tagged w/ U.S.
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Our leaders are now boldly selling wars as commendable instruments of such profit-focused imperialism.
June 19, 2010 |
Reading this week's New York Times headline – "U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan" – many probably wondered how this information was being presented as "news" in 2010. After all, humanity has long been aware of the country's vast natural resources. As Mother Jones magazine's James Ridgeway said after recalling past public accounts of the ore deposits, "This 'discovery' in fact is ancient history tracing back to the times of Marco Polo."
The intrigue in The Times dispatch, then, is not Afghanistan's "huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals" that the paper quotes Pentagon officials gushing about – it is the gushing itself. Indeed, the real question is: What would prompt the government to portray well-known geology as some sort of blockbuster revelation?
The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder proffers a convincing answer. Noting the military's coordinated quotes in The Times piece, he writes that the Pentagon is probably trying to bolster Americans' support for the flagging Afghanistan campaign by "publicizing or re-publicizing valid but already public information about the region's potential wealth."
This assertion, mind you, is not coming from some antiwar ideologue in a "No War for Oil!" t-shirt. On the contrary, Ambinder is a quintessential buttoned-down establishmentarian far more interested in covering political process than in pushing a pet cause – which means his charge (later echoed by other Washington journalists) is a particularly powerful one. And if he's correct, we may be witnessing the final spasm of a radical shift.
Remember, the idea that the U.S. invades countries to pilfer natural resources was once written off as an inflammatory insult and/or an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, irrespective of corroborating facts (like, say, pre-9/11 Pentagon plans to divvy up Iraqi petroleum, State Department proposals to privatize Iraq's oil fields and top government officials insisting Saddam Hussein's overthrow was "essential" to protect oil supplies). The assumption, of course, was that the public opposes resource conflicts and that therefore labeling wars as such is nothing but disreputable slander designed only to harm a political opponent.
This manufactured construct, though, began eroding as soon as George W. Bush started turning the "war for oil" aspersion into a proud clarion call.
In 2005, the Associated Press reported that the president "answered growing antiwar protests with a fresh reason for U.S. troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the country's vast oil fields." During a press conference a year later, Bush three times pitched petroleum as a rationale for war, criticizing "extreme elements" who "want to control oil resources," insisting that "we can't tolerate a new terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East with large oil reserves" and warning that we must stop insurgents from gaining "the capacity to use oil as an economic weapon."
More at the link:Our leaders are now boldly selling wars as commendable instruments of such... more
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IsraelNationalNews.com
Published: 06/20/10, 5:37 PM / Last Update: 06/20/10, 6:08 PM
US, Israel Warships in Suez May Be Prelude to Faceoff with Iran
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
Follow Israel news on Twitter and Facebook.
Egypt allowed at least one Israeli and 11 American warships to pass through the Suez Canal as an Iranian flotilla approaches Gaza. Egypt closed the canal to protect the ships with thousands of soldiers, according to the British-based Arabic language newspaper Al Quds al-Arabi.
One day prior to the report on Saturday, Voice of Israel government radio reported that the Egyptian government denied an Israeli request not to allow the Iranian flotilla to use the Suez Canal to reach Gaza, in violation of the Israeli sea embargo on the Hamas-controlled area.
International agreements require Egypt to keep the Suez open even for warships, but the armada, led by the USS Truman with 5,000 sailors and marines, was the largest in years. Egypt closed the canal to fishing and other boats as the armada moved through the strategic passageway that connects the Red and Mediterranean Seas.
Despite Egypt’s reported refusal to block the canal to Iranian boats, the clearance for the American-Israeli fleet may be a warning to Iran it may face military opposition if the Iranian Red Crescent ship continues on course to Gaza.
The warships may exercise the right to inspect the Iranian boat for the illegal transport or weapons. Newsweek reported that Egyptian authorities could stop the ship for weeks, using technicalities such as requiring that any official documents be translated from Farsi into Arabic.
The magazine’s website also reported that the Iranian navy is the weakest part of its armed forces. Tehran has already backed down from announced intentions to escort the Iranian ships with "volunteer marines” from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
The Iranian news site Hamsayeh.net reported, “The move might be in connection to U.S. self-inflicted embargo against Iran aimed at inspecting Iran bound ships for suspected goods related to the country’s nuclear program.”
Another battle on the high seas may involve one, and possibly two, Lebanese vessels that are aimed at challenging Israel’s sovereignty over the Gaza coastal waters. Hizbullah, gearing up for a reaction to a possible clash between the Israeli Navy (pictured) and the Lebanese boats, has delayed rocket units near Lebanese ports, according to unofficial military sources.
Israel has warned U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that Israel will use force, if necessary, to stop the boats, one of which is carrying approximately 70 women passengers and crew organized by Hizbullah support Samar al-Hajj. Her husband is one of several jailed suspects involved in the assassination for former Lebanese anti-Syrian Prime Rafik Hariri.
Hizbullah has denied it is connected with the Lebanese flotilla, but it has been reported that Al Hajj met with Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah last month. (IsraelNationalNews.com)IsraelNationalNews.com
Published: 06/20/10, 5:37 PM / Last Update: 06/20/10, 6:08... more
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ANALYZING STAGED WORLD CONFLICT
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor
In 2006, North Korea exploded a plutonium based nuclear weapon, an unsuccessul test of either a “found” nuke in poor repair, or something poorly designed. America had predicted that they were at least five years from this capability, we always hear the same story, everyone is five years from having nuclear weapons. On May 25th, 2009, North Korea exploded its second bomb, its first clearly identifiable nuclear weapon, a “Hiroshima sized” bomb, tiny by US standards. What we didn’t say is that the signature of this bomb had been seen before.
An identical nuclear weapon, manufactured at the same facility, same design, same impurities, had been exploded in September 22, 1979, in a test in the Indian Ocean conducted jointly by Israel and South Africa. When UN inspectors were asked to come to South Africa in 1990 to arrange to dismantle their nuclear weapons, ten bombs were admitted to having been built with one tested. Today we claim six existed, none were tested and three never existed. One of those three exploded in North Korea. The mystery is, how did it get there? Are American “broken arrow” nukes, recovered, sold and traded? What “special country” might do this?
The cover story was that Pakistan through nuclear scientist, Dr. A. Q. Khan, had supplied Korea with the required highly specialized centrifuges along with nuclear triggers and advanced missile technology. Investigations have shown, however, that the US had asked, or rather demanded, President Musharraf “convince” Khan to confess to this and a seemingly endless series of nuclear proliferation violations from South Africa to Libya to Germany. The deal was that Khan had to confess but would be immediately pardoned. We have another mystery, who was the US covering for and why? Who wanted it to seem like North Korea had a real nuclear program, who would profit by this? What could be more comical than “Cardboard Lothario” Kim Jung-il, war mongering mastermind terrorizing the world from one of the most isolated and poverty stricken nations on earth. I could carve a better “axis of evil” dictator out of a banana.
Who are the Cardboard Lotharios? They are world leaders and conflict driven icons who simply don’t seem to fit. We knew where Hitler came from, we understood Napoleon, Mussolini, even George W. Bush. With a world bereft of “prime movers,” no major ideological struggles, no national races for dwindling resources, only multi-national corporations carving away the world, today’s chaos is purely manufactured and the cardboard cutout bad-boys aren’t even good actors. Who invented Osama bin Laden, Bibi Netanyahu, Mullah Omar, Kim Jung-il, Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Do we add Hameed Karzai to the list? How to people like Libya’s Muammar Gadaffi simply quit, get taken off the list and retire as though they had been to some sort of “terrorist mastermind rehab?” Remember Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi cleric whose Mahdi army was the caused mayhem in Iraq? How can Gulbuddin Hekmatyar be number one on the world terror list and be asked by Americans to open negotiations with the Taliban at the same time? Anyone smelling a rat?
