Nasir Khan blog

Pentagon Requests Mightier Bomb to Attack Iran

2012-01-29T17:40:00.004+01:00

The 30,000-pound bunker-busters are designed to penetrate Iran’s underground nuclear facilities

by John Glaser, Antiwar.com, January 28, 2012

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The Pentagon has decided that its largest conventional bomb isn’t capable of destroying Iran’s underground nuclear enrichment facilities and has ordered efforts to make it more powerful.

The 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bomb, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, was designed to penetrate deeply buried targets, like some of Iran’s nuclear facilities. But tests of the bomb led the Pentagon to believe it may not fully destroy the facilities, and so this month they secretly submitted a request to Congress additional for funding to build a bigger, more destructive bomb.

Already more than $330 million has been spent to develop about 20 of the bombs, which are built by Boeing Co. The Pentagon is now seeking about $82 million more to enhance it.

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Tags: antiwar com, bunker buster bomb, defense corporations, john glaser, largest conventional bomb, massive ordnance penetrator

Stephen Lendman: Profile of a Rogue State

2012-01-28T17:25:00.002+01:00

by Stephen Lendman, opednews.com, Jan 27, 2012

America’s unmatched globally. However, pound for pound, based on size, its policies, and regional threat, Israel stands out.

Daily, its crimes against humanity continue. On January 23, Jerusalem police arrested two Palestinian officials, Khaled Abu Arafeh and Mohammed Totah.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said both men were wanted for unspecified “Hamas activities” with no further comment.

Hamas, of course, is Palestine’s legitimate government. Israel and America spuriously call it a terrorist organization. Hamas spokesman Mushir al-Masri said arresting both men was a “Zionist crime.” Palestine’s parliament hasn’t functioned since Hamas and Fatah split in 2007.

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Barghouti sent to isolation after Israel comments

2012-01-27T10:12:00.002+01:00

Ma’an News, Jan 26, 2012

Marwan Barghouti pictured during an interview from his prison cell in
2006. (MaanImages/file)

RAMALLAH (Ma’an) — Jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti was sent to solitary confinement on Wednesday after making critical comments about Israel to journalists.
After testifying in a Jerusalem court on Wednesday the Fatah leader briefly spoke to reporters.

Upon returning to Hadarim prison in Israel, Barghouti was not allowed back into his regular cell and was instead put in isolation, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society said Thursday.

Detainees in the prison protested the move and asked prison authorities to explain their decision.

Israeli authorities have not responded.

Barghouti, the former secretary-general of Fatah in the West Bank, told journalists that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would only be resolved when the occupation comes to an end and Israel withdraws to the pre-1967 borders.

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society condemned the Israeli decision to isolate him and called on human rights organizations to stop violations against Palestinian leaders in jail.
The Fatah leader has been serving a life sentence since 2004 and has been widely viewed as a contender to succeed Mahmoud Abbas as president.

Pups on Parade: EU Obediently Pushes Toward War with Iran

2012-01-27T09:34:00.000+01:00

By Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque, Jan 23, 2012

This week, the warlords of the West took yet another step toward their long-desired war againt Iran. (Open war, that is; their covert war has been going on for decades — via subversion, terrorism, and proxies like Saddam Hussein.) On Monday, the European Union obediently followed the dictates of its Washington masters by agreeing to impose an embargo on Iranian oil.

The embargo bans all new oil contracts with Iran, and cuts off all existing deals after July. The embargo is accompanied by a freeze on all European assets of the Iranian central bank. In imposing these draconian measures on a country which is not at war with any nation, which has not invaded or attacked another nation in centuries, and which is developing a nuclear energy program that is not only entirely legal under international law but is also subject to the most stringent international inspection regime ever seen, the EU is “targeting the economic lifeline of the regime,” as one of its diplomats put it, with admirable candor.

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US Media Iraq Reporting: See No Evil

2012-01-26T11:07:00.000+01:00

by Dave Lindorff, This Can’t Be Happening, Jan 23, 2012

The Iraq war may be over, at least for US troops, but the cover-up of the atrocities committed there by American forces goes on, even in retrospectives about the war. A prime example is reporting on the destroyed city of Fallujah, where some of the heaviest fighting of the war took place.

On March 31, 2004, four armed mercenaries working for the firm then known as Blackwater (now Xe), were captured in Fallujah, Iraq’s third largest city and a hotbed of insurgent strength located in Anbar Province about 40 miles west of Baghdad. Reportedly killed in their vehicle, which was then torched, their charred bodies were strung up on a bridge over the Euphrates River.

Pictures and videos of Fallujah residents mocking the bodies, which, unlike the images of burned and mutilated Iraqi victims of American forces, were broadcast on American television and displayed on the front pages of American newspapers, created a wave of indignation and outrage in the U.S., and led the Bush/Cheney administration and the Pentagon to decide they needed to punish the city of over 300,000.

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New York Times Continues to Conceal U.S. Role in 1965 Indonesia Coup

2012-01-24T18:01:00.000+01:00

By Conn Hallinan, ZNet, Jan 24, 2012

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Why is the New York Times concealing the key role that the United States played in the 1965 coup in Indonesia that ended up killing somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million people? In a story Jan. 19—“Indonesia Chips Away At the Enforced Silence Around a Dark History”—the Times writes that the coup was “one of the darkest periods in modern Indonesian history, and the least discussed, until now.”

Indeed it is, but the Times is not only continuing to ignore U.S. involvement in planning and carrying out the coup, but apparently doesn’t even bother to read its own clip files from that time that reported the Johnson administration’s “delight with the news from Indonesia.” The newspaper also reported a cable by Secretary of State Dean Rusk supporting the “campaign against the communists” and assuring the leader of the coup, General Suharto, that the “U.S. government [is] generally sympathetic with, and admiring of, what the army is doing.”

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Fidel Castro: World Peace Hanging by a Thread

2012-01-22T15:00:00.006+01:00

By: Fidel Castro Ruz, Cuba Debate, Jan 14, 2012

Editor's Note: In his usual all-comprehensive fashion, Comrade Fidel Castro warns of the dangers of nuclear war, which can obliterate the human civilisation. American aggressive foreign policy and its criminal wars of aggression in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan and its mobilising of propganda war against Iran with a view to prepare public opinion in favour of an attack on Iran show the real danger United States poses to the world. All peace-loving people and organisations should oppose the militaristic policies of the American Empire.

---Nasir Khan, Editor

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Yesterday I had the satisfaction of having a pleasant conversation with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I had not seen him since 2006, more than five years ago, when he visited our country to participate in the 14th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement of Countries in Havana. During the summit, Cuba was elected for the second time as president of the organization for a three-year term.

I had become gravely ill on July 26, 2006, a month and a half prior to the summit, and could barely sit up in bed. Many of the most distinguished leaders who participated in the event were kind enough to visit me. Chavez and Evo visited me several times. One afternoon four visitors came by whom I will always remember: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; an old friend, Abdelaziz Buteflika, the president of Algeria; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran; and the vice minister of Foreign Affairs and current Foreign Minister of China, Yang Jiechi, on behalf of the leader of the Communist Party and the president of China, Hu Jintao. It was really an important time for me; I was in the midst of intense physiotherapy on my right hand that I had seriously injured when I fell in Santa Clara.

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Tags: cuba debate, Fidel Castro, fidel castro ruz, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of algeria, university of havana

Noam Chomsky: US Terrorism (video)

2012-01-21T11:06:00.001+01:00

Noam Chomsky delivers the 5th Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture, Dec 3, 2009

Video

Richard Falk: Stop Warmongering in the Middle East

2012-01-21T10:44:00.000+01:00

By Richard Falk, MWC News, Jan 20, 2012

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The public discussion in the West addressing Iran’s nuclear program has mainly relied on threat diplomacy, articulated most clearly by Israeli officials, but enjoying the strong direct and indirect backing of Washington and leading Gulf states. Israel has also engaged in covert warfare against Iran in recent years, somewhat supported by the United States, that has inflicted violent deaths on civilians in Iran. Many members of the UN Security Council support escalating sanctions against Iran, and have not blinked when Tel Aviv and Washington talk menacingly about leaving all options on the table, which is ‘diplospeak’ for their readiness to launch a military attack. At last, some signs of sanity are beginning to emerge to slow the march over the cliff.

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Tags: covert warfare, members of the un security council, military attack, Richard Falk, sanctions against Iran, violent deaths

Korea Shows All That Is Wrong With U.S. Foreign Policy

2012-01-19T17:11:00.001+01:00

by Laurence M. Vance, fff.org, January 18, 2012

The tension on the Korean peninsula escalated late last year when South Korea began live-firing drills off its coastline. That was after North and South Korea shelled each other for the first time since the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War. U.S. forces in the area went on high alert even as the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington joined South Korean naval forces in exercises in the Yellow Sea. That carrier had just concluded drills with Japan involving 400 aircraft, 60 warships, and more than 40,000 U.S. and Japanese troops. South Korea was an official observer during the drills.

Korea shows all that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy.

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The Guantanamo Legacy – Ten Years of Criminality go beyond this one base and one state

2012-01-19T16:57:00.002+01:00

Dr Abdul Wahid, New Civilisation, Jan 17, 2012

Last week I attended an event in London marking the 10-year anniversary of the American gulag at Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, organised jointly by Cage Prisoners, Islamic Human Rights Commission and Reprieve.

It was also the launch of a project by Cage Prisoners called “Laa Tansa –(Never Forget)”, a campaign aimed so that people do not forget the 779 victims of Guantanamo Bay. 171 men remain under detention despite President Obama’s 2009 promise to close the camp. Of these 89 have already been cleared for release, 46 have been cleared for Stalin-style indefinate detention and 32 earmarked for ‘prosecution’ – most likely in closed, military courts.

The event did something powerful insofar as it humanised the men who were kidnapped, tortured, murdered (in some cases) and imprisoned after being arbitrarily labelled ‘terrorist suspects’ and ‘enemy combatants’. It reminded us they were fathers, husbands, and sons of other innocent victims who were their family members. It gave sobering testimony to the complexities after release and the guilt feelings about those left behind – like Shaker Aamer, the last British resident who remains in abominable conditions with 170 others.

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Americans Fed Up with Neocon Wars?

2012-01-18T18:54:00.000+01:00

By Lawrence S. Wittner, Consortium News, January 17, 2012

Mitt Romney and other Republican presidential hopefuls (with the exception of Ron Paul) are touting tough-guy global strategies that sound like George W. Bush, circa 2002. But recent public opinion polls suggest that Americans are leery of new neocon adventures, Lawrence S. Wittner reports.

Are American politicians out of sync with the public when it comes to foreign policy? There is considerable reason to believe so.

Throughout the scramble for the Republican presidential nomination, the major candidates have certainly been rabidly nationalistic. In a major foreign policy address on Oct. 7, 2011, Mitt Romney proclaimed that “the twenty-first century can and must be an American Century.”

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney

Championing a vast military buildup, he argued that, to secure this “American Century,” the United States should have “the strongest military in the world.” By contrast, he assailed the “shameful” role of the United Nations and other international institutions and declared that he did not see any reason to obey them — or the international law they represented — when it did not suit the U.S. government.

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Open Marxism volume 1: dialectics and history

2012-01-17T18:46:00.001+01:00

libcom.org,

First volume of Bonefeld, Gunn and Psychopedis’ ‘Open Marxism’ collection.

