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Thursday, April 25, 2013

US Unveils Iraq WMD “Curveball-Style” Lies Vs. Syria

As NATO terror front collapses in Syria, US attempts to justify intervention by drumming up familiar WMD lies.

Tony Cartalucci
Activist Post

Image: From Independent’s “Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all: Defector tells how US officials ‘sexed up’ his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion.” In retrospect, the corporate-media has no problem admitting the insidious lies that were told to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq – the lead up to the war was another story. A verbatim repeat of these admitted lies are being directed at Syria amidst the West’s failure to overthrow the government with terrorist proxies.

The last two weeks have seen a series of victories for the Syrian Army across Syria. It appears that 2 full companies of so-called “Free Syrian Army” fighters have been annihilated near Damascus, while government forces have restored order in parts of Homs and along the previously porous Lebanese-Syrian border.

Time has run out for the West, and it appears that they are desperately seeking any excuse to rescue their failing proxy war. When urgent, but otherwise unjustified military intervention is needed, a “humanitarian” pretext is usually invented – as it was in Libya. Failing that, as the West has already clearly done in Syria, an even more tenuous narrative has been resurrected from its well-earned grave.

CNN has reported in their article, “Hagel: Evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria,” that:

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Thursday that the United States has evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria.

This comes a couple of days after an Israeli intelligence official said Damascus was using weapons banned under international law against its own people in the country’s civil war. Syria has said rebels have used chemical weapons.

U.S. President Barack Obama has said the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons against its own people in the country would be a “game changer.”

Astonishingly, the West is attempting to repeat tales of “WMD’s” in Syria, just as it infamously did in Iraq. In the Washington Post’s “U.S. intelligence agencies: Assad used chemical weapons ‘on a small scale’,” the nature of this “evidence” is elaborated on (emphasis added):

Hagel said the intelligence agencies’ assessment was reached with “varying degrees of confidence,” meaning that they lacked proof or overwhelming evidence. He said the conclusion was “reached within the last 24 hours” and that the White House delivered a letter outlining the findings to Congress Thursday morning.
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A letter from the White House via the Washington Post exposed further just how tenuous the evidence actually is (emphasis added):

Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin. This assessment is based in part on physiological samples. Our standard of evidence must build on these intelligence assessments as we seek to establish credible and corroborated facts. For example, the chain of custody is not clear, so we cannot confirm how the exposure occurred and under what conditions. We do believe that any use of chemical weapons in Syria would very likely have originated with the Assad regime.

Physiological samples indicating sarin – in other words – samples taken from people exposed to sarin, could have been produced in a number of ways. It is confirmed that Libya’s chemical weapon stockpiles included sarin and mustard gas. In the Washington Post’s 2011 “Libya’s poison gas unaffected by turmoil, official says,” it was stated:

Experts believe that Libya destroyed about 3,300 bombshells designed to carry mustard and sarin gas chemicals years ago, as part of its deal to end decades of economic and diplomatic isolation with the West.

But some 10 metric tons of mustard sulfate and sarin gas precursor remain stockpiled in barrels at three locations in the Libyan desert south of Tripoli, where Moammar Gaddafi has holed up in a last-ditch fight to keep from being overthrown.

Many experts worry that the barrels are ripe for picking by terrorists linked to al-Qaeda.

Of course, since 2011, it is now confirmed that the so-called “Libyan rebels” were actually Al Qaeda terrorists operating under the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) which has been confirmed to have subsequently traveled  to Syria to join Al Qaeda’s al-Nusra franchise in NATO’s proxy war there.

It is just as likely that NATO’s proxy forces brought along with them not only small arms and cash from Libya, but also heavier weapons, including possibly chemical weapons – and specifically – sarin and mustard gas.

Considering that the Syrian government knows the use of chemical weapons would basically hand the moral, strategic, and geopolitical initiative over to the West, and in light of its recent gains made using conventional weapons and tactics, it makes it all the more likely any real sarin to be found and used in Syria was the work of NATO proxies attempting to produce a plausible casus belli. Terrorists operating in Syria have already been caught using other chemical weapons.

And yet still, despite all of this doubt, the Western political establishment has hailed the so-called “findings” as the “game changer” required to green-light US military intervention.

Remember “Curveball”

It is absolutely imperative to recall the propaganda campaign conducted prior to invading Iraq in 2003. Chemical weapons were also used as a pretext for an otherwise unjustified war. The “intelligence” used by Hagel’s predecessors was admittedly fabricated on-demand.

In the British Independent’s article, “Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all: Defector tells how US officials ‘sexed up’ his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion,” it stated:

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

“Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi’s lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.”

We can already envision the establishment defending in hindsight its next “noble lie” to unseat “the tyrant in Syria.”

The Independent continues:

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him “we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, he simply replies: “Yes.”

US officials “sexed up” Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell’s former chief of staff. “I brought the White House team in to do the graphics,” he says, adding how “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy”.

How “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy,” indeed is the most important aspect of the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, and is without doubt what is being done in Washington, Doha, Riyadh, and Tel Aviv in regards to Syria now.

The “Curveball-style” lies told about Iraq are now being repeated about Syria by an increasingly unhinged West who has tried every trick in the book, and is flipping back to the beginning to start over again. The question is, can the world afford to be led down this path again, knowing exactly where it ends? Nations and people outside the Wall Street-London international order are tasked with foiling this criminal war of aggression – unable this time to plead ignorance to the West’s true intentions.

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at
Land Destroyer Report, Alternative Thai News Network and LocalOrg. Read other contributed articles by Tony Cartalucci here.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Thanks again to Tony Cartalucci …

Key to Peace in Korea – Remove US Presence

Tony Cartalucci
Activist Post

On March 26, 2010, the ROKS Cheonan is hit by what appears to be a German-made torpedo, sinks while claiming the lives of 46 South Korean sailors. The world, America at the lead, was quick to point its finger at North Korea before South Korea itself ruled them out as a suspect. North Korea adamantly insisted it was not behind the attack, and despite their paranoid and isolated posture, little beyond insanity could serve as a motive.

Despite evidence adding up otherwise, to no one’s surprise a joint “international” investigation by the US, UK, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Sweden would later conclude that a North Korean submarine was the culprit, leaving even most South Koreans skeptical.

During this period of time, America’s position in Asia Pacific was already waning. Endless war in Central Asia and the Middle East, along with a deepening economic crisis in the West allowed other actors to begin eyeing the seemingly inevitable void soon to be left. Japan under then Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, began reasserting itself over unpopular US military installations scattered throughout the nation. China was continuing to expand its economic and diplomatic influence in the region, luring in even America’s traditional allies like Australia and Thailand.

The sinking of the ROKS Cheonan then “serendipitously” served as a reminder as to why America claims their troops and influence are needed in the region for “peace and security.”

The Korean Won tumbled as the US Dollar was temporarily bolstered and Japanese PM Hatoyama not only conceded to US demands regarding US installations, but would also resign over the matter. Literally citing the mysterious, still unsolved sinking of the Cheonan, Washington insisted its need to reassert itself in Asia to counter North Korea, if not for any other reason.

North Korea, either out of shadowy complicity or because of its paranoid predictable nature, became America’s greatest ally in many ways.

November 2010, a similar scenario played out after an artillery exchange between North and South Korea which claimed several lives. America was again bolstered in its highly tenuous position not only in Asia as a whole, but on the Korean Peninsula itself, having been rebuffed on the US-Korean FTA and facing the possibility of US banking interests meeting with Tobin taxes in Korean markets.