A hypothesis, several forces, conspiratorial in nature, hiding in plain sight are “out there.” The players, oil, arms, banking, are the real powers in the world, easily “super-governments,” well beyond any Illuminati-Freemason or Bilderberg conspiracy. Their game, ”they” meaning the real powers that control the governments, is managing continual regional conflicts where none, according to respected studies of the dynamics of global conflict and the real clash of “civilizations,” should exist. We live in a world where our wars, our news, the stories and myths we accept as gospel are little more than part of a play. Shakespeare had said, “All the world’s a stage and the men and women merely players” (William Shakespeare, As You Like it, Act II, Scene VII) How can we get to this point? Lets take a look at today’s hotspot, Iran.
Running with our hypothesis, we could look at two tiers of conflict, geopolitical and “irregular warfare” or “globalterrorism.” Depending on your local school system, you might call terrorism and insurgency “asymetrical warfare.” Were neither to exist, either or both can be created and stimulated easily and inexpensively yet both are major sources of significant economic gain for those pulling the strings. Conflict propagation is far more valuable than conflict resolution. Quoting Robert Duval in Apocalypse Now, “Someday, this war could end….”
To play the game, civilian rule in the United States had to be eliminated. To do that, control of the media was a must, that and an iconic disaster, a “New Pearl Harbor” as author David Ray Griffin called it, had to push America into blind obedience. Doubters became “soft on terror” and faced public scorn or worse. The icon, of course, was 9/11, nearly a decade later barely surviving under the weak cover story of a dozen or so angry Arabs performing endless acts that violate, not only all probabilities but several physical laws as well. Even the whitewash of the 9/11 Commission blew up in their faces with demands for criminal investigations being refused and all real findings classified. All that has been needed is for the media to push the myth, hide the real findings and ignore the controversy. Thus, the most massive fraud in world history was created, a three trillion dollar looting of America, two nations invaded, over a million killed and a decade of war.
To keep it going, all that has been needed is a few perfectly timed terrorist acts, London, Madrid, Detroit, Times Square, Mumbai, dozens in Pakistan, all, like 9/11, showing “Oswald ” dupes traveling around the world with the ease of diplomats in private jets.
All that was required to provide cover for an imagined worldwide terrorist conspiracy, banding together groups that hate each other more than us is the same branding process we follow when buying soap and toothpaste. “Can you give me a pack of bin Ladens, a bottle of the Mullah Omar and a bag of those Hezbollah’s please? Oh, and a lottery ticket.” You could spend a lifetime talking about terrorist leaders but one thing is true of all of them. They all worked for intelligence agencies, either the CIA, ISI, RAW, MI-6, Mossad, the Saudis or someone. For those who don’t know, an ISI officer in Pakistan is more comfortable with a Mossad agent than, let’s say, a political opponent in his own country. Anyone who works for or with one intelligence agency is likely to be handed around like a drunken sorority girl in a football locker room.
What does our hypothesis say? No terrorists were in Iraq, we attacked and suddenly, we were up to our necks in terrorists for years. When Osama bin Laden died in Afghanistan in 2001, the same bin Laden reputed to be in exile at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach, he may have been the only person in the world America knew for certain had nothing to do with 9/11. If you don’t think the FBI confirms this, go to www.fbi.gov.
More at the link:ANALYZING STAGED WORLD CONFLICT
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor
In... more
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It is not possible to imagine a better symbol of the miserable condition of the United States today than an oil company destroying a huge swath of the American ecosystem, society and economy, while the President sits by helplessly, saying that he is meeting with experts in order to find out “whose ass to kick.” Obviously, Obama should have seized all the equipment that BP had available to plug the leak, deputized their engineers, brought in the US navy and coast guard, and spent as necessary to deal with the problem within days, or even hours of the original spill, when it became clear that BP was in over its head.
That is what Lincoln did in 1861 when he took control of the railroads and telegraph lines around Washington DC, what Wilson did in 1916 when he nationalized the defense industries, what Roosevelt did in 1941 when he seized an aviation plant, and again in 1944 when he seized Montgomery Ward, it is what Truman did in 1947 when the government took control of the steel industry, in a sense it is what Reagan did in 1980 when the government fired the air controllers. These acts were all controversial but that is what strong Presidents did when facing threats no less severe than those in the Gulf today.
Why hasn’t Obama done anything like that? Ultimately the answer depends on understanding his individual character, but there are at least four large conditioning factors that will help us understand, if not the man, then the event.
First, since the 1970s neo-liberals have told us that we need small government, that markets are the best way of solving problems, that private industry is efficient and that government is wasteful. It is worth noting, at this point, that it was the Democrats who led the way in these delusions, beginning during the Carter administration, and that it is only the sham of politics that they sometimes associate themselves with populist positions. Whichever party is responsible, however, it apparently has never occurred to anyone that there is a difference between an oil company, which can only be guided by profit, and a government that can take collective, democratic needs and wishes into account. The whole sad tale shows how Americans have degraded politics and exalted markets and for what? Cheap prices?
Second, we can learn from the incident how Obama functions as a President. He is a manager, with a managerial ideology. This doesn’t only mean the priority of private interests and “cost-cutting” for such “entitlements” as equipment to deal with oil spills, not to mention health care and social security. In his case it means that he has no real authority of his own, that he has disregarded his base from the beginning, and that his method of governing is to call a meeting of the elites or powers that be, and have them come up with a solution. The powers can be generals, insurance companies, oil companies, and they can even be Republicans, but Obama is a deal maker, a trimmer, not someone trying to move the country in a new direction.
Third, we can see from the incident how in the neo-liberal era everything is understood in money terms. Thus, BP consistently promises that it will make everything right by paying claims, and Obama consistently insists that he will make them pay those claims. As if money can compensate for the destruction of communities, of marshes, of beaches, of wildlife and birds, of streams and trees and shrubs and whole ways of life embedded in the Gulf. What kind of nation suffers a wound of this sort, and thinks in terms of money? The same kind of nation that suffers a paradigm-changing blow like the recent financial crisis and acts as if controlling a few financial maneuvers will fix the problem.
Finally, we can learn from the spill that there is a difference between decisions based on values, and decisions based on data. This is a distinction Obama fails to make. His scientistic, anti-party, anti-political ideology, which he has used for health care and Afghanistan has certainly failed in the Gulf. A health care plan, a war, off-shore drilling: these are questions that need to be discussed in terms of our values, not supposedly scientific data. Yet when Obama announced that he was permitting offshore drilling three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew he said “It turns out, by the way that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” As if he knows!
Finally, as for the policy change itself, prompted by Obama’s deal making over energy, according to the New York Times, “The breadth of the expansion stunned oil industry representatives, who were expecting a much more restrictive policy accompanied by tough new safety and environmental rules. They were prepared to attack the new policy; instead, the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s main lobby, praised it.” Enough said.It is not possible to imagine a better symbol of the miserable condition of the United... more
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From the Washington Post…
Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.
Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.
Nobel Prize
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.From the Washington Post…
Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken... more
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Four ways to see the true drivers of current wars around the world.