This volume contains the following articles:

Introduction - Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn, Kosmas Psychopedis
Dialectical Theory: Problems of Reconstruction - Kosmas Psychopedis
Between Philosophy and Science: Marxian Social Economy as Critical Theory - Hans-Georg Backhaus
Social Constitution and the Form of the Capitalist State - Werner Bonefeld
The Global Accumulation of Capital and the Periodisation of the Capitalist State Form - Simon Clarke
The Bourgeois.State Form Revisited - Heide Gerstenberger

Edited by Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis, 1992.

Attachment	Size
Bonefeld, Gunn and Psychopedis - Open Marxism - Volume 1 - Dialectics and History.pdf	17.94 MB

Chris Hedges: Why I’m Suing Barack Obama

2012-01-17T18:25:00.000+01:00

By Chris Hedges, truthdig.com, Jan 16, 2012


AP / Dusan Vranic
Detainees pray at the U.S. military detention facility known as Camp Bucca in Iraq in this 2009 photo.

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.

The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.

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Marjorie Cohn: Close the Guantánamo Gulag

2012-01-16T21:10:00.000+01:00

______________________________

by Marjorie Cohn, ZNet, Monday, January 16, 2012

Travelers to Cuba and music lovers are familiar with the song “Guantanamera”— literally, the girl from Guantánamo. With lyrics by José Martí, the father of Cuban independence, Guantanamera is probably the most widely known Cuban song. But Guantánamo is even more famous now for its U.S. military prison. Where “Guantanamera” is a powerful expression of the beauty of Cuba, “Gitmo” has become a powerful symbol of human rights violations—so much so that Amnesty International described it as “the gulag of our times.”

That description can be traced to January 2002, when the base received its first 20 prisoners in shackles. General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned they were “very dangerous people who would gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.” We now know that a large portion of the 750 plus men and boys held there posed no threat to the United States. In fact, only five percent were captured by the United States; most were picked up by the Northern Alliance, Pakistani intelligence officers, or tribal warlords, and many were sold for cash bounties.

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Tags: Amnesty International, chairman of the joint chiefs, chiefs of staff, joint chiefs of staff, Marjorie Cohn, tribal warlords

Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution (1900)

2012-01-15T22:57:00.002+01:00

Luxemburg

Reform or Revolution (1900)

Written: 1900, 1908
Source: Social Reform or Revolution, by Rosa Luxemburg
Publisher: Militant Publications, London, 1986 (no copyright)
First Published: 1900 (revised second edition 1908)
Translated: Integer
Online Version: Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1999
Transcription/Markup: A. Lehrer

Contents:

Introduction
The Opportunist Method
The Adaptation of Capitalism
The Realisation of Socialism through Social Reforms
Capitalism and the State
The Consequences of Social Reformism and General Nature of Reformism
Economic Development and Socialism
Co-operatives, Unions, Democracy
Conquest of Political Power
Collapse
Opportunism in Theory and Practice

Tags: internet archive, opportunism, opportunist, Rosa Luxemburg, social reformism, social reforms

Spain: Garzón Trial Threatens Human Rights

2012-01-15T22:10:00.004+01:00

Spanish Judge Challenged Amnesties in Spain, Worldwide

Human Rights Watch, January 13, 2012

Judge Baltasar Garzón leaves the Spanish High Court in Madrid on April 14, 2010.
© 2010 Reuters

More reporting on Spain

What bitter irony that Garzón is being prosecuted for trying to apply at home the same principles he so successfully promoted internationally. Thirty-six years after Franco’s death, Spain is finally prosecuting someone in connection with the crimes of his dictatorship – the judge who sought to investigate those crimes.

—Reed Brody, counsel for Human Rights Watch

(Madrid) – The upcoming trial of the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón for investigating abuses from Spain’s past threatens the concept of accountability in Spain and beyond, Human Rights Watch said today.

Garzón’s prosecution in a second case, for issuing a judicial instruction to intercept lawyer-client communications in a corruption scandal, raised questions as to whether the judge is facing retaliation for his actions in controversial cases.

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Barack Obama Worked For The CIA - John Pilger

2012-01-15T14:28:00.006+01:00

Some hard facts about Barack Obama

You Tube

Boycott the Colonial-Settler-Apartheid State!

2012-01-14T21:18:00.012+01:00

Photo by Michael Letwin, January 14, 2012

Editor's Comment: In many European countries products from the Zionist-European entity called ‘Israel’ are openly sold. The power of Zionists and their right-wing sympathisers in Europe and North America is incredible. But some trade unions and political organisations have tried to mobilise people to boycott such products from the colonial-settler State.

It is important for democratic people to clarify what this Israel is and how its agricultural products are in fact from the stolen land that belonged to the people of Palestine. Under criminal law, buying stolen good from a criminal is a crime. The same thing applies to products from this colonial-settler State. Thus many people, inadvertently though, are aiding and abetting a criminal State and thus become accomplices in an international crime.

Nasir Khan, Editor

Iraq – What was done in our name?

2012-01-14T19:01:00.003+01:00

Phil Shiner, one of the UK’s leading human rights lawyers, argues we shouldn’t forget that everything the world community abhors about US military actions, from Guantanamo Bay to this week’s US Marines video scandal, is of a piece with UK policies and practices in Iraq, including, as he documents, the abuse, torture of killing of detainees.

Phil Shiner, Ceasefire Magazine, Jan 13, 2012

Baha Mousa, 26, with his wife and two children. He was detained by the British army for 36 hours and died on 15 September 2003 (Photograph: Reuters)

Two million people marched in London against an invasion of Iraq on 15 February 2003. I doubt if any of the protesters could have imagined in their wildest dreams the serious human rights violations about to be committed by UK Armed Forces and intelligence personnel in our name. Our worst nightmares might have included the use of cluster munitions causing indiscriminate deaths of Iraqi civilians, or disproportionate bombardments of civilian areas, or even the use of depleted uranium, but not what actually happened.

The UK’s detention and interrogation policies in Iraq were not only completely unlawful but outrageously contaminated by the fact that our co-author in this illegal war, soon to become our Joint Co-Occupier subsequently, was the United States. Everything the world community associates with US practices and techniques, whether at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base, Abu Ghraib, secret sites or rendition is of a piece with UK policies and practices in Iraq. This is not my subjective opinion or idle speculation. It is a matter of publicly available evidence.

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Stephen Lendman: Waging Covert War on Iran

2012-01-13T21:11:00.002+01:00

By Stephen Lendman, MWC News, 13 January 2012

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Washington and Israel plan regime change in Iran and Syria. Israel wants regional supremacy. Washington wants global hegemony and control of the world’s strategic resources.

America tolerates no independent states. Making them client ones is prioritized.
Insurgent infiltrators ravaged Syria for months. Libya’s model was replicated short of NATO intervention perhaps to follow.

Washington, Israel, and rogue allies use many destabilization tactics. They include fake accusations, political and economic sanctions, isolation, covert and direct confrontation, cyberwar, targeted assassinations, and other provocations short of war perhaps planned.

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Israeli Source: Assassination of Iranian Nuclear Scientist Joint Mossad-MEK Operation

2012-01-11T20:13:00.000+01:00

Richard Silverstein, Tikun Olam, Jan 10, 2011

Remains of car in which Iranian nuclear scientist was killed

An Iranian news agency reports that a fourth Iranian nuclear scientist has been assassinated. Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was a professor specializing in petroleum engineering at a technical university and director of Natanz’s uranium enrichment facility. Mehr news agency said he was “deputy director of the commercial department of the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility.” He was killed by a bomb attached to the side of his car by two men on a motorcycle. My own confidential Israeli source confirms today’s murder was the work of the Mossad and MEK, as have been a number of previous operations I’ve reported here.

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Alan Hart: The Zionization of American politics and how it could be terminated

2012-01-11T11:59:00.000+01:00

By Alan Hart, Veterans Today, Jan 9, 2012

The first headline I thought of for this article was The Zionization of American democracy and how it could be terminated, but then I said to myself: “Don’t be silly, Alan, there’s no democracy in the ‘Land of the Free.’”

Leaving aside the fact that any American can now be arrested and detained without due process, there’s no mystery about why. There’s much more to democracy than voting every few years for the lesser of two or three evils or in America’s case naked political whores (with the exception among the would-be Republican presidents of Ron Paul).

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Guantánamo: A decade of damage to human rights

2012-01-11T11:58:00.000+01:00

Amnesty International, Jan 11, 2012

The Guantánamo detention facility has become a symbol of torture© US DoD

“Guantánamo has come to symbolize 10 years of a systematic failure by the USA to respect human rights”

—Rob Freer, Amnesty International’s USA researcher
Wed, 11/01/2012

The failure of the US government to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay is leaving a toxic legacy for human rights, Amnesty International said on the 10th anniversary of the first detainees being transferred to this notorious US prison.

In a report published ahead of the anniversary, Guantánamo: A Decade of Damage to Human Rights, Amnesty International highlights the unlawful treatment of Guantánamo detainees and outlines the reasons why the detention centre continues to represent an attack on human rights.

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Bigoted Republicans, Deceptive Democrats and the onward march of a police state

2012-01-10T15:49:00.007+01:00

by Rupen Savoulian, January 8, 2012

Editors Comment: In this rather exhaustive article, Rupen Savoulian has shown in a remarkably clear-sighted way how the American two-party system functions in practice and what sort of policies the two parties follow domestically and in foreign affairs. With the sort of power yielded by special interest groups, especially the military-industrial complex, the candidates of the two parties vying to reach the White House devise their strategies and manipulations tailored to meet the powerful backers. The author has a clear perception of how such political gimmicks translate into practice in forming policies of the Savage Empire in these times. In discussing the Bush-Cheney regime and the present administration of Obama, he provides a general political context before dealing with the specifics of the topic under discussion.

What emerges from Rupen Savoulian’s article is a clear picture of the deceptive nature of Obama’s polices in contrast to his initial false promises that played fraud upon ordinary citizens. But this was nothing of a hat-trick but rather a systemic prerequisite in the inherent power politics of the United States. Therefore, when Obama used anti-war feelings of the people against the Bush-Cheney’s wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was simply adhering to the common practice of deception that defines the American political system. Once in power, he not only carried on the polices of his predecessor, but also extended the imperial wars of aggression. In reality, this oily-tongued demagogue has been more cunning a president than Bush!

The author has presented his views in a candid and clear fashion. He has shown how the US imperialism under Bush and now under Obama has been instrumental in keeping the people of the Middle East in bondage to the U.S. imperial interests by supporting dictators, kings and despots. I view this article as an important contribution to exposing the role of American war-mongering power elite and the weapon producers. US imperialism’s global power and its Savage Empire exists on two wings: military power and false propaganda. An honest observer of American imperialism cannot combat the U.S. military power; but he or she has the moral power to expose the false propaganda and global deception played by the imperialists. This, the author does so well; his exposure of the militarists and war criminals in this article is splendid.

–Nasir Khan, Editor

.............................................................

Bigoted Republicans, Deceptive Democrats and the onward march of a police state

by Rupen Savoulian, Antipodean Atheist, January 8, 2012

It is easy to attack the US Republicans, because they openly express their bigotry, hatred and their woeful incompetence is plain for all to see. One of the previous frontrunners for the Republican party nomination, Herman Cain, demonstrated his terrible ineptness when attempting to answer a simple question about US policy towards Libya, an important issue given the Libyan uprising and subsequent NATO intervention in 2011. Add to that the expression of racist ignorance by Newt Gingrinch who contemptuously called the Palestinians an ‘invented people’, the ‘brain freeze’ of Rick Perry, and the homophobic rantings of Rick Santorum, and it is easy to see that the US Republicans are a pack of floundering buffoons. Sherry Wolf, socialist activist, public speaker and associate editor of the International Socialist Review, said it best when she wrote that this parade of ultra-reactionary Republican dinosaurs proves that in US politics “you could walk into any bar in Brooklyn and find 7 drunks more qualified to run the country.”