South Korean leadership now admits they were conducting joint US-Korean live fire exercises close to highly contested waters in the Yellow Sea before the exchange took place. North Korea maintains this incident was intentionally provoked, as was the sinking of the Cheonan, as contrived incidents of opportunity for the waning American empire to reassert itself.

And like the sinking of the Cheonan, America once again renewed the rhetorical lease on its presence in Asia Pacific.

America’s “Asia Pivot”

Fast forward to today, 2013, and the openly declared US policy entitled, the “pivot toward Asia.”  Built upon the ultimate goal of encircling and containing China, it hinges on special interests cobbling Southeast Asia into a regional European Union-style bloc to then be used economically, politically, and militarily against China. In fact, in recent island disputes, this ASEAN bloc is already being tested out as a collective proxy to maintain US hegemony in Asia Pacific.

While the “pivot” appears to be “new” US foreign policy, it is deeply rooted in long-conspired hegemonic ambitions. As far back as 1997, America corporate-financier think-tanks had been documenting their intentions to pursue just such a containment policy with the expressed goal of maintaining American dominance across Asia Pacific. Neo-Con policy maker Robert Kagan penned a fairly insightful 1997 piece in the Weekly Standard titled, “What China Knows That We Don’t: The Case for a New Strategy of Containment,” where he discusses the prospects of an effective containment strategy coupled with the baited hook of luring China into its place among the “international order.”

In Kagan’s1997 piece, he literally states (emphasis added):

The present world order serves the needs of the United States and its allies, which constructed it. And it is poorly suited to the needs of a Chinese dictatorship trying to maintain power at home and increase its clout abroad. Chinese leaders chafe at the constraints on them and worry that they must change the rules of the international system before the international system changes them.

Here, Kagan openly admits that the “world order,” or the “international order,” is simply American-run global hegemony, dictated by US interests. These interests, it should be kept in mind, are not those of the American people, but of the immense corporate-financier interests of the Anglo-American establishment. Kagan continues (emphasis added):

In truth, the debate over whether we should or should not contain China is a bit silly. We are already containing China — not always consciously and not entirely successfully, but enough to annoy Chinese leaders and be an obstacle to their ambitions. When the Chinese used military maneuvers and ballistic-missile tests last March to intimidate Taiwanese voters, the United States responded by sending the Seventh Fleet. By this show of force, the U.S. demonstrated to Taiwan, Japan, and the rest of our Asian allies that our role as their defender in the region had not diminished as much as they might have feared. Thus, in response to a single Chinese exercise of muscle, the links of containment became visible and were tightened.

The new China hands insist that the United States needs to explain to the Chinese that its goal is merely, as [Robert] Zoellick writes, to avoid “the domination of East Asia by any power or group of powers hostile to the United States.” Our treaties with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia, and our naval and military forces in the region, aim only at regional stability, not aggressive encirclement.

But the Chinese understand U.S. interests perfectly well, perhaps better than we do. While they welcome the U.S. presence as a check on Japan, the nation they fear most, they can see clearly that America’s military and diplomatic efforts in the region severely limit their own ability to become the region’s hegemon. According to Thomas J. Christensen, who spent several months interviewing Chinese military and civilian government analysts, Chinese leaders worry that they will “play Gulliver to Southeast Asia’s Lilliputians, with the United States supplying the rope and stakes.”

Indeed, the United States blocks Chinese ambitions merely by supporting what we like to call “international norms” of behavior. Christensen points out that Chinese strategic thinkers consider “complaints about China’s violations of international norms” to be part of “an integrated Western strategy, led by Washington, to prevent China from becoming a great power.

What Kagan is talking about is maintaining American preeminence across all of Asia and producing a strategy of tension to divide and limit the power of any single player vis-a-vis Wall Street and London’s hegemony. Kagan would continue (emphasis added):

The changes in the external and internal behavior of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s resulted at least in part from an American strategy that might be called “integration through containment and pressure for change.”

Such a strategy needs to be applied to China today. As long as China maintains its present form of government, it cannot be peacefully integrated into the international order. For China’s current leaders, it is too risky to play by our rules — yet our unwillingness to force them to play by our rules is too risky for the health of the international order. The United States cannot and should not be willing to upset the international order in the mistaken belief that accommodation is the best way to avoid a confrontation with China.

We should hold the line instead and work for political change in Beijing. That means strengthening our military capabilities in the region, improving our security ties with friends and allies, and making clear that we will respond, with force if necessary, when China uses military intimidation or aggression to achieve its regional ambitions. It also means not trading with the Chinese military or doing business with firms the military owns or operates. And it means imposing stiff sanctions when we catch China engaging in nuclear proliferation.

A successful containment strategy will require increasing, not decreasing, our overall defense capabilities. Eyre Crowe warned in 1907 that “the more we talk of the necessity of economising on our armaments, the more firmly will the Germans believe that we are tiring of the struggle, and that they will win by going on.” Today, the perception of our military decline is already shaping Chinese calculations. In 1992, an internal Chinese government document said that America’s “strength is in relative decline and that there are limits to what it can do.” This perception needs to be dispelled as quickly as possible.

Clearly, however, this “perception” of US military decline has only been heightened as the Wall Street-London financier model of “economic growth” has been revealed as an untenable global Ponzi scheme versus the Chinese model of industrial production and infrastructure expansion. The military might  required to contain China is also politically and economically unjustifiable, and increasingly so.

Image: From the Strategic Studies Institute’s 2006 “String of Pearls” report detailing a strategy of containment for China, the evolution of Kagan’s 1997 paper, and the strategic foundation for much of the engineered violence now unraveling along the “string of pearls” from Pakistan to Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia, to the islands of the South China Sea.

It appears possible that US policy makers committed to a losing strategy based on inaccurate interpretations and projections regarding the collapse of the Soviet Union and its comparison to the Chinese. US policy makers have led the populations of Western civilization down a dead-end in pursuit of global hegemony instead of one of domestic economic and technological progress, and now depend on a steady diet of contrived crises the West can then play a role in “stabilizing.”

Perpetuating and Harnessing North Korean Paranoia & Belligerence

A reverse in the West’s decline is unlikely especially when the prescription is more of the same uninspired, antiquated policies that created the decline in the first place. Cultivating animosity between Southeast Asia and China, as well as depending on the predictable belligerence of North Korea are two of the remaining tricks Wall Street and London have left to justify their continued presence in Asia – both of which serve only to destabilize the region and jeopardize the collective peace and prosperity of people all across Asia.

North Korea’s belligerence in particular, is directly proportional to the US’ meddling on the Korean Peninsula. It should be noted that the US State Department, starting in 2008, had been training North Korean “activists” alongside those who would take part in the US-engineered “Arab Spring.” In Foreign Policy’s 2011 article “Revolution U,” where the story of US-funded and trained “activism” is told, North Korean activists are mentioned several times as recipients of the same US State Department training used by proxies to help overthrow the governments of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt – all three it should be mentioned are now brutal sectarian dictatorships bent in service to the IMF and Western interests, that make their excised predecessors look progressive in comparison.

To what extent these “activists” have sowed unrest inside North Korea upon their return is unknown – but it represents one of the many covert means the US can prod the North with to provoke what would appear to be otherwise “unprovoked” aggression.

Like ship sails to the wind, American foreign policy makers are outstretched and ready to harness North Korea’s belligerence, and in the case of the Cheonan’s sinking or the training of “activists” to return home and sow unrest, apparently blow on the sails themselves when the winds are calm. A reclusive hereditary communist dictatorship sounds scary, but those with no qualms utilizing such a dictatorship at the risk of regional or world war, are even scarier.