June 16, 2010 |
Editor's Note: With so many problems in the USA, it's no easy job to single out a handful of the most important, priority issues. But the enormous pile of wasted money spent on wars and the military-industrial complex has to be right at the top. Not only is the money spent an enormous destructive waste, but there's also the question of opportunity cost; just a fraction of war money could make major improvements to health care, schools and universities, and our decaying public infrastructure. The release of the Pentagon's Quadrennal Defense Review indicates that Obama intends to spend even more on war. David DeGraw's article below sheds some light on the madness of war spending and the serious attempts made by the racketeers to make our wars self-perpetuating to keep the cash rolling in; infuriating as it is sickening.
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A few recent news items help expose the true drivers of current wars around the world.
#1) Wherever there is a war, look for CIA/IMF/private military war profiteers covertly funding and supporting BOTH sides in order to keep the wars raging and the profits rolling in. As former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell explained: “Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the US military machine to turn.”
Here’s an important glimpse of truth to seep through last week in the NY Times, via Raw Story:
US-backed ‘bribes’ in Afghanistan may be funding Taliban
On June 7, the day Afghanistan became America’s longest-ever war, the New York Times reported on an ongoing investigation poised to prove that private security companies “are using American money to bribe the Taliban” to fuel combat and thus enhance demand for their services. The news follows a “series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents,” the Times said.
“The American people are paying to prop up a corrupt government that may be using our money to pay private companies to drum up business by paying the insurgents to attack our troops,” [Kucinich] said…. The Times interviewed a NATO official in Kabul who “believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban.” [read more]
#2) On top of that report, Sunday’s headlines read, “Pakistani spy agency supports Taliban:”
Pakistan’s main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group’s leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, said a research report released Sunday.
The findings could heighten tension between the two countries and raise further questions about U.S. success in Afghanistan since Pakistani cooperation is seen as key to defeating the Taliban, which seized power in Kabul in the 1990s with Islamabad’s support.
U.S. officials have suggested in the past that current or former members of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, have maintained links to the Taliban despite the government’s decision to denounce the group in 2001 under U.S. pressure.
More at the link:Four ways to see the true drivers of current wars around the world.
June 16, 2010 |... more
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THE brutal raid on the freedom flotilla carrying humanitarian supplies that was trying to break the blockade of Gaza was bound to provoke outrage—and rightly so.
The Israeli government arrogantly declared that Israel had the right to defend itself, in justification of the massacre of unarmed humanitarians.
And this ” right to defend itself ” jazz seemed as some kind of ” reverse logic”, to almost everybody who were following the updates of this terrible incident on TV screens, including the people with impartial view on the Arab – Israeli conflict, but this Israeli raid somehow helped them to take sides.
The Israeli statement failed to gain any worldwide sympathy this time, it failed to delude people.
This time, Israel looked as the aggressor, and only an act of god could convince people otherwise. And actually this is what the Israelis needed, a divine intervention, maybe another parting of the sea, which would have swallowed up the aid flotilla and spared the Israeli commandos the trouble of confronting enemies in international waters.
Anyhow, the Israeli commandos must have killed those civilians with a clear conscience, for they were assured that God was on their side, at least that how the Rabbis must have brainwashed them beforehand, the same way that happened in the inhumane Israeli war on Gaza2008- 2009.
To those commandos, they were not engaged in a military mission but in holy war. And speaking of holiness, let’s go back in time and take a look at the Israeli conflicts in the bible.
The holy conflict scenario
Scholars failed to trace the Jews to any affinity to an ancient cultural tradition other than the Ibraheimic tale. And agreed that being Jewish is solely a religious affiliation?
Remove the old bible with all its fancy tales of the Israelites and you’ll be literally left with nothing, absolutely nothing worth mentioning regarding the Jews or their heritage as if they never existed outside the narrative of the Old Testament. Or maybe they did, but in a far different manner from the biblical story.
That’s why most scholars of ancient near eastern history relied primarily on the bible to study the ancient history of the Israelites but that is no longer the case. In the last quarter century or so, archaeologists have seen one settled assumption after another concerning who the ancient Israelites were and where they came from proved false.
If you examined the history of the Israelites in the ancient near east, from a biblical perspective, you would be surprised by the fact that Israel had always been depicted as the one nation exclusively chosen by their God, but on the contrary to that unjustified and weird divine attitude, the Israelites had commonly been persecuted by their neighbors.
Intolerance of the Jews has always been the most commonly shared feature of every tribe or culture or even kingdom that came to deal with Israel as far as the old bible is concerned.
Conflict due to intolerance of Israel has been a biblical reality whenever Israel has existed as a nation in the old testament. Whether it was the Egyptians, Amalekites, Midianites, Moabites, Ammonites, Amorites, Philistines, Assyrians, Persians, or Romans, the nation of Israel has always been surrounded by and persecuted by its neighbors. Why is this?
There are two possible answers to this question;
1 – The biblical narrative could be correct, and all the above cultures, authorities and monarchies acted antagonistically to the Jews.
2 – The biblical narrative could be corrected and refuted by another and more solid vision of the ancient Israelites era, namely modern archaeology.
Early biblical archaeology was conducted in “bible and spade “approach with the presumption that the bible must be true, finds only being considered as illustrations for the biblical narrative, and interpreting evidence to fit the bible.
The first biblical archaeologists were thus guilty of one of the most elementary of scientific blunders: rather than allowing the facts to speak for themselves, they had tried to fit them into a preconceived theoretical framework. Another layer of political mystification was added in the twentieth century by Zionist pioneers eager for evidence that the Jewish claim to the Holy Land was every bit as ancient as the Old Testament said it was.
But since the 1970s most archaeologists have begun instead to interpret the evidence only in the light of other archaeology, treating the bible as an artifact to be examined, rather than as an unquestioned truth.
Israeli archeologist, Ze’ev Herzog born 1941, professor of archaeology at The Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University , is considered one of the leading figures in that modern field archeology along with his colleague archeologist, Israel Finkelstein.
In 1999 Herzog’s cover page article in the weekly magazine Haaretz “Deconstructing the walls of Jericho” attracted considerable public attention and debates. In this article Herzog cites evidence supporting that “the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom.
And archaeologists noticed that ancient chronicles and records of all the above mentioned authorities and kingdoms were silent and devoid of any record of a conflict with the ancient Israelites.
And if modern scientific history and archaeology managed to refute the bible claims to history, and showed that Jewish bible scribes were keen on portraying Israel as the nation surrounded by imaginary enemies,who held them in enslavement and captivity, In an attempt to keep the conflict scenario going, and keep the sympathy with Israel going. But what does that say of the legitimacy of the holy war that the Israeli military is now waging on alleged enemies, especially that the pro-Palestinian sympathy is considerably gaining momentum worldwide.
For Israel, this aid flotilla tragedy should be the starting point for deeper questions—about the Israeli list of potential and alleged enemies, about the Jewish state’s increasing loneliness
Israel is caught in a vicious circle. The more it tends to shoot opponents first and ask questions later, the more it finds that the world is indeed full of enemies.THE brutal raid on the freedom flotilla carrying humanitarian supplies that was trying... more
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LONDON TIMES STORY OUTLINING NUKE ATTACK ON IRAN CITED
AS ISRAELI DECEPTION TO MANIPULATE U.S. STOCK MARKET
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor
The London Times reported today that Saudi Arabia has given permission for Israel to fly over their territory to attack unspecified “nuclear facilities” in Iran. Mention of specific Saudi actions including deactivating their air defense systems to allow Israel use of their airspace was directly referenced by the Times in their story by Hugh Tomlinson. However, not only is such a possibility not a possibility, the story itself is designed to destabilize world markets.