It is obvious to any political observer that the US Republicans will cut social expenditure, cut back education, health care and public transportation, all the while increasing funding for the US military-industrial complex. The current speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, Republican from Ohio, is in the pocket of the large tobacco companies, maintains close relations with big tobacco company executives, and has fought for the interests of the tobacco companies in Washington. In other words, the Republicans are backed by very wealthy supporters, and will use their money and connections to roll back any gains made by working people.

Obama and his supporters will highlight the ignorant, reactionary ravings of his opponents to garner support for his reelection campaign. The Obama Democrats will emphasize any difference, however minuscule, to co-opt the electorate and win a second term in office. What is harder to recognise is the role of the US Democrats, particularly under Barack Obama, in continuing the Bush-Cheney policies, whether it be on the issue of civil liberties, challenging the untrammeled greed and pervasive financial corruption of Wall Street, or on the big questions of US wars overseas.

Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony

Back in 1982, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder released a single called ‘Ebony and Ivory.’ It was a corny, superficial song, ostensibly meant to demonstrate that people of different skin colour can and should work together. Noble sentiments, even if it was expressed in a simplistic, juvenile touching sort of way. The lyrics speak of how people of all colours can all live and work together. Subsequent history has proven them to be correct – but not in the way the songwriters intended. The vicious, snarling ‘ivory’ of the Bush-Cheney cabal has been replaced by the smiling, touchy-feely ‘ebony’ Obama. The faces have changed, but the underlying course remains the same.

The Bush-Cheney regime was widely despised by the US working class (and governments overseas) as an administration ruling in the interests of the financial-industrial oligarchy. Its propaganda was exposed as war-mongering, and geared towards provoking confrontations with recalcitrant regimes in developing countries, intended to start expansionist wars and advance US imperial objectives. Growing opposition to these imperialist wars, and the steady erosion of civil liberties and democratic safeguards, prompted a change of tactics by the governing military-industrial-financial complex. Obama dutifully exploited the growing antiwar sentiment, and general revulsion against a narrow cabal that ruled to promote the interests of a super-rich elite to get elected. He made many promises to end wars, stop the indefinite detentions and renditions of suspects, and generally promote socially progressive economic policies domestically.

Now we can see that Obama posed as an antiwar candidate only to coopt the antiwar movement, and he quickly exposed his true colours soon after taking office. The election of Obama was a tactical shift by the US ruling class from open warfare to more covert forms of intervention, including Predator drone strikes, escalating anti-terrorism laws to lock up an ever increasing number of suspects, cracking down on insurgencies by using private security contractors (ie mercenaries), redesigning the Iraqi and Afghani occupations to make them less conspicuous but no less intrusive, and making cosmetic changes to the US economy while promoting the interests of the Wall Street elite. Not only has Obama started more imperialist wars overseas, he has nullified the Nuremberg laws by promoting the doctrine of ‘pre-emptive war’, a doctrine that was considered a war crime at the end of World War Two. He has refined the Bush-era doctrine of ‘regime change’, and he has promoted/coopted internal opposition groups to instigate covert regime change in the targeted countries. When that tactic fails, Obama has employed direct and lethal force.

Attack on civil liberties

Obama, the ‘yes we can’ president, promised a wave of changes after the Bush-Cheney regime was exposed as a corrupt, malignant, war-mongering administration. Yet, since taking office after the 2008 elections, Obama has escalated the Bush-era attacks on civil liberties. The recently passed National Defence Authorisation Act, signed into law by President Obama in December 2011, contains clauses 1031 and 1032 that empower the US military to indefinitely detain any person – US citizens or otherwise – any person suspected of terrorism offences, or providing support for terrorist groups. This law repeals the fundamental human right of habeas corpus, and provides more scaffolding for an emerging police state structure in the United States. And this act also provides another $662 billion dollars for the US military to continue its predatory wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere. Obama has failed to close Guantanamo, and has overseen the construction of another Guantanamo-style secret prison in Bagram airbase, Afghanistan. The courageous journalist Anand Gopal investigated the existence of secret prisons, who stated that “there is a vast complex network of prisons across Afghanistan, mostly situated on US military bases.”

When accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, Obama repudiated the international law laid down at Nuremberg more than 60 years ago, by advocating preemptive war. The Nuremberg trials, held in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, established the precedent that heads of state who plan and execute aggressive wars of expansion are guilty of war crimes and crime against humanity. Senior government leaders were held accountable for their decisions that cost the lives of millions of people. The international community expressly repudiated ‘preventive’ war in the context of German imperialism’s drive to establish economic and political domination in Europe. The US ruling class, seeking to dominate vast areas of the globe, escalated its drive to achieve economic supremacy in the early 1990s with the breakup of the Soviet Union. Obama, the allegedly ‘liberal’ Democrat President, extended the policy of establishing US economic hegemony by invoking the outlawed policy of ‘preventive war’. In so many words, aggressive and predatory wars are now an official part of US foreign policy, as elaborated by the fictional ‘anti-war’ President Obama.

The assassination of people overseas – euphemistically called ‘targeted killings’ – is an innovation for which Obama deserves full credit. Killings by unmanned Predator drones have been a characteristic feature of Obama’s administration. Rather than capture Osama Bin Laden and put him on trial, thus demonstrating the evidence of his guilt for all the world to see, Obama deemed it more appropriate to kill him. Bin Laden, a nonentity rendered obsolete by the forward-currents of history in the words of Robert Fisk, was sheltered in Pakistan, a solid US client state. Killing Bin Laden ensured that whatever secrets he had, died with him. Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni cleric was assassinated on Obama’s orders back in September 2011. His status as a US citizen, and all the constitutional protections afforded by that status, did not matter to the Obama administration.
Targeted killings were authorised by the Obama administration in February 2010 by then director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis C Blair (retired). Obama knew that Blair had ties to the Indonesian military, a force guilty of serious human rights abuses including mass murder, rape and torture during Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor. In 1999, as the Indonesian forces went on a murderous rampage killing thousands of East Timorese, Blair as commander-in-chief of US forces in the Pacific, was ordered to convey to Indonesian general Wiranto to close down the pro-Indonesian militias. Blair meet with Wiranto, but offered further US military assistance to Indonesia. Wiranto continued to direct the militias that were murdering thousands of East Timorese.

The executive branch of government is now judge, jury and executioner. Awlaki was never convicted, or even charged, with any crime. He was accused by the corporate press as a hate-mongering preacher, and that seemed to be enough to condemn him. Well, the US is renowned for producing hateful preachers – Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, John Hagee – but they are Christian hate-mongers so that is okay.

Yemen, Saudi Arabia and undermining democracy

The killing of Awlaki occurred in Yemen, soon after the return from temporary exile of the Yemeni dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Yemen has been convulsed by a courageous, continuing uprising that began in January 2011. The dictator Saleh has been a solid ally of the United States since he took power in 1978. The anti-regime protests, like similar uprisings throughout the Arab world, have shaken the regime, and the US is seeking a way to engineer an outcome that protects its interests while mollifying the protesters with some concessions. While Saleh has safeguarded US interests in Yemen, and has cooperated wholeheartedly with that other US client regime Saudi Arabia, the US intends that any post-Saleh regime will not harm US interests. The Obama administration has worked to moderate the demands of the protesters, encouraging the Yemeni regime to make cosmetic changes while preserving the main repressive state and economic apparatus intact. Obama is no friend of democracy and human rights in the Middle East, and as if to underscore the point, Obama approved a multi-billion dollar arms deal with the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia. Rather than encourage democratisation and support the brave people who have risen up in the Middle East, Obama has sought to maintain the repressive status quo, make certain limited concessions, and direct any political change towards a social outcome friendly to US interests.

We saw the same realpolitik calculations applied by the United States in the case of the Libyan uprising. Qadhafi’s regime had started as a pan-Arab, semi-socialist project that considerably developed the country’s infrastructure and improved the education and health care of the population. In the 1970s and 1980s Qadhafi provided an Arab Nasserist model of development. From the early 1990s, he began a Sadat-style reversal, opening up the country to pockets of private investment. By the early 2000s, he joined the US ‘war on terror’ and his regime had deteriorated into a Western-friendly dictatorship with ties to big European capital. The uprising that began in early 2011 resembled the similar protests in Tunisia and Egypt. Qadhafi waged a brutal counterinsurgency war to stamp out the rebels. Initially, the US was tepid in its response to the uprising – it was essentially playing a waiting game to see if Qadhafi, whose weapons had been supplied by the West, could defeat the insurgents. After all, the Western powers’ intelligence agencies were cooperating with the Qadhafi regime, the latter a useful ally in the ‘war on terror’.

However, once it became clear that the Qadhafi loyalists could not comprehensively defeat the rebels, the Obama administration moved swiftly to support setting up a ‘no-fly zone’, on the excuse that it was motivated by humanitarian considerations in preventing a genocide of Libyan people. Qadhafi’s counterinsurgency was brutal and savage – no less brutal and savage than the countless counterinsurgency wars launched by the US and its proxies in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries where the US has supported dictatorial regimes in suppressing popular uprisings. NATO intervention in that conflict has meant that any post-Qadhafi regime will be beholden to the interests and needs of big European and American capital. Tariq Ali described it as ‘selective vigilantism’, bombing Libya to install a pro-Western Transitional National Council, while shoring up the despots in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen. As the Socialist Worker magazine explained, the ‘noble aims’ of the West, ‘preventing massacres’ in Libya, is always exposed as a fraud by the greater crimes and atrocities of the imperial powers and their proxies, such as the NATO siege and obliteration of the town of Sirte, and the ethnic-cleansing of black African townships by the rebel forces which amount to crimes against humanity. Just to be clear about the real victors in Libya, the New York Times documented that while profit-making opportunities have receded in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have opened up exponentially in post-Qadhafi Libya.

Fake withdrawal

At the end of 2011, Obama announced that all American combat troops have left Iraq, thus fulfilling a campaign promise of 2008 to end that conflict. But upon closer inspection, that withdrawal was just as fake as the Bush-era ‘Mission Accomplished” theatrics. Not only is the US leaving behind 50 000 residual troops in the country, the largest US embassy in the world happens to be in Baghdad. Hundreds of thousands of private security contractors, ie. mercenaries, will continue to carry out counter-insurgency operations. Remaining American forces in Iraq will be rebranded as ‘advisors’ and ‘trainers’, obscuring their role as an occupying force. Obama exerted tremendous pressure on his proxy in Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, to provide legal immunity for all US troops in Iraq. Maliki and the Iraqi government did not provide such a blanket exemption, because that measure would have meant political suicide for the fragile coalition headed by Maliki. With the Iraqis refusing to grant blanket immunity from prosecution, the US had no choice but to stage a withdrawal for public consumption and hide the scale of the US debacle in that country.

