twenty-first-century America, “rights” are increasingly meant for those who behave themselves and don’t exercise them. And if you happen to be part of a government in which no criminal act of state -- torture, kidnapping, the assassination of U.S. citizens abroad, the launching of wars of aggression -- will ever bring a miscreant to court, only two crimes evidently exist: blowing a whistle or expressing your opinion. State Department official Peter Van Buren, whose new book about a disastrous year he spent in Iraq, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, is a must read, learned that the hard way. So did Morris Davis. So may we all. Tom

No Free Speech at Mr. Jefferson’s Library
George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury Would Have Recognized Morris Davis's Problem
By Peter Van Buren

Here’s the First Amendment, in full: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Those beautiful words, almost haiku-like, are the sparse poetry of the American democratic experiment. The Founders purposely wrote the First Amendment to read broadly, and not like a snippet of tax code, in order to emphasize that it should encompass everything from shouted religious rantings to eloquent political criticism. Go ahead, reread it aloud at this moment when the government seems to be carving out an exception to it large enough to drive a tank through.

As the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, like those pepper-sprayed at UC Davis or the Marine veteran shot in Oakland, recently found out, the government’s ability to limit free speech, to stopper the First Amendment, to undercut the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances, is perhaps the most critical issue our republic can face. If you were to write the history of the last decade in Washington, it might well be a story of how, issue by issue, the government freed itself from legal and constitutional bounds when it came to torture, the assassination of U.S. citizens, the holding of prisoners without trial or access to a court of law, the illegal surveillance of American citizens, and so on. In the process, it has entrenched itself in a comfortable shadowland of ever more impenetrable secrecy, while going after any whistleblower who might shine a light in.

Now, it also seems to be chipping away at the most basic American right of all, the right of free speech, starting with that of its own employees. As is often said, the easiest book to stop is the one that is never written; the easiest voice to staunch is the one that is never raised.

It’s true that, over the years, government in its many forms has tried to claim that you lose your free speech rights when you, for example, work for a public school, or join the military. In dealing with school administrators who sought to silence a teacher for complaining publicly that not enough money was being spent on academics versus athletics, or generals who wanted to stop enlisted men and women from blogging, the courts have found that any loss of rights must be limited and specific. As Jim Webb wrote when still Secretary of the Navy, “A citizen does not give up his First Amendment right to free speech when he puts on a military uniform, with small exceptions.”

Free speech is considered so basic that the courts have been wary of imposing any limits at all. The famous warning by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes about not falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater shows just how extreme a situation must be for the Supreme Court to limit speech. As Holmes put it in his definition: “The question in every case is whether the words used… are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” That’s a high bar indeed.

The Government v. Morris Davis

Does a newspaper article from November 2009, a few hundred well-reasoned words that appeared in the conservative Wall Street Journal, concluding with these mild sentences, meet Justice Holmes’s high mark?

“Double standards don't play well in Peoria. They won't play well in Peshawar or Palembang either. We need to work to change the negative perceptions that exist about Guantanamo and our commitment to the law. Formally establishing a legal double standard will only reinforce them.”

Morris Davis got fired from his research job at the Library of Congress for writing that article and a similar letter to the editor of the Washington Post. (The irony of being fired for exercising free speech while employed at Thomas Jefferson’s library evidently escaped his bosses.) With the help of the ACLU, Davis demanded his job back. On January 8, 2010, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Library of Congress on his behalf. In March 2011 a federal court ruled that the suit could go forward.

The case is being heard this month. Someday, it will likely define the free speech rights of federal employees and so determine the quality of people who will make up our government. We citizens vote for the big names, but it’s the millions of lower-ranked, unelected federal employees who decide by their actions how the laws are carried out (or ignored) and the Constitution upheld (or disregarded).

Morris Davis is not some dour civil servant. Prior to joining the Library of Congress, he spent more than 25 years as an Air Force colonel. He was, in fact, the chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo and showed enormous courage in October 2007 when he resigned from that position and left the Air Force. Davis had stated he would not use evidence obtained through torture back in 2005. When a torture advocate was named his boss in 2007, Davis quit rather than face the inevitable order to reverse his position.

In December 2008, Davis went to work as a researcher at the Library of Congress in the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division. None of his work was related to Guantanamo. He was not a spokesperson for, or a public face of, the library. He was respected at work. Even the people who fired him do not contest that he did his “day job” as a researcher well.

On November 12, 2009, the day after his op-ed and letter appeared, Davis was told by his boss that the pieces had caused the library concern over his “poor judgment and suitability to serve… not consistent with 'acceptable service'" -- as the letter of admonishment he received put the matter. It referred only to his op-ed and Washington Post letter, and said nothing about his work performance as a researcher. One week later, Davis was fired.

But Shouldn’t He Have Known Better Than to Write Something Political?

The courts have consistently supported the rights of the Ku Klux Klan to use extreme and hateful words, of the burners of books, and of those who desecrate the American flag. All of that is considered “protected speech.” A commitment to real free speech means accepting the toughest cases, the most offensive things people can conceive of, as the price of a free society.

The Library of Congress does not restrict its employees from writing or speaking, so Davis broke no rules. Nor, theoretically at least, do other government agencies like the CIA and the State Department restrict employees from writing or speaking, even on matters of official concern, although they do demand prior review for such things as the possible misuse of classified material.

Clearly, such agency review processes have sometimes been used as a de facto method of prior restraint. The CIA, for example, has been accused of using indefinite security reviews to effectively prevent a book from being published. The Department of Defense has also wielded exaggerated claims of classified material to block books.

Since at least 1968, there has, however, been no broad prohibition against government employees writing about political matters or matters of public concern. In 1968, the Supreme Court decided a seminal public employee First Amendment case, Pickering v. Board of Education. It ruled that school officials had violated the First Amendment rights of teacher Marvin Pickering when they fired him for writing a letter to his local paper criticizing the allocation of money between academics and athletics.

A Thought Crime

Morris Davis was fired by the Library of Congress not because of his work performance, but because he wrote that Wall Street Journal op-ed on his own time, using his own computer, as a private citizen, never mentioning his (unrelated) federal job. The government just did not like what he wrote. Perhaps his bosses were embarrassed by his words, or felt offended by them. Certainly, in the present atmosphere in Washington, they felt they had an open path to stopping their own employee from saying what he did, or at least for punishing him for doing so.

It’s not, of course, that federal employees don’t write and speak publicly. As long as they don’t step on toes, they do, in startling numbers, on matters of official concern, on hobbies, on subjects of all sorts, through what must be an untold number of blogs, Facebook pages, Tweets, op-eds, and letters to the editor. The government picked Davis out for selective, vindictive prosecution.

More significantly, Davis was fired prospectively -- not for poor attendance, or too much time idling at the water cooler, but because his boss believed Davis’s writing showed that the quality of his judgment might make him an unsuitable employee at some future moment. The simple act of speaking out on a subject at odds with an official government position was the real grounds for his firing. That, and that alone, was enough for termination.

As any devoted fan of George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, or Philip K. Dick would know, Davis committed a thought crime.

As some readers may also know, I evidently did the same thing. Because of my book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, about my experiences as a State Department official in Iraq, and the articles, op-eds, and blog posts I have written, I first had my security clearance suspended by the Department of State and then was suspended from my job there. That job had nothing to do with Iraq or any of the subjects I have written about. My performance reviews were good, and no one at State criticized me for my day-job work. Because we have been working under different human resources systems, Davis, as a civil servant on new-hire probation, could be fired directly. As a tenured Foreign Service Officer, I can’t, and so State has placed me on indefinite administrative leave status; that is, I’m without a job, pending action to terminate me formally through a more laborious process.

However, in removing me from my position, the document the State Department delivered to me darkly echoed what Davis’ boss at the Library of Congress said to him:

“The manner in which you have expressed yourself in some of your published material is inconsistent with the standards of behavior expected of the Foreign Service. Some of your actions also raise questions about your overall judgment. Both good judgment and the ability to represent the Foreign Service in a way that will make the Foreign Service attractive to candidates are key requirements.”

There follows a pattern of punishing federal employees for speaking out or whistle-blowing: look at Davis, or me, or Franz Gayl, or Thomas Drake. In this way, a precedent is being set for an even deeper cloud of secrecy to surround the workings of government. From Washington, in other words, no news, other than good or officially approved news, is to emerge.

The government’s statements at Davis’s trial, now underway in Washington D.C., do indeed indicate that he was fired for the act of speaking out itself, as much as the content of what he said. The Justice Department lawyer representing the government said that Davis’s writings cast doubt on his discretion, judgment and ability to serve as a high-level official. (She also added that Davis’s language in the op-ed was “intemperate.” One judge on the three-member bench seemed to support the point, saying, “It’s one thing to speak at a law school or association, but it’s quite a different thing to be in The Washington Post.” The case will likely end up at the Supreme Court.

Free Speech is for Iranians, not Government Employees

If Morris Davis loses his case, then a federal employee’s judgment and suitability may be termed insufficient for employment if he or she writes publicly in a way that offends or embarrasses the government. In other words, the very definition of good judgment, when it comes to freedom of speech, will then rest with the individual employer -- that is, the U.S. government.

Simply put, even if you as a federal employee follow your agency’s rules on publication, you can still be fired for what you write if your bosses don’t like it. If your speech offends them, then that’s bad judgment on your part and the First Amendment goes down the drain. Free speech is increasingly coming at a price in Washington: for federal employees, conscience could cost them their jobs.

In this sense, Morris Davis represents a chilling precedent. He raised his voice. If we’re not careful, the next Morris Davis may not. Federal employees are, at best, a skittish bunch, not known for their innovative, out-of-the-box thinking. Actions like those in the Davis case will only further deter any thoughts of speaking out, and will likely deter some good people from seeking federal employment.