Iran is capable of closing the Straits of Hormuz and stopping all oil shipments from, not only the Persian Gulf states, including Kuwait and Iran but Saudi Arabia itself. At the first sight of an Israeli plane, every tanker and oil facility in the Gulf would be destroyed and the Saudi capital in ruins from Iranian missiles.
The closing of the Straits alone would crash the world’s stock markets instantly throwing the world into an immediate depression. Oil would go over $250 a barrel overnight and gas prices in the US would hit $10 per gallon. This is not speculation.
IRANIAN SILKWORM MISSILE NEAR HORMUZ
Iran’s military capability has been focused entirely on closing the Straits and cutting off much of the world’s oil supply. Thousands of Chinese Silkworm missiles are at the ready, set into the islands of the Straits seized by Iran years ago or hidden along the coastline or on mobile launchers. In fact, the US Navy is would have to immediately withdraw from the region.
Every defense specialist in the world knows all of this. The United Arab Emirates sits across the Straits from Iran and stares into this mass of missiles, torpedo boats and submarines. They are funding a massive missile defense system and have even considered spending billions to construct a canal bypassing the narrow straits. Iranian troops have been dug into islands adjacent to the Straits for decades. When talking about the Straits of Hormuz, the term “tight as a tick” comes to mind. “Duck in a barrel” is another analogy with us being the ducks.
The game isn’t to start a war, knowing full well that America would be required to defend Saudi Arabia though there are no agreements to defend Israel, especially if they are the aggressor. With over $2 trillion dollars pumped from the US economy by Israeli-American companies like Goldman Sachs during the Bush sponsored “pump and dump,” the “banksters” weren’t satisfied. They now want to pick America’s bones.
Any attack on Iran that involved Saudi Arabia in any way would bring an automatic response from Pakistan. Without their military efforts, the US would be forced to withdraw from Afghanistan in weeks. Even with their help, and increased force levels, America’s presence is unsustainable as the Karzai government has already collapsed. Nobody is admitting it yet but Karzai and his US backers rule nothing and control nothing, even worse than when Bush left office.
The real players in the Middle East are Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. Two of these nations are major US allies. The population of the three nations exceeds that of the US and their combined armies number, with reserves at two million, over double that of the United States. Were the three to join together, Afghanistan and Iraq would be forced, out of survival to join in, creating a contiguous state, a nuclear state, capable of taking Saudi Arabia in days and doing so without any US resistance. After all, these are American allies and Saudi Arabia would be, technically, an aggressor nation. Though mutual defense pacts do not include Iran, a history of resentment against Saudi-Israeli collusion and the current chill between Israel and Turkey would build this polyglot coalition state almost overnight.
In the long run, such a country would be the real strategic partner the US has always desired, with a single nuclear arsenal under Pakistani control and Iranian issues eliminated as they would be the junior power in a coalition with decades of ties to the US. If any of this seems difficult to grasp, position papers outlining this exact situation have been around for years.
Given the chance, Israel would join this group of states. Those familiar with private “back channel” diplomatic initiatives know that this has is considered. Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan all maintain a covert level of cordial relations with Israel, relations poisoned by the Gaza crisis.
Israel’s aggressive stance toward apartheid expansionism, fueled by the hubris supplied by American hegemony in the region is only one of the considerations needed in evaluating the dynamic in the region. The humiliation Turkey suffered, despite the fact Turkey’s powerful military has always worked closely with Israel, threatens to destabilize their civilian government and add to Islamic militancy there.
Iraq is going through a rough period after recent elections. They are expect to ask the US to keep troops in place in significant numbers well past the agreed upon date of withdrawal.
Iran, a country whose civil government is extremely unpopular with its own people, maintains stability through police state tactics rivaling those of the Shah’s Savak and punishes its own population by maintaining status as a rogue state, a virtual pariah nation, as a way of clamping down on dissent.
Afghanistan is in total collapse. Along with the Taliban, a number of additional divides with the nation have occurred and the new national army and police force are total failures. An informal defacto government is now ruling increasing areas of the country and may be able to build stability if certified by the royal families. President Karzai is trying to work closely with Pakistan, a major policy change for him, out of a combination of necessity and panic. However, Karzai has burned too many bridges to be able to bring cordial relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, nations with a history of rivalry and some acrimony.
Pakistan may be the key to the puzzle. Pakistan’s unsteady democracy has been ineffective but current military leadership in Pakistan is highly competent, very pro-US and moderate. The primary problems are Pakistan’s economy, nearing total collapse and the instability of terrorism that has pushed Pakistan to the edge. Pakistan’s desire is to underwrite economic growth but has no oil resources for such as task. Without the ability to overcome internal corruption and address the root causes of extremism in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, Pakistan faces destabilization. Membership in a coalition state would address some of these problems. Occupation of Saudi Arabia under an “Islamic Protectorate” necessitated by Israeli incursions into Saudi airspace would solve all of Pakistan’s problems.
The media can be a powerful thing. When a story, such as the one in the London Times, could jolt markets or push nations to irational acts, a poor understanding of regional conditions and history could have quite another effect, one entirely unexpected.LONDON TIMES STORY OUTLINING NUKE ATTACK ON IRAN CITED
AS ISRAELI DECEPTION TO... more
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For 40 years, intelligence analysts have kept this knowledge secret, a testament to our country's widespread fear of the Israel lobby.
By Ray McGovern
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee brags that it is the most influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill, and it has demonstrated that time and again, and not only on Capitol Hill.
Nowhere is the lobby's power more clearly demonstrated than in its ability to suppress the awful truth that on June 8, 1967, during the Six Day War:
* Israel deliberately attacked the intelligence collection ship USS Liberty, in full awareness it was a U.S. Navy ship, and did its best to sink it and leave no survivors;
* The Israelis would have succeeded had they not broken off the attack upon learning, from an intercepted message, that the commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet had launched carrier fighters to the scene; and
* By that time, 34 of the Liberty's crew had been killed and over 170 wounded…
Scores of intelligence analysts and senior officials have known this for years. That virtually all of them have kept a 40-year frightened silence is testament to the widespread fear of touching this live wire.
Even more telling is the fact that the National Security Agency destroyed voice tapes seen by many intelligence analysts, showing beyond doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing.
But the truth will come out — eventually. All it took in this case is for a courageous journalist (of the endangered species kind) to listen to the surviving crew and do a little basic research, not shrinking from naming war crimes and not letting senior U.S. officials, from the president on down off the hook for suppressing — even destroying — unimpeachable evidence from intercepted Israeli communications.
The mainstream media have now published an exposé based largely on interviews with those most intimately involved.
A lengthy article by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter John Crewdson appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on Oct. 2 titled "New revelations in attack on American spy ship." (For the full story, click here.)
To the subtitle goes the prize for understatement of the year: "Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn't tell full story of deadly 1967 incident."
Better 40 years late than never, I suppose. Many of us have known of the incident and coverup for a very long time and have tried to expose and discuss it for the lessons it holds for today.
It has proved far easier, though, to get a very pedestrian dog-bites-nan article published than an article with the importance and explosiveness of this damning story.
A Marine stands up
On the evening of Sept. 26, 2006, I gave a talk on Iraq to an overflow crowd of 400 at National Avenue Church in Springfield, Mo.
A questioner asked what I thought of the study by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy."