Sectarian violence has been incited by the Bush and Obama administrations, in order to divide and rule. 40 000 thousand American troops are stationed at bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, supported by the US air force and navy aircraft carriers – all in close proximity to Iraq. As Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology at the State University of New York Stony Brook, has commented, Obama has reduced the ambitious scope to transform Iraq into an aggressive ally of Israel (an objective inherited from the Bush-Cheney days), but he has redesigned the Iraqi occupation to make it less conspicuous and placate his critics, and pursue the vast oil and natural gas reserves in the country. The US occupation has destroyed a functioning society, ruined the health care, electricity, medical and educational services, and left sectarian enclaves under the control of a US-controlled dictatorship in Baghdad.

Embracing Wall Street

Obama has been accused by his Democrat supporters, like veteran journalist Robert Scheer, of abandoning his electoral base by failing to tackle the predatory criminality of the Wall Street financial elite. However, Obama has consistently advocated the cause of the Wall Street bankers and financial speculators whose corrupt practices led to the global financial crash of 2008. He has done nothing to bring those responsible for that financial ruin to account, and instead has opted to shift the cost of that crisis onto working people. While it is obvious that the US Republicans oppose regulations for the financial sector and intend on continuing the policies of reckless financial speculation, Obama packed his cabinet with Wall Street representatives and economists with strong connections to the Wall Street bankers. Back in 2008, Obama (with agreement from Republican John McCain) gave the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson the authority to supply $700 billion from federal funds in order to bail out the big banks, buying up the worthless mortgage-supported securities thus acquiring the debts accumulated by the private sector. In other words, the private sector can rack up an enormous debt, but the public will be required to foot the bill. In 2008, Obama appointed Mary Schapiro to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Schapiro is a long-term Wall Street insider, and a solid representative of the big investment banks and financial institutions. This demonstrates that Obama is a servant of the financial plutocracy, and is not going to confront the people responsible for the financial crisis.

In September 2010, Obama made it perfectly clear that his government was no enemy of big business. In a speech entitled ‘Investing in America’ given to a CNBC-organised event broadcast by that channel from Washington, Obama dropped all the rhetoric against ‘fat cats’ and openly praised the ‘free market’ as the answer to the country’s economic problems. He talked about ‘partnering with Wall Street’ to revive the economy, and declared that “”In every speech, every interview that I have made, I’ve constantly said what sets America apart, what has made us successful over long term, is we’ve got the most dynamic free-market economy in the world.” A clear statement of an entrepreneur’s fantasy-philosophy.

It is time to occupy wall street, and remove the pretense that the US Democrats represent some kind of labour-friendly alternative. The Occupy movement, having spread to Australia, focuses on the malignant influence of the corporate hierarchy in subverting political democracy. The defence of jobs, health care, education, social services and our democratic rights needs to focus on the immense concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny financial oligarchy. Socialists, activists, and all those concerned about the growing criminality of the US ruling class need to merge with and strengthen the Occupy movement, and reject the danger of falling into the trap of tailing the Democrat party.
Glenn Greenwald has stated that Obama is abandoning the basic principles of the Democrat party, leading the charge to cutback social security, health care, continuing to promote Bush-era policies on indefinite detention, torture of rendition suspects, assassinating US citizens (and others) without any regard for due process, and building secret prisons. It is time to bluntly state that Obama is a mass murderer and war criminal, and belongs in the dock with Bush and Cheney.

Tags: bush cheney, deceptive nature, false promises, Military Industrial Complex, savage empire, special interest groups

Western oil firms remain as US exits Iraq

2012-01-09T22:21:00.002+01:00

Dahr Jamail, Aljazeera, Jan 7, 2012

The end of the US military occupation does not mean Iraqis have full control of their oil.

(Click the pic to enlarge it)

Baghdad, Iraq - While the US military has formally ended its occupation of Iraq, some of the largest western oil companies, ExxonMobil, BP and Shell, remain.

On November 27, 38 months after Royal Dutch Shell announced its pursuit of a massive gas deal in southern Iraq, the oil giant had its contract signed for a $17bn flared gas deal.
Three days later, the US-based energy firm Emerson submitted a bid for a contract to operate at Iraq’s giant Zubair oil field, which reportedly holds some eight million barrels of oil.

Earlier this year, Emerson was awarded a contract to provide crude oil metering systems and other technology for a new oil terminal in Basra, currently under construction in the Persian Gulf, and the company is installing control systems in the power stations in Hilla and Kerbala.

Continues >>

Marwan Barghouti: Prisoner of Conscience

2012-01-08T22:05:00.000+01:00

MWC News, Sunday, 08 January 2012

By Stephen Lendman

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1 Comment and Reactions

From March 29 – May 3, 2002, during the second Intifada, Israel conducted Operation Defensive Shield. Before Cast Lead, it was its largest military operation since June 1967 when Israel occupied Palestine.On September 23, 2001, a warrant was issued for Barghouti’s arrest.

On April 14, 2002, he was arrested on spurious charges of murder, aiding and abetting murder, promoting murder, criminal conspiracy, and being an active member of a terrorist organization.

At the time he said:

“I am a political leader, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, elected by my people. Israel has no right to try me, to accuse me, to judge me. This is a violation of international law. I have a (legal) right to resist occupation.”

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How Propaganda Targets Iran

2012-01-08T17:52:00.000+01:00

Lawrence Davidson, Consortiumnews.com, January 6, 2012

Dr Joseph Goebbels

America’s Founders saw press freedom as a key check on government dishonesty, but today’s media has become a powerful ally of official lies by funneling sophisticated propaganda especially in support of war, as Lawrence Davidson notes about the hysteria over Iran.

Winston Churchill once said, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.” He was right.

Democracy in its various manifestations is a flawed system, flawed by virtue of its roots. By definition it is the system where power flows from the people (or at least a supposed majority of the people), and as there are no perfect people, then … Well, the logic speaks for itself.

Many of democracy’s problems are common to all forms of governance. For instance, (a) the tendency of a political leader to mistake his or her own interests or that of his party, for the nation’s or community’s interests and (b) the corruptive influence of powerful subgroups or lobbies usually coming through the manipulation of money and other resources.

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Tony Blair and the £8million tax ‘mystery’

2012-01-08T17:39:00.002+01:00

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair channelled millions of pounds through a complicated web of companies and paid just a fraction in tax, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Tony Blair channelled millions of pounds through a complicated web of companies. Photo: Getty

By Robert Mendick, Chief Reporter, The Telegraph, Jan 7, 2012

Official accounts show a company set up by Mr Blair to manage his business affairs paid just £315,000 in tax last year on an income of more than £12 million. In that time, he employed 26 staff and paid them total wages of almost £2.3 million.

The accounts provide the strongest evidence yet of the huge sums generated by Mr Blair through his various activities since quitting Downing Street in June 2007.

He runs a business consultancy – Tony Blair Associates – which has deals with the governments of Kuwait and Kazakhstan among others and is a paid adviser to JP Morgan, an American investment bank, and to Zurich International, a global insurance company based in Switzerland. Mr Blair makes a further £100,000 a time from speeches and lectures while also presiding over a number of charities including a faith foundation.

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Ukraine: Security or Torturing Julia Timoshenko (text in Norwegian)

2012-01-08T17:38:00.000+01:00

En tilhenger av tidligere statsminister Julia Timosjenko foran appelldomstolen i Kiev. Støttespillerne frykter at fengselsforholdene vil knekke Timoskjenko.FOTO: SERGEI CHUZAVKOV

►Kameraovervåkes døgnet rundt

Fengselsledelsen i Ukraina sier de utelukkende er opptatt av Julia Timosjenkos beste. Derfor hevder de at det av sikkerhetsmessige  årsaker er nødvendig med kameraovervåking og opplyst celle 24 timer i døgnet.

steinar dyrnes, Aftenposte n, 08.jan. 2012

- Videoovervåking er ikke forbudt i loven. For å gjennomføre videoovervåking må det være tilstrekkelig lys i cellene, sier Ivan Pervusjkin, lederen av fengslet som Timosjenko ble flyttet til dagen før nyttårsaften.

Lyser rett mot sengen

Men forsvareren til Julia Timosjenko er på ingen måte enig i at kameraovervåking og medfølgende lys 24 timer i døgnet er til hennes beste.

- Lyset er rettet rett mot sengen hun ligger på, sier advokaten hennes.

Han mener at hun nå soner under «umenneskelige forhold» og at lys i ansiktet gjør det umulig å sove uten medisinsk hjelp.

- Alt dette har bare ett mål: å knekke Julia Timosjenko psykisk og psykologisk, sier fforsvareren.

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Obama: Drones and Change

2012-01-07T18:46:00.001+01:00

by Sean Fenley, Dissident Voice, January 5th, 2012

[Obama] didn’t just embrace the Bush policies he kissed them on the lips and ran with them.

— Ret. United States Air Force Colonel, Morris Davis

The buck stops here!

— Harry S. Truman

The Washington Post looks like it decided to do a bit of actual journalism recently — penning an extensive and informative article on the Obama infatuation with the mass-killing aerial drone. This former constitutional scholar does not seem to feel impeded — by either the Constitution or the Bill of Rights — in his love affair with and, indeed, his use and misuse of this harbinger (and indeed harvester) of death.

Obama is at present, in fact, leading the way in the history of United States presidents in his extensive reliance on the secret killing of individuals ostensibly in the interest of securing national security goals. Attorney Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantanamo, has raised serious doubts about the entire nature of the multi-fold and various drone assassination program.

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Iran, US and Israel announce new war games as tensions rise in the Gulf

2012-01-07T18:44:00.002+01:00

Surge in military activity in the region comes amid threat of EU embargo on Iranian oil and possible closure of strait of Hormuz

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 January 2012 13.49 GMT

Iran’s navy conducting the Velayat-90 naval war games in the strait of Hormuz on New Year’s Day. Photograph: Mohsen Shandiz/Corbis

Tensions on the oil shipping lanes in the Gulf have escalated with the announcement of new naval exercises by Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards and news that Israel and the US are planning to carry out extensive joint manoeuvres in the region.

The naval commander for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, said the drill in February would be “different compared to previous exercises held by the IRGC”. The Iranian navy finished 10 days of exercises in the Gulf on Monday, during which it tested a range of new missiles. It warned that Iran could close the strait of Hormuz, the narrowest point in the Gulf, through which a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes.

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Arms Dealer Obama Will Win by Default

2012-01-05T19:22:00.000+01:00

By Robert Scheer, opednews.com, January 5, 2011

reprinted from truthdig.com

Barack Obama will be re-elected not as a vindication of his policies but because the Republicans are incapable of providing a reasonable challenge to his flawed performance. On the central issue of our time–reining in the greed of the multinational corporations, led by the financial sector and the defense industry–a Republican presidential victor, with the possible exception of the now-sidelined Ron Paul, would do far less to challenge the kleptocracy of corporate-dominated governance.

As compared to front-runner Mitt Romney, who wants to derail even Obama’s tepid efforts at regulating Wall Street, and who seeks ever more wasteful increases in military spending, the incumbent president appears relatively enlightened, but that is cold comfort.

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Iraq: Began with Big Lies, Ending with Big Lies, Never Forget

2012-01-04T19:20:00.002+01:00

Anti-Empire Report

by William Blum, Dissident Voice, January 4th, 2012

“Most people don’t understand what they have been part of here,” said Command Sgt. Major Ron Kelley as he and other American troops prepared to leave Iraq in mid-December. “We have done a great thing as a nation. We freed a people and gave their country back to them.”