More broadly, the Davis case threatens to give the government free rein in selecting speech by its employees it does not like and punishing it. It’s okay to blog about your fascination with knitting or to support official positions. If you happen to be Iranian or Chinese or Syrian, and not terribly fond of your government, and express yourself on the subject, the U.S. government will support your right to do it 110% of the way. However, as a federal employee, blog about your negative opinions on U.S. policies and you’ve got a problem. In fact, we have a problem as a country if freedom of speech only holds as long as it does not offend the U.S. government.

Morris Davis’s problem is neither unique nor isolated. Clothilde Le Coz, Washington director of Reporters without Borders, told me earlier this month, "Secrecy is taking over from free speech in the United States. While we naively thought the Obama administration would be more transparent than the previous one, it is actually the first to sue five people for being sources and speaking publicly." Scary, especially since this is no longer an issue of one rogue administration.

Government is different than private business. If you don’t like McDonald’s because of its policies, go to Burger King, or a soup kitchen, or eat at home. You don’t get the choice of federal governments, and so the critical need for its employees to be able to speak informs the republic. We are the only ones who can tell you what is happening inside your government. It really is that important. Ask Morris Davis.

Peter Van Buren spent a year in Iraq as a State Department Foreign Service Officer serving as Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Now in Washington, he writes about Iraq and the Middle East at his blog, We Meant Well. His book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), has recently been published. To read about the grilling he’s gotten from the State Department for his truth-telling, click here.

[Note on further readings: You can check out the ACLU’s full-filing text on behalf of Davis by clicking here.]

[Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense, or any other entity of the U.S. Government. It should be quite obvious that the Department of State has not approved, endorsed, or authorized this post.]

Copyright 2011 Peter Van Buren

© 2011 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175472/

US mulls harboring anti-Iran terrorists:

Members of the terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) and US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Washington (File Photo)

The United States is mulling over removing the anti-Iranian Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) from its terrorist watch list and giving refuge to its members, a move which indicates Washington's support for terrorism. . . .

Click to read the entire article

2011-11-26T21:44:00.000-08:00

The Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on Occupy

By Naomi Wolf

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality.

November 26, 2011 "The Guardian" - -

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week.

An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park. . . .

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening. . .

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them. . .

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence.

It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent.

Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square.

Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

Click here to read the entire story, and read/post comments

Ask the Candidates Real Questions – Like These

By Ray McGovern

Pity the pundits. It must be hard to pretend to be a journalist and live in constant fear of being one question or comment away from joining the jobless. Continue

Bush, Blair Found Guilty of War Crimes

By Press TV

A War Crimes Tribunal in Malaysia has found former US President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair guilty of war crimes for their roles in the Iraq war. Continue

Libya Leaders Supported by "Money, Arms, PR"- Ex-premier
By Reuters

One of the most senior figures in Libya's outgoing government has denounced its leaders as an unelected elite, supported by "money, arms and PR," and warned that 90 percent of Libya is politically voiceless. Continue

The Roads To War And Economic Collapse

By Paul Craig Roberts

The day before the Thanksgiving holiday brought three extraordinary news items. Continue

2011-11-18T20:32:00.000-08:00

US to stockpile cluster bombs in Australia?

Despite Australia having signed the convention against cluster munitions, a US base at Darwin may transport and stockpile cluster bomb munitions.

By NAJ Talor

Cluster munition or parts of the munition often do not explode on impact, causing great harm to the envrionment [EPA]

Brisbane, Australia: A US military "base" in Darwin, Australia (spun as a "rotational deployment" for China, I suspect), will necessitate foreign weapons systems and armaments being stockpiled, retained and transited on and in Australian territory.

Although they are long-standing and committed allies, Australia and the United States hold different positions on many matters relating to both arms control and humanitarian law.

One recent normative development where the US and Australia's views have diverged is the ban on cluster bombs, a weapon that has inside multiple - often hundreds - of small explosive sub-munitions or "bomblets" that are dispersed over an area the size of several football fields from either the air or ground.

As a result, the final location of each bomblet is impossible to control for those deploying them, and so whom they maim or kill is both unknown and indiscriminate. Roughly 30 per cent of those deployed "fail" to explode on impact, and so the unexploded bomblets become de facto landmines.

When the Convention on Cluster Munitions came into effect in August last year, the Gillard government was part of a chorus of NGOs and governments that saw "an end for all time" of the use of cluster munitions by prohibiting their production, use, stockpiling and transfer.

At present, a bill sits with the senate that will criminalise Australian deployment of the weapon under domestic law, thereby ratifying the international convention.

With the formation of a US military base in Darwin, Gillard will effectively make use of certain "loopholes" in the bill that arise from US' non-signatory status to the Convention, and obfuscation of negotiations that are currently taking place for an additional arms control measure this week.

Best estimates are that the US forces presently have a quarter of the world's four billion cluster munitions in stockpiles across both its territory and existing overseas bases. The US last deployed cluster munitions during the Iraq War in 2003, despite the emerging norm.

In my view, there's a fair degree of probability cluster munitions will be stockpiled in Darwin, since there are known plans for the US to base a number of B-52 bombers historically used to deploy cluster bombs. It is already known that nuclear weapons will not be permitted onto Australian territory, but a number of the US' naval fleet are nuclear-powered vessels, which will be allowed. . .

As I wrote for Crikey in March this year, "No other signatory country in the world has expressly permitted such unfettered free access to its territories as this. It is unprecedented."

If only I knew then what I do now about Darwin, especially given how little we are likely to ever know about what weapons the US keeps there.

NAJ Taylor is a doctoral candidate in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. A version of this article was first posted on his blog, This Blog Harms.

Follow NAJ Taylor on Twitter: @najtaylor

Link to this article: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011111783832165197.html

2011-11-16T15:40:00.001-08:00

Right now, the US Congress is debating a law that would give them the power to censor the world's Internet -- creating a blacklist that could target YouTube, WikiLeaks and even Avaaz! Now if we stand with key members of the US Congress, we can defeat this attempt at global Internet censorship.
Click here and help build an unprecedented global petition for a free and open Internet:

2011-11-12T04:26:00.000-08:00

Veteran's Day
A Time To Honor Duped Murderers?

By fishychick

November 11, 2011 "Information Clearing House"

When one is called to defend one's home and family, it is not really courage that is required, it is a sense of duty. If my home is under attack, if my family is in danger, it is proper and fitting that I defend them and not expect someone else to put their life at risk for my home and family.

When one is called to defend one's nation, the same sense of duty is conjured. Unfortunately, the calls to defend this nation have been issued on false information in EVERY WAR THE US EVER FOUGHT.

The delusion that the US military is defending our home and our nation can be put to the lie with one simple fact: You do not defend your home by going next door and killing your neighbor. That is what our military does. There has never been a war, defending from foreign aggressors, the land that we call "ours" since we "won" independence from England (and stole from the Native Americans and Mexicans, but that is another topic.)

I am sick of pretending that a person who joins today's army is a hero. They are a mercenary at best, and a murderer looking for legitimate employment at worst. The history of US aggression against peaceful nations is long and disgusting.

The attack on the passenger ship the "Lusitania" was used to drag us into WW1, and it turns out the ship WAS full of military equipment after all. The passengers were murdered to rile the citizens and get them hungry for war. The citizens obliged. It worked so well the government used that trick over and over, and they are still at it today.

The news is full of posturing to go to war with Iran. Iran, who has not attacked another nation in over 100 years, is supposed to be this grave danger to our freedom. Well, the joke is on us, we have no meaningful freedom left.

Here is a nice link to a brief history of the lies used to wage war around the world at YOUR expense:

I do not want to kill anyone. I do not want anyone to kill anyone pretending they are "protecting" me unless the attacker is IN MY HOUSE. (That is where the US soldiers are, IN THE HOMES of Iraqi and Afghan people.) I have tried to honor their heart, the thing that made them willing to risk their life for others. But they are WRONG and I will no longer defend them in any way.

Defending is acceptable, but the US Military is NOT defending the US by going to OTHER nations and invading and occupying them. They are empire building and war mongering. I do not support that, and I only pay taxes out of fear of imprisonment (extortion) because I believe it is my MORAL duty to NOT fund these wars. It is a sad statement on US "freedom" when I cannot behave morally out of fear for my liberty.

Veterans' Day was signed into "legal holiday" status by Eisenhower. Rather ironic, in light of his dire warnings against the military industrial complex. It seems he felt pressured to honor immoral behavior, too. It is hard to draw the line between good men and women who have been deliberately duped into fearing an enemy that does not really exist and the behavior they engage in due to that fear.

So today, I do not honor Veterans who served, I honor the draft dodgers and the peace activists and the INCREDIBLY brave men who went to war and came back and TOLD US THE TRUTH. What they had to face about their own actions is no small task - we all want to believe that we make good decisions and behave morally, and it takes true strength of character to admit one was lied to and used, and then to stand and call out the liars.

I still support the individuals who are caught in the military machinery, they are people who deserve better. I DO NOT SUPPORT WAR or anyone who is stealing money from me to wage it.

If you are in the military, STOP KILLING PEOPLE IN MY NAME AND WITH MY MONEY. You are responsible for your actions, you KNOW there were no "weapons of mass destruction" and you know bin Laden was a CIA agent and you know Iran is no threat to you or me or this land we call home. The enemy is domestic now, and if you are in the Middle East you are leaving your home and family defenseless. Shame on you.

It was the men in the trenches who finally ended Viet Nam, it is up to the men and women in the desert to end the US invasion and occupation of the Middle east.

Today, I honor:

My brother Gordon who thought he was headed to Viet Nam, and did not want to go. Not wanting to kill strangers was a good thing.

My second cousin Tristan who volunteered after 9-11 then was killed in an unarmored Humvee by an IED.He will not kill any more strangers now.