Worth repeating, was Donald Rumsfeld’s position on the board of directors of ABB out of Zurich, when the engineering firm sold North Korea the nuclear technology they later used as the basis of their nuclear arms program. Rumsfeld would then later, as Secretary of Defense in the ever revolving door between big business and corporate-fascist government, leverage the enhanced menace of North Korea against America’s supposed ally in the south.

This reality highlights that the stability America represents in Asia Pacific is not one of rule of law and healthy foreign diplomacy, but rather one of holding stability over the head of the region with the constant threat of unhinging peace through carefully arranged events, be it staging Maoist color revolutions in Bangkok, funding the Khmer Rouge, in 2010 training land grabbing troops in Cambodia, or repeatedly provoking an unstable military dictatorship on the Korean Peninsula.

The Key to Peace in Asia – Remove America’s Presence

If China, Japan, or South Korea can offer a substantial alternative focused on cooperation without the need to mercilessly strip national sovereignty and force integration politically and economically as the West’s ASEAN and AEC are poised to do, then the manipulative invasive nature of the Anglo-American banking elite and their already collapsing global order, no matter how much peace America manages or threatens to unhinge, will be all but expelled from the region.

The key to peace in Korea, and across greater Asia, is removing entirely and permanently the hegemonic influence of Wall Street and London. National governments can achieve this by cultivating a more independent, self-sufficient, inward-looking socioeconomic strategy that uses foreign trade more as a supplement for a strong, domestic economy. Individually, people across Asia need to recognize the special interests lurking behind the roll-out of ASEAN and the subsequent ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) – and how it represents in no way the interests of the people of Southeast Asia – and how it will lead to a protracted and destructive confrontation with China over many years to come.

The alleged opportunities ASEAN and AEC has promised, like those the European Union promised and promptly broke for millions of Europeans, can easily be replaced by more sustainable, local development – much of which is already present and expanding across Asia. The illusion of “Pax Americana” is one insidiously maintained by the Wall Street-London elite who both create the “problems” and then convenient “solutions” in an increasingly transparent regional racket akin to gangsters extorting protection money from local neighborhood shops. Asia outnumbers and overpowers the crumbling Wall Street-London international order many times over – now is the time they remove this manipulative regressive influence from their midst once and for all.

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at Land Destroyer Report, Alternative Thai News Network and LocalOrg. Read other contributed articles by Tony Cartalucci here.

Thanks to Joe Kress for this truth …

NOTHING CHANGES EXCEPT INNOVATIVE REPETITION

By Joe Kress

April 6, 2013

NewsWithViews.com

Looking back to the beginning when Cain murdered Able, one thing is clear – mankind is flawed and just can’t keep from repeating the same old sins. We seem to forget too easily who we are, where we’ve been and where we are going. Why is this so? Because the Bible in the Old Testament points out our flaws, but free interpretation obfuscates the message and over three quarters of the world’s population never read it and those that do don’t follow it. Why else would France, Germany, Russia, China and the United States governments condone abortion, systematically persist in depleting their populations through contraceptives, homosexual practices, delayed pregnancies to satisfy creature comforts; divorce, self-gratification, obesity, magic diet pills instead of exercise; repeated involvement in wars and belief in the oxymoron idea that democracy or communism somehow will fit all governments and all people, fiendish weapons and Luciferian greed develop as time progresses. In North Korea starvation is a means of population control.

The current terms mentioned in publications by the modern-day, wordsmithians’ juxtapositions to make obnoxious ideas more palatable for public digestion – words like “modernism” and “progressivism” are designed to mislead the public. The French Revolution was born out of chaos and from it the creation of an idea stemming back to Rome’s Caesars who declared that they were God(s). In other words, Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminists were birthed when he and his cult took over the Jacobins and launched mass slaughter and the overthrow of the monarchy and civilization as then existed. The populace gave up the idea of a Divine Being and adopted that each man is godlike thus enjoying the antics of the Head Choppers.

The result was not only affecting monarchies but religion and ethics, St. Thomas Aquinas logic and St. Anthony’s ideals of charity were substituted by Atheism, Free Masonry and Communism. All in one way or another led to the idea of a new Tower of Babel, a goal for utopian world government and mankind’s salvation. The problem being that liberty, fraternity, solidarity are impossible pillars. In order to have liberty one must have its own discipline – not be disciplined. Solidarity means belonging to a whole which in itself creates a discipline, but by whom? Fraternity means friends belonging to the same screed. Excluding outsiders is contrary to democracy and ferments autocracy.

Looking back to the period emerging from the fall of Rome and the dark ages, mankind was in the process of once again returning to being civilized through the influence of the Church. This was much different from that of Rome’s cruelty, repeated wars and corrupt senates, but early reformation retained severe religious condemnations where confessed sinners were ordered to stand in front of a church in sack cloth and ashes for a determined period of exposition.

Conversely, the populace still retained the same enthusiasm as did the Romans in the Coliseum and still retained the same perverse desire for macabre public entertainment. No they didn’t approve crucifixions, or being eaten by wild animals, or gladiators fighting to the death. They gathered to watch the practice of drawing and quartering. For those unfamiliar with that grotesque punishment, the executioner stood by while the prosecutor read the charges.

Afterwards, the victim was strung up by the neck by a rope and tightened just enough not to choke to kill during the procedure. Before the victim reached the point of expiring, he or she was laid on a table before the crowd. At that point, the execution becomes messy when the executioner takes a long-handle, sharpened scythe and proceeded to cut the individual just below the breastbone through the stomach and bowls ending at the groin. Sometimes, the victim was again hung up and guts spilled out of the body cavity or sometimes a more “humane” end a coup de grace ended by decapitating the head.

During the inquisitions of the middle ages, the rack, red hot iron tongs and the Iron Maiden were the vogue of the day. Of course in the name of religion, the nine crusades began with the purpose of regaining the Holy Grail and the conversion of the followers of Mohamed. History records that the crusaders waded knee deep in blood.

In America, the religious pilgrims and those that followed did not hold to the pillory, witch burning but slaughtered Indians for their lands.

Our modern day, least humane homo-sapiens use water boarding to extract confessions or in the case of Abu Ghraib prison where captured Iraqi suspects were exposed to demeaning, humiliating practices that added insults to their Muslim Faith. That was just child’s play to hanging the subjects by the ankles and dislocating shoulders, arms and hips to obtain a confession. Are we really more civilized? We sure are because Abu Ghraib is condemned, but instead we turn over foreign suspects to foreign torture experts. Are we more civilized? What about Shock and Awe bombing, the indiscriminate bombing of civilian and military Iraqis as a preliminary softening up before the actual invasion by our troops? That exercise removed over a hundred thousand souls from the living and for what purpose? Saddam had no nuclear or poison gas storage areas as reported in the newspapers. That was the reason for the invasion. Did our intelligence sources fail miserably or was the real reason Iraqi oil?

Were we more civilized near the end of WW II when Franklyn D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill allowed (ordered) the bombing and strafing of the civilians in Dresden, Germany just a few days before the end of the war? The mustangs repeatedly machine gunned scurrying civilians in the parks, the only place to congregate and sleep. The bombing of Dresden, once one of the most beautiful cities in the world on a par with Paris and Rome, was a final act of revenge for Hitler’s bombing of London and other British cities.

The meeting at Potsdam (July 1945) between Harry Truman, Stalin and Churchill was complete capitulation to Stalin in dividing up the spoils of war, including the forcing of whole populations who escaped from the clutches behind the Soviet advance by entering the American sphere of military control only to be forced back behind the Iron Curtain and to the Soviet gulags and death camps was known as “Operation Keelhaul.”