The study had originally been commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly. When the draft arrived, however, shouts of "leper!" were heard at the Atlantic. The magazine wasted no time in saying "thanks, but no thanks," and the leper study then wandered in search of a home, finding none among American publishers.
Eventually the London Review of Books published it in March 2006.
I had read that piece carefully and found it an unusual act of courage as well as scholarship. That's what I told the questioner, adding that I did have two problems with the study:
First, it seemed to me the authors erred in attributing virtually all the motivation for the U.S. attack on Iraq to the Israel Lobby and the so-called "neoconservatives" running our policy and armed forces. Was Israel an important factor? Indeed. But of equal importance, in my view, was the oil factor and what the Pentagon now calls the "enduring" military bases in Iraq, which the White House and Pentagon decided were needed for the United States to dominate that part of the Middle East.
Second, I was intrigued by the fact that Mearsheimer and Walt made no mention of what I believe to be, if not the most telling, then perhaps the most sensational proof of the power the lobby knows it can exert over our government and Congress. In sum, in June 1967, after deliberately using fighter bombers and torpedo boats to attack the USS Liberty for over two hours in an attempt to sink it and kill its crew, and then getting the U.S. government, the Navy and the Congress to cover up what happened, the Israeli government learned that it could — literally — get away with murder.
I found myself looking out at 400 blank stares. The USS Liberty? And so I asked how many in the audience had heard of the attack on the Liberty on June 8, 1967. Three hands went up; I called on the gentleman nearest me.
Ramrod straight he stood:
"Sir, Sgt. Bryce Lockwood, United States Marine Corps, retired. I am a member of the USS Liberty crew, Sir."
Catching my breath, I asked him if he would be willing to tell us what happened.
"Sir, I have not been able to do that. It is hard. But it has been almost 40 years, and I would like to try this evening, sir."
You could hear a pin drop for the next 15 minutes, as Lockwood gave us his personal account of what happened to him, his colleagues and his ship on the afternoon of June 8, 1967.
He was a linguist assigned to collect communications intelligence from the USS Liberty, which was among the ugliest — and most easily identifiable — ships in the fleet with antennae springing out in all directions.
Lockwood told of the events of that fateful day, beginning with the six-hour naval and air surveillance of the Liberty by the Israeli navy and air force on the morning of June 8.
After the air attacks, including thousand-pound bombs and napalm, three 60-ton torpedo boats lined up like a firing squad, pointing their torpedo tubes at the Liberty's starboard hull.
Lockwood had been ordered to throw the extremely sensitive cryptological equipment overboard and had just walked beyond the bulwark separating the NSA intelligence unit from the rest of the ship when, he recalled, he sensed a large black object, a tremendous explosion, and sheet of flame.
The torpedo had struck dead center in the NSA space.
The cold, oily water brought Lockwood back to consciousness. Around him were 25 dead colleagues, but he heard moaning.
Three were still alive; one of Lockwood's shipmates dragged one up the hatch. Lockwood was able to lift the two others, one by one, onto his shoulder and carry them up through the hatch.
This meant alternatively banging on the hatch for someone to open it and swimming back to fish his shipmate out of the water lest he float out to sea through the 39-foot hole made by the torpedo.
At that, Lockwood stopped speaking. It was enough. Hard, very hard — even after almost 40 years.
More at the link:For 40 years, intelligence analysts have kept this knowledge secret, a testament to... more
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This post originally appeared on Booman Tribune.
If true, this is pretty damning stuff and would constitute a war crime.
A US cruise missile carrying cluster bombs was behind a December attack in Yemen that killed 55 people, most of them civilians, Amnesty International (AI) said on Monday. The London-based rights group released photographs that it said showed the remains of a US-made Tomahawk missile and unexploded cluster bombs that were apparently used in the December 17, 2009 attack on the rural community of Al-Maajala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province.
Here’s more from Amnesty International’s own website about the attack:
Amnesty International has released images of a US-manufactured cruise missile that carried cluster munitions, apparently taken following an attack on an alleged al-Qa’ida training camp in Yemen that killed 41 local residents, including 14 women and 21 children. [...]Shortly after the attack some US media reported alleged statements by unnamed US government sources who said that US cruise missiles launched on presidential orders had been fired at two alleged al-Qa’ida sites in Yemen. [...]
The photographs enable the positive identification of damaged missile parts, which appear to be from the payload, mid-body, aft-body and propulsion sections of a BGM-109D Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile.
This type of missile, launched from a warship or submarine, is designed to carry a payload of 166 cluster submunitions (bomblets) which each explode into over 200 sharp steel fragments that can cause injuries up to 150m away. An incendiary material inside the bomblet also spreads fragments of burning zirconium designed to set fire to nearby flammable objects.
A further photograph, apparently taken within half an hour of the others, shows an unexploded BLU 97 A/B submunition itself, the type carried by BGM-109D missiles. These missiles are known to be held only by US forces and Yemeni armed forces are unlikely to be capable of using such a missile. [...]
A Yemeni parliamentary committee that investigated the 17 December 2009 attack reported in February that 41 people it described as civilians had been killed. In its report the committee said that on arrival at the scene of the attack in al-Ma’jalah it found that all the homes and their contents were burnt and all that was left were traces of furniture.
It said the committee â??found traces of blood of the victims and a number of holes in the ground left by the bombings as well as a number of unexploded bombs, and that one survivor told the committee that his family, who were killed although they had committed no crime, were sleeping when the missiles struck on the morning of 17 December 2009.
The the images released by Amnesty International of alleged US cruise missiles and cluster munitions used in Yemen can be found here.
Are we reaching to the point where our government considers anyone, including women and children, potential terrorists because of where they reside, as the Israelis do in Gaza? President Obama, as Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces, would have had to give the okay for such an attack with a weapon that is not precise, is not exact, that is intended to kill large numbers of individuals.
I call on the President to immediately answer the question whether he authorized such an attack in violation of international law and simple moral values. You do not murder innocent civilians in a town because you’re enemy may live there. That is what we specifically condemned the Nazis for in WWII when they rounded up civilians and killed them in reprisals for attacks by various resistance groups in occupied countries across Europe. The only difference wa the Nazis shot their civilians at close range. We use cruise missiles so we don;t have to force our soldiers to witness the results of their “wet work.”
Perhaps using cluster bombs against suspected terrorist sites in civilian areas would have been an acceptable policy under former President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who continue to defend torture and an illegal war of aggression against Iraq to this day without any hint of regret or remorse. However,it should never be the policy that a Democratic President adopts. This was certainly not an action I expected a Democratic President to endorse: the use of cluster bombs which he must have known would kill and maim civilians.
And people wonder why US residents irate at the slaughter of innocent Muslims are attempting to join Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations on Americans after attacks like this. The question must be asked of this administration: what benefit is there to unilaterally killing people in countries where no state of war exists, and with weapons designed to kill as many people as possible, regardless of their connection to alleged terrorists.
In the short term we may have eradicated an Al Qaeda training site. Good for us.
However, it is the long term, that I am concerned about. One of these days we won’t be so lucky when a homegrown terrorist tries to explode a car bomb in Times Square, or attacks some other target of “opportunity.” I wonder if the people murdered at Ft Hood would have been gunned down by Major Hasan if the Bush administration had not adopted torture and promoted a war in Iraq that killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of civilians, including many children.
When we use weapons that are bound to kill people who have nothing to do with those who oppose us, we are no better than base murderers. War does not excuse such actions authorized by our government and carried out by our military. In the end, it will be innocent Americans who will pay the price for these senseless killings. Perhaps your child or mine.