My friend Blayne who served and now speaks truth and defends peace. He's trying to stop the killing of strangers in general.

Adam Kokesh for relentlessly and publicly speaking out against the wars.

Scott Olsen who stood and put his life on the line for peace on US soil.

Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Veterans For Peace.

Smedley Butler who tried to warn us all.

Every man who dodged the draft in the name of peace (not out of cowardice like GWBush.)

I am sure there are good men and women in uniform, but it is time to fight for peace MORE aggressively than you ever fought a war. If you REALLY want your home and family safe, then get to Oakland or Wall Street and start fighting the domestic enemy that is about to destroy any last shred of liberty the US citizens enjoy.

If you or someone you know is about to join the military because they cannot get a job, PLEASE remind them that there are jobs with the Mafia and Bloods and Cryps where you get to murder people and make serious money, If they are compelled by some sense of duty, please show them the history of false flag attacks by our government on our citizens.

And if you or anyone you knows thinks Israel is our ally, please learn about the USS Liberty. Then do a little research and look and see how many Israel / US dual citizens sit in places of extreme power in the US government, and how many of them are current or former CEO's of the banks that are stealing our homes from us.

The US government has been overthrown by bankers whose first loyalty is to Israel, not the US. If soldiers and Veterans had truly defended the US from the actual invasion of our nation, we would not be at endless war with Israel's enemies, we would be engaged in peaceful trade throughout the world with our friends and allies.

How about a holiday celebrating peace? I know, everyone wishes for "Peace on Earth" at Christmas, but then when Jesus does not leave it under the tree for them they give up on it. At least they got some flashy electronic war simulation games for the kids - that will make everyone happy and lead to a better world any day now, I am sure....

Click here to read / post comments

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America's Media War on Iran

By Stephen Lendman

When Washington goes to war or threatens it, America’s media march in lockstep, cheerleading.

Fiction substitutes for fact. Continue

Reports of Iran's Nuclear Ambitions Sound Like a Repeat of Iraq Eight Years Ago

By Gwynne Dyer

“We will not build two (nuclear) bombs in the face of (America’s) 20,000,” said Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in response to an International Atomic Energy Agency report this week that accuses Iran of doing just that. He called Yukiya Amano, the head of the IAEA, a U.S. puppet. Continue

Terror and Revenge Engulfs NATO’s Libya

By Franklin Lamb

The “new Libya” has entered its own “Terror” which is spreading inexorably, aided by NATO member states including American, French and British SAS units known locally as “disappearance squads”. Continue

From The Archives
A Veteran Remembers

By Howard Zinn

They want us to forget what we learned at the Vietnam War's end: that our leaders cannot be trusted, that modern war is inevitably a war against civilians and particularly children, that only a determined citizenry can stop the government when it embarks on mass murder. Continue

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Australia: Obama to announce US marine base in Darwin: PRESIDENT Barack Obama is to announce that the US will begin rotating marines through an Australian base in Darwin in a permanent new military presence. . .
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The Nuclear Scientist That Wasn't
IAEA Errs on "Foreign Expert" in Iran N-programme

By Vladimir Radyuhin

The latest report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Iran appears to have falsified information about a Russian scientist who allegedly helped Tehran advance its nuclear weapons programme. Continue

Iran Nuclear Report: Why It May Not Be A Game-changer After All

By Scott Peterson

Robert Kelley, an American nuclear engineer and former IAEA inspector who was among the first to review the original data in 2005. "It's certainly old news; it's really quite stunning how little new information is in there." Continue

Did Police Go Too Far With Clashes at Berkeley?

Must Watch Video By RT

Video shows police attacking protesters with batons, bluntly striking them in their abdomens and elsewhere. - Police are clearly seen striking protesters, unprovoked, from behind. Continue

Murder Inc - Licensed to Kill
US Assassination Drones & Targeted Killings

By Press TV

The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago, and has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones in 2012. Continue

*
Why We Fight

Must Match - Documentary

This award-winning film provides an inside look at the anatomy of the American war machine.

*

The US is a Police State

By Prof. John McMurtry

What is a police state? - it can be deduced as unlimited state power of armed force freely discharged without citizen right to stop it. Continue

Occupy America

By Michael Parenti

When the people liberate their own minds and take a hard clear look at what the 1% is doing and what the 99% should be doing, then serious stuff begins to happen. Continue

2011-11-09T21:54:00.000-08:00

IAEA’s ‘Soviet Nuclear Scientist’ Never Worked on Weapons

by Gareth Porter, November 10, 2011

From http://antiwar.com/

The report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published by a Washington think tank Tuesday repeated the sensational claim previously reported by news media all over the world that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon.

But it turns out that the foreign expert, who is not named in the IAEA report [.pdf] but was identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist but one of the top specialists in the world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives.

In fact, Danilenko, a Ukrainian, has worked solely on nanodiamonds from the beginning of his research career and is considered one of the pioneers in the development of nanodiamond technology, as published scientific papers confirm.

It now appears that the IAEA and David Albright, the director of the International Institute for Science and Security in Washington, who was the source of the news reports about Danilenko, never bothered to check the accuracy of the original claim by an unnamed “Member State” on which the IAEA based its assertion about his nuclear weapons background....

Danilenko clearly explained that the purpose of his work in Iran was to help the development of a nanodiamond industry in the country....

Careful examination of the “alleged studies” documents has revealed inconsistencies and other anomalies that give evidence of fraud.

But the IAEA, the United States and its allies in the IAEA continue to treat the documents as though there were no question about their authenticity.

The unnamed member state that informed the agency about Danilenko’s alleged experience as a Soviet nuclear weapons scientist is almost certainly Israel, which has been the source of virtually all the purported intelligence on Iranian work on nuclear weapons over the past decade.

Israel has made no secret of its determination to influence world opinion on the Iranian nuclear program by disseminating information to governments and news media, including purported Iran government documents.

Israeli Foreign Ministry and intelligence officials told journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins about the special unit of Mossad dedicated to that task at the very time the fraudulent documents were being produced....

In an interview in September 2008, Albright said Olli Heinonen, then deputy director for safeguards at the IAEA, had told him that a document from a member state had convinced him that the “alleged studies” documents were genuine. Albright said the state was “probably Israel.”

The Jerusalem Post‘s Yaakov Katz reported Wednesday that Israeli intelligence agencies had “provided critical information used in the report,” the purpose of which was to “push through a new regime of sanctions against Tehran.”

(Inter Press Service)

It doesn't matter to them if it's untrue. It's a higher truth.

"We came, we saw, he died."
— US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton,
giggling, as she spoke of the depraved murder of Moammar Gaddafi

Imagine Osama bin Laden or some other Islamic leader speaking of 9-11: "We came, we saw, 3,000 died ... ha- ha."

Clinton and her partners-in-crime in NATO can also have a good laugh at how they deceived the world. The destruction of Libya, the reduction of a modern welfare state to piles of rubble, to ghost towns, the murder of thousands ... this tragedy was the culmination of a series of falsehoods spread by the Libyan rebels, the Western powers, and Qatar (through its television station, al-Jazeera) — from the declared imminence of a "bloodbath" in rebel-held Benghazi if the West didn't intervene to stories of government helicopter-gunships and airplanes spraying gunfire onto large numbers of civilians to tales of Viagra-induced mass rapes by Gaddafi's army. (This last fable was proclaimed at the United Nations by the American Ambassador, as if young soldiers needed Viagra to get it up!)¹

The New York Times (March 22) observed:

... the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda, claiming nonexistent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a key city days after it fell to Qaddafi forces, and making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior.

The Los Angeles Times (April 7) added this about the rebels' media operation:

It's not exactly fair and balanced media. In fact, as [its editor] helpfully pointed out, there are four inviolate rules of coverage on the two rebel radio stations, TV station and newspaper:

No pro-[Qaddafi] reportage or commentary
No mention of a civil war. (The Libyan people, east and west, are unified in a war against a totalitarian regime.)
No discussion of tribes or tribalism. (There is only one tribe: Libya.)
No references to Al Qaeda or Islamic extremism. (That's [Qaddafi's] propaganda.)

The Libyan government undoubtedly spouted its share of misinformation, but it was the rebels' trail of lies, both of omission and commission, which was used by the UN Security Council to justify its vote for "humanitarian" intervention; followed in Act Three by unrelenting NATO/US bombs and drone missiles, day after day, week after week, month after month; you can't get much more humanitarian than that. If the people of Libya prior to the NATO/US bombardment had been offered a referendum on it, can it be imagined that they would have endorsed it?

In fact, it appears rather likely that a majority of Libyans supported Gaddafi. How else could the government have held off the most powerful military forces in the world for more than seven months? Before NATO and the US laid waste to the land, Libya had the highest life expectancy, lowest infant mortality, and highest UN Human Development Index in Africa. During the first few months of the civil war, giant rallies were held in support of the Libyan leader.²

For further discussion of why Libyans may have been motivated to support Gaddafi, have a look at this video.

If Gaddafi had been less oppressive of his political opposition over the years and had made some gestures of accommodation to them during the Arab Spring, the benevolent side of his regime might still be keeping him in power, although the world has plentiful evidence making it plain that the Western powers are not particularly concerned about political oppression except to use as an excuse for intervention when they want to; indeed, government files seized in Tripoli during the fighting show that the CIA and British intelligence worked with the Libyan government in tracking down dissidents, turning them over to Libya, and taking part in interrogations.³

In any event, many of the rebels had a religious motive for opposing the government and played dominant roles within the rebel army; previously a number of them had fought against the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.⁴

The new Libyan regime promptly announced that Islamic sharia law would be the "basic source" of legislation, and laws that contradict "the teachings of Islam" would be nullified; there would also be a reinstitution of polygamy; the Muslim holy book, the Quran, allows men up to four wives.⁵

Thus, just as in Afghanistan in the 1980-90s, the United States has supported Islamic militants fighting against a secular government. The American government has imprisoned many people as "terrorists" in the United States for a lot less.