General Eisenhower ordered all those captured in arms as enemy and not subject to the rules of war and the Geneva Convention. As such, they were put in open fields, during the winter months, without food, water or warm clothing. Thousands perished at a rate of 2% a week. Later, he forced all German prisoners within the American zone, to be considered in the same category as those captured in arms, because they fought the NATO forces. Many were little boys not much older than eleven years old. General Patton, released his prisoners, but was reprimanded by Eisenhower and forced to return as many as he could to the imprisonment areas of open fields.

The French, under General De Gaul followed Eisenhower’s example within its zone. The British were more lenient and fed, clothed and housed their prisoners and refused to accept more. When Eisenhower left for Washington to plan the occupation and governance of the defeated enemy, General Beatle Smith released many of the American captured in arms prisoners, but upon Eisenhower’s return, he too was ordered to return them to the open holding areas. It was the rumor that Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau influenced Eisenhower because of the treatment of Jews by the Nazis. An act of revenge.

Sun Tzu, the Chinese general who lived 2,500 years ago was more humane than some WW II generals. Alexander even offered captured cities the opportunity to join his forces, as did Sun Tzu, otherwise they destroyed them and the entire populations to insure that they would not rise up against them behind the lines. It wasn’t revenge; it was tactics.

Has mankind really changed? Has our government learned one damn thing since WW I, WW II, The Korean non-war war, the Viet Nam non-war war, the non-war war in Iraq, which left the country in ruins, its civilian population decimated, its people disillusioned and under control of Shea factions having a never-ending hatred of Americans for what they wrought on their lives? Since WWII, we have been embroiled in conflicts stemming from Teddy Roosevelt’s manifest destiny for America and the New World Order where The United States is to be the protector of the “freedom loving world” until the Blue Helmeted U.N troops replace us not only in continued battles for peace, but are stationed here in our country. The fact is we never were meant to win these non-war wars and from the looks of it we are about to lose Afghanistan only to be embroiled in a new war against Iran to save Israeli bacon. We are in a state of national bankruptcy, both morally and physically and our advisories salivate at the opportunity to collect their debts held as collateral in land, minerals, oil and our forests.

Our military have become goats for the establishment. They are asked to give blood and sacrifice while a dummied down, misinformed, ignorant, purposely created education system deleted civics, substituted nationalism for globalism and trashes the American Constitution. Our department of education with government approval deleted God from the human equation. Our White House resident supports contraception, abortion, and gun control and promotes an invasion of illegal civilians, of which many are here to feed off of our welfare system or rob and murder and import illegal drugs into our society.

Like the ancient Roman Senate we have been governed by self-serving, grasping fools led by presidents devoted to world government. Our people have become not only ignorant, but dependent on those in government who would make them mendicants slaves. Our propaganda system in Hollywood has offered violence and sex to weaken our morals; our national news is filtered by the owners of the press who support one world government and Marx; our children are fed pabulum and electronic games instead of education about the rights that our forefathers bequeathed to us, especially the 1st and2nd Amendments of free speech and protection from an out-of-control dictatorship type government which is now the vogue.

For too long complacency has been the mantra of a people who are willing to sit by; make money and enjoy luxury on credit, while their progeny, for generations to come, will suffer untold hell emanating from ancestral greed. All are the result of public apathy and lack of citizen participation in government at the local level where all politics begin.

Is it too late or are we to suffer a wretched future that our forefathers predicted because we refused to follow their advice?

© 2013 Joe Kress – All Rights Reserved

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He served in England and Viet Nam where he received the Bronze Star during the TET Offensive, then he was appointed Chief of Supply for two state-side assignments; the DOD’s Defense Disposal Agency where he was chief of disposal operations for all of Southeast Asia, based at CINCPAC Headquarters in Hawaii. He retired from Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio as chief of supply with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel at the age of 52, and now he and his wife reside in Summerville, S.C.

Since leaving the military, he was involved in political campaigns, writing articles for the local papers, and as a realtor.

Thanks to Greg Palast

Bradley Manning & The Deepwater Horizon
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
Wednesday, 3. April 2013

Three years ago this month, on the 20th of April, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew itself to kingdom come.

Soon thereafter, a message came in to our office’s chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, from a person I dare not name, who was floating somewhere in the Caspian Sea along the coast of Baku, Central Asia.

The source was in mortal fear he’d be identified – and with good reason. Once we agreed on a safe method of communication, he revealed this: 17 months before BP’s Deepwater Horizon blew out and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.

Crucially, both the Gulf and Caspian Sea blow-outs had the same identical cause: the failure of the cement “plug”.

To prevent blow-outs, drilled wells must be capped with cement. BP insisted on lacing its cement with nitrogen gas – the same stuff used in laughing gas – because it speeds up drying.

Time is money, and mixing some nitrogen gas into the cement saves a lot of money.

However, because BP’s penny-pinching method is so damn dangerous, they are nearly alone in using it in deep, high-pressure offshore wells.

The reason: nitrogen gas can create gaps in the cement, allow methane gas to go up the borehole, fill the drilling platform with explosive gas – and boom, you’re dead.

So, when its Caspian Sea rig blew out in 2008, rather than change its ways, BP simply covered it up.

Our investigators discovered that the company hid the information from its own shareholders, from British regulators and from the US Securities Exchange Commission. The Vice-President of BP USA, David Rainey, withheld the information from the US Senate in a testimony he gave six months before the Gulf deaths. (Rainey was later charged with obstruction of justice on a spill-related matter.)

Britain’s Channel 4 agreed to send me to the benighted nation of Azerbaijan, whose waters the earlier BP blow-out occurred in, to locate witnesses who would be willing to talk to me without getting “disappeared”. (They didn’t talk, but they still disappeared.)

And I was arrested. Some rat had tipped off the Security Ministry (the official name of the Department of Torture here in this Islamic Republic of BP). I knew I’d get out quick, because throwing a reporter of Her Majesty’s Empire into a dungeon would embarrass both BP and the Azeri oil-o-crats.

The gendarmes demanded our film, but I wasn’t overly concerned: Before I left London, Badpenny handed me one of those Austin Powers camera-in-pens, on which I’d loaded all I needed. But I did fear for my witnesses left behind in Azerbaijan – and for my source in a tiger cage in the USA: Pvt Bradley Manning.

Manning could have saved their lives
Only after I dove into deep water in Baku did I discover, trolling through the so-called “WikiLeaks” documents, secret State Department cables released by Manning. The information was stunning: the US State Department knew about the BP blow-out in the Caspian and joined in the cover-up.

Apparently BP refused to tell its own partners, Chevron and Exxon, why the lucrative Caspian oil flow had stopped. Chevron bitched to the office of the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. (George Bush’s cabinet member should not be confused with the 129,000-tonne oil tanker “Condoleezza Rice”, which Chevron named after their former board member.)

The US Ambassador in Baku got Chevron the answer: a blow-out of the nitrogen-laced cement cap on a giant Caspian Sea platform. The information was marked “SECRET”. Apparently loose lips about sinking ships would help neither Chevron nor the Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, the beneficiary of millions of dollars in payments of oil company baksheesh.

So what about Bradley Manning?

Manning has been charged with “aiding the enemy” – a crime punishable by death.

But Manning’s sole and only purpose was to get out the truth. It wasn’t Manning who wrote the cover-up memos, he merely wanted to get them to the victims: us.

And since when did the public become “the enemy”?

Had Manning’s memos come out just a few months earlier, the truth about BP’s deadly drilling methods would have been revealed, and there’s little doubt BP would have had to change its ways. Those eleven men could well have been alive today.

Did Manning know about this particular hush-hush cable about BP’s blow-out when he decided he had to become Paul Revere and warn the planet?

