Tales of an Empire Gone Mad. The United States and Its Comrade-in-Arms, Al Qaeda. Afghanistan in the 1980s and 90s … Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s … Libya 2011 … Syria 2012 … In military conflicts in each of these countries the United States and al Qaeda (or one of its associates) have been on the same side. 1 What does this tell us about the United States’ “War On Terrorism”? Regime change has been the American goal on each occasion: overthrowing communists (or “communists”), Serbians, Slobodan Milosevic, Moammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad … all heretics or infidels, all non-believers in the empire, all inconvenient to the empire. Why, if the enemy is Islamic terrorism, has the United States invested so much blood and treasure against the PLO, Iraq, and Libya, and now Syria, all mideast secular governments? Why are Washington’s closest Arab allies in the Middle East the Islamic governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain?
William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Notes. 1. 2. False Flags: An American Tradition in the Business of “Covert Operations Designed to Deceive the Public” Wikipedia defines false or black flags as “covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities.” They’re “big lies,” defined by Merriam-Webster as “deliberate gross distortion(s) of the truth used especially as a propaganda tactic.” America’s decade from September 11, 2001 to May 1, 2011 was punctuated by the (big) lie of our time and (big) lie of the moment. Put another way, the official stories are falsified, myths, widely believed fantasies contrary to reality.
In his exhaustive research and writings, David Ray Griffin provided convincing evidence that 9/11 was an inside job and that bin Laden died of natural causes in mid-December 2001. The former spawned a decade of overt and covert “war on terror” lawlessness at home and abroad. Allegedly removing America’s “Enemy Number One,” in fact, may intensify, not diminish, Washington’s scheme for unchallengeable global dominance. . – a fake shoe bomber; War Criminals in Our Midst. The State Department has an office that hunts German war criminals. Bureaucracies being what they are, the office will exist into next century when any surviving German prison guards will be 200 years old. From time to time the State Department claims to have found a lowly German soldier who was assigned as a prison camp guard. The ancient personage, who had lived in the US for the past 50 or 60 years without doing harm to anyone, is then merciless persecuted, usually on the basis of hearsay.
I have never understood what the State Department thinks the alleged prison guard was supposed to have done–freed the prisoners, resign his position? What the State Department needs is an office that rounds up American war criminals. They are in abundance and not hard to find. At the Nuremberg Trials of the defeated Germans after World War II, the US government established the principle that naked aggression–the American way in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen–is a war crime. Assassination Nation. Fifty Years of US Targeted ‘Kill Lists’: From the Phoenix Program to Predator Drones [Editor's note: Information in this article pertaining to the Phoenix Program was derived primarily from the ground-breaking investigative work conducted by Douglas Valentine, author of The Phoenix Program.
Although Valentine is credited seven times in the footnotes of this story, he should have been credited by name in the body of the report due to the fact that the author of this report relied heavily on Valentine's book to craft his narrative pertaining to the Phoenix Program.] “A broad-gauged program of targeted assassination has now displaced counterinsurgency as the prevailing expression of the American way of war.”
This spring the US drone killing program has come out of the closet. Attorney General Eric Holder publicly defended the drone killing of an American citizen [2], while Obama’s counter terrorism czar John Brennan publicly explained and justified the target killing program [3]. Really? Would You Dodge the Draft in Afghanistan? Two years after he was sacked by President Obama as the top commander in Afghanistan for suggesting to Rolling Stone magazine that the real enemy were ”the wimps in the White House”, General Stanley A McChrystal has recycled a perennial chestnut: Bring back the draft – i.e. a conscripted army, not the volunteer army of today.
These days McChrystal teaches at Yale with what must be a protection unique in the annals of academic freedom. According to CounterPunch’s David Price, everything he tells his students is by contractual agreement off the record. But he made his proposal about the draft in a public venue. McChrystal claimed: “I think we ought to have a draft.
It’s certainly true that the volunteer army is a mess. The war, Broyles wrote, is being fought by Other People’s Children. But the truth is that despite all these fine words, a draft is never going to happen. When Obama introduced ‘the new strategy’ last year, he emphasized that the Pentagon will be getting more money not less. American Freefall. Washington has been at war since October, 2001. This war took a back seat when Bush concocted another excuse to order the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a war that went on without significant success for 8 years and has left Iraq in chaos with dozens more killed and wounded every day, a new strong man in place of the illegally executed former strongman, and the likelihood of the ongoing violence becoming civil war.
Upon his election, President Obama foolishly sent more troops to Afghanistan and renewed the intensity of that war, now in its eleventh year, to no successful effect. These two wars have been expensive. According to estimates by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, when all costs are counted the Iraq invasion cost US taxpayers $3 trillion dollars. Ditto for the Afghan war. Americans got nothing out of the wars, but as the war debt will never be paid off, US citizens and their descendants will have to pay interest on $6,000 billion of war debt in perpetuity.