“It is pretty exciting,” said another young American soldier in Iraq. “We are going down in the history books, you might say.”¹

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Urging Obama to Stop Rush to Iran War

2012-01-04T19:19:00.000+01:00

A torrent of war propaganda against Iran is flooding the American political scene as U.S. neocons and Israeli hardliners see an opening for another war in the Middle East, a momentum that ex-CIA analysts Ray McGovern and Elizabeth Murray urge President Obama to stop.

Middle East Online, January 2, 2011

President Obama needs to put an abrupt halt to the game of Persian Roulette about to spin out of control in the Persian Gulf. If we were still on active duty at the CIA, this is what we would tell him:

This informal memorandum addresses the escalating game of chicken playing out in the waters off Iran and the more general issue of what can be done to put the exaggerated threat from Iran in some kind of perspective.

In keeping with the informality of this memo and our ethos of speaking truth to power, we may at times be rather blunt. If we bring you up short, consider it a measure of the seriousness with which we view the unfolding of yet another tragic mistake.

Continues >>

Iraq: Remembering Those Responsible

2012-01-03T18:44:00.002+01:00

By Stephen Zunes, ZNet, January 3, 2011

Source: Truthout

The formal withdrawal of US troops from Iraq this month has led to a whole series of retrospectives on the invasion and the eight and a half years of occupation that followed as well as a host of unanswered questions, including – given the tens of thousands of Americans and others on the US government payroll, many of whom are armed, who are remaining in Iraq – just how total the withdrawal might actually be.

In any case, of critical importance at this juncture is that we not allow the narratives on the war to understate its tragic consequences or those responsible for the war – both Republicans and Democrats -to escape their responsibility.

The US invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in the deaths of up to half a million Iraqis, the vast majority of whom are civilians, leaving over 600,000 orphans. More than 1.3 million Iraqis have been internally displaced and nearly twice that many have fled into exile. Almost 4,500 Americans were killed and thousands more have received lifelong serious physical and emotional injuries. . .

Continues >>

Obama’s New Year Resolution: More Middle East War

2012-01-03T18:43:00.002+01:00

Steohen Lendman, Veterans Today, January 2, 2011

Syria and Iran are targeted. Regime change is planned. At issue is replacing them with client ones, controlling the region’s strategic resources, and depriving key rivals China and Russia from access.

Pressure keeps building relentlessly. For months, Syria’s been ravaged by externally generated violence. Its economy’s also suffered enormously. According to a Damascus University assessment:

“The general financial situation of the country is suffering from the inability of the state budget because of the inability of the general revenue to cover expenses.”

Moreover, conditions ahead look worse because tax revenues are half what’s needed. Economic sanctions also impede oil revenues. As a result, the estimated 2012 budget deficit will be about 529 billion Syrian pounds ($9 billion dollars) out of a total $1,316 billion budget. A 40% revenue shortfall amounts to 18% of GDP.

Continues >>

A Happy New Year

2011-12-31T21:28:00.005+01:00

I wish
all our readers, writers, human rights activists,

anti-fascist, anti-imperialist and anti-war

friends and comrades:
A Happy New Year

United States as a global power: new world disorder

2011-12-31T15:29:00.000+01:00

The US is struggling with a paradox: while its military power retains global reach, its role as world leader is gradually ending

Editorial
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 December 2011

The time has long since past when it became fashionable to talk about a new world order. The collapse of the Soviet Union provided an opportunity to fashion one. But instead of using that opportunity to create a new security architecture in Europe, Nato expanded eastwards as the military anchor for democracy promotion. Not content to have seen off one global military competitor in the Soviet Union, the western military industrial complex and the think-tanks they funded scurried around for a worthy replacement. When 11 September happened, they thought they were in business again. For a brief moment, al-Qaida seemed to fulfil some of the characteristics of communism: it could pop up anywhere in the world; it was an existential enemy, driven ideologically and uncontainable through negotiation; and it was potentially voluminous. . .

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Pakistan murder testimony doctor Baqir Shah shot dead

2011-12-31T15:27:00.002+01:00

BBC News, 29 December 2011

A doctor who testified that Pakistani security forces had killed a group of unarmed foreigners has himself been shot dead.

Dr Baqir Shah was gunned down in the city of Quetta.

He had contradicted police reports earlier this year which suggested the five victims had been suicide bombers.

Dr Shah was in his car when gunmen pulled up alongside him and sprayed the vehicle with bullets.

He died soon afterwards in hospital.

It was Dr Shah who, back in May, carried out the autopsies in a controversial case.

Continues >>

Stephen Lendman: Israel v. Palestine in 2012

2011-12-31T15:26:00.001+01:00

Stephen Lendman, uruknet.info, Dec 30, 2011

Palestinians have endured decades of ruthless occupation. World leaders decline support. They’re left largely on their own despite growing millions globally supporting them.

Life in occupied Palestine is harsh and repressive. On December 26, Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barakat, delivered another blow. The Municipality will classify 70,000 Israeli Arab citizens non-residents and involuntarily transfer them to West Bank locations.

At issue is entirely Judaizing Jerusalem through forced ethnic cleansing to facilitate escalated settlement construction. It’s also part of creating a greater Jerusalem and preventing a two-state solution.

Two new Haaretz reports are also significant heading into 2012, one by writer Barak Ravid.

Continues >>

PAKISTAN: A lawyer from Hindu community is missing and police refuse to register the case claiming that the abduction of Hindus is of no consequence

2011-12-31T15:25:00.000+01:00

AHRC, Dec 30, 2011

Urgent Appeal Case : The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information regarding that a lawyer belonging to the Dalit caste of Hindu minority community has been missing since December 23 when he was going to attend the Sindh High Court. His car was found abandoned at a Taxi stand with all court files in it. The high police officials of the district Hyderabad, Sindh province have refused to register the case. The police are also fighting on the jurisdiction of the concerned police stations to avoid filing the case. The abductors have asked for ransom of Rs. 10 million but still the police refuse to register the case and are also not investigating it as the abductions of Hindus are not a new thing and the routine business of Muslim fundamentalist groups. It is feared by his family that he would be killed if he does not embrace Islam or pay the ransom.

Continues >>

Qaddafi Was Worth More Than $200 Billion By Far The Richest Person In The World Business

2011-12-30T23:17:00.000+01:00

By Gus Lubin | Bu siness Insider – Sat, 22 Oct, 2011 10:08 AM EDT

Muammar Qaddafi was three times as rich as Carlos Slim and ten times richer than King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia — easily the richest man in the world.

Qaddafi was supposedly worth over $200 billion with assets in bank accounts, real estate and corporate investments around the world.

This staggering new estimate comes from senior Libyan officials and seems to be legitimate, according to the LA Times.How did he get so rich?”King of Kings” Qaddafi had uncontested personal control over the largest oil reserves in Africa for the past 41 years.Unlike Abdullah and other oil-rich leaders, Qaddafi invested little money in national infrastructure like schools and hospitals or any kind of economic diversification. What money Qaddafi did spend went largely to buy support from African leaders.While much of this money was held by government institutions like the Central Bank of Libya and the Libyan Investment Authority, Qaddafi was able to withdraw money at will. Read more details at the LA Times >

USA: Government of the rich, by rich and for the rich

2011-12-28T22:32:00.000+01:00

Patrick Martin, wsws.org, 28 December 2011

According to a study reported Tuesday, nearly half the members of the United States Congress are millionaires. Of the 535 legislators (100 members of the Senate and 435 members of the House of Representatives), at least 250 are millionaires and the median net worth is $913,000.

Sixty-seven senators are millionaires and the median wealth of the body’s 100 members is $2.63 million.

While the Senate has long been known as a millionaires’ club, the transformation of the House is a relatively recent phenomenon. The median net worth of members of the House of Representatives, excluding home equity, has more than doubled over the last 25 years, from $280,000 in 1984 to $725,000 in 2009 in inflation-adjusted dollars. During that same period, the median net worth of an American family fell from $20,600 to $20,500.

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Gaza: Remembering Cast Lead

2011-12-28T22:17:00.000+01:00

by Stephen Lendman, opednews.com, Dec 28, 2011

December 27 is the third anniversary of Israel’s premeditated war of aggression on Gaza with more planned.

December 27 marks the third anniversary of Israel’s lawless war on Gaza. Without provocation, three weeks of terror bombing and invasion devastated the Strip.

Missiles, bombs, shells, and illegal weapons were used against defenseless people. Mass slaughter and destruction followed.

Brazen crimes of war and against humanity were committed. Responsible officials remain unaccountable. Security Council no-fly zone protection wasn’t ordered. International leaders shared culpability through silence. They still do. Washington was complicit by supplying Israel with weapons, munitions, and encouragement.

Cast Lead’s one of history’s great crimes. Before his fall from grace, Richard Goldstone said:

“(T)here is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.”

Continues >>

Tahrir doctors: The military treated us like prisoners of war

2011-12-28T22:16:00.000+01:00

Khalaf Ali Hassan, Egypt Independent, December 27, 2011

The military police assaulted volunteer doctors working at the field hospital in Tahrir Square, doctors have said. The doctors say the military told them it was helping the wounded.

“The military police burnt our first aid kits,” said Dr. Mona Mina at a press conference on Sunday, adding that they were treating the doctors as if they were prisoners of war. “They must respect the international conventions that Egypt has signed in this regard.”

“The wounded have the right to medical treatment, even if they were thugs,” she said, refuting the army’s excuse for removing the make-shift clinics.

Dr. Karim Abdel Halim said the military police beat him with clubs and shocked him with taser guns. “And they took my mobile phone and my camera,” he said.

Continues >>

Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing

2011-12-28T22:12:00.002+01:00

By Greg Miller, The Washington Post, December 28, 2011

The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents.

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Stephen Lendman: Netanyahu Rejects Peace

2011-12-27T21:03:00.000+01:00

by Stephen Lendman, Veterans Today, Dec 27, 2011

Sham Israeli peace negotiations were stillborn from inception. Writer Henry Siegman once called them “the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history.”

Netanyahu once said they’re “a waste of time.” Previous Israeli officials called occupation and status quo conditions “permanent.”

Republican presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich calls Palestinians an “invented” people. Decades ago, former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (a transplanted Ukrainian American) said:

“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist….How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.”

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The Bush/Obama War Against Truth

2011-12-26T18:09:00.000+01:00

The harsh treatment of alleged leaker Bradley Manning is part of a broader campaign to silence government whistleblowers, a pattern that began with Vice President Dick Cheney’s outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame but has expanded under President Obama, says ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman.

By Melvin A. Goodman, Consortiumnews.com, Dec 21, 2011

When Pvt. Bradley Manning appeared in a military courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland, last week, it was his first public appearance in more than 19 months. Manning has been held without trial for the past year and a half; only now is a hearing being conducted to determine if there is sufficient evidence to refer his case to a general court martial.

During this period, Manning, who is charged with transferring classified information to an unauthorized source, has been treated as an “enemy combatant,” subjected to solitary confinement in a maximum-security cell as well as harassment day and night.

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Israeli FM: No Peace in Next Decade

2011-12-26T18:06:00.000+01:00

Palestinians Only Obstacle to Peace, Insists Lieberman

by Jason Ditz, Antiwar.com, December 25, 2011

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In a Christmas press conference attended by a number of top ambassadors, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman lashed those critical of Israel’s position on the peace process, while insisting no peace could be achieved within the next decade.

“In the next decade, this will be the situation and we need to know how to deal with it,” insisted Lieberman, saying that ambassadors should focus on “managing” the conflict instead of trying to solve it.