That’s unlikely, in the thousands of cables he had. But he’d seen enough evidence of murder and mendacity in other cables, so, as Manning, under oath, told a court, he tried to give it all to the New York Times to have knowledgeable reporters review the cables confidentially for life-saving information.

The New York Times immediately seized on this extraordinary opportunity… to ignore Manning. The Times only ran it when the Guardian was going to scoop – and embarrass – the New York hacks.

Though there are limits. While reporter David Leigh put the story of BP’s prior blow-out on page one of the Guardian, neither the New York Times or any other major US news outlet ran the story of the blow-out and oil industry cover-up. No surprise there, though – the most “prestigious” US news programme, PBS Newshour, was sponsored by… Chevron Corporation.

Hanging their source while taking his applause
As a working journalist, and one whose head is likely to be in the foggy gun-sights of some jet jockey or a dictator’s goon squad, I have more than a little distaste for toffs like New York Times‘ former executive editor, columnist Bill Keller, who used Manning documents to cash in on a book deal and land star turns on television while simultaneously smearing his source Manning as, “troubled”, “emotionally fractured”, “vague”, “inchoate” and – cover the children’s ears – “gay”.

Furthermore, while preening about their revelations from the Manning documents, the Times had no problem with imprisoning their source. I do acknowledge that the Times and Keller did editorialise that a sentence of life imprisonment without parole would be “overkill”. How white of them.

When it was mentioned that Manning is no different from Daniel Ellsberg, the CIA operative who released the Pentagon Papers, Keller reassured that the Times also told Ellsberg he was “on his own” and did not object to their source being charged as a spy.

And the Times‘ much-lauded exposure of the My Lai massacre? My late good friend, the great investigative reporter Ron Ridenhour, who gave the story to Seymour Hersh, told me that he and Hersh had to effectively blackmail the Times into printing it.

Manning: aid to the enemy?
Times man Keller writes that Manning, by going to “anti-American” WikiLeaks, threatened the release of, “information that might get troops in the field or innocent informants killed”.

Really?

This is the same Bill Keller who admits that he knew his paper’s reports in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were completely false, but that he – as editor – covered up his paper’s knowledge their WDM stories were simply bogus. Those stories validated the Bush propaganda and helped tip the political balance to invade Iraq. Four-thousand US soldiers died. I guess the idea is that releasing information that kills troops is criminal, but that dis-information that kills troops is quite acceptable.

Maybe I’m just cranky because I wouldn’t have seen my own sources vanish and my film grabbed if the Times had only run the Manning facts about BP and Caspian when they had the chance.

Look, I’m only picking on the New York Times and PBS Newshour because they are the best in America, God help us.

What other lives could have been saved by the Manning revelations? Lots. Watch this space: I promise more aid to the enemies of the state – which is YOU.

Thanks to   “WorldNetDaily”  for this important information.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

WARNING: “Final” Psy-Op Vs. Syria Begins

Tony Cartalucci

Activist Post

Out of time, out of legitimacy, and out of options, the West is attempting once again to prop up its faltering terrorist proxies with another psychological operation aimed at breaking the will of the Syrian people, despite the West’s multiplying tactical and political shortcomings. It began with a suspicious CBS News/AP report titled, “AP: “Master plan” underway to help Syria rebels take Damascus with U.S.-approved airlifts of heavy weapons,” which claims to divulge a “covert” plan by the West to flood Syria’s northern and southern borders with increased weapons and fighters for a “final” push to take the capital. The article would claim:

Mideast powers opposed to President Bashar Assad have dramatically stepped up weapons supplies to Syrian rebels in coordination with the U.S. in preparation for a push on the capital of Damascus, officials and Western military experts said Wednesday.

A carefully prepared covert operation is arming rebels, involving Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, with the United States and other Western governments consulting, and all parties hold veto power over where the shipments are directed, according to a senior Arab official whose government is participating. His account was corroborated by a diplomat and two military experts.

One must question why the Western media would boldly declare to the world what is supposed to be a “covert” operation, if such an operation had any tactical chance of succeeding – unless of course, the announcement was designed to either cover for wide-scale Western special operations inside Syria, or to help achieve a psychological victory (or both) – to induce panic and terror across the Syrian population in tandem with recent, and increasingly barbaric terrorist attacks on Syria’s civilians.

One such attack included the recent mortar bombardment of Damascus University which left at least 15 dead. The New York Times seemed to take special pleasure in describing in great detail the disruptive effect the attack had on people attempting to live normal lives during the ongoing conflict in their article, “Syria’s War Invades a Campus That Acted as a Sanctuary.”

Now, echoes of NATO’s spectacularly failed July 2012 “Operation Damascus Volcano” – where the Western media coordinated a propaganda blitzkrieg designed to portray Syria as on the verge of collapsing with Aleppo and Damascus’ fall “imminent,” are appearing once again in the headlines. Just a day after CBS/AP’s announcement of the so-called “covert Master Plan,” the Western media is reporting “rebel gains” including the alleged cutting off of Daara in Syria’s south – meant to foreshadow the once again “inevitable fall” of Damascus. AFP cited the discredited “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” in their article, “Syria rebels seize town on key highway to south: NGO,” that:

“Rebels seized control of Dael after destroying the three army checkpoints at the entrances to the town,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. “The town is located on a main road linking Daraa to Damascus.”

The Britain-based watchdog said that a child was among 10 civilians killed in the fighting for the town over the past 24 hours.

At least 15 rebels and a media activist working with them were also killed, as were 12 loyalist troops, it added.

“Large swathes of Daraa (province) are now under rebel control. Their advance in the south is escalating,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

In actuality, the so-called “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights” is a single opposition propagandists,  Rami Abdel Rahman, based in a comfortable countryside home in the UK, disingenuously masquerading as a human rights organization. When not feeding the biased-hungry Western media, Rami Abdel Rahman can be found scurrying in and out of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London to meet with Britain’s Foreign Secretary, William Hague.

“Rami Abdelrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, leaves the Foreign and Commonwealth Office after meeting Britain’s Foreign Secretary, William Hague, in central London November 21, 2011 Reuters had even admitted in their December 2011 article, “Coventry – an unlikely home to prominent Syria activist,” that “Rami Abdulrahman,” is openly part of the Syrian opposition who seeks the end of the Syrian government. Abdulrahman admits that he had left Syria over 10 years ago, has lived in Britain ever since, and will not return until “al-Assad goes.”

This facade is fully sanctioned by the Western media which despite acknowledging him as a biased, compromised source, consistently misrepresents him to their audience as a credible “human rights organization,” while almost exclusively deferring to him to lend credibility to their otherwise baseless narratives.

When entire articles hinge on Rami Abdel Rahman’s verified propaganda, perception management, not journalism, is dictating headlines and overarching narratives.

The Syrian people have resisted the collective efforts of the US, UK, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and their regional partners for 2 years, and have defeated at least two previous psychological operations aimed at toppling the government and destroying the country. The tides have shifted across public opinion, and evidence that the West has intentionally sought to arm and direct sectarian extremists against the Syrian nation since at least 2007, are reaching a crescendo.

While the West now openly admits it is working directly with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and NATO-member Turkey to supply thousands of tons of weapons to militants in Syria, it cannot explain how else Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra front has become the best armed and most well equipped front in the conflict – unless these thousands of tons of weaponry were sent directly to them, as was intended to begin with, according to Seymour Hersh’s 2007 article, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” which reported:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

A window is closing, and the West is resorting to dangerous desperation. Syria and its allies, as well as concerned interests around the world, must be more vigilant and resilient than ever. The tell-tale signs of a psychological operation are there – but for a psychological operation to succeed, a nation’s people must not be prepared or aware that it is coming. By raising awareness of this most recent, insidious attempt at snatching a psychological victory from the jaws of a tactical defeat, we can help quicken the day when the West’s war machine finally stumbles and falls, giving the people of Syria their lives back.
Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at Land Destroyer Report, Alternative Thai News Network and LocalOrg. Read other contributed articles by Tony Cartalucci here.

