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War on the World: Obama's Surge in State Terror
Chris Floyd
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"Afghanistan Troop Surge" © Paul Tong
Most sentient beings have long recognized that murdering civilians in foreign countries -- especially through the cowardly methods of "secret war" -- is entirely counterproductive ... if your actual aim is to enhance America's national security by reducing violent extremism and hatred for the United States, that is. However, if your aim is to perpetuate and expand a militarist empire and the bloated, brutal, corrupt, war-profiteering system that supports it, why then, secret war and civilian slaughter are perfectly logical and remarkably effective methods.
And that is why our highly intelligent and cool, pragmatic president is now vastly expanding the use of secret war, subversion, sabotage and murder into even more countries around the world, and giving America's secret, unaccountable death squads and covert operators even more power to carry out their lawless operations. As one Pentagon mandarin gushed, Obama is allowing "things that the previous administration did not."
That quote comes from a remarkably candid story in the Washington Post on Obama's "surge" in America's secret war on the world, which now encompasses no fewer than 75 countries.
(By the way, the Post is often a very good source of information about the operations and machinations of the militarist empire -- not because its editors are seeking to expose the empire's crimes and atrocities, but because they approve of them. And thus they will often write about them, in detail, in the most straightforward manner: "Hey, look at the cool stuff our boys are doing now!")
Sea blockade of Gaza was 'temporary' - 15 years ago
Stuart Littlewood
I must have got it all wrong.
I thought the first duty of a government was to protect its citizens from assault while going about their lawful business.
"There is no greater priority, no more important responsibility than the safety of all our citizens..." Didn't our previous prime minister, Gordon Brown, say so?
To my way of thinking, that means protecting from armed thugs any British subjects sailing peacefully and lawfully on the high seas. The Israelis advertised their threats. The government had plenty of warning. So where was the Royal Navy?
How did Hitler lose the war: Providence, Miracle, or What Really Happened, Part 4
By Robert Singer
The following Glossary, abbreviations and essay will help the reader who did not live through the Second World War understand a) the pervasive atmosphere of hatred against Germans that began in 1933 and b) how Theodor Herzl’s prophesy, “that within fifty years there would be a Jewish state”, came true.
RothIsm: an organization of Jews who believed the Jewish people needed a nation of their own to escape persecution.
Judaism: Jews collectively who practice a religion based on the Torah and the Talmud.
RothIsm or Rothschildism: abbreviation for The Zionist movement corrupted and co-opted by The House of Rothschild and their agents to advance a New World Order agenda. In 1871 Albert Pike Grand Master of the Luciferian group known as the Order of the Palladium, received a vision, which he described in a letter dated August 15, 1871 that graphically outlined plans for three world wars that were seen as necessary to bring about the One World Order.
US Media's Pro-Israeli Bias: Response to the Freedom Flotilla Slaughter
Stephen Lendman
In promoting his 2008 book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," Jimmy Carter said one reason for writing it was "to provoke (unbiased) discussion, which is very rarely heard in this country" on the question of Israel. In America, "any sort of debate back and forth, any sort of incisive editorial comment in the major newspapers, is almost completely absent....There are no significant countervailing voices" to deter Israel from getting away with murder, an illegal blockade, aggressive wars, and the most extreme crimes against humanity; its latest, of course, the massacre of peace activists taking aid to besieged Gazans.
Besides coming from officials and their spokespersons, Israel's propaganda arm, Israel Politik, said "Israel had no choice but to stop the flotilla from breaking the blockade....While Israel was forced to take action in international waters, its actions are supported by international maritime law." False. Under international law, interdictions in international waters constitute piracy in the broadest sense of the term, and blockades are acts of war, variously defined as:
● surrounding a nation or objective with hostile forces;
● measures to isolate an enemy;
● encirclement and besieging;
● preventing the passage in or out of supplies, military forces or aid in time of or as an act of war; and
● an act of naval warfare to block access to an enemy's coastline and deny entry to all vessels and aircraft.
According to international law expert, Professor Francis Boyle, blockades under international law are:
"....belligerent measures taken by a nation (to) prevent passage of vessels or aircraft to and from another country. Customary international law recognizes blockades as an act of war because of the belligerent use of force even against third party nations in enforcing the blockade. Blockades as acts of war have been recognized as such in the Declaration of Paris of 1856 and the Declaration of London of 1909 that delineate the international rules of warfare."
As an occupying power, Israel is obligated under the Hague Regulations of 1907, Fourth Geneva, and numerous UN resolutions to protect Palestinian rights, including for adequate food, health, education, and housing. The blockade and occupation deny them. According to Amnesty International (AI), "The blockade constitutes collective punishment under international law and must be lifted immediately." So does the occupation. Israel maintains them both repressively. Yet Gaza poses no threat to Israel.
J'accuse - Patrick Fitzgerald! You didn't do your job either!
You remember him, the supposedly squeaky clean U.S. Attorney who was going to get the slackers responsible for outing CIA agent Valerie Plame. Yeah, that guy.
He's prosecuting the flamboyant former governor of Illinois right now, the still honorable and innocent Rod Blagojevich. The case is being tried in in the United States District Court in Chicago. You won't believe the charges: 1) devising and participating in a scheme "to defraud the State of Illinois and the people of the State of Illinois of (his) honest services" and 2) offering a contract to the Chicago Tribune to dump some editorial writers critical of his administration.