So, President Obama, answer the question: were our armed forces behind the attack on al-Ma’jalah? Did we employ cluster munitions? Is it our policy to continue to employ such weapons regardless of the risk to innocent civilians who are likely to be killed or maimed for life along with any potential militants that may attack America?
If so, I’d like to know your reasons for authorizing such a vicious assault and whether you believe such weapons of mass murder are an appropriate means to assault civilian areas as opposed to military installations.
This is most certainly not the change I voted for. If your administration is responsible, stand up and be accountable for this heinous crime. No more lies or evasions. We had enough of those under the former President.This post originally appeared on Booman Tribune.
If true, this is pretty damning... more
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This week:
1. Obama’s Grades
2. Military Industrial Reach Around
3. No Hope for Transparency
4. Futuristic Justice
5. If there was oil in Honduras
6. He ain’t got your back
7. Public Enemy
8. Derrick JensenThis week:
1. Obama’s Grades
2. Military Industrial Reach Around
3. No Hope... more
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Noam Chomsky discusses his forthcoming book, the hypocrisy of neoliberalism and where he feels hopeful about democracy despite U.S. terrorism.
May 12, 2010 |
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If Noam Chomsky’s critics have a common refrain, it is pointing to his habit of being far too hard on America’s motives and too easy on its opponents. The former, of course, is his métier. The latter criticism has limited (though a few important) instances. In fact, Chomsky’s central question is how do you punish the crook who owns the jailhouse, pays the police their salaries, and fails consistently to see his crimes as such? Or perhaps, how do you get a self-enamored hypocrite to reckon with his pathology? Certainly not by repeating the praise, or what Chomsky sometimes calls America’s “state religion” of self-worship. And despite this, in a very limited way, Chomsky does give credit where credit is due.
In his forthcoming book Hopes and Prospects, Chomsky admits that a black family in the White House is historic. But he credits not “America,” a “system of power” defined by “market interventions” in the economy that once tolerated, and even fought for, the right to own humans as slaves. Nor does he give much credit to “Brand Obama,” as he calls the phenomenon that elected our new president, insisting that the new president is “likely to ‘have more influence on boardrooms than any president since Ronald Reagan.’” In fact, Chomsky gives credit for the 2008 election, in a way, to himself and his ilk.
In an early manuscript of the book, Chomsky writes, “The two candidates in the Democratic primary were a woman and an African-American. That, too, was historic. It would have been unimaginable forty years ago. The fact that the country has become civilized enough to accept this outcome is a considerable tribute to the activism of the nineteen sixties and its aftermath, with lessons for the future.” As such, this small tome is Chomsky’s legacy book.
And high time. His landmark critique of B.F. Skinner that crippled behaviorism’s predominance in psychology and linguistics turns fifty this year. His first book on politics, American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays, turns forty. The Essential Chomsky, edited by Anthony Arnove, came out from the New Press last year, in time for Chomsky’s eightieth birthday. And Chomsky’s wife died of cancer last winter, which would make anyone take stock. Regularly voted into the “top public intellectual” polls various magazines frequently run, the linguist and foreign policy critic, said to be worth two million dollars, remains a polarizing figure.
What’s remarkable is how Chomsky’s criticism of the Vietnam war and America’s many interventions seem even more relevant today, prescient in their understanding of how American greed, dehumanization of others, cultural ignorance, and hypocrisy are rewritten as pragmatic, not moral, mistakes. In “The Remaking of History,” from Toward a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, he writes, “They may concede the stupidity of American policy, and even its savagery, but not the illegitimacy inherent in the entire enterprise.” He continues a page later, “One may criticize the intellectual failure of planners, their moral failures, and even the generalized and abstract ‘will to exercise domination’ to which they have regrettably but understandably succumbed. But the principle that the United States may exercise force to guarantee a certain global order that will be ‘open’ to transnational corporations—that is beyond the bounds of polite discourse.”
More at the link:Noam Chomsky discusses his forthcoming book, the hypocrisy of neoliberalism and where... more
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Google's Android operating system edged out Apple's iPhone operating system for the No. 2 spot in the U.S. consumer smartphone market in the first quarter, research firm NPD Group reported Monday.According to NPD, devices running Android accounted for 28 percent of the units sold to U.S. consumers in the first quarter of 2010.
link :http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/05/11/cnet.android.apple.iphone/index.htmlGoogle's Android operating system edged out Apple's iPhone operating system... more
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I watch and listen to the advocacy of human trafficking at rallies, on web sites, in government reports and NGO reports. The research and statistics on human trafficking in America are ambiguous, especially in relation to race and ethnicity. We need to explicitly recognize the connections between trafficking, poverty, migration, gender, racism and racial discrimination to adequately battle and destroy human trafficking in the U.S.
Trafficking persons is inherently discriminatory. Since an overwhelming majority of trafficked persons are women, trafficking in most circles is usually considered a gender issue, especially in the United States (majority of trafficking in the U.S. is sex trafficking). In the U.S., most state human trafficking laws explicitly and directly address sexual exploitation, ignoring or vaguely covering other types of trafficking (myths of trafficking).
However, a link that is rarely discussed in open forums about human trafficking is racial discrimination. A question that I don’t hear enough is, “Does race and ethnicity contribute to the likelihood of people becoming victims of trafficking?” I say, “Yes.” Furthermore, I believe that not only does race and ethnicity constitute a risk factor for trafficking, it may also determine the treatment those victims’ experience.
The Polaris Project, who does outstanding work in combating human trafficking, stated the majority of trafficked persons come from vulnerable populations, including undocumented migrants, runaways and at-risk youth, oppressed or marginalized groups, and the poor; specifically because they are easiest to recruit and control. In the U.S., statistically speaking, people of color more than fit this criterion.
Available Statistics by Race
A large majority of trafficked persons in the U.S. for the purposes of labor and sexual exploitation are people of color. Domestically, 50 percent of trafficked victims are children and an overwhelmingly are girls, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Most foreign nationals are women, children and men from Mexico and East Asia, as well as from South Asia, Central America, Africa, and Europe, about 17,500 each year, according to statistics compiled by Polaris Project and 2009 TIP report.
More at the link:I watch and listen to the advocacy of human trafficking at rallies, on web sites, in... more
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Children can legally work on any farm at age 12, with their parents’ permission, and it's not uncommon to see children as young as 7 and 8 in the fields. During peak harvest season, the children work up to 14-hour days, and earn far less than minimum wage. There is no minimum age for children working on a small farm with parental permission.
Health and safety risks:
Agriculture is the most dangerous occupation open to children in the United States.
Children work with sharp tools, heavy machinery, and dangerous chemicals, and die at four times the rate of other young workers. Yet they can legally do hazardous work in agriculture from which they would be banned by law in any other industry.
School and future:
Farmworker youth drop out of school at four times the national rate, according to government estimates—one third never graduate from high school.
US child labor laws fail to protect child farmworkers:
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) allows child farmworkers to work at younger ages, for far longer hours, and under more hazardous conditions than all other working youths
continued...Children can legally work on any farm at age 12, with their parents’ permission,... more
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Israel has long been waging war on the U.S. by way of deception. To date, its operatives have worked from the shadows hoping not to be detected. Their duplicity typically includes the displacement of facts with what the American public can be deceived to believe.
Thus the need to create a widely held belief around Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi meetings in Prague, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories and Iraq’s purchase of uranium from Niger. Though all five “facts” were false, only the last claim was conceded as phony prior to inducing our invasion of Iraq.
There lies our national security challenge as the groundwork is being laid for another 911.