Thanks to “The Cross Of Bethlehem”

American Led Apocalypse

Is eternal war profitable ?

Rambo | American Assassins Around the World

While planning and designing this article, I knew I would face technical problems. Yet, I thought everything would fit into a reasonably sized web page. While collecting and formatting the data, it became obvious that wasn’t possible while keeping the page’s clarity. Eventually, I split it, concentrating raw data in a downloadable excel file named American Military Operations. It contains a partial list of military operations performed by the United States of America since its foundation. It doesn’t include the violent massacres on Native Americans committed by the illegitimate British colonies that became the USA. It doesn’t include an unknown number of classified operations that were never acknowledged by this violent government. It doesn’t include the violence of this government towards its citizens. It doesn’t include operations performed around the world by subservient governments (like Israel and the CAZAB countries) in the name of the noble American Empire. Yet, the list includes over 500 operations! This is more than one per year of existence of this violent organization. Despite the usual self-perception of Americans as a bunch of peaceful folk – happy-go-lucky to their nearest McDonald’s branch – they are probably among the most violent cultures in the history of the world; clearly surpassing the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan. A related piece of information is the list of American military bases around the world. Again, the list is so extensive that instead of bringing it, I’m placing a map with countries in which American troops were deployed in 2007. Again, this map is per published sources; there are good reasons to believe (for example the persistent news on the existence of clandestine interrogation bases of the CIA and books like INSIDE THE COMPANY: CIA DIARY) that bases are present in additional countries. It doesn’t take long to appreciate we are dealing with a world-wide self-proclaimed empire, which is involved in an incessant series of wars. America is nothing but Genghis Khan’s wet dream.

US Military Bases in the World | 2007 – Doesn’t Include Secret Bases

The list of American military operations contains many surprises. One of them dates back to 1983, when in an event named Operation Urgent Fury, the mighty USA confronted a tiny Caribbean island called Grenada. Nuclear weapons were aimed at the island, elite troops armed with the latest gadgets and weapons of mass destruction were deployed there and succeeded in defeating islanders armed with empty coconut shells. What an inspiring nation, America! Next, they are planning to extinguish mosquito colonies with nuclear artillery and to go hunting for grasshoppers with elephants. Inwardly, the American establishment sells its citizens a 1984 type of reality, where events like the occupation of the Green Square in Tripoli are staged in Qatar. America the Beautiful. America the Noble. America the Liar.

Grenada – as many other countries mentioned in the list of American military operations had never threatened America. It neither sent troops into America nor stationed them along its borders. America – in the name of pluralism, corporation’s democracy and the weapons-industry profits – systematically destroys every culture and nation preaching a different system. Don’t like cheeseburgers? Too bad for Grenada!

The last years have been especially violent, with the American military having reached supremacy over the American formal government. Following the recent downgrade of the American financial system, the American president was warned by the military establishment (as well as by Hillary Clinton – Secretary of State at the time) not to touch the defense budget. The American government surrendered to this and created the basis for the next catastrophe. The USA cannot sustain its actual level of expenses on the military budget. Good news for the countries in America’s list of targets.

Can we expect to witness the collapse of this World Wide Evil in the near future? Giving accurate prophecies while dealing with such a violent organization is difficult; yet, in the last months we may have witnessed a key event. Yesterday (September 20, 2011), the American president issued a strange statement claiming that “we all learned something from Libya.” I couldn’t but agree with him, though due to what I assume is not the interpretation desired by this utterly noble, peaceful man, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the commander in chief of the American army.

Yes, we have learned something from the events in Libya. We learned that the will of local populations carries no weight when compared with the needs of the Energy Pirates and Colonizers Coalition running the Northern Atlantic regimes. We learned that when this unholy coalition decides so, it can murder civilians without fear of being brought to justice. We learned local customs and traditions can be crushed in the holy name of gold and oil.

After having learned so much, something becomes clear. This is a mutual situation. NATO’s violation of Libya doesn’t end there; the entering of a future Coalition of the Free into the USA in order to replace the violent cabal running it is a legal step in this world. Yes, we have learned.

Revelations 20:7-9 And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.

Genghis Khan | As brutal as the American Empire

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Iraq After Ten Years

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Activist Post

Ten years ago today the Bush regime invaded Iraq. It is known that the justification for the invasion was a packet of lies orchestrated by the neoconservative Bush regime in order to deceive the United Nations and the American people.

The US Secretary of State at that time, General Colin Powell, has expressed his regrets that he was used by the Bush regime to deceive the United Nations with fake intelligence that the Bush and Blair regimes knew to be fake. But the despicable presstitute media has not apologized to the American people for serving the corrupt Bush regime as its Ministry of Propaganda and Lies.

It is difficult to discern which is the most despicable: the corrupt Bush regime, the presstitutes that enabled it, or the corrupt Obama regime that refuses to prosecute the Bush regime for its unambiguous war crimes, crimes against the US Constitution, crimes against US statutory law, and crimes against humanity.

In his book, Cultures Of War, the distinguished historian John W. Dower observes that the concrete acts of war unleashed by the Japanese in the 20th century and the Bush imperial presidency in the 21st century “invite comparative analysis of outright war crimes like torture and other transgressions. Imperial Japan’s black deeds have left an indelible stain on the nation’s honor and good name, and it remains to be seen how lasting the damage to America’s reputation will be. In this regard, the Bush administration’s war planners are fortunate in having been able to evade formal and serious investigation remotely comparable to what the Allied powers pursued vis-a-vis Japan and Germany after World War II.”

Dower quotes Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: “The president [Bush] has adopted a policy of ‘anticipatory self-defense’ that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy.”

Americans paid an enormous sum of money for the shame of living in infamy. Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes calculated that the Iraq war cost US taxpayers $3,000 billion dollars. This estimate might turn out to be optimistic. The latest study concludes that the war could end up costing US taxpayers twice as much. (Source)

In order to pay for the profits that have flowed into the pockets of the US military-security complex and from there into political contributions, Americans are in danger of losing Social Security, Medicare, and the social cohesiveness that the social welfare system provides.

The human cost to Iraq of America’s infamy is extraordinary: 4.5 million displaced Iraqis, as many as 1 million dead civilians leaving widows and orphans, a professional class that has departed the country, an infrastructure in ruins, and social cohesion destroyed by the Sunni-Shia conflict that was ignited by Washington’s destruction of the Saddam Hussein government.

It is a sick joke that the United States government brought freedom and democracy to Iraq. What the Washington war criminals brought was death and the destruction of a country.

The US population, for the most part, seems quite at ease with the gratuitous destruction of Iraq and all that it entails: children without parents, wives without husbands, birth defects from “depleted” uranium, unsafe water, a country without hope mired in sectarian violence.

Washington’s puppet state governments in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Japan seem equally pleased with the victory–over what? What threat did the victory defeat? There was no threat. Weapons of mass destruction was a propaganda hoax. Mushroom clouds over American cities was fantasy propaganda. How ignorant do populations have to be to fall for such totally transparent propaganda? Is there no intelligence anywhere in the Western world?

At a recent conference the neoconservatives responsible for the deaths and ruined lives of millions and for the trillions of dollars that their wars piled on US national debt were unrepentant and full of self-justification. While Washington looks abroad for evil to slay, evil is concentrated in Washington itself.