A Lullaby of Lies
That's the Obama administration talking
While most Americans were sitting out on their decks barbecuing over the Memorial Day weekend, our leaders were planning to barbecue a few Pakistanis, as the Washington Post reported:
“The U.S. military is reviewing options for a unilateral strike in Pakistan in the event that a successful attack on American soil is traced to the country’s tribal areas, according to senior military officials.”
Hey, wait a minute: I thought Attorney General Eric Holder has supposedly already established that the Pakistani Taliban were directly involved in the Times Square bombing attempt – which, although not successful, did succeed in generating shockwaves from Washington to Islamabad.
Well, not quite: the evidence for the existence of a “network” supposedly assisting Shahzad – consisting, so far, of three Pakistani-Americans and immigrants living in the US – is far less solid than Holder and the Obama administration would have us believe. In the case of Aftab Khan, a gas station attendant and Pakistani immigrant arrested at his home in Watertown, Mass., the only piece of evidence they can come up with is Shahzad’s phone number, which was stored on a phone said to be Khan’s and written on a piece of paper found in the apartment.
Israeli Murders, NATO and Afghanistan
"But what kind of mutual support organisation is NATO when members must make decades long commitments, at huge expense and some loss of life, to support the Unted States, but cannot make even a gesture to support Turkey when Turkey is attacked by a non-member?"
I was in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office for over 20 years and a member of its senior management structure for six years, I served in five countries and took part in 13 formal international negotiations, including the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea and a whole series of maritime boundary treaties. I headed the FCO section of a multidepartmental organisation monitoring the arms embargo on Iraq.
I am an instinctively friendly, open but unassuming person who always found it easy to get on with people, I think because I make fun of myself a lot. I have in consequence a great many friends among ex-colleagues in both British and foregin diplomatic services, security services and militaries.
I lost very few friends when I left the FCO over torture and rendition. In fact I seemed to gain several degrees of warmth with a great many acquantances still on the inside. And I have become known as a reliable outlet for grumbles, who as an ex-insider knows how to handle a discreet and unintercepted conversation.
What I was being told last night was very interesting indeed. NATO HQ in Brussels is today a very unhappy place.
The Black Art Of ‘Master Illusions’
How do wars begin? With a “master illusion”, according to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA’s pioneers in “black propaganda”, known today as “news management”. In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an “incident” that became the “conclusive proof of North Vietnam’s aggression”. This followed a claim, also fake, that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.
“The CIA,” he said, “loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons—the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place, and they brought in the American press. Based on this evidence, two Marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam.” An invasion that took three million lives was under way.
The Israelis have played this murderous game since 1948. The massacre of peace activists in international waters on 31 May was “spun” to the Israeli public for most of last week, preparing them for yet more murder by their government, with the unarmed flotilla of humanitarians described as terrorists or dupes of terrorists. The BBC was so intimidated that it reported the atrocity primarily as a “potential public relations disaster for Israel”, the perspective of the killers, and a disgrace for journalism.
A similar master illusion currently preoccupies Asian governments. On 20 May, South Korea announced that it had “overwhelming evidence” that one of its warships, the Cheonan, had been sunk by a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine in March with the loss of 46 sailors. The United States maintains 28,000 troops in South Korea, where popular sentiment has long backed a détente with Pyongyang.
Rights groups call for investigation of Israeli attack on flotilla
Mary Shaw
On May 31, Israeli troops attacked a flotilla headed to Gaza with humanitarian aid supplies. According to the Free Gaza Movement, which organized the flotilla, the six boats were carrying more than 10,000 tons of aid and about 600 passengers from more than 20 countries.
On one of the boats, the scene got ugly and violent, and at least nine people died.
Israel says that its troops were acting in self-defense. According to CNN, "the Israel Defense Forces said its troops 'were met with premeditated violence, evident by the activists' use of clubs, metal rods, and knives, as well as the firing of two weapons stolen from the soldiers.' It said troops responded with 'defensive action on behalf of the forces who felt their lives were endangered.'"
But the human rights group Amnesty International (AI) suspects that the Israeli troops overreacted. "Israeli forces appear clearly to have used excessive force," said Malcolm Smart, AI's director for the Middle East and North Africa. "Israel says its forces acted in self-defense, alleging that they were attacked by protestors, but it begs credibility that the level of lethal force used by Israeli troops could have been justified. It appears to have been out of all proportion to any threat posed." So AI has called for an independent inquiry into the incident.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) agrees. "A prompt, credible, and impartial investigation is absolutely essential to determine whether the lethal force used by Israeli commandos was necessary to protect lives and whether it could have been avoided," said Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's Middle East director.
And they are not alone.
Canada's War on Islam: The Case of Mohamed Harkat
by Stephen Lendman
Like in America post-9/11, Canadian Muslims have been victimized, vilified, and persecuted for their faith, ethnicity, prominence, and activism. They've been targeted, hunted down, rounded up, held in detention, kept in isolation, denied bail, restricted in their right to counsel, tried on secret evidence, convicted or incriminated on bogus charges, given long sentences and incarcerated as political prisoners or deported to certain torture, imprisonment or death by so-called democratic countries that, in fact, mock the rule of law and judicial fairness.
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