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Tales of an Empire Gone Mad. The United States and Its Comrade-in-Arms, Al Qaeda.

Tales of an Empire Gone Mad

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. 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.”

False Flags: An American Tradition in the Business of “Covert Operations Designed to Deceive the Public”

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.

War Criminals in Our Midst. The State Department has an office that hunts German war criminals.

War Criminals in Our Midst

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. 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.”

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.

Would You Dodge the Draft in Afghanistan?

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. American Freefall. Washington has been at war since October, 2001.

American Freefall

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. 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.

The US-made Manufacturing of Wars: Challenging China, Russia for the West’s Continued Full Spectrum Dominance

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.

Ali G - Iran vs. Iraq. Body Counts. By M.

Body Counts

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.

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?

No, It Has Not 'Always Been This Way'

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. 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.

Losing Polio - By Laurie Garrett

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. 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.

America as Self-Declared Victim

That is the legacy of 9/11. “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. 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”). 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. The U.S. Empire’s Achilles Heel: Its Barbaric Racism. The American atrocities in Afghanistan roll on like a drumbeat from hell. To Avoid Being Locked Up in Canada Cheney Stays Locked Up At Home. Earlier this week former US Vice-President Dick Cheney, the dominant, hands-on operative in the two-term presidency of George W. 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. On March 15, American Defense Secretary Leon Panetta remarked that “terrorists cannot be the friends of any country. 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.

February 11, 2012 VOA News U.S. lawmakers have approved a Pentagon request for more than $81 million in funding to make improvements to a massive bomb designed to penetrate deeply-buried enemy facilities. News reports say defense appropriators in Congress agreed to the request earlier this week, a month after Iran announced it would begin uranium enrichment at its underground Fordow facility, which is beneath a mountain near the Shi'ite holy city of Qom. 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. From Military Resistance: “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Scoring the Global War on Terror. By ANDREW J. 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.