Lieberman also reiterated his condemnation of the European Union for criticizing settlement expansion, saying that the only obstacle to peace with the Palestinians is the Palestinians themselves and that construction would continue.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to support the notion that the Israeli government has abandoned the idea of peace, insisting that his government will no longer negotiate with the Palestinians under any circumstances once they form a unity government, something expected within the next few months.

Jesus 2011

2011-12-25T15:26:00.000+01:00

By Badri Raina – Delhi, Dec 24, 2011

Jesus of Nazareth, I tell you

You remain much in my heart.

In moments when the world disappears,

I have sight of you in tattered white robe

And matted shoulder-length hair

Walking the desert towards the sea,

Turning your back on us

Who are now money changers all.

But listen to my short little wish:

May those that are destined to go in 2012

Do so quickly and quietly,

Without pain or regret.

And, may those that last the year

Cease to give to Caesar

What is never Caesar’s,

And may Caesar be obliged to

Yield to them all that Caesar has stolen.

Assure me that much,

And your divinity shall be mine as well.

Smile, O wise one, and be born tonight

Afresh into an innocence timelessly bright.

The Warped Morality of a Warmonger

2011-12-21T22:08:00.000+01:00

MWC News, 20 December 2011

By Nima Shirazi

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Why Alan Dershowitz is Wrong on Israel’s ‘Rights’

Renowned torture enthusiast and perennial Israel apologist Alan Dershowitz is in Tel Aviv this week attending an annual business conference sponsored by Globes and, as usual, has been busy equivocating for Israeli espionage, defending war criminals, and warmongering about Iran.

During a speech he delivered on Sunday December 11, Dershowitz opined, “Israel has the right morally and legally to strike Iran just as it did on [the Osirak nuclear facility] in Iraq in 1981.“

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Pvt. Manning and Imperative of Truth

2011-12-21T22:05:00.002+01:00

by Ray McGovern, CommonDreams.org, Dec 21. 2011

When I was asked to speak at Saturday’s rally at Fort Meade in support of Pvt. Bradley Manning, I wondered how I might provide some context around what Manning is alleged to have done.

(In my talk, so as not to think I had to insert the word “alleged” into every sentence, I asked for unanimous consent to using the indicative rather than the subjunctive mood.)
What jumped into my mind was the letter Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from the Birmingham City jail in April 1963, from which I remembered this:

“Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up, but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

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US Blocks UN From Condemning Israeli Settlement Expansion

2011-12-21T22:04:00.002+01:00

14 UN Security Council Members Issue United Statements Slamming US

by Jason Ditz, Antiwar.com, December 20, 2011

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In a move Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin termed “historic,” all 14 other members of the United Nations Security Council united today to offer statements slamming the United States for its decision to block a UN Security Council resolution on Israel’s settlement expansion.

Israel announced the latest in a long line of such expansions on Sunday, and it has been roundly criticized by virtually every nation on the planet, with European Union officials in particular warning the move harmed the prospect of peace talks.

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Video: John Pilger answers Obama’s claim that US military is “finest fighting force in history”

2011-12-20T20:11:00.000+01:00

Uruknet.info, Dec 18, 2011

StoptheWarCoalition

Announcing the Iraq war was ended, Barack Obama told US troops on 14 December 2011, “The United States military is the finest fighting force in the history of the world.” What he didn’t say is that since 1945 the US military has been directly responsible for the deaths of over 10 million people and that America has in that time overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and intervened in at least 30 more. John Pilger has something to say about that.

Manning Hearing Moves Into ‘Secret’ Sessions

2011-12-20T20:09:00.002+01:00

Almanza: Protecting Classified Info Outweighs Open Proceeding

by Jason Ditz, Antiwar.com, December 19, 2011

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With the prosecution pushing to introduce “secret” evidence against Pfc. Bradley Manning, the presiding officer in his preliminary hearing has moved the session behind closed doors, insisting that “protecting classified information is an overriding interest that outweighs the value of an open proceeding.”

The decision removed the public and press from the courtroom, though the Army did say that certain “other government agencies” which they did not identify would be allowed to remain and follow the hearing.

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Gary Younge: The US is blind to the price of war that is still being borne by the Iraqi people

2011-12-20T20:08:00.000+01:00

Every effort must be made to thwart those who seek to embellish and distort America’s lamentable legacy in Iraq

- Gary Younge, guardian.co.uk, Sunday 18 December 2011 21.00 GMT

Illustration by Toby Morison

On 19 November 2005 a US marine squad was struck by a roadside bomb in Haditha, in Iraq’s Anbar province, killing one soldier and seriously injuring two others. According to civilians they then went on the rampage, slaughtering 24 people. They included a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair and a three-year-old child. It was a massacre. “I think they were just blinded by hate … and they just lost control,” said James Crossan, one of the injured marines.

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Russia: Politics Without Choice

2011-12-20T20:05:00.002+01:00

By Boris Kagarlitsky, The Moscow Times, Dec 20, 2011

The surge in street protests this month was the natural result of widespread discontent that has been building up steam for several years without any outlet. It would have been difficult to predict that the trigger would be the falsified results of the elections for the purely decorative State Duma. These results came as no surprise to the public, but it seems that people were simply looking for a pretext to vent their frustrations.

The Duma elections served only one purpose: to prepare for the presidential election in March, and we all know who the winner will be. That decision is made not by voters but by a select group within the bureaucratic elite. The purpose of presidential elections is only to try to legitimize decisions that rulers have already made and to provide legal validation for a political relationship that already exists.

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Seumas Milne: The ‘Arab spring’ and the west: seven lessons from history

2011-12-20T10:23:00.000+01:00

Drawing on the Pathé News archive, Seumas Milne picks out the recurrent themes of imperial efforts to control the Middle East

- Seumas Milne,guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 December 2011 15.41 GMT

October 2011: Egyptians in Talat Harb square, Cairo, protest against military rule; October 1956: Egyptians demonstrate in the same square against British-French invasion. Photograph: Getty/Associated Press

There’s a real sense in which, more than any other part of the former colonial world, the Middle East has never been fully decolonised. Sitting on top of the bulk of the globe’s oil reserves, the Arab world has been the target of continual interference and intervention ever since it became formally independent.

Carved into artificial states after the first world war, it’s been bombed and occupied – by the US, Israel, Britain and France – and locked down with US bases and western-backed tyrannies. As the Palestinian blogger Lina Al-Sharif tweeted on Armistice Day this year, the “reason World War One isn’t over yet is because we in the Middle East are still living the consequences”.

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‘We’re not leaving,’ say U.S. officials in Afghanistan

2011-12-19T21:28:00.000+01:00

By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY, Dec 18, 2011

KABUL – Top American officials in Afghanistan say the U.S. military intends to maintain a troop presence here beyond a 2014 deadline for Afghan troops to take over.

Pool photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais
U.S. to ensure Afghans are ready to take over: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, left, talks with U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker, right, and Marine Gen. John Allen in Kabul on Dec. 13.

U.S. to ensure Afghans are ready to take over: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, left, talks with U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker, right, and Marine Gen. John Allen in Kabul on Dec. 13.

Marine Gen. John Allen, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said the Taliban and other forces in the region need to know the U.S. military will make sure the Afghans can handle the job.

“If you been waiting for us to go, we’re not leaving,” he said.

NATO forces agreed last year to set a deadline of the end of 2014 for turning over security to Afghan forces and ending combat operations.

The United States has 90,000 troops in Afghanistan. There are more than 30,000 troops from NATO allies.

By the end of the summer of 2012, U.S. forces are slated to drop to about 68,000.

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Image of unknown woman beaten by Egypt’s military echoes around world

2011-12-19T21:26:00.000+01:00

The arrest and brutal treatment of this young woman reminds us that the revolution is far from over

- Ahdaf Soueif,guardian.co.uk, Sunday 18 December 2011

Egyptian soldiers beating and dragging a young woman during clashes in Tahrir Square. Her image has become the latest icon of the revolution. Photograph: Reuters

The woman is young, and slim, and fair. She lies on her back surrounded by four soldiers, two of whom are dragging her by the arms raised above her head. She’s unresisting – maybe she’s fainted; we can’t tell because we can’t see her face. She’s wearing blue jeans and trainers. But her top half is bare: we can see her torso, her tummy, her blue bra, her bare delicate arms. Surrounding this top half, forming a kind of black halo around it, is the abaya, the robe she was wearing that has been ripped off and that tells us that she was wearing a hijab.

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New Photos Released of Iraq Atrocity, With Documents and Video

2011-12-18T19:10:00.000+01:00

By David Swanson, ZNet, Dec 18, 2011

Source: Warisacrime.org

Every American should read this letter:

December 18, 2007
To:   Mr. Randy Waddle, Assistant Inspector General, Ft Carson, Colorado
CC: LTC John Shawkins, Inspector General, Ft Carson, Colorado
        Major General Mark Graham, Commanding Officer, Ft Carson, Colorado
        Major Haytham Faraj, USMC, Camp Pendleton, California
        Lt General Stanley Greene, US Army Inspector General

Subject: Formal Notification of War Atrocities and Crimes Committed by Personnel, B Company, 2-12, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division in Iraq

Dear Mr. Waddle,

My name is John Needham. I am a member of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry division, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, (BCo,2-12INF,2BCT,2ID . I deployed with my unit to Iraq from October 2006 until October 2007 when I was medically evacuated for physical and mental injuries that I suffered during my deployment. The purpose of my letter is to report what I believe to be war crimes and violation of the laws of armed conflict that I personally witnesses while deployed in Iraq.

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Washington’s Greater Middle East Agenda: War

2011-12-18T19:07:00.000+01:00

By Stephen Lendman, opednews.com, Dec 18, 2011

America’s permanent war agenda.

Targeting the Middle East’s rich oil and gas resources, Washington plans waring against the region one country at a time to replace independent regimes with client ones.
At issue is achieving total dominance over MENA (Middle East/North Africa) countries and Central Asia to Russia and China’s borders. Another key objective is removing or marginalizing their regional influence.

Russia is Washington’s main military rival. Between them, they control about 97% of the world’s nuclear arsenal with sophisticated delivery systems able to target strategic global sites.

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War Without End, Amen: The Reality of America’s Aggression Against Iraq

2011-12-17T17:00:00.004+01:00

Chris Floyd, uruknet.info, Dec 16, 2011

In March 2003, the United States of America launched an entirely unprovoked act of military aggression against a nation which had not attacked it and posed no threat to it. This act led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It drove millions more from their homes, and plunged the entire conquered nation into suffering, fear, hatred and deprivation.

This is the reality of what actually happened in Iraq: aggression, slaughter, atrocity, ruin. It is the only reality; there is no other. And it was done deliberately, knowingly, willingly. Indeed, the bipartisan American power structure spent more than $1 trillion to make it happen. It is a record of unspeakable savagery, an abomination, an outpouring of the most profound and filthy moral evil.

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No justice for Bradley Manning

2011-12-17T16:59:00.003+01:00

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

By Charles Davis, Information Clearing House

December 16, 2011 “Al Jazeera” – - Washington, DC - Private Bradley Manning was just 22 years old when he allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of US State Department cables and video evidence of war crimes to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. For that act of courage that revealed to the world the true face of the American empire, he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.