What began in Libya as "normal" civil war violence from both sides — repeated before and since by the governments of Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria without any Western military intervention at all (the US actually continues to arm the Bahrain and Yemen regimes) — was transformed by the Western propaganda machine into a serious Gaddafi genocide of innocent Libyans.

Addressing the validity of this very key issue is another video, "Humanitarian War in Libya: There is no evidence". The main feature of the film is an interview with Soliman Bouchuiguir, Secretary-General, and one of the founders in 1989, of the Libyan League for Human Rights, perhaps the leading Libyan dissident group, in exile in Switzerland.

Bouchuiguir is asked several times if he can document various charges made against the Libyan leader. Where is the proof of the many rapes? The many other alleged atrocities? The more than 6,000 civilians alleged killed by Gaddafi's planes? Again and again Bouchuiguir cites the National Transitional Council as the source. Yes, that's the rebels who carried out the civil war in conjunction with the NATO/US forces.

At other times Bouchuiguir speaks of "eyewitnesses": "little girls, boys who were there, whose families we know personally". After awhile, he declares that "there is no way" to document these things. This is probably true to some extent, but why, then, the UN Security Council resolution for a military intervention in Libya? Why almost eight months of bombing?

Bouchuiguir also mentions his organization's working with the National Endowment for Democracy in their effort against Gaddafi, and one has to wonder if the man has any idea that the NED was founded to be a front for the CIA. Literally.

Another source of charges against Gaddafi and his sons has been the International Criminal Court. The Court's Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, is shown in this film at a news conference discussing the same question of proof of the charges. He refers to an ICC document of 77 pages which he says contains the evidence.

The film displays the document's Table of Contents, which shows that pages 17-71 are not available to the public; these pages, apparently the ones containing the testimony and evidence, are marked as "redacted". In an appendix, the ICC report lists its news sources; these include Fox News, CNN, the CIA, Soliman Bouchuiguir, and the Libyan League for Human Rights. Earlier, the film had presented Bouchuiguir citing the ICC as one of his sources. The documentation is thus a closed circle.

Historical footnote: "Aerial bombing of civilians was pioneered by the Italians in Libya in 1911, perfected by the British in Iraq in 1920 and used by the French in 1925 to level whole quarters of Syrian cities. Home demolitions, collective punishment, summary execution, detention without trial, routine torture — these were the weapons of Europe's takeover" in the Mideast.⁶

The worldwide eternal belief that American foreign policy has a good side that can be appealed to

On April 6, 2011 Moammar Gaddafi wrote a letter to President Obama, in which he said: "We have been hurt more morally than physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened. ... Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu Oubama, your intervention in the name of the U.S.A. is a must, so that Nato would withdraw finally from the Libyan affair."⁷

Before the American invasion in March 2003, Iraq tried to negotiate a peace deal with the United States. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction and offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search; they also offered full support for any US plan in the Arab-Israeli peace process, and to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. If this is about oil, they added, they would also talk about US oil concessions.⁸ ... Then came shock and awe!

In 2002, before the coup in Venezuela that briefly ousted Hugo Chávez, some of the plotters went to Washington to get a green light from the Bush administration. Chávez learned of this visit and was so distressed by it that he sent officials from his government to plead his own case in Washington. The success of this endeavor can be judged by the fact that the coup took place shortly thereafter.⁹

In 1994, it was reported that the leader of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico, Subcommander Marcos, said that "he expects the United States to support the Zapatistas once US intelligence agencies are convinced the movement is not influenced by Cubans or Russians." "Finally," Marcos said, "they are going to conclude that this is a Mexican problem, with just and true causes."¹⁰ Yet for many years, the United States provided the Mexican military with all the training and tools needed to crush the Zapatistas.

The Guatemalan foreign minister in 1954, Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana in 1961, and Maurice Bishop of Grenada in 1983 all made their appeals to Washington to be left in peace.¹¹ The governments of all three countries were overthrown by the United States.

In 1945 and 1946, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, a genuine admirer of America and the Declaration of Independence, wrote at least eight letters to President Harry Truman and the State Department asking for America's help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French.

He wrote that world peace was being endangered by French efforts to reconquer Indochina and he requested that "the four powers" (US, USSR, China, and Great Britain) intervene in order to mediate a fair settlement and bring the Indochinese issue before the United Nations.¹² Ho Chi Minh received no reply. He was, after all, some sort of communist.

America's presstitutes

Imagine that the vicious police attack of October 25 on the Occupy Oakland encampment had taken place in Iran or Cuba or Venezuela or in any other ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) ...

Page One Righteous Indignation with Shocking Photos. But here's the Washington Post the next day: A three-inch story on page three with a headline: "Protesters wearing out their welcome nationwide"; no mention of the Iraqi veteran left unconscious from a police projectile making contact with his head; as to photos: just one — an Oakland police officer petting a cat that was left behind by the protesters.

And here's TV comedian Jay Leno the same night as the police attack in Oakland: "They say Moammar Gaddafi may have been one of the richest men in the world ... 200 billion dollars. With all of the billions he had, he spent very little on education or health care for his country. So I guess he was a Republican."¹³

The object of Leno's humor was of course the Republicans, but it served the cause of further demonizing Gaddafi and thus adding to the "justification" of America's murderous attack on Libya.

If I had been one of Leno's guests sitting there, I would have turned to the audience and said: "Listen people, under Gaddafi health care and education were completely free. Wouldn't you like to have that here?"

I think that enough people in the audience would have applauded or shouted to force Leno to back off a bit from his indoctrinated, mindless remark.

And just for the record, the 200 billion dollars is not money found in Gaddafi's personal bank accounts anywhere in the world, but money belonging to the Libyan state. But why quibble? There's no business like show business.

The Iraqi Lullabye

On February 17, 2003, a month before the US bombing of Iraq began, I posted to the Internet an essay entitled "What Do the Imperial Mafia Really Want?" concerning the expected war. Included in this were the words of Michael Ledeen, former Reagan official, then at the American Enterprise Institute, which was one of the leading drum-beaters for attacking Iraq:

If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

After a year of the tragic farce that was the American intervention in Iraq I could not resist. I sent Mr. Ledeen an email reminding him of his words and saying simply: "I'd like to ask you what songs your children are singing these days."

I received no reply.

Has there ever been an empire that didn't tell itself and the world that it was unlike all other empires, that its mission was not to plunder and control but to enlighten and liberate?

The United Nations vote on the Cuba embargo — 20 years in a row

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an "international pariah". We don't hear that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution which reads: "Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba". This is how the vote has gone (not including abstentions):

Year	..... Votes (Yes-No)	No Votes
1992	......59-2	US, Israel
1993	......88-4	US, Israel, Albania, Paraguay
1994	......101-2	US, Israel
1995	......117-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1996	......138-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1997	......143-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1998	......157-2	US, Israel
1999	......155-2	US, Israel
2000	......167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2001	......167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2002	......173-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2003	......179-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2004	......179-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2005	......182-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2006	......183-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2007	......184-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2008	......185-3	US, Israel, Palau
2009	......187-3	US, Israel, Palau
2010	......187-2	US, Israel
2011	......186-2	US, Israel

Each fall the UN vote is a welcome reminder that the world has not completely lost its senses and that the American empire does not completely control the opinion of other governments.

How it began: On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: "The majority of Cubans support Castro ... The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. ... every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba."

Mallory proposed "a line of action which ... makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government."¹⁴ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo against its eternally-declared enemy.

Notes

Viagra: Reuters, April 29, 2011 ^↩
See, for example, "Million Man, Woman and Child March in Tripoli, Libya", June 20, 2011^↩
The Guardian (London), September 3, 2011 ^↩
Washington Post, September 15, 2011, "Islamists rise to fore in new Libya" ^↩
USA Today, October 24, 2011 ^↩
Rashid Khalidi, professor of Arab studies, Columbia University, Washington Post, November 11, 2007 ^↩
Associated Press, April 6, 2011, some obvious errors in the original have been corrected ^↩
New York Times, November 6, 2003 ^↩
New York Times, April 16, 2002 ^↩
Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1994, p.7 ^↩
Guatemala: Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (1982), p.183; Jagan: Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (1965), p.774-9; Bishop: Associated Press, May 29, 1983, "Leftist Government Officials Visit United States" ^↩
The Pentagon Papers (NY Times edition, 1971), pp.4, 5, 8, 26; William Blum, Killing Hope, p.123) ^↩
Washington Post, October 26, 2011 ^↩
Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba (1991), p.885 ^↩

–

William Blum is the author of:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 [at] aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area.

(Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite.)

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate it if the website were mentioned.

Home

2011-11-04T05:33:00.000-07:00

With 'Occupy Wall Street', as well as the October 2011 movement, spreading to cities throughout the USA and the world, something new and important seems to be happening.

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author, offers some insights into what it is all about, and where it might be heading.

Chris Hedges: No way in US system to vote against banks

Watch the video interview
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz5RxhahHK0

2011-11-04T01:01:00.000-07:00

News & analysis from Voltaire Network:

http://www.voltairenet.org/en

von Thierry Meyssan

von Thierry Meyssan

von Thierry Meyssan
par Thierry Meyssan

par Thierry Meyssan

par Domenico Losurdo
by Thierry Meyssan

by Thierry Meyssan

Documentary by Julien Teil: "Humanitarian War in Libya : There is no evidence !"
by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

2011-11-03T17:55:00.000-07:00

Nato claimed it would protect civilians in Libya, but delivered far more killing – a warning to the Arab world and Africa

27 10 2011

* After 9 months of championing NATO and the ‘Rebels’, The Guardian decide now to reflect on the devastating humanitarian impact ‘intervention’ has had on Libya

By Seumas Milne

As the reality of what western media have hailed as Libya’s “liberation” becomes clearer, the butchering of Gaddafi has been revealed as only a reflection of a much bigger picture. On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch reported the discovery of 53 bodies, military and civilian, in Gaddafi’s last stronghold of Sirte, apparently executed – with their hands tied – by former rebel militia.