The same fact-displacing modus operandi is again at work. In the parlance of national security analysts, psy-ops specialists are “preparing the mind” to accept another generally accepted truth at odds with the facts. This time the objective is Iran. Or Pakistan.
Except that this time national security is shining a bright light in the shadows where such operations are launched.
The Displacement Process
As a reasoning species, we depend on rationality to stay alive and thrive. That’s why the displacement of facts requires preparation. First the public’s shared field of consciousness is flooded with thoughts and impressions to ease the displacement process.
A decade before the thematic Clash of Civilizations was used as a rationale to invade a nation that played no role in 911, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington published this thesis in Foreign Affairs, a publication widely read by opinion-makers. The Clash premise first appeared in the writings of Bernard Lewis, a Jewish-Zionist academic at Princeton.
By the time Huntington’s book with that title appeared in 1996, 100 organizations were prepared to promote it. As that process gained momentum, the Cold War consensus was replaced by a new generally accepted truth: the Global War on Terrorism. The widespread embrace of that theme was catalyzed in September 2001 by a mass murder on U.S. soil.
Such a seamless segue from one generally accepted truth to another requires both mental preparation and an emotionally wrenching event. In combination, those two influences create an ideal framework for explaining to ourselves what we now know was a pre-staged storyline. A myth need not be true; it need only be plausible—and only temporarily so.
Prompted by false intelligence fixed around a predetermined goal, The Clash emerged as the latest generally accepted truth. With the rebranding of Saddam Hussein, a former ally, as a plausible Evil Doer, the stage was set. As the war began, the term “Islamo fascist” crept into the rhetoric to reinforce the theme that a new enemy had emerged—by consensus.
Anyone not outraged at this mental and emotional manipulation is ill informed about the common source of this ongoing deceit. In the Information Age, this is how wars are catalyzed. And how treason is committed in plain sight and, to date, with legal impunity.
The Next Provocation
With chilling consistency, the Myth Makers responsible for this latest corruption of U.S. intelligence have proven adept at inducing serial conflicts that hollowed out our economy, damaged our credibility and undermined our faith in our own government.
There was no Gulf of Tonkin incident, the rationale that took us to war in Vietnam. Israel was not endangered in 1967 when it began the Six-Day war. Phony intelligence rationalized a massive land grab guaranteed to provoke antagonisms that undermined our security.
In rationalizing the war in Iraq, who deceived us? Who had the means, motive and opportunity? Are our minds again being prepared to wage yet another war that is not in our interest? Are we again being subjected to a seductive psy-ops as a prelude to war, awaiting only the emotional catalyst of another mass murder?
The mental threads have been laid. For example, in March 2005, author Jerome Corsi published Atomic Iran urging that either the U.S. or Israel kill the “mad mullahs” of Iran.
In July 2006, Corsi released Minuteman. Citing the president’s “failed immigration policy,” this Israeli asset claimed that Iran-supported terrorists are “invading from Mexico” to stage another 911. “We have definitive proof that we have Hezbollah—the terrorist group that Israel is fighting today—sleeper cells that are here.”
This prepare-the-minds publication appeared two weeks after Israel invaded Lebanon to combat “Hezbollah terrorists.” Where was the book launched? If you answered Ground Zero, the 911 site in Manhattan, you understand how psy-ops experts deploy the power of association to displace facts with fictions.
Such “associative” duplicity can only succeed in plain sight. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer broadcasts from “The Situation Room” with its White House-associative branding. What “the most trusted name in news” fails to tell you is that Blitzer worked 17 years for The Jerusalem Post and authored a sympathetic book on Israeli master spy Jonathan Pollard.
Treason in Plain Sight
The mental preparation is well advanced. The missing ingredient is another mass murder. Strongly provoked emotions are critical when staging psy-ops designed to displace facts with what “the mark” can be deceived to believe. Plus, of course, it helps to muster some evidence that plausibly links the attack to Iran or Pakistan. That will suffice.
Or perhaps not. This time around, those who took an oath to defend this nation from all enemies—both foreign and domestic—may well have better tools to do their job.
There is but one possible source able to sustain such operations with impunity inside the U.S. Only one nation has the requisite intelligence capabilities to operate from within our government in plain sight yet non-transparently.
As yet, few dare speak its name. Instead, four-fifths of those in “our” Congress recently proclaimed themselves loyal to a foreign nation and insisted that our commander-in-chief maintain an “unbreakable bond” with what the facts confirm is an enemy within.
Will the U.S. again be attacked? If so, will we focus our forces on the real enemy? Our veterans’ community is 27 million strong. Let your voice be heard. Our nation is at stake.Israel has long been waging war on the U.S. by way of deception. To date, its... more
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* By Sherwood Ross *
As both the Republican and Democratic political parties are locked into a national security state that is perpetually at war, Americans urgently need to create a third political party, a law school dean writes.
“It will take a third party to allow us to shed the national-security state…which the two major parties are locked into, which they maintain regardless of the votes of the populace, and which will destroy us as surely as it has destroyed previous empires,” writes Lawrence Velvel in his book “An Enemy of the People”(Doukathsan).
As has been shown by the second Gulf War, both parties are “incapable of doing the right thing. They are too beholden to big money—money is virtually all that our politicians care about,” writes Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. The political parties “have gotten too used to the ethically crooked, morally criminal ways of our system, (and) cannot even envision serious change in the political and electoral system.”
Both parties, he charges, cling to policies which do not work, such as the country’s “traditional ready resort to war” that has been “practically an addiction since 1950” and that “has created disasters at home and abroad.” “If we do not cure ourselves of the American addiction to violence,” Velvel continued, “it is only a matter of time until much of the world gangs up on us, with results that nobody can foresee. Such has been the fate of all empires…”
In a blog titled VelvelonNationalAffairs, the law school dean added that a third political party could successfully fight the entrenched parties’ by making better use of the Internet, “especially its rapidly advancing full motion video capacity, to do virtually everything that has to be done in politics: to have small group discussions, to have meetings, to make speeches, to trade writings, to conduct both the written and oral back-and-forth needed to work out positions, to raise whatever money is needed, to arrange for signing petitions, (one of the requirements that the two major parties use to keep third parties off the ballot), to campaign, to communicate with and to see and be seen by the voters.”
Carefully considered positions will be worked out through lengthy, extensive and highly considered deliberations via real time audio/video meetings, Velvel said. “Through such decision-making made possible by the internet, one can foresee positions and compromises being given much greater and far deeper consideration than they receive from the two present major parties with their in-groups, back rooms, and pressuring lobbyists and money men.”
“The use of the internet,” he added, “to work out positions should be a continuous process, so that any necessary changes can be made as facts and circumstances in the world change.” Velvel goes on to say that telephone calls and face to face discussions will still be used but the main work and the main campaigning of a new party would be via Internet.
Velvel called for other reforms, such as scrapping the Electoral College, which he called “a disaster continuously waiting to happen,” and for ending the single member district method of election for the House of Representatives.
In today’s House races, this method “discourages the entry into politics of people who have important ideas not consonant with the conventional wisdom of Republicans and Democrats.” “One notes,” Velvel added, “that the system of winner-take-all single member districts has resulted in 95 percent of the seats in Congress being ‘safe’ seats for which there is no real contest—a result that creates entrenched corruption.”