The US-made Manufacturing of Wars: Challenging China, Russia for the West’s Continued Full Spectrum Dominance. The systematic Manufacturing of War, challenging Russia and China in Race for either Global Full Spectrum Dominance or Global Full Spectrum Devastation. A Comprehensive Analysis. Genesis – Pax Americana – The Race for Global Full Spectrum Dominance. When Russia´s Chief of Staff states that Russia will reserve itself the right to a first strike against the recently activated NATO missile defense shield it is not a prop from the requisites of the Russian diplomatic box of tricks, used with the purpose to achieve the one or the other trade benefit, the relief of sanctions against an allied Iran or any other demand. It is a clear and unequivocal demand for guaranties for the safety of Russia and it´s allies. (1) It is a demand from a Russia that has been under threat evener since the discontinuation of the USSR, and the subsequent US and NATO demand for a Pax Americana and Global Full Spectrum Dominance.
Russian envoy Stopped at Kosovo Border Why the War on Iraq matters today. Ali G - Iran vs. Iraq. Body Counts. By M. REZA PIRBHAI In the early days of the ‘War on Terror,’ US General Tommy Franks declared, “We don’t do body counts.” He was referring, of course, to the dead of Afghanistan. That the names of 9/11 victims have been appropriately written in stone, only makes it doubly striking that the war waged in their names generates little interest on non-US or NATO civilian deaths. In fact, a war now in its 11th year, comprising the invasion and occupation of two countries, as well as the ongoing bombing of at least three more, has not produced any holistic studies on its direct and indirect casualties.
That a global war can rage so long with no official will to ascertain the number of ‘others’ killed is indicative of the manner in which the cost of war is calculated by those states prosecuting it. Non-US and NATO dead, maimed, disappeared or displaced can’t be part of the equation if official policy is not to count. M. No, It Has Not 'Always Been This Way' One of the more common responses I get when I try to point out the alarming decline of basic civic values and practices in the US is one version or another of the following: "What are you getting so excited about? It is a dog eat dog world today, just as it has been for the entire trajectory of the human race.
The powerful have always sought to fully exploit their ability to toy with the lives of “lesser beings”. Adolf Eichmann listening as the court declares him guilty on all counts at his war crimes trial in Jerusalem in December 1961. Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives And with this response, these men--they are almost always men--feel they have really put the silly dreamer in his place, and that, moreover, that they have actually engaged in an argument and won it. Why? Because their commandingly voiced “knowledge” of the past really doesn't go much beyond the tweeter-depth slogans they have been given by the corporate media. Feral Scholar » Blog Archive » The Roles of Finance, Food, and Force in US Foreign Policy.
Losing Polio - By Laurie Garrett. Last week, a Pakistani doctor was sentenced by his government to three decades in prison for actions that helped the United States kill Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, in far-off Geneva, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a state of emergency in its decades-long battle to eradicate polio. That these two events are intimately connected speaks volumes about new challenges -- political ones -- that threaten to undermine extraordinary global health achievements. A tribal court in Peshawar sentenced Dr. Shakil Afridi to 33 years' imprisonment for treason -- a penalty considered mild given that the nontribal Pakistani government courts would have ordered death by hanging for the same alleged crime. Bin Laden was indeed inside the compound, which was raided by U.S. The same day Afridi received his sentence, leaders attending the Geneva meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA), the WHO's governing body, declared a state of emergency in the global effort to eradicate polio.
Ralph Nader: President Obama, Where Are Your Lawyers? (Re: ‘Kill List’ Meetings) America as Self-Declared Victim. America today lives with a cultivated sense of victimhood. That is the legacy of 9/11. It fills us with anxieties. It warps our self-image. It distorts our foreign relations. It is self-perpetuating. Yet we need it. Too many benefit – politically or materially or psychologically. The trauma exposed America’s vulnerability to attack.
Above all, Americans have found a renewed purpose in our dealings with the world that is unhealthy. The “global war on terror” is politically convenient, too. Afghanistan is in the same vein – even though we did have a legitimate purpose when in 2001 we ousted the Taliban and broke up the al-Qaeda network then extant (as it is not now). Elsewhere, we insist on seeing ourselves as the victims of the worldwide jihadist campaign to undo us. One reason for this feckless conduct is that the pronounced sense of American victimhood has powerfully strengthened American self-righteousness. Americans, more than most other peoples, live by their collective myths. “Militants”: media propaganda. 2010.05.21 Fatima. The face of collateral damage. Around midnight on May 21, 2010, a girl named Fatima was killed when a succession of U.S. -made Hellfire missiles, each of them five-feet long and traveling at close to 1,000 miles per hour, smashed a compound of houses in a mountain village of Mohammed Khel in North Waziristan along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Wounded in the explosions, which killed a half dozen men, Fatima and two other children were taken to a nearby hospital, where they died a few hours later. Behram Noor, a Pakistani journalist, went to the hospital and took a picture of Fatima shortly before her death. Then, he went back to the scene of the explosions looking for evidence that might show who was responsible for the attack. In the rubble, he found a mechanism from a U.S. -made Hellfire missile and gave it to Reprieve, a British organization opposed to capital punishment, which shared photographs of the material with Salon. In the religious rhetoric used by al-Qaida’s online allies, Fatima was a “martyr.”