Its investigator in Libya, Peter Bouckaert, told me yesterday that more bodies are continuing to be discovered in Sirte, where evidence suggests about 500 people, civilians and fighters, have been killed in the last 10 days alone by shooting, shelling and Nato bombing.

That has followed a two month-long siege and indiscriminate bombardment of a city of 100,000 which has been reduced to a Grozny-like state of destruction by newly triumphant rebel troops with Nato air and special-forces support.

And these massacre sites are only the latest of many such discoveries. Amnesty International has now produced compendious evidence of mass abduction and detention, beating and routine torture, killings and atrocities by the rebel militias Britain, France and the US have backed for the last eight months – supposedly to stop exactly those kind of crimes being committed by the Gaddafi regime.

Throughout that time African migrants and black Libyans have been subject to a relentless racist campaign of mass detention, lynchings and atrocities on the usually unfounded basis that they have been loyalist mercenaries. Such attacks continue, says Bouckaert, who witnessed militias from Misrata this week burning homes in Tawerga so that the town’s predominantly black population – accused of backing Gaddafi – will be unable to return.

All the while, Nato leaders and cheerleading media have turned a blind eye to such horrors as they boast of a triumph of freedom and murmur about the need for restraint. But it is now absolutely clear that, if the purpose of western intervention in Libya’s civil war was to “protect civilians” and save lives, it has been a catastrophic failure.

Read the rest of this entry »

Murder of Gadhafi is next step to wider U.S. wars in Africa

25 10 2011

Murder of Gadhafi is next step to wider U.S. wars in Africa

Lynching in Libya – Made in U$A

by Sara Flounders

Global Research, October 24, 2011

The brutal lynching of Moammar Gadhafi, the leader of Libya, is the latest criminal act in NATO’s seven-month war of regime change and conquest.

Gadhafi died resisting to the very end U.S.-NATO war, as he said he would. He refused to negotiate with NATO an ignominious departure for himself or to surrender. He chose a martyr’s death for Libya’s independence and sovereignty. Despite ridicule in the West, in Africa Gadhafi will be remembered as an anti-imperialist fighter.

The gross and disrespectful behavior of the National Transitional Council (TNC) in the display of Moammar Gadhafi’s body confirms to the world in the most graphic way that these elements, who the imperialist powers have given official recognition, are in fact crude, low-life gangsters.

Instead of burying Gadhafi within a day as required under Islamic law, they chose to display Gadhafi’s battered, half naked body — bloody, unwashed and uncovered — on a soiled mattress in a meat locker at a shopping center.

This affront to religious and national custom will further deepen outrage and resistance.

TNC militias did no real fighting. These divided, competing military bands operate as scavengers or vultures, calling in air strikes and lying in wait to pick over the death that NATO bombers have blasted in front of them. In seven months of NATO bombing they have shown themselves capable of firing endless weapons in front of cameras and brutalizing Black Libyans, yet incapable of conducting any independent military action.

Read the rest of this entry »

For more news and analysis on Libya:
http://globalciviliansforpeace.com/

2011-10-17T06:03:00.000-07:00

'Israelis, Saudis' Behind Iran Terror Plot: Former CIA Operative

"The Congress is crazy for war with Iran” and some U.S. Senators like Joe Lieberman and John McCain “are owned by the Israelis". . . Continue

Obama Sends 100 Troops to Fight Ugandan Rebels

By BNO

In a letter to Congress, Obama informed that in the next months further U.S. troops will be shipped out to other African countries as well, including South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Continue

From The Archives
Fresh Uganda Oil Find ‘Africa’s Biggest’

By The Times

Paul Atherton, chief financial officer, told The Times that the wider field it was developing, dubbed Buffalo-Giraffe, had several “billions of barrels of oil in place” Continue

Israel and Libya:
Preparing Africa for the “Clash of Civilizations”

By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

The Yinon Plan, is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the Middle Eastern and Arab states into smaller and weaker states. Continue

"Where is the U.S.-Iran Confrontation Headed?"
Obama Doubles Down

By Stephen M. Walt

It looks like the Administration is making a concerted campaign to ratchet up the pressure on Tehran. Countries like Britain, Saudi Arabia and France are going along with that program, and no doubt Israel is happy to see this development too. Continue

Is It Immoral to Vote for Obama?

By MIKE WHITNEY

How can anyone cast a ballot for a man who they know will continue to kill people in other countries merely to advance US policy objectives? That’s the question people need to ask themselves. Continue

A Brief Message for Humanity:
We Want to be Free!

By Andrew Gavin Marshall

Can you hear it? Taste it? Smell it? See it? Touch it? … Can you feel it? The people of the world are waking up, rising up, acting up. Continue

Live Revolution
#OccupyWallStreet Live From Around the World

- Live Video -

All Occupy Wall Street Streams and IRC.

Click to view

2011-10-17T05:44:00.001-07:00

John Pilger - Civil Disobedience Is The Only Way Now

Video

Award winning journalist John Pilger
speaks at antiwar demonstration to commemorate 10 years of the war in Afghanistan - Trafalgar Square, London - 08/10/11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytC6oxf4SnI&feature=player_embedded

"The war on Afghanistan was a fraud right from the beginning, just as the attack on Iraq was a fraud and the invasion of Libya is a fraud."

2011-10-10T05:14:00.000-07:00

Stop The Machine Occupies Washington

By Stephen Lendman

October 08, 2011 "October 08, 2011 "Information Clearing House"" --

On October 6, thousands massed in Washington on the 10th anniversary of America's illegal Afghan war against a nonbelligerent country.

Years ago it was lost. Nonetheless, it continues without end. The business of America is war, permanent wars, multiple ones. One nation after another is plundered for wealth and power while homeland needs go begging.

US duopoly power spurns human and civil rights, rule of law principles, and democratic values. Long ago they were abandoned to advance Washington's imperium globally.

Allied with America's military/industrial profiteers, Wall Street runs America. Political Washington serves them. Public needs are increasingly shut out.

The criminal class in Washington is bipartisan. Every new administration and Congress exceed the worst of previous ones. America's heading straight downhill.

Political Washington is corrupted, broken, and unfixable. Thomas Jefferson wrote in America's Declaration of Independence:

"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government..."

That time is now! Change never comes top down, only bottom up by committed people demanding no less.

Fed up Americans across the country want long denied social justice. Slogans like "Banks Got Bailed Out! We Got Sold Out!" are chanted.

Occupy Together.org said "meetups" were established in 761 cities and towns.

They're heading everywhere, despite enormous obstacles confronting them. Corporate money wants them co-opted. Corrupt union bosses and political insiders are involved.

Committed leaders city by city aren't evident. Neither is focus on what matters most. Without it cosmetic changes only are possible.

Issue one is money power in private hands to make more of it. Political Washington gave bankers control for private enrichment. Wall Street crooks took full advantage, transforming America into an unprecedented money making racket.

Working Americans got scammed. They've lost their savings, jobs, homes and futures so privileged elites can get richer and more powerful.

Transforming America depends on returning money power to public hands, according to the Constitution's Article 1, Section 8, giving people through Congress sole control.

Not Goldman Sachs. Not JP MorganChase. Not Bank of America or other Wall Street giants, running America like a wholly owned subsidiary. Taking full advantage, they exploit people for profit, bribing public officials to go along.

They willingly grab all they can, getting more every election cycle to serve power, not popular interests.

They, crooked bankers and other corporate criminals transformed America into a corrupted business-run sinkhole.

Change depends on people power regaining what's lost. It includes making the business of America social justice and peace, not unbridled greed and war.

On Thursday, thousands came to Washington for social change. They also want imperial wars ended.

Their October 2011.org site said "(j)oin us in Freedom Plaza starting October 6. STOP THE MACHINE! Create a New World!"

It's for everyone concerned about "injustice, militarism and environmental destruction to join in ending concentrated corporate power" and corrupted politicians serving America's super-rich alone.

"Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!" urges wrongfully imprisoned human rights lawyer Lynne Stewart until another world worth struggling for is gotten!

Now's the time for full throttle action. Rage against the system until it is!

On October 6, after massing in Freedom Plaza, thousands marched past the US Treasury, White House and Commerce Department, shouting:

"We Got Sold Out!" "We Want Jobs! We Want Jobs!"

On the Progressive Radio News Hour, Ray McGovern said he and other were heading to Washington to stay until their demands are met.

In his September 18 Charlottesville, VA speech, he said he "look(ed) forward to descending on our own 'Tahrir Square' at Freedom Plaza in Washington....In the final analysis, we will be confronting the 'upper crust,' which my Irish grandmother described as 'a bunch of crumbs held together by a lot of dough.' "

In Washington and across America, fed up workers, students, teachers, and others vow no longer to take it anymore. Hopefully that spirit won't wane despite enormous corporate pressure to co-op it, when cold weather arrives up north, or because cops keep beating up on people as crime boss enforcers.

So far, committed activists vow to stay the course. October 2011 Americans want "to take control of our country and our lives." They'll occupy Freedom Plaza "and hold a People's Assembly (to) come up with just and sustainable solutions....and demand....people's needs be addressed."

Civil resistance is planned to achieve long denied "inherent rights and freedoms (so) our children have a chance to live in peace, to breathe clean air, and to grow edible natural food."

Urging millions to join them in person or online, "peace, justice and equality....starts here."

"History is knocking. Will you answer the call?"