“It is crucial,” Velvel writes, “to open up the legislature to third parties. Only in that way is it liable to be possible to elect legislators who wish to cause America to recede from being a national security state, and who will vote for policies that serve the interests of the vast bulk of the country instead of the oligarchy of wealth and power that has run it for about the last 50 years.” Velvel said:
“If 40 or 50 third party legislators were elected to Congress (instead of there being only one or two who do not belong to any major party,) the debates over policy and legislation would have quite a different cast, the enacted policy and legislation would like be quite different, presidents could not safely ignore the third party legislators’ views, and we would have a fighting chance to go upward instead of downhill. The initial years of the Republican Party in the 19th century show what a difference can be made by a new party with a fighting chance to win.”
“The needed third party would be given a great boost by requiring a majority vote to win the presidency, and by implementing this through some form of ranked, instant run off system if no candidate initially has more than a plurality,” Velvel continued. “Such a system,” he explained, “would allow people to vote their first choice for a third party candidate whom they favor, with little if any fear that this would throw the election to some Neanderthal if their candidate fails.”
Velvel is dean and cofounder of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, established in 1988 to provide a rigorous quality, affordable education to students who would otherwise not be able to obtain a legal education. It is purposefully dedicated to the education of students from minority, immigrant, and low- and middle-income backgrounds.* By Sherwood Ross *
As both the Republican and Democratic political parties are... more
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Solar-cell manufacturing in Frederick, Maryland, dates back to the mid-1970s. BP Solar, one such company, was so profitable it was in the middle of building a $97 million expansion to create more jobs in the solar panel industry. Now the BP Solar building is being demolished and 320 people in Maryland are unemployed.
What happened?
The answer is, the federal government got involved and destroyed the free market generated profitability of the making of solar panels. Here’s how: the Obama Administration has spent billions of dollars to create “green jobs.” Through his tax incentives and credits for those businesses that manufacture renewable energy products, he created a glut in the marketplace. With so many businesses now producing solar panels (most of them overseas in anticipation of a booming U.S. market), the cost of panels has been nearly cut in half, making it impossible for businesses like BP Solar to stay in business in the U.S. In an effort to create green jobs, hundreds of green jobs that had been around for 30-plus years were lost. Ironic isn’t it?
Because companies like BP Solar can’t survive in the U.S. anymore, due to the market being over-inflated with far too many subsidized companies creating a surplus of solar panels, they move to where business is more cost effective. Places like China, India, Mexico and Poland, where less overhead, lower labor costs and fewer taxes make for a friendlier business environment. Businesses in the U.S. pay huge corporate and property taxes, as well as absorb skyrocketing energy costs. Even if the government subsidized BP Solar, like it has done with so many other green industries, it would not have been enough.
Bill Wilson, President of Americans for Limited Government flatly states, “The market is no longer sustainable because of the glut caused by the overproduction of solar panels. This is a problem unless the government plans to subsidize these companies forever.”
Not only is the U.S. hard on businesses to begin with, but by meddling in the free market, the federal government has made conditions far worse — for everyone.
“320 jobs. That is absolutely absurd,” says Audrey Scott, former Secretary of Planning for the Ehrlich Administration, about the number of jobs lost at BP Solar. “In the Western part of the state jobs are a very critical issue. It’s all about jobs, jobs, jobs.”
You can lay some of the blame of the closing of BP Solar on the State of Maryland’s laws and regulations. Other businesses have left the state and moved to Pennsylvania or elsewhere to more business-friendly environments.
“Maryland is very anti-business and that is one of our issues,” Scott says. “What our government is doing here in Maryland at the present time is getting in the way of the job creation. The regulations and the horrendous atmosphere and environment for jobs and for business here in Maryland are just unacceptable.”
Sound familiar? While Maryland’s drop in 2007 to 47th worse business tax climate, according to a nonprofit Tax Foundation report played a big role in BP Solar’s decision to close, the overall business climate in the U.S. contributed to the shutdown as well. It’s not only solar panels that are being manufactured overseas, it’s other renewable energies as well — even by those companies that received “help” from the federal government.
For example, of the $2 billion already spent on wind power alone, funding the creation of enough new wind farms to power 2.4 million homes over the past year, nearly 80 percent of that money has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines. And wind energy is just another industry receiving some of money spent on this “green” initiative. There are still billions more dollars being spent by the federal government on this initiative.
Obama’s method of subsidizing these renewable energy companies and interfering in free market environments is not original. Spain is a good example of a country that has done exactly what Obama is trying to do. An Institute of Energy Research (IER)-commissioned study coming out of King Juan Carlos University in Madrid by Gabriel Calzada found that, for every green job created, 2.2 jobs in other sectors have been destroyed. Furthermore, Spain’s government spent $758,471 to create each green job and used $36 billion in taxpayer money to invest in wind, solar, and mini-hydro from 2000-2008. The country’s unemployment rate is currently at 19.4% and is nearing insolvency.
Does the U.S. really want to continue down this same path?
It is time to learn from the mistakes of others before it is too late. America is next in line to becoming insolvent, as ALG News has previously reported.
“It is lunacy to expect top-down, Soviet-style economic planning to work in America,” says Wilson. “It has failed all over the world. We need to let markets work. Before the government got involved, 320 Americans were profitably building solar panels in Maryland. Now, they are unemployed.”
When walking the streets of Frederick, Maryland, you sense sadness and frustration. Peoples’ hopes are replaced with despair. Maybe if the federal government would have left the free market system alone, BP Solar might have had a chance and continued to produce solar panels and more jobs.Solar-cell manufacturing in Frederick, Maryland, dates back to the mid-1970s. BP... more
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I was disgusted by the Netanyahu government’s slap to the face of Vice President Biden. What I was not was surprised.
In the run-up to the Iraq War, I had a friend who commented on the irony that Great Britain had become the colony of America. Well, the same can be said of the U.S. vis-a-vis Israel.
Familiarity, the saying goes, breeds contempt, but no one has ever opined on the progeny of slavish devotion. The Israelis kick you whenever they feel like it because they can. Any criticism of their “policy” toward the Palestinians results in the immediate invocation of the Holocaust, while discussion about Israeli influence over American politics is denounced as anti-Semitism.
Fine! Call me an anti-Semite! Overuse has rendered that term about as impactful as a strand of wet spaghetti!
Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom (HA!) were Israeli-driven wars. Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan was, of course, a response to 9/11. But 9/11 itself was the product of American servitude to Israel. And now, just as it did with Iraq, Israel and its American shill organizations like AIPAC and AEI are throwing a stick at Iran and commanding you to fetch. Whether or not the Obama Administration is as obedient as its predecessor remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, back at the pogrom, the Israelis continue to oppress, harass, and kill Palestinians whenever the hell they feel like it. They know that their faithful dog won’t do anything about it. In the Occupied Territories (a marvelous euphemism for Stolen Lands), Krystalnacht requires no sunset, for it is a 24/7 continuum.
Muslims, including those who are fanatical and violent, can spot weakness as easily as anybody else. Is it any wonder they don’t respect you?
The time is long past for the United States to kick the fascist Israeli State to the curb. Let it take care of its own damn business for a change! Bring your troops home from countries with which you’ve no legitimate quarrel. al Qaeda attacked you, not Afghanistan, while Iraq was never your enemy. Cut off all military and financial aid to Israel. All of it! AND LEAD THE WORLD IN THE IMPOSITION OF SANCTIONS AGAINST THIS ROGUE REGIME!
America watched in the late 1930s as the Nazis practiced lebensraum and readied their monstrous Final Solution. Don’t stand idly by while the descendants of their victims do the same!I was disgusted by the Netanyahu government’s slap to the face of Vice President... more
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