The American war criminals walk about unmolested. They are paid large sums of money to make speeches about how Americans are bringing freedom and democracy to the world by invading, bombing and murdering people. The War Crimes Tribunal has not issued arrest warrants. The US Department of State, which is still hunting for Nazi war criminals, has not kidnapped the American ones and sent them to be tried at the Hague.

The Americans who suffered are the 4,801 troops who lost their lives, the thousands of troops who lost limbs and suffer from other permanent wounds, the tens of thousands who suffer from post-traumatic stress and from the remorse of killing innocent people, the families and friends of the American troops, and the broken marriages and single-parent children from the war stress.

Other Americans have suffered on the home front. Those whose moral conscience propelled them to protest the war were beaten and abused by police, investigated and harassed by the FBI, and put on no-fly lists. Some might actually be prosecuted. The United States has reached the point where any citizen who has a moral conscience is an enemy of the state. The persecution of Bradley Manning demonstrates this truth.

A case could be made that the historians’ comparison of the Bush regime with Japanese war criminals doesn’t go far enough. By this October 7, Washington will have been killing people, mainly women, children, and village elders, in Afghanistan for 12 years. No one knows why America has brought such destruction to the Afghan people. First the Soviets; then the Americans. What is the difference? When Obama came into the presidency, he admitted that no one knew what the US military mission was in Afghanistan. We still don’t know. The best guess is profits for the US armaments industry, power for the Homeland Security industry, and a police state for the insouciant US population.

Washington has left Libya in ruins and internal conflict. There is no government, but it is not libertarian nirvana.

The incessant illegal drone attacks on Pakistani civilians is radicalizing elements of Pakistan and provoking civil war against the Pakistani government, which is owned by Washington and permits Washington’s murder of its citizens in exchange for Washington’s money payments to the political elites who have sold out their country to Washington.

Washington has destabilized Syria and destroyed the peace that the Assad family had imposed on the Islamic sects. Syria seems fated to be reduced to ruins and permanent violence like Libya and Iraq.

Washington is at work killing people in Yemen.

As the video released to WikiLeaks by Bradley Manning shows, some US troops don’t care who they kill–journalists and civilians walking peacefully along a street, a father and his children who stop to help the wounded. As long as someone is killed, it doesn’t matter who.

Killing is winning.

The US invaded Somalia, has its French puppets militarily involved in Mali, and perhaps has Sudan in its crosshairs for drones and missiles.

Iran and Lebanon are designated as the next victims of Washington’s aggression.

Washington protects Israeli aggression against the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon from UN censure and from embargoes. Washington has arrested and imprisoned people who have sent aid to the Palestinian children. Gaza, declares Washington which regards itself as the only fount of truth, is ruled by Hamas, a terrorist organization according to Washington. Thus any aid to Gaza is aid to terrorism. Aide to starving and ill Palestinian children is support of terrorism. This is the logic of an inhumane war criminal state.

What is this aggression against Muslims about?

The Soviet Union collapsed and Washington needed a new enemy to keep the US military/security complex in power and profits. The neoconservatives, who totally dominated the Bush regime and might yet dominate the Obama regime declared Muslims in the Middle East to be the enemy. Against this make-believe “enemy,” the US launched wars of aggression that are war crimes under the US imposed Nuremberg standard that was applied to the defeated WWII Germans.

Although the British and French started World War II by declaring war on Germany, it was Germans, defeated by the Red Army, who were tried by Washington as war criminals for starting a war. A number of serious historians have reached the conclusion that America’s war crimes, with the fire-bombings of the civilian populations of Dresden and Tokyo and the gratuitous nuclear attacks on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are of the same cloth as the war crimes of Hitler and the Japanese.

The difference is that the winners paint the defeated in the blackest tones and themselves in high moral tones. Honest historians know that there is not much difference between US WWII war crimes and those of the Japanese and Germans. But the US was on the winning side.

By its gratuitous murder of Muslims in seven or eight countries, Washington has ignited a Muslim response: bitter hatred of the United States. This response is termed “terrorism” by Washington and the war against terrorism serves as a source of endless profits for the military complex and for a police state to “protect” Americans from terrorism, but not from the terrorism of their own government.

The bulk of the American population is too misinformed to catch on, and the few who do
understand and are attempting to warn others will be silenced. The 21st century will be one of the worst centuries in human history. All over the Western world, liberty is dying.

The legacy of “the war on terror” is the death of liberty.

This article first appeared at Paul Craig Roberts’ new website Institute For Political Economy.  Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

William Blum

Official website of the author, historian, and U.S. foreign policy critic.

The Anti-Empire Report #114

By William Blum – Published March 11th, 2013

Hugo Chávez

I once wrote about Chilean president Salvador Allende:

Washington knows no heresy in the Third World but genuine independence. In the case of Salvador Allende independence came clothed in an especially provocative costume – a Marxist constitutionally elected who continued to honor the constitution. This would not do. It shook the very foundation stones upon which the anti-communist tower is built: the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that “communists” can take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population. There could be only one thing worse than a Marxist in power – an elected Marxist in power.

There was no one in the entire universe that those who own and run “United States, Inc.” wanted to see dead more than Hugo Chávez. He was worse than Allende. Worse than Fidel Castro. Worse than any world leader not in the American camp because he spoke out in the most forceful terms about US imperialism and its cruelty. Repeatedly. Constantly. Saying things that heads of state are not supposed to say. At the United Nations, on a shockingly personal level about George W. Bush. All over Latin America, as he organized the region into anti-US-Empire blocs.

Long-term readers of this report know that I’m not much of a knee-reflex conspiracy theorist. But when someone like Chávez dies at the young age of 58 I have to wonder about the circumstances. Unremitting cancer, intractable respiratory infections, massive heart attack, one after the other … It is well known that during the Cold War, the CIA worked diligently to develop substances that could kill without leaving a trace. I would like to see the Venezuelan government pursue every avenue of investigation in having an autopsy performed.

Back in December 2011, Chávez, already under treatment for cancer, wondered out loud: “Would it be so strange that they’ve invented the technology to spread cancer and we won’t know about it for 50 years?” The Venezuelan president was speaking one day after Argentina’s leftist president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, announced she had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. This was after three other prominent leftist Latin America leaders had been diagnosed with cancer: Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff; Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo; and the former Brazilian leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

“Evo take care of yourself. Correa, be careful. We just don’t know,” Chávez said, referring to Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, both leading leftists.

Chávez said he had received words of warning from Fidel Castro, himself the target of hundreds of failed and often bizarre CIA assassination plots. “Fidel always told me: ‘Chávez take care. These people have developed technology. You are very careless. Take care what you eat, what they give you to eat … a little needle and they inject you with I don’t know what.” 1

When Vice President Nicolas Maduro suggested possible American involvement in Chávez’s death, the US State Department called the allegation absurd. 2

Several progressive US organizations have filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA, asking for “any information regarding or plans to poison or otherwise assassinate the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, who has just died.”

I personally believe that Hugo Chávez was murdered by the United States. If his illness and death were NOT induced, the CIA – which has attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders, many successfully 3 – was not doing its job.

When Fidel Castro became ill several years ago, the American mainstream media was unrelenting in its conjecture about whether the Cuban socialist system could survive his death. The same speculation exists now in regard to Venezuela. The Yankee mind can’t believe that large masses of people can turn away from capitalism when shown a good alternative. It could only be the result of a dictator manipulating the public; all resting on one man whose death would mark finis to the process.