Martin Luther King's Message

On April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, Martin Luther King spoke at New York's Riverside Church, saying:

"We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence, or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight."

King headlined his speech, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence."

Silence is "betrayal," he said. War in Vietnam was "an enemy of the poor."

So are multiple Obama ones today.

"(I)t should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life (in) America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam."

"This madness must cease....We must stop now....We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam."

He called for a "revolution of values, (including) declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism."

He ended quoting James Russell Lowell (1819 - 1891), saying:

"Once to every man and nation Comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth and falsehood, For the good or evil side...."

That time is now, said King. It still is unfulfilled 44 years later.

A Final Comment

On the Progressive Radio News Hour, Trends Analyst Gerald Celente discussed a visionary new society - "DIRECT DEMOCRACY NOW!"

America's "representative democracy" never worked. Today it's too corrupted to fix. Presidents and congressional members serve monied, not popular, interests."

http://directdemocracynow.org is a global movement to spread Direct Democracy, using popular referenda power replacing back room deal making.

Victor Hugo said,

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come."

That time is now.

With enough believers committed to stay the course, "Direct Democracy can happen if we make it happen."

Get involved. Enlist family and friends. Join groups. Link up with others. Do it for yourself and children. Do it for their future and yours.

Do it to stop political Washington and Wall Street crooks from selling you out. Do it to save humanity before imperial warmakers consume it.

Do it because it matters! Do it now!

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/

2011-10-05T09:17:00.000-07:00

Occupation: Coming to a City Near You?

By Mary Bottari

Find a Big Bank Protest Near You - Everyone who cares about creating an economy that works for working people should get on board. Continue

Global Revolution
Live from Occupy Wall Street

Video Stream - Chat - Twitter

This channel will feature live streams from global non violent revolution spreading across the globe, with broadcasts from Wall Street Occupation in NYC. Continue

A New American Revolution

Class Warfare Accelerating, Democracy Losing Grip

By Paul B. Farrell

Warning: Inequalities are at the heart of all revolutions. Today, inequities are at 1929 levels. Continue

US Murder of Awlaki
Obama Impeachment a Possibility, says Ron Paul

By DAN HIRSCHHORN

Paul called the killing a movement toward “tyranny.” Continue

Nearly 12,000 Prisoners Join California Hunger Strike To End Torture Conditions

By Jeffrey Kaye

California prisons are a stinking mess, a scandal of gigantic proportions. Continue

The Anti-Empire Report

Making Americans Aware Of Their Own History

By William Blum

Is history getting too close for comfort for the fragile little American heart and mind? Their schools and their favorite media have done an excellent job of keeping them ignorant of what their favorite country has done to the rest of the world. Continue

We Are The 99 Per Cent

By Mark Ruffalo

Occupy Wall Street is a peaceful stand against the big American rip-off. Support it and regain your dignity. Continue

2011-10-01T10:03:00.002-07:00

Message to the '2nd International Conference of Victims of Agent Orange / dioxin', Hanoi, August 8-9, 2011

Message to:

The Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA), on the occasion of the Second International Conference of Victims of Agent Orange / dioxin, held on August 8-9, 2011 in Ha Noi, Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.

From: Bruce McPhie

It is my pleasure and honour to send warm greetings to everyone participating in the 50^th Commemoration of Agent Orange /dioxin sprayed on Viet Nam, and to wish you great success.

This work is of vital importance, on many levels: To raise public awareness of Agent Orange around the world. To provide practical and compassionate support to the Vietnamese Agent Orange victims in desperate need. To seek the basic human right of Justice for the victims. And to disarm the war mongers from using such diabolical weapons of mass destruction again.

Many people from all walks of life, throughout Viet Nam and around the world, are dedicated to this work. They may be doctors, scientists, lawyers, journalists, or just ordinary people like me, and it is wonderful to see our numbers growing, despite the enormous obstacles put in our way by powerful vested interests with a lot to hide and a lot of guilt.

On that fateful day, August 10, 1961, when the US military began spraying toxic chemicals as a weapon of war against Viet Nam, did anyone ever stop to consider the deadly and painful consequences for Viet Nam’s people, the environment, and future generations?

For some 10 years, nearly 100 million litres of diabolical chemicals, including dioxin - perhaps the most dangerous chemical known to man - were sprayed over vast areas and on millions of innocent people in Viet Nam and even Cambodia.

In 1988, the Pentagon compiled a classified report linking Agent Orange to 28 life-threatening conditions, including genetic birth defects and many cancers. The US Academy of Sciences has confirmed this. These effects were known at the time they were being sprayed, but did anyone care?

An international conference in Stockholm in July 2002 asked the United Nations, the US government and the chemical companies to take responsibility for dealing with the long-term consequences of these toxic chemicals. But have they?

A conference at Yale University in April 2003 concluded that in Viet Nam the US had conducted QUOTE “the largest chemical warfare campaign in history.” END OF QUOTE.

I wonder how many people in the world even know that today?

The International People’s Tribunal of Conscience in Paris made its final judgment on May 18, 2009, concluding that the use of dioxin by the US military in Vietnam from 1961 to 1971 was a war crime against humanity. Has anyone been charged with these war crimes?

Now, 50 years since the war crime of Agent Orange was first unleashed on the world, in Viet Nam, we are still waiting for the guilty parties to accept their responsibility to clean up the shocking mess they left behind, or to answer for their crimes.

Now, 50 years later, millions of innocent Vietnamese victims suffer to live and die with the horrible diseases caused by Agent Orange and the kaleidoscope of other toxic chemicals used. These victims are now into the 3^rd and 4^th generation, with no end in sight. What a shocking legacy to leave for the future.

Now, 50 years later, the unrepentant war mongers continue to ignore the consequences of their criminal actions, now using Depleted Uranium munitions in the countries they have bombed since Viet Nam. These radio-active uranium shells are now an every-day weapon of war, yet, as with Agent Orange, these indiscriminate weapons not only kill in the present, but they go on killing with cancers and birth defects long into the future generations. What type of monsters can go on doing this without care?

The innocent people of Libya have now become the latest victims of such genocidal Uranium weapons - after Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. And who might be next? Depleted Uranium weapons are effectively nuclear weapons, yet so-called civilized, Western powers are using them with hardly a peep of protest. How many people even know about this? Where are the truthful stories exposing these crimes in the mainstream media? Where is the outrage?

In the case of Viet Nam, the US war propagandists told the great lie that this was a “noble cause” to “save” the people of Viet Nam. Somehow “We had to destroy the town in order to save it”, as the US army officer infamously said about 1968. Many people believed it, at least at first, because ordinary, decent people want to believe that their governments act with good intentions, not evil.

Today, imperialist wars continue to be ‘sold’ to the public by similar feel-good messages, such as the big lie that the ongoing US / NATO war against Libya is a “humanitarian mission” to “save innocent civilians”. Of course, it is no such thing. NATO is killing civilians with weapons including Depleted Uranium (the Agent Orange of the present wars), which will go on killing future generations, long after the conflict is over, as is the case with Viet Nam.

The intent in Libya is regime change for a host of other strategic reasons, none of which have anything to do with compassion for ordinary people, or respect for the rule of law. It is all about oil, control of resources, and to stop the introduction of the Gold Dinar as an alternative currency to the USD and the Euro. Powerful vested interests really don’t like that idea!

As was the case with Viet Nam, imperialist powers seek to defeat the very idea that any country can exercise its right to develop independently outside the exploitative control of the international capitalist financial system. Of course, they use nice-sounding words to hide their true intent, as they did in Viet Nam, and as they do today with Libya.

There is a long-term, consistent plan here. U.S. General Wesley Clark (Retired) is on public record saying that he was told years ago that the US Administration of George W. Bush planned to take out 7 countries in 5 years - Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran.

What do these seven countries have in common?

In the context of banking, one thing is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), thus putting them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers' central bank in Switzerland.

Kenneth Schortgen Jr., writing on Examiner.com, noted that QUOTE "six months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept euros instead of dollars for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar." END OF QUOTE

According to a Russian article titled ‘Bombing of Libya - Punishment for Ghaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar’, Gaddafi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Gaddafi was successfully working towards a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single gold dinar currency, so he had to be stopped.

George W. Bush has been replaced by a new Nobel Peace Prize-winning warrior president, but the imperialist war crimes continue with no change ‘we can believe in’, just more of the same or worse.

It is safe to assume that imperialist wars are always fought for the benefit of the rich ruling class, and never for the interests of the ordinary people. They are always sold to the public with cynical, carefully-crafted lies, and sustained corporate media propaganda. Our only defence against that is to always be sceptical, to be well-informed from a variety of news sources, and not to automatically believe the official stories promoting unjust wars with lies and misinformation.

This is one of the important and enduring lessons of the Viet Nam experience, which we all must learn if we are to understand the real reasons behind the ongoing, endless imperialist wars of the present and future.

US Major-General Smedley Butler knew this long ago. As a 33-year veteran of the US marine corps and America’s most decorated soldier, Smedley Butler became a whistle blower against war, writing his powerful book ‘War is a Racket’ way back in 1935. In that book he wrote:

“…For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it…I must face it and speak out...” He confessed to having been a “…high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” END OF QUOTE

During the American War against Viet Nam, ordinary GIs played a vital role in helping to end that imperialist war, when they awoke to the truth of what it was really all about. Similarly, veterans of the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are also mobilizing against the ‘racket of war.’ Meanwhile, Bradley Manning, who allegedly released official documents to WikiLeaks exposing the criminality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, still languishes in a US prison, tortured and denied his legal rights. In a sane world, heroic whistle blowers against wars would get the Nobel Peace Prize, wouldn’t they?

However, the war makers and profiteers are tireless and persistent in the pursuit of their vested interests. So we, the people, must be at least as equally tireless and persistent if we are to enjoy the human right to live in a sustainable world free of imperialist war.