The Imperial Mind. Americans of all types — Democrats and Republicans, even some Good Progressives — are just livid that a Pakistani tribal court (reportedly in consultation with Pakistani officials) has imposed a 33-year prison sentence on Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani physician who secretly worked with the CIA to find Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. Their fury tracks the standard American media narrative: by punishing Dr. Afridi for the “crime” of helping the U.S. find bin Laden, Pakistan has revealed that it sympathizes with Al Qaeda and is hostile to the U.S. (NPR headline: “33 Years In Prison For Pakistani Doctor Who Aided Hunt For Bin Laden”; NYT headline: “Prison Term for Helping C.I.A.
Find Bin Laden”). Except that’s a woefully incomplete narrative: incomplete to the point of being quite misleading. What Dr. That means that numerous Pakistani children who thought they were being vaccinated against Hepatitis B were in fact left exposed to the virus. In fact, the U.S. Two related points: VIDEO: Hard Truths About Afghanistan, Iran, Israel and America. U.S. Military Desperate To Be Handed Just One Solid War It Can Knock Out Of The Park. ARLINGTON, VA—Reportedly fed up with complicated and protracted operations overseas, top Pentagon officials acknowledged this week they were desperate to be given just one straightforward, no-nonsense military engagement they could really knock out of the park.
"Given all these messy, ambiguous conflicts we've been fighting against enemies you can't even put your finger on, what we could really use right now is a plain old war against a clear-cut bad guy employing conventional tactics and weaponry," said Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "No roadside bombs or plainclothes militants hiding out among innocent civilians—just a fair fight where two sides shoot at each other and someone wins. That's it. " "If Congress or our commander in chief could pull a few strings to make that happen, I swear we could totally nail a war like that, no question," Dempsey added. "Come on," the four-star general added, "we really, really need this. " The U.S. Empire’s Achilles Heel: Its Barbaric Racism. The American atrocities in Afghanistan roll on like a drumbeat from hell.
With every affront to the human and national dignity of the Afghan people, the corporate media feign shock and quickly conclude that a few bad apples are responsible for U.S. crimes, that it’s all a mistake and misunderstanding, rather than the logical result of a larger crime: America’s attempt to dominate the world by force. But even so, with the highest paid and best trained military in the world – a force equipped with the weapons and communications gear to exercise the highest standards of control known to any military in history – one would think that commanders could keep their troops from making videos of urinating on dead men, or burning holy books, or letting loose homicidal maniacs on helpless villagers. These three latest atrocities have brought the U.S. occupation the point of crisis – hopefully, a terminal one. Copyright © 2012 Black Agenda Report. To Avoid Being Locked Up in Canada Cheney Stays Locked Up At Home.
History of US Interventions. Context of 'April, 1976: Church Committee Reports on Domestic Surveillance and Other Illegal Activities by US Intelligence Agencies' Panetta’s Terrorism Error. America - Fuck Yeah! David Stockman: If You Want to Address Gas Prices, 'Stop Beating the War Drums Right Now' The Ghost and the Machine. Obama, the Human Rights Hypocrite. Expanded Role Proposed for Elite Military Forces. US Lawmakers Approve Pentagon Request to Improve Bunker-Buster Bomb. The United States and its Dark Passenger. Exhibition.
The Rise or Fall of the American Empire - By Robert Kagan, Gideon Rachman, and Daniel W. Drezner. Andrew Bacevich: Uncle Sam, global gangster. Hypnotized into an endless dirty war - War on Terror. ‘We Are Drowning’ On A Road To Nowhere. Scoring the Global War on Terror. Gidra takes on the American war machine. Various matters. Jake Tapper vs. Jay Carney on President Killing U.S. Citizens. US Interventions in the World since WW II. ABC's Jake Tapper Asks: What Exactly is Obama Doing? Khader Adnan and now-normalized Western justice. The WH Loves Aggressive Journalism — Abroad — Today’s Q’s for O’s WH — 2/22/2012. Pentagon as Lying Machine. Those weak losers who care about “law”
The American Century Is Over—Good Riddance - The Chronicle Review. Report: U.S. trained terror group. Www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R42429.pdf. World’s Apex Bully Leads World Into Lawlessness. The Blaster: The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War. Noam Chomsky on America's Declining Empire, Occupy and the Arab Spring. The Fetish of National Security: How America's Worst Crimes Are Perpetrated and Excused. Why The Rest of the World Should Tell the U.S. to F*cK Off. U.S. Military Presence Throughout the World (Map) Www.projectcensored.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/ElectromegnaticWeapons.pdf. Bush Convicted of War Crimes in Absentia. American Empire and the Future.
It’s Back to 1980, With the JCS Auctioning Off the Presidency From the Pentagon Battlements.