It’s the end of the world … again

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) recent convention in Washington produced the usual Doomsday talk concerning Iran’s imminent possession of nuclear weapons and with calls to bomb that country before they nuked Israel and/or the United States. So once again I have to remind everyone that these people – Israeli and American officials – are not really worried about an Iranian attack. Here are some of their many prior statements:

In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion “Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel.” She “also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.” 4

2009: “A senior Israeli official in Washington”, reported the Washington Post (March 5), asserted that “Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation.”

In 2010 the Sunday Times of London (January 10) reported that Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, war hero, pillar of the Israeli defense establishment, and former director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, “believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.”

January 2012: US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a television audience: “Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No, but we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability.” 5

Later that month we could read in the New York Times (January 15) that “three leading Israeli security experts – the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz – all recently declared that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel.”

Then, a few days afterward, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in an interview with Israeli Army Radio (January 18), had this exchange:

Question: Is it Israel’s judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

Barak: People ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now … in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently that is not the case.

In an April 20, 2012 CNN interview Barak repeated this sentiment: “It’s true that probably [Iranian leader] Khamenei has not given orders to start building a [nuclear] weapon.” 6

And on several other occasions, Barak has stated: “Iran does not constitute an existential threat against Israel.” 7

Lastly, we have the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, in a January 2012 report to Congress: “We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.” … There are “certain things [the Iranians] have not done” that would be necessary to build a warhead. 8

So why, then, do Israeli and American leaders, at most other times, maintain the Doomsday rhetoric? Partly for AIPAC to continue getting large donations. For Israel to get massive amounts of US aid. For Israeli leaders to win elections. To protect Israel’s treasured status as the Middle East’s sole nuclear power.

Listen to Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at America’s most prominent neo-con think tank, American Enterprise Institute:

The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, “See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.” … And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem. 9

Osama bin Laden, Bradley Manning, & William Blum

Bradley Manning has the charge of “Aiding the enemy” hanging over his head. This could lead to a sentence of life in prison. As far as can be deduced, the government believes that the documents and videos that Manning gave to Wikileaks, which Wikileaks then widely distributed to international media, aided the enemy because it put US foreign policy in a very bad light.

Manning’s attorneys have asked the prosecution more than once for specific examples of how “the enemy” (whoever that may refer to in a world full of people bitterly angry at the United States because of any of many terrible acts carried out by the US government) has been “aided” by the Wikileaks disclosures. Just how has the enemy made use of the released material to harm the United States? The government has not provided any such examples, probably because what really bothers Washington officials is the embarrassment they have experienced before the world resulting from the documents and videos; which indeed are highly embarrassing even to genuine war criminals; filled with violations of international law, atrocities, multiple lies to everyone, revelations of gross hypocrisy, and much more.

So our splendid officials are considering putting Bradley Manning in prison forever simply because they’re embarrassed. Hard to find much fault with that.

But now the prosecutors have announced that a Navy Seal involved in the killing of Osama bin Laden is going to testify at the court martial that bin Laden possessed articles about the Wikileaks documents that Manning leaked. Well, there must be a hundred million other people in the world who have similar material on their computers. The question remains: What use did the enemy make of that?

The Iraqi government made use of the material, inducing them to refuse immunity to US troops for crimes committed in Iraq, such as the cold-blooded murders revealed by the Wilileaks videos; this in turn led the US to announce that it was ending its military engagement in Iraq. However, Manning was indicted in May 2010, well before the Iraqi decision to end the immunity.

In January, 2006 bin Laden, in an audio tape, declared: “If Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book ‘Rogue State’ [by William Blum], which states in its introduction … ” He then went on to quote the opening of a paragraph I wrote (which appears actually in the Foreword of the British edition only, that was later translated to Arabic), which in full reads:

“If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize – very publicly and very sincerely – to all the widows and the orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. I would then announce that America’s global interventions – including the awful bombings – have come to an end. And I would inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the union but – oddly enough – a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims and repair the damage from the many American bombings and invasions. There would be more than enough money. Do you know what one year of the US military budget is equal to? One year. It’s equal to more than $20,000 per hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born.

“That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.”

Thus, Osama bin Laden was clearly making use of what I wrote, and the whole world heard it. And I was thus clearly “aiding the enemy”. But I was not prosecuted.

The United States would like to prove a direct use and benefit by “the enemy” of the material released by Wikileaks; but so far it appears that only possession might be proven. In my case the use, and presumed propaganda benefit, were demonstrated. The fact that I wrote the material, as opposed to “stealing” it, is irrelevant to the issue of aiding the enemy. I knew, or should have known, that my criticisms of US foreign policy could be used by the foes of those policies. Indeed, that’s why I write what I do. To provide ammunition to anti-war and other activists.

The Department of Justice and socialism

For many years when I’ve been asked to explain just what I mean by “socialism” I’ve usually replied simply: “Putting people before profits”. There are a thousand-and-one details that would have to be considered in a transformation from a capitalist society to a socialist society, but rather than going into all that it’s much simpler to leave it with just that motto, which expresses the essence of my socialist society. In any event, in that glorious future world things will evolve in ways that could not be wholly predicted. The structure could take any one of many forms, but the essence must remain the same if it’s going to be called socialist.

Thus was I both surprised and amused in reading a news article about the current trial in New Orleans which is attempting to determine, amongst other things, the extent of blame of various companies, particularly BP, involved in the 2010 historic accident which took the lives of 11 workers and dumped an estimated 172 million gallons of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The US Justice Department attorney declared in his opening statement: “The evidence will show that BP put profits before people, profits before safety and profits before the environment.” 10

Well, imagine that. The Justice Department certainly captured the essence of corporate behavior. The attorney chose such words because he knew that the sentiments expressed would appeal to the average American sitting on a jury. The members of the jury would understand that BP had blatantly ignored and violated certain cherished ideals like people, safety and the environment. Prosecuting the corporation would sound fair and just to them.

Yet, when someone like me expresses such sentiments – and I have used the exact same words on occasion – I run the risk of being written off as an “extremist”, a “radical”, and other bad-for-you labels; not long ago it was “commie”.

The irony runs even deeper. If a corporation flagrantly ignores putting profits before everything else, stockholders can sue the executives.

This just in! The real reason the Pope resigned!

He’s losing his mind.

In January, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta met with Pope Benedict XVI to receive his blessing. Afterward, Panetta said the pontiff told him, “Thank you for helping to keep the world safe.” 11

The precious art of assassinating legally

Obama hopeium addicts can soon be expected to call for support of the president’s increasing use of drones for assassination on the ground of their being good for the environment. My White House agent informs me that Obama is going to announce that all American drones will soon be composed 85% of recyclable material and will be solar-powered. And each drone missile will have the following painted on its side: “He was a bad guy. Just take our word for it!”

http://williamblum.org/aer/read/11433

Notes

1. The Guardian (London), December 29, 2011 ↩
2. Huffington Post, March 7, 2013 ↩
3. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/assass.htm ↩
4. Haaretz.com (Israel), October 25, 2007; print edition October 26 ↩
5. “Face the Nation”, CBS, January 8, 2012 ↩
6. Washington Post, August 1, 2012 ↩
7. Iran Media Fact Check, “Does Israel Consider Iran an ‘Existential Threat’?” ↩
8. The Guardian (London), January 31, 2012 ↩
9. Political Correction, “American Enterprise Institute Admits The Problem With Iran Is Not That It Would Use Nukes” ↩
10. Associated Press, February 26, 2013 ↩
11. Washington Post, January 17, 2013 ↩

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.

← Issue #113

Books by William Blum

America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy

The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else

Killing Hope

U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II

Rogue State

A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower

Freeing the World to Death

Essays on the American Empire