Agent Orange is just one of the diabolical weapons of war, which should never be used again. The greatest evil is war itself. For the sake of humanity, and the planet, we must move beyond war and find peaceful means to settle conflicts. But we cannot actually move on until past crimes are properly dealt with. This includes healing the wounds of war in Viet Nam, and delivering care, compassion and justice for the innocent Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.

The world can certainly learn valuable lessons from the experiences of Viet Nam in wartime and peace.

Thank you and warm regards to you all.

Bruce McPhie

July 10, 2011

http://lemonjuicebruce.blogspot.com/

2011-09-30T23:48:00.000-07:00

Extrajudicial Executions

Ron Paul Condemns Killing of "al Qaeda’s" Awlaki

By Elizabeth Williamson

“Nobody knows if he ever killed anybody,” Mr. Paul said after a breakfast at Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics. “If the American people accept this blindly and casually…I think that’s sad.” Continue

The Due-process-free Assassination of U.S. Citizens is Now Reality

By Glenn Greenwald

From an authoritarian perspective, that's the genius of America's political culture. It not only finds ways to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power. It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards. Continue

Extrajudicial Executions
Obama Can Kill Anyone He Wants To

By Robert Dreyfuss

American citizens are supposed to have legal and civil rights that protect them from political or prosecutorial assassinations, even if they’re bad guys. Apparently, no longer. Continue

He Kills His Own People

Obama: A Disaster for Civil Liberties

By Jonathan Turley
He may prove the most disastrous president in our history in terms of civil liberties. Continue

Is The War On Terror A Hoax?

By Paul Craig Roberts

When I observe the gullibility of my fellow citizens at the absurd “terror plots” that the US government manufactures, it causes me to realize that fear is the most powerful weapon any government has for advancing an undeclared agenda.

In the past decade, Washington has killed, maimed, dislocated, and made widows and orphans millions of Muslims in six countries, all in the name of the “war on terror.” Washington’s attacks on the countries constitute naked aggression and impact primarily civilian populations and infrastructure and, thereby, constitute war crimes under law.

Nazis were executed precisely for what Washington is doing today.

Moreover the wars and military attacks have cost American taxpayers in out-of-pocket and already-incurred future costs at least $4,000 billion dollars--one third of the accumulated public debt--resulting in a US deficit crisis that threatens the social safety net, the value of the US dollar and its reserve currency role, while enriching beyond all previous history the military/security complex and its apologists.

Perhaps the highest cost of Washington’s “war on terror” has been paid by the US Constitution and civil liberties. Any US citizen that Washington accuses is deprived of all legal and constitutional rights. The Bush-Cheney-Obama regimes have overturned humanity’s greatest achievement--the accountability of government to law.

If we look around for the terror that the police state and a decade of war has allegedly protected us from, the terror is hard to find. Except for 9/11 itself, assuming we accept the government’s improbable conspiracy theory explanation, there have been no terror attacks on the US. Indeed, as RT pointed out on August 23, 2011, an investigative program at the University of California discovered that the domestic “terror plots” hyped in the media were plotted by FBI agents.

FBI undercover agents now number 15,000, ten times their number during the protests against the Vietnam war when protesters were suspected of communist sympathies. As there apparently are no real terror plots for this huge workforce to uncover, the FBI justifies its budget, terror alerts, and invasive searches of American citizens by thinking up “terror plots” and finding some deranged individuals to ensnare. For example, the Washington DC Metro bombing plot, the New York city subway plot, the plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago were all FBI brainchilds organized and managed by FBI agents.

RT reports that only three plots might have been independent of the FBI, but as none of the three worked they obviously were not the work of such a professional terror organization as Al Qaeda is purported to be. The Times Square car bomb didn’t blow up, and apparently could not have.

The latest FBI sting ensnared a Boston man, Rezwan Ferdaus, who is accused of planning to attack the Pentagon and US Capitol with model airplanes packed with C-4 explosives. US Attorney Carmen Ortiz assured Americans that they were never in danger, because the FBI’s undercover agents were in control of the plot.

Ferdaus’ FBI-organized plot to blow up the Pentagon and US Capitol with model airplanes has produced charges that he provided “material support to a terrorist organization” and plotted to destroy federal buildings--the most serious charge which carries 20 imprisoned years for each targeted building.

What is the terrorist organization that Ferdaus is serving? Surely not al Qaeda, which allegedly outwitted all 16 US intelligence services, all intelligence services of America’s NATO and Israeli allies, NORAD, the National Security Council, Air Traffic Control, Dick Cheney, and US airport security four times in one hour on the same morning. Such a highly capable terror organization would not be involved in such nonsense as a plot to blow up the Pentagon with a model airplane.

As an American who was in public service for a number of years and who has always stood up for the Constitution, a patriot’s duty, I must hope that the question has already popped into readers’ minds why we are expected to believe that a tiny model airplane is capable of blowing up the Pentagon when a 757 airliner loaded with jet fuel was incapable of doing the job, merely making a hole not big enough for an airliner.

When I observe the gullibility of my fellow citizens at the absurd “terror plots” that the US government manufactures, it causes me to realize that fear is the most powerful weapon any government has for advancing an undeclared agenda.

If Ferdaus is brought to trial, no doubt a jury will convict him of a plot to blow up the Pentagon and US Capitol with model airplanes. Most likely he will be tortured or coerced into a plea bargain.

Apparently, Americans, or most of them, are so ruled by fear that they suffer no remorse from “their” government’s murder and dislocation of millions of innocent people. In the American mind, one billion “towel-heads” have been reduced to terrorists who deserve to be exterminated. The US is on its way to a holocaust that makes the terrors Jews faced from National Socialism into a mere precursor.

Think about this: Are not you amazed that after a decade (2.5 times the length of WW II) of killing Muslims and destroying families and their prospects in six countries there are no real terrorist events in the US?

Think for a minute how easy terrorism would be in the US if there were any terrorists. Would an Al Qaeda terrorist from the organization that allegedly pulled off 9/11--the most humiliating defeat ever suffered by a Western power, much less “the world’s only superpower”--still in the face of all the screening be trying to hijack an airliner or to blow one up?

Surely not when there are so many totally soft targets. If America were really infected with a “terrorist threat,” a terrorist would merely get in the massive lines awaiting to clear airport “security” and set off his bomb. It would kill far more people than could be achieved by blowing up an airliner, and it would make it completely clear that “airport security” meant no one was safe.

It would be child’s play for terrorists to blow up electric sub-stations as no one is there, nothing but a chain link fence. It would be easy for terrorists to blow up shopping centers. It would be easy for terrorists to dump boxes of roofing nails on congested streets and freeways during rush hours, tying up main transportation arteries for days.

Before, dear reader, you accuse me of giving terrorists ideas, do you really think that these ideas would not already have occurred to terrorists capable of pulling off 9/11?

But nothing happens. So the FBI arrests a guy for planning to blow up America with a model airplane. It is really depressing how many Americans will believe this.

Consider also that American neoconservatives, who have orchestrated the “war on terror,” have no protection whatsoever and that the Secret Service protection of Bush and Cheney is minimal. If America really faced a terrorist threat, especially one so professional to have brought off 9/11, every neoconservative along with Bush and Cheney could be assassinated within one hour on one morning or one evening.

The fact that neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, William Kristol, Libby, Addington, et. al., live unprotected and free of fear is proof that America faces no terrorist threat.

Think now about the airliner shoe-bomb plot, the shampoo-bottled water plot, and the underwear-bomb plot. Experts, other than the whores hired by the US government, say that these plots are nonsensical. The “shoe bomb” and “underwear bomb” were colored fireworks powders incapable of blowing up a tin can. The liquid bomb, allegedly mixed up in an airliner toilet room, has been dismissed by experts as fantasy.

What is the purpose of these fake plots? And remember, all reports confirm that the “underwear bomber” was walked onto the airliner by an official, despite the fact that the “underwear bomber” had no passport. No investigation was ever conducted by the FBI, CIA, or anyone into why a passenger without a passport was allowed on an international flight.

The purpose of these make-believe plots is to raise the fear level and to create the opportunity for former Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff to make a fortune selling porno-scanners to the TSA.

The result of these hyped “terrorist plots” is that every American citizen, even those with high government positions and security clearances, cannot board a commercial airline flight without taking off his shoes, his jacket, his belt, submitting to a porno-scanner, or being sexually groped. Nothing could make it plainer that “airport security” cannot tell a Muslim terrorist from a gung-ho American patriot, a US Senator, a US Marine general, or a CIA operative.

If a passenger requires for health or other reasons quantities of liquids and cremes beyond the limits imposed on toothpaste, shampoo, food, or medications, the passenger must obtain prior approval from TSA, which seldom works. One of America’s finest moments is the case, documented on UTube, of a dying woman in a wheelchair, who requires special food, having her food thrown away by the gestapo TSA despite the written approval from the Transportation Safety Administration, her daughter arrested for protesting, and the dying woman in the wheelchair left alone in the airport.

This is Amerika today. These assaults on innocent citizens are justified by the mindless right-wing as “protecting us against terrorism,” a “threat” that all evidence shows is nonexistent.

No American is secure today. I am a former staff associate of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee. I required high security clearances as I had access to information pertaining to all US weapons programs. As chief economist of the House Budget Committee I had information pertaining to the US military and security budgets. As Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, I was provided every morning with the CIA’s briefing of the President as well as with endless security information.

When I left the Treasury, President Reagan appointed me to a super-secret committee to investigate the CIA’s assessment of Soviet capability. Afterwords I was a consult to the Pentagon. I had every kind of security clearance.

Despite my record of highest security clearances and US government confidence in me including confirmation by the US Senate in a presidential appointment, the airline police cannot tell me from a terrorist.