After waiting more than 18 months, half of which he spent in torturous solitary confinement that he was only removed from after an international outcry and the resignation of a top State Department official, Manning is finally getting a shot at justice - if we can think of a military court as justice - when his case moves to the pre-trial hearing phase this Friday. But whether Manning is ultimately found guilty or not is beside the point: All one needs to know about American justice is that if he had murdered civilians and desecrated their corpses - if he had the moral capacity to commit war crimes, not the audacity to expose them - he’d be better off today.

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Obituary: Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

2011-12-16T21:11:00.000+01:00

by Alex Callinicos, Socialist Worker, Dec 17, 2011

The news of the writer Christopher Hitchens’s death fills my mind with contradictory images and feelings.

I remember the young Christopher. He was a couple of years ahead of me at the same Oxford college in the late 1960s. He was then the best known activist of the International Socialists (IS, now the Socialist Workers Party) at Oxford.

Chain-smoking, elegant even in the donkey jacket that was standard issue on the revolutionary left, he was a brilliant orator. It was from him that I first learned, often with the force of revelation, many of the main ideas of the Marxist tradition.

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US exit from Iraq: ‘this is not a withdrawal, this is an act on a stage’

2011-12-15T18:30:00.000+01:00

Iraqi people greet pullout ceremony with ambivalence mixed with concern over an uncertain future

Martin Chulov in Baghdad
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 December 2011 16.55 GMT

US soldiers hold the US and Iraqi flags during the symbolic flag-lowering ceremony marking the end of the US mission in Iraq. Photograph: Ali Al-Saadi/AFP/Getty Images

There was no triumphalism and certainly no shock or awe. The end of the war in Iraq was subdued and simple: a small band playing as the US forces flag was furled with 200 troops watching on quietly.

In a makeshift parade ground in a corner of Baghdad airport, time was called on the war just after 1pm on Thursday, eight years, eight months and 26 days after its far more dramatic opening in March 2003. Nearby a plane was waiting to take home the US high command. And in southern Iraq, the 4,000 US troops who remain were steadily streaming towards Kuwait.

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The Myth of U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan

2011-12-15T18:29:00.000+01:00

By Sheldon Richman, MWC News, Dec 14, 2011

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Despite Barack Obama’s trumpeted force draw-down in Afghanistan, by the end of next summer more than twice as many U.S. troops will be fighting in that country’s civil war as there were when he became president in 2009. His soothing words notwithstanding, a force of about 70,000 will remain there at least until the end of 2014. We can be sure, however, that that won’t stop the president from campaigning for reelection on a peace platform. As Election Day 2012 approaches, we’ll be treated to lots of footage of withdrawing soldiers.

Yet Obama’s speech in June was mostly show, a spectacle to make the war- and deficit-weary public think he’s taking substantial steps toward disengagement. He did something similar in Iraq, though 50,000 troops remain and are still taking casualties.

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Defiance in the face of repression on Iran’s Student Day

2011-12-15T18:27:00.002+01:00

By Drewery Dyke, Amnesty International’s Iran researcher, Dec 9, 2011

To mark Iran’s National Student Day on 7th December, a letter from imprisoned student Majid Dorri has been smuggled out of Behbehan Prison in southern Iran. In it, he says:
“16th of Azar [7 December] is a day when the university stood against oppression; it stood and gave martyrs; it stood and was dragged over the ground and through blood; but it did not leave, it stayed; it trembled but it did not surrender; it was weakened but did not bend.”

Student Day marks the killing of three students by police in 1953. On this day every year, Iranian students hold demonstrations and gatherings calling for reforms. They refuse to be silenced by the ever-mounting tide of repression.

Continues >>

An Eyewitness Account of the Israeli Attack on Mustafa Tamimi’s Funeral

2011-12-15T18:24:00.004+01:00

By Holly Rigby, Information Clearing House, Dec 14, 2011

This has been one of the darkest and most disturbing days I have ever had to experience. The funeral of Mustafa Tamimi, murdered by the IOF at a demonstration at Nabi Saleh on Friday, ended with the IOF shooting endless rounds of the teargas canisters that killed Mustafa at unarmed mourners, beating and arresting people with impunity as they walked across Nabi Saleh village after the funeral.

Nabi Saleh, a small village of only 550 people, has been organising non-violent protests against the theft of their land since 2009. The illegal Israeli settlement of Halamish has continued to grow and expand since 1976, and the tiny village has been holding the demonstration for two years protesting against the confiscation of the village’s main water supply, the Kaws Spring. Nabi Saleh has become infamous for its violence and arrests against Palestinians, but until yesterday nobody had been killed there by the IOF.

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The struggle emerges in Russia

2011-12-15T18:23:00.002+01:00

Interview: Boris Kagarlitsky

Socialist Worker, December 14, 2011

Protests by tens of thousands of people in Moscow and other cities December 10 were by far the largest demonstrations in Russia since the collapse of the USSR two decades ago.
The focus of the mobilizations was massive fraud in the December 4 parliamentary elections. The ruling party, United Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, outraged millions with ballot-stuffing operations to try to achieve a parliamentary majority. These brazen attempts at vote-rigging were documented by both poll monitors and ordinary citizens using cell phone cameras.

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President Obama Richly Deserves To Be Dumped

2011-12-15T08:46:00.001+01:00

By John R. MacArthur, Harpers Magazine, Dec 14, 2011

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the Providence Journal on December 14, 2011.

As evidence of a failed Obama presidency accumulates, criticism of his administration is mounting from liberal Democrats who have too much moral authority to be ignored.

Most prominent among these critics is veteran journalist Bill Moyers, whose October address to a Public Citizen gathering puts the lie to our barely Democratic president’s populist pantomime, acted out last week in a Kansas speech decrying the plight of “innocent, hardworking Americans.” In his talk, Moyers quoted an authentic Kansas populist, Mary Elizabeth Lease, who in 1890 declared, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”

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Fallujah : Iraqis burn US flags to celebrate troop withdrawal

2011-12-15T08:44:00.005+01:00

uruknet.info, Dec 14, 2011

Source: AFP

FALLUJAH, Iraq — Hundreds of Iraqis set alight US and Israeli flags on Wednesday as they celebrated the impending pullout of American forces from the country in the former insurgent bastion of Fallujah.

Shouting slogans in support of the “resistance,” the demonstrators held up banners and placards inscribed with phrases like, “Now we are free” and “Fallujah is the flame of the resistance.”

In the centre of the city surrounded by the Iraqi army, demonstrators carried posters bearing photos of apparent insurgents, faces covered and carrying weapons.

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Nuclear-Israel versus a Nuclear-Free Iran

2011-12-15T08:43:00.000+01:00

Written by Yamin Zakaria, Radical Views, Dec 13, 2011

Facts are the best antidote against poisonous media propaganda. Nuclear-free Iran is militarily weaker than nuclear-Israel, backed by the mighty US; based on the disparity of military capabilities, any impartial observer would identify the likely aggressor. In this case, this is corroborated with a substantive track record of invading and attacking other nations. Unlike Israel, Iran has not invaded anyone in the last 300 years or more; it lives peacefully with all its neighbours.

From the 1950s, Iran was virtually colonised through the CIA installed puppet, Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was eventually ousted by the popular revolution in 1979, led by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. In response the US, in collusion with the other western powers, initiated a proxy war through Saddam Hussein of Iraq that lasted for almost a decade. The country is now surrounded by hostile US military bases, and there is constant talk of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, largely incited by the neo-conservatives, the far right and the Zionist commentators.

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Haaretz: In Israel, the life of a Palestinian is cheap

2011-12-13T18:22:00.002+01:00

When it comes to shooting a Palestinian, pulling the trigger does not come with a real fear of having to answer to the law.

Haaretz Editorial, Dec 13, 2011

The pictures from Friday’s events in Nabi Saleh are hard to swallow: An Israel Defense Forces soldier opens the back door of an armored military jeep and, from a distance of just a few meters, fires a tear-gas canister directly at a young man who is throwing stones. After the canister is fired, the jeep continues on its way without stopping.
A photographer on the scene relates that the young man “fell to the ground, remained conscious for a few seconds, and then began bleeding profusely from the region of his eye.” He was subsequently evacuated for treatment at Beilinson Hospital, where he was sedated and placed on a respirator. On Saturday, he died from his wounds.

	Mourners carry the body of Palestinian activist Mustafa Tamimi during his funeral in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on December 11, 2011.
	Photo by: AFP

Continues >>

THAILAND: “Ingrained culture of impunity” denies rights, AHRC says

2011-12-13T18:20:00.002+01:00

AHRC , December 9, 2011
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(Hong Kong, December 9, 2011) A “deep-seated, ingrained culture of impunity that spans the state security forces, judiciary and civil service” is continuing to block the emergence of a human rights-respecting culture in Thailand, the Asian Human Rights Commission said today in its annual State of Human Rights in Asia report.

The 16-page Thailand report, entitled “Consolidated internal security state, complaisant judiciary” synthesizes and analyses a number of key human rights issues from throughout the year, including the criminalizing of victims of torture, persecution of human rights defenders, and constrictions of free speech.

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The Washington – “Moderate Islam” Alliance: Containing Rebellion Defending Empire

2011-12-13T18:19:00.004+01:00

The dynamic of democratic, nationalist and class struggles throughout the Moslem world has set in motion a new constellation of alliances between the imperial West (US and European Union) and Islamist parties, leaders and regimes, dubbed “moderate” by US officials, propagandists and academics.

by James Petras, Veterans Today, Dec 12, 2011

This essay analyzes the changing contemporary context of imperial domination, especially the demise of longstanding client regimes. It then examines the previous significant ties between western imperial powers and Islamist movements and regimes and the basis of ‘historical collaboration’.

The third part of the paper will outline the political circumstances in which the imperial powers embrace “moderate” Islamists in government and utilize “armed fundamentalists” in opposition to secular regimes. We will critically analyze how “moderate” Islam is defined by the Western imperialist powers. Is this a tactical or strategic alliance? What are the political “trade-offs”? What do imperialism’s neo-liberal clients and their new ‘moderate’ Muslim allies have in common and how do they differ?

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Inspiratorer, interessenter, innvielsesmestre og investorer i Breiviks verden (text in Norwegian)

2011-12-13T14:28:00.001+01:00

Dr Ola Tunander, Nytt Norsk Tidsskrift/ 2011, No. 04

Sammendrag

Norske forskere spekulerte i Dagserevyen den 22. juli 2011 om et islamistisk angrep, men det viste seg snart at den ansvarlige, Anders Behring Breivik, hadde blitt inspirert av et helt annet politisk miljø. Denne artikkelen ser nærmere på gjerningsmannens inspiratorer og på hvilke aktører som kan ha hatt interesse av å bruke ham. Her framheves ikke minst voldelige nettverk og finansielle bånd som Breiviks manifest og andre vitnesbyrd peker mot.

Continues >>

Neocons Don’t Believe Their Own Anti-Iran Propaganda

2011-12-12T21:37:00.000+01:00

By Sheldon Richman, MWC News, Dec 7, 2011

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We’re being lied to about the purported Iranian nuclear threat, and the war party knows it.
In ways eerily reminiscent of the 2002 buildup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the American people are being fed a steady diet of war propaganda about Iran and its alleged quest for a nuclear weapon.

As with Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, comparisons to Hitler circa 1938 abound. Max Boot, the neoconservative columnist, is just one of many propagandists working to agitate Americans into supporting a military attack on Iran. He wrote recently, “After the failure to stop Hitler and Bin Laden, among others, Westerners were said to have suffered a ‘failure of imagination.’ We are suffering that same failure today as we fail to face up to the growing threat from the Islamic Republic.”