If I were into model airplanes or attending anti-war demonstrations, little doubt I, too, would be arrested.

After my public service in the last quarter of the 20th century, I experienced during the first decade of the 21st century all of America’s achievements, despite their blemishes, being erased.

In their place was erected a monstrous desire for hegemony and highly concentrated wealth. Most of my friends and my fellow citizens in general are incapable of recognizing America’s transformation into a warmonger police state that has the worst income distribution of any developed country.

It is extraordinary that so many Americans, citizens of the world’s only superpower, actually believe that they are threatened by Muslim peoples who have no unity, no navy, no air force, no nuclear weapons, no missiles capable of reaching across the oceans.

Indeed, large percentages of these “threat populations,” especially among the young, are enamored of the sexual freedom that exists in America. Even the Iranian dupes of the CIA-orchestrated “Green Revolution” have forgotten Washington’s overthrow of their elected government in the 1950s. Despite America’s decade-long abusive military actions against Muslim peoples, many Muslims still look to America for their salvation.

Their “leaders” are simply bought off with large sums of money.

With the “terrorist threat” and Al Qaeda deflated with President Obama’s alleged assassination of its leader, Osama bin Laden, who was left unprotected and unarmed by his “world-wide terrorist organization,” Washington has come up with a new bogyman--the Haqqanis.

According to John Glaser and anonymous CIA officials, US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen “exaggerated” the case against the Haqqani insurgent group when he claimed, setting up a US invasion of Pakistan, that the Hagganis were an operating arm of the Pakistan government’s secret service, the ISI. Adm. Mullen is now running from his “exaggeration,” an euphemism for a lie. His aid Captain John Kirby said that Mullen’s “accusations were designed to influence the Pakistanis to crack down on the Haqqani Network.” In other words, the Pakistanis should kill more of their own people to save the Americans the trouble.

If you don’t know what the Haqqani Network is, don’t be surprised. You never heard of Al Qaeda prior to 9/11.

The US government creates whatever new bogymen and incidents are necessary to further the neoconservative agenda of world hegemony and higher profits for the armaments industry.

For ten years, the “superpower” American population has sat there, being terrified by the government’s lies. While Americans sit in fear of non-existent “terrorists” sucking their thumbs, millions of people in six countries have had their lives destroyed. As far as any evidence exists, the vast majority of Americans are unperturbed by the wanton murder of others in countries that they are incapable of locating on maps.

Truly, Amerika is a light unto the world, an example for all.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was appointed by President Reagan Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and confirmed by the US Senate. He was Associate Editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, and he served on the personal staffs of Representative Jack Kemp and Senator Orrin Hatch.

He was staff associate of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, staff associate of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, and Chief Economist, Republican Staff, House Budget Committee. He wrote the Kemp-Roth tax rate reduction bill, and was a leader in the supply-side revolution.

He was professor of economics in six universities, and is the author of numerous books and scholarly contributions. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

The FBI Again Thwarts Its Own Terror Plot

By Glenn Greenwald
The FBI has received substantial criticism over the past decade -- much of it valid -- but nobody can deny its record of excellence in thwarting its own Terrorist plots. Continue

Blair to be Declared 'Persona Non Grata'

By Press TV

The PLO decided that Blair is no longer trusted to be an international representative as he is strongly lobbying European powers to decline a Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN Security Council, and that they would declare him 'persona non grata' in the next few days. Continue

The Best Among Us

By Chris Hedges
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Continue

2011-09-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

Libya -
NATO's war of aggression continues, and so do the media lies!

NTC Lies, The alleged Mass Graves of Abu Salim contain nothing but Camel Bones

According to a French journalist, the famous grave of Abu Salim contains nothing but camel bones.

Venezuela condemns U.S., NATO, UN over Libya War at UN General Assembly

Venezuelan Foreign Minister: "There is a very serious threat to global peace: a new cycle of colonial wars, which started in Libya, with the sinister goal of refreshing the capitalist global system."

Libya: Illustrious corpses -- the truth is always revolutionary

This is an absolute must-read analysis: one of the best reads in a long time -- this correctly throws light on the blatant exposure of the numerous layers of gate-keepers from so many areas of life: media such as The Guardian and the New York Times to organizations such as Amnesty International and the United Nations, as well as journalists, intellectuals and activists...

Muammar Gaddafi: Libya will never belong to traitors, Libya will be a hell for them

Message by the Leader of the Revolution broadcast on Bani Walid radio on September 26.

Truth about Libya, Gaddafi and Western Media Lies

USA, Canada, most of West Europe, 40 countries are at war, and their populations do not even know it

LIBYA NEWS from Mathaba

http://www.mathaba.net/news/libya/

***

Exposing mainstream media lies!

Learn the truth about the unjust NATO war against Libya. An excellent source of regularly updated news and information on the events leading up to the NATO intervention, ongoing political analysis of the situation and recent videos illustrating the response of the Libyan people.

Global Civilians for Peace in Libya
http://globalciviliansforpeace.com/

2011-09-24T04:43:00.000-07:00

From Al Burke, "Nordic News Network":


	Link to the article: http://www.nnn.se/pox/agee-0911.htm The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the USA triggered an orgy of selective retrospection by Western mainstream media. Here, two examples from Sweden: “We were all Americans” declares The Local, a news website based in Stockholm (although many reader comments express an emphatic distaste for that sentiment). “The sorrow still remains” intones Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's leading newspaper, with a full front-page concern that fails to include the vastly greater sorrow still remaining in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq and so many other countries afflicted by U.S. aggression.
	Phillip Agee and the 9/11 streetcar to the “war on terror” There is much to suggest that many or all of the repressive and hegemonistic policies implemented by U.S. governments during the past 10 years were planned well in advance.
	In his book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and The Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg explains how the U.S. government made extensive preparations for an invasion of Vietnam and then waited for a suitable excuse to begin: “Patrols were ordered back into the Tonkin Gulf for the first time in five months, with the mission of provoking an attack.… The American public, in the dark about the Administration's objectives and sense of commitment in Vietnam, still needed to be given a plausible reason for dropping bombs on [northern] Vietnam. But it shouldn't take long now for one to come around. McGeorge Bundy recalled later that it was like waiting for a streetcar.” The streetcar came shortly thereafter and became known as the Tonkin Gulf incident; it was an attack by the Vietnamese that never happened, despite all the provocations documented by Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers. But with a lot of help from the mainstream press, it sufficed to “justify” the long-planned invasion and all the subsequent horrors infllicted on the peoples of Indochina during ten or more years of appallingly aggressive war.
	Ten years ago today, another streetcar came along in the form of the terror attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. This time, it was real enough-- airplanes crashing into large buildings, annihilating those in New York with an ease and rapid efficiency that have aroused suspicions among numerous technical experts that other factors must also have been involved. Whatever the ultimate resolution of those suspicions, the fact remains that the 9/11 attacks have been used by U.S. governments as its excuse for several wars of aggression, massive violations of norms and laws relating to civil and human rights, and more. As President Bush II and several members of his government observed, the attacks provided an excellent ”opportunity”. That choice of words and much else suggest that, like the Vietnam War, many or all of the repressive and hegemonistic policies implemented by U.S. governments during the past ten years were planned well in advance. If the 9/11 streetcar hadn't come along, there would have surely been another one soon enough, That is certainly a conclusion that may be drawn from a speech given by Philip Agee in Stockholm on 24 September, thirteen days after the streetcar named 9/11. The speech was remarkably prophetic, as events have unfolded pretty much as he foresaw and explained-- no doubt reflecting Philip's perspicacity and foresight, but also the predictability of the U.S. power elite for anyone familiar with its patterns of thought and behaviour. Accordingly, the text of Philip's speech from ten years ago is well-worth studying, whether for the first or an additional time. It is in PDF format and can be accessed by clicking on the following link:
	Text of Agee speech (PDF: 1.5 MB) Related items Tribute to Philip upon his death in 2008 Review of Secrets byDaniel Ellsberg (PDF: 60 KB) * * * * *
	CHILDREN WHO MATTER To the Editor The Independent (U.K.) 11 Sept. 2011 Channel 4 and The Independent on Sunday have chosen to contemplate the fates of children left behind by victims of a rare act of aggression against the United States ("9/11 10 years on: The children left behind", 4 September). I cannot recall any corresponding interest by the mainstream press in the children left behind by victims of habitual US aggression in Indochina, Latin America and the rest of the world. Granted, a fair treatment of that subject would consume a vastly greater and constantly expanding space. Still... Al Burke Sweden

_________________________

Al Burke, "Nordic News"

Internet: http://www.nnn.se

Sweden

2011-09-11T10:27:00.000-07:00

911 Experts Speak Out

Video
Are All Of These Architects and Engineers Wrong?

Please take the time to watch this, by far the most professional, remarkable and convincing video yet made...The best documentary on 9/11... No fancy theories about mysterious agencies or fanciful technologies, just classic physics, logic and thermodynamics. . . what AE911Truth does is 'compelling evidence'.

Watch the TRAILER!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIOC1J44RYw

Then watch the complete documentary!

'Lemon Juice' Bruce

Tomgram:

Peter Van Buren, Thought Crime in Washington

By Peter Van BurenPosted on November 27, 2011, Printed on November 28, 2011http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175472/

© 2011 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175472/

Read more by Gareth Porter

It doesn't matter to them if it's untrue. It's a higher truth.

The worldwide eternal belief that American foreign policy has a good side that can be appealed to

America's presstitutes

The Iraqi Lullabye

The United Nations vote on the Cuba embargo — 20 years in a row

Notes

Chris Hedges: No way in US system to vote against banks

Murder of Gadhafi is next step to wider U.S. wars in Africa

By Peter Van Buren
Posted on November 27, 2011, Printed on November 28, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175472/

© 2011 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175472/