The message is unmistakable: Time is running out. Get Iran now before it’s too late.

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The real definition of Terrorism

2011-12-12T21:25:00.002+01:00

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, Dec 10, 2011

The FBI yesterday announced it has secured an indictment against Faruq Khalil Muhammad ‘Isa, a 38-year-old citizen of Iraq currently in Canada, from which the U.S. is seeking his extradition. The headline on the FBI’s Press Release tells the basic story: “Alleged Terrorist Indicted in New York for the Murder of Five American Soldiers.” The criminal complaint previously filed under seal provides the details: ‘Isa is charged with “providing material support to a terrorist conspiracy” because he allegedly supported a 2008 attack on a U.S. military base in Mosul that killed 5 American soldiers. In other words, if the U.S. invades and occupies your country, and you respond by fighting back against the invading army — the ultimate definition of a “military, not civilian target” — then you are a . . . Terrorist.

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Stephen Lendman: Wrecking Europe to Fix It

2011-12-12T21:21:00.002+01:00

by Stephen Lendman, opednews.com, Dec 12, 2011

Deepening Eurozone crisis spreads globally.

From inception, Eurozone monetary union was an idea doomed to fail. Nonetheless, it was engineered fraudulently to look workable.

In 1979, Europe’s Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) was introduced as part of the European Monetary System (EMS) to propel the continent to one European currency unit (ECU).

ERM never worked. ECU is failing. At issue is duplicity, conflicts of interest, and uniting 17 dissimilar countries under rigid euro straightjacket rules. Doing so usurps their monetary and fiscal autonomy disastrously.

Nonetheless, banking giants partnered with EU, ECB and IMF Troika power decide everything. Policies require lowering living standards, sacking public workers, and selling off state assets lock, stock and barrel at fire sale prices.

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CIA prison exposed in Romania

2011-12-12T12:07:00.000+01:00

By Sybille Fuchs , wsws.org, 12 December 2011

Journalists from the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the German television magazine “Panorama” have uncovered the location of one of the chain of notorious secret torture prisons run by US Central Intelligence Agency in Europe. The prison is situated in a residential area of the Romanian capital, Bucharest.

The prison in Bucharest began operations following the closure in 2003 of a similar torture centre in Poland. The prison was located in a building housing the Romanian National Registry Office for Classified Information (Official Registrului National al Informatiilor Secrete de Stat) authority. The transport of prisoners to the prison from Bucharest’s airport was carried out in inconspicuous minibuses.

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Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo and other Chinese activists must be released

2011-12-11T22:31:00.004+01:00

Amnesty International, Dec 9, 2011

“Chinese citizens are living in a straitjacket as the authorities imprison and ‘forcibly disappear’ those who speak out for political reform”

—Catherine Baber, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Deputy Director, Dec 9, 2011

China must release jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo along with others imprisoned for dissent, Amnesty International said today – one year after the Chinese activist won the award.

Liu Xiaobo has remained in prison since he was awarded the prize in absentia on 10 December 2010, while his wife Liu Xia has been under illegal house arrest.

Meanwhile, other government critics, such as veteran democracy activist Liu Xianbin, have also received long jail terms for speaking out on the same spurious charge of “inciting subversion of state power”.

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Time to Apologize for the West’s Shameful Support of Dictatorship in Egypt

2011-12-11T16:46:00.002+01:00

by Eric Margolis, CommonDreams.org, Dec 11, 2011

Tahrir Square, epicenter of the earthquake that ousted Egypt’s western-backed dictator, Husni Mubarak, is quiet – for the moment.

There are banner-wavers, speakers, and youngsters milling about. But the by now world-famous square has a forlorn, leftover look, with more street people than revolutionaries. Violence crackles like static electricity.

Heavily armed riot and security police and their armored vehicles are massed nearby. In the ancient Khan al-Khalili Bazaar, I saw vanloads of government thugs waiting to attack demonstrators. I was almost arrested when I started taking photos.

Demonstrators at Tahrir showed me cans of expended tear gas that caused some deaths and many casualties. Whether they were the usual anti-riot CS gas, or the six times stronger, carcinogenic CR that can kill or blind, I could not tell. But the canisters were marked, “Made in the USA” and everyone knew it.

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Robert Fisk: Bankers are the dictators of the West

2011-12-11T16:45:00.002+01:00

Robert Fisk, The Independent, Dec 10, 2011

Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other “story” – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard “experts” who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.

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PHILIPPINES: Inability to protect has created a ‘parallel system’

2011-12-11T16:44:00.000+01:00

AHRC, Dec 9, 2011

Statement : The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) today published its 25-page report containing its analyses on what it has observed as the irreparable ‘social and systemic impact’ of the ongoing violations of human rights in the country. The government remains incapable of providing the most rudimentary forms of protection to its people despite the growing intolerance of the public towards human rights violations. On the other hand the improvements in the legal framework to protect rights, has created the situation where despite the laws being in place to protect the citizens they resort to an emerging ‘parallel system’ from which they now seek remedies and redress.

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Newt Gingrich and the “invented” Palestinians

2011-12-11T16:43:00.000+01:00

by Sami Jamil Jadallah, Veterans Today, Dec. 10, 2011

We all know who “invented” the Palestinians, what we do not know is who “invented” Newt Gingrich?

This is typical political season, where presidential candidates out bid each other and will do every thing they are capable of doing, and since they have no moral or ethical scruples, they stoop so low they become indistinguishable from crawling worms, and are ready to sell their mothers, their country for a ‘fist full of dollars”.

And there is no better place full of dollars than the American Jewish community with its vast financial resources and its well-known financial contributions for political candidates on both sides of the isles and its one issue, Israel.

Outbidding all of his rivals on the Republican side, Newt Gingrich came out making this discovery: “ I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and who were historically part of the Arab community and who had a chance to go many places”.

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Seumas Milne: War on Iran has already begun. Act before it threatens all of us

2011-12-09T18:38:00.000+01:00

Escalation of the covert US-Israeli campaign against Tehran risks a global storm. Opposition has to get more serious

طالع المقال بالعربية

Seumas Milne,guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 December 2011

Iranians carry honorary coffins and pictures of a Revolutionary Guards commander killed in an explosion at the Alghadir missile base. Photograph: Reuters

They don’t give up. After a decade of blood-drenched failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, violent destabilisation of Pakistan and Yemen, the devastation of Lebanon and slaughter in Libya, you might hope the US and its friends had had their fill of invasion and intervention in the Muslim world.

It seems not. For months the evidence has been growing that a US-Israeli stealth war against Iran has already begun, backed by Britain and France. Covert support for armed opposition groups has spread into a campaign of assassinations of Iranian scientists, cyber warfare, attacks on military and missile installations, and the killing of an Iranian general, among others.

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How US policy creates a disaster in Pakistan

2011-12-09T18:36:00.002+01:00

By Paul J. Balles, Arab News, Dec 9, 2011

PATRIOTISM consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong,” said James Bryce, a British academic, jurist, historian and liberal politician.

Americans won’t like this. Practically everyone else will: Americans simply can never admit they were wrong.

Ill-begotten wars – from Vietnam to Afghanistan – have accomplished nothing but increasing enemies toward American arrogance. Nothing could have been more misguided than the Iraq war, based on a mythical collection of weapons of mass destruction. The lie, the war and the occupation cost the lives of 4,801 Americans plus 179 UK lives and the death of 1,455,590 Iraqis. The WMDs never existed.

Instead of an admission that the Iraq debacle was wrong, the fraudsters made lame excuses in attempts to exonerate themselves. “There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to ‘Americanize’ him,” wrote American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley.

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ASIA: The state of human rights in Asia on International Human Rights Day 2011

2011-12-09T18:35:00.002+01:00

AHRC, Dec 9, 2011

Asia

Statement : On the occasion of the annual International Human Rights Day, held on December 10, 2011, the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) is releasing reports on the human rights situations in ten Asian countries: Bangladesh, Burma, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea and Sri Lanka. In 2011, the AHRC has witnessed the continuing widespread use of torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings by state agents, serious clampdowns on the freedom of expression, and attacks on human rights defenders. Furthermore, in some of the countries listed above, religious intolerance has led to suppression of religious freedoms and violence against religious minorities.

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Israel Is Only A Democracy If You Are A Jew. – Vanunu

2011-12-09T18:33:00.000+01:00

Eileen Fleming, Veterans Today, Dec 5, 2011

Both Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have now gone public with concerns over Israel’s growing isolation in the Middle East and are urging that regime to take diplomatic steps to address the issue.

Israeli Government ministers reacted to Clinton’s criticism of democracy Israeli style on Sunday at a weekly cabinet meeting.

In 2006, Israel’s Nuclear Whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu explained why “Israel is only a democracy if you are a Jew.”

Both Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have now gone public with concerns over Israel’s growing isolation in the Middle East and are urging that regime to take diplomatic steps to address the issue.

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Obama plays the populist card

2011-12-08T20:42:00.000+01:00

Jerry White, wsws.org, 8 December 2011

In what was billed by the White House as a major speech on the economy, President Barack Obama on Tuesday combined a potted review of American history with half-truths and lies in an attempt to present himself as a fighter for social equality and critic of Wall Street.

Obama, who has spent nearly three years in the White House single-mindedly defending the interests of the financial elite, has in recent weeks adopted this populist persona with the aim of derailing the emergence of social protest, in the form of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and seeking to channel it behind his reelection campaign.

Typical of such carefully staged events, the site of Obama’s remarks—Osawatomie, Kansas, where Theodore Roosevelt gave his 1910 “New Nationalism” speech—was chosen for its symbolism. By wrapping himself in the mantle of Roosevelt’s Progressive Era reform agenda, Obama hoped to lend credibility to his improbable pose as a man of the people and opponent of the moneyed interests.

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USA: The Wars of the One Percent

2011-12-08T19:22:00.002+01:00

TruthOut.com, Thursday 8 December 2011

by: William J. Astore, TomDispatch | News Analysis

America’s wars are remote. They’re remote from us geographically, remote from us emotionally (unless you’re serving in the military or have a close relative or friend who serves), and remote from our major media outlets, which have given us no compelling narrative about them, except that they’re being fought by “America’s heroes” against foreign terrorists and evil-doers. They’re even being fought, in significant part, by remote control — by robotic drones“piloted” by ground-based operators from a secret network of bases located hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from the danger of the battlefield.

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Ilan Pappé: Unequal under the law

2011-12-08T19:21:00.001+01:00

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, author of the groundbreaking The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, has spent years documenting Israel’s abuses, both of the Palestinians and of history. During his recent speaking tour in the U.S., he spoke with Eric Ruder about Israel’s drive to maintain its grip on legitimacy and the apartheid regime that Palestinians are daily confronted by.

Socialist worker, Dec 1, 2011

For decades, Israel has waged war against Palestinians with the blessing of the world’s chief powers in Western Europe and North America. Though the issues involved and the names of the players changed over the years, little else seemed to–until recently.

First, there was the global revulsion at Israel’s barbaric assault on Gaza in late 2008-09, which spurred action on a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement launched by Palestinian civil society in 2005. Israeli officials have termed this growing movement a “delegitimization” campaign and pledged to counter it.

Then there was Israel’s murderous assault on a Turkish ship carrying humanitarian aid to the besieged people of Gaza, again creating an outpouring of sympathy for Palestinians from people around the world.

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