Is the US Ambassador in Kabul a Liar or an Idiot?

Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador in Kabul, was quoted in the UK Guardian by Jonathan Steele (The Taliban’s wishlist, 21 June, 2011) as solemnly pronouncing:

America has never sought to occupy any nation in the world. We are a good people.

This is staggering. Americans incessantly complain that the rest of the world hates them, and always want to do them harm, even though they are “good people”. Are these Americans, blind, or deluded, or are these just neocon lies to feed the self righteous ignorance of the US public?

Eikenberry is a diplomat and sits in the center of a ten year long war against the present occupation of Afghanistan by the US and its sycophantic allies. Nor can he be unaware that the US just fought a terrible war for no obvious moral cause in Iraq, dividing and devastating the country, and still occupy it with tens of thousands of soldiers. They have just joined with France and the UK via NATO in an unjustified attack on Libya, which has again divided the country and will require another occupying force to prevent a civil war if Gaddafi is ousted.

Richard Carter, replying to Eikenberry in the Guardian adds the following historical synopsis of significant US occupations, omitting minor ones:

There’s Honduras (seven times between 1903 and 1989), Nicaragua (seven times between 1894 and 1933, not to mention the support for the Contra terrorists in 1981-90), China (six times between 1894 and 1949), Cuba (five times between 1912 and 1933), Haiti (five times between 1891 and 2005), the Dominican Republic (four times between 1914 and 1966), El Salvador (twice: 1932, 1981-92), Mexico (twice: 1913, 1914-18) and Vietnam (once, but for 15 years)….

Isn’t it about time that the US public caught on—they have a problem with their leaders, and that means with their much vaunted democracy. These wars do not and cannot help the ordinary US citizen whether poor or middle class. Only the rich profit out of them, and the US has been ruled on behalf of this rich minority for the whole of the time R Carter surveyed.

Our Heroic Leaders Lead us into a Fruitless War Again! Why?

Well, here we go again. We are three days into another crusade against the Moslems. Western leaders inevitably deny it, but it has become essential for us to effect regime change over certain Moslem leaders, some of whom, like Gaddafi and the late Saddam Hussein, who used to be so much in favour that western arms dealers sold them billions worth of modern weapons. Only a few weeks ago, the latest grubby British leader to emulate the avaricious and unprincipled T Blair, “Dave” Cameron, was selling arms personally to Arab sheiks and kings. Now he is sending “our boys” to risk death flying over Libya to bomb the poor souls beneath, to save them from being bombed by Gaddafi! Could anything be more hypocritical?

The spokesman for the Arab League did not think so. He complained that the Arabs understood a “no fly zone” was to stop Gaddafi’s aeroplanes from flying, not to stop Libyans from living, whether supporters of Gaddafi or rebels. Plainly Cameron and his vile coalition, including Obama, intend to weight the civil war, which until last week looked favorable to Gaddafi, heavily towards the rebels. No one seems to know what proportion of the Libyans oppose Gaddafi. They quickly seemed to capture the north eastern corner of the country around Benghazi, then could make no more progress. The bulk of Libya seems to prefer their present leader to some western puppet.

“Dave” admits he wants to see regime change, admitting that his objectives are the same as Blair’s and Bush’s in Iraq, but pretends the terms of the UN resolution 1973 forbid it. Even so, almost the first blow struck was a cruise missile strike against an important administrative building in Tripoli where there was a chance that Gaddafi might be himself killed. While the direct objective cannot be Gaddafi, “Dave” explains, he can be legitimately targeted because the UN resolution said all means can be used to stop Libyan civilians from being killed, so killing one Libyan civilian can be legitimate on those grounds, and, naturally, many others might be killed colaterally—sad that!

Hypocrisy

Meanwhile the hypocrisy of taking precipitate action against some oil rich dictators while favoring other equally unpleasant or worse oil rich dictators passes by the half of our knowing electorate that happily soak up every lie the BBC, Murdoch and company sling at them. Simultaneously with the rebellion against Gaddafi the people of Bahrein rebelled against their king, who after being forced to say he was willing to concede some reforms, was obliged by an unyielding public, to bring in the Saudi Arabian army, an army that is the personal arm-twister of the Saud family who rule Arabia.

Arabia is the best friend of all opportunistic western leaders because of their oil, and their oil wealth, which again makes them prime customers for arms dealers. The arms they sold were used against a tiny island, just a causeway off Saudi Arabia, but where is the call for the king of Bahrein and the wicked Saud family to yield to the legitimate rebels? Why is there a no fly Zone over Arabia? For the same reason that Bush chose to bomb Iraq as punishment of the Moslems for the 9/11 attacks, even though the 9/11 bombers were almost entirely Saudi terrorists, not Iraqi terrorists—Osama bin Laden is a Saudi. But the Saudi’s are chums of the west, specifically of the Bush family, it was said at the time. There can be no one with a brain cell today who does not know this, but sadly our cynical rulers know full well that there is nothing easier than for the minority to rule the majority. Just use media manipulation.

In the UK, before the war in Iraq, a million people turned out against the war. It woke up the British ruling class and their media pals to the need for continuous propaganda, so a campaign began that is continuing still. Almost the only history taught in British schools these days is Hitler and WWII, the way our “brave boys” beat the Nazis. They were indeed brave boys… then… fighting against a right wing racist dictatorship that wanted to control the world from Europe to India, and most of them conscripted, not professional soldiers, but it gets our youth admiring warfare, and imagining that we only fight just wars—now a big lie.

Our “brave boys” today are more like the Nazis, fighting against poor foreigners thousands of miles away who just want to live their own lives. But the propaganda in the last decade has worked, and these—our own soldiers—though they are killing farmers and their families trying to wrest back the control of their own land from foreigners, are hailed as heroes! Well, they are called that when they return in a box, or with bits of themselves missing. In the UK a charity was set up for these heroes called, would you believe, “Help the Heroes”, when the people helping could have been more help marching in an angry mass to stop these boys, and girls, from wasting their lives for no good reason. Helping rich men grab someone else’s resources, mainly oil not carrots, is not heroic. They do not differ from heavies working for gangsters, except that the heavies know what they are doing, and do it for profit, while our soldiers are paid little more than KPs.

We can always afford a good war!

Now the Queen has given the little Wiltshire town of Wootton Basset the accolade of “Royal” because it hosted a regular mass line up of people grieving for the victims as each one, returned to Lineham air base, proceeded in a funeral procession through the town. Some will have grieved genuinely. But how much more valuable it would have been if they had instead been protesting against the war. Instead it became a neo Nazi showcase of tattooed bikers, war veterans who ought to have known better, various other rentacrowd types, and, of course, BBC and Murdoch’s TV camera men duly filming it several times a week, for its propaganda value. The town naturally loved it—business had never been better.

Now we learn that with the launch of the war against Libya, another propaganda charity has started, “Horses for Heroes”, in which disabled soldiers are riding from John o’Groats at the tip of Scotland to Land’s End at the tip of Cornwall, around 1000 miles, nominally to raise money, but, in fact, like “Help the Heroes”, to continue the war sympathy campaign on the British people. The UK is now like the US. It is on a permanent war economy, and even the media have to show some people, even veterans, saying so, and criticizing the hysteria for war sentiment. These wise people ask:

How can we afford these wars when we are bankrupt, and ordinary people are feeling the weight of government cuts through pay freezes and tax hikes. How can money be found, in these allegedly dire circumstances, for stupid overseas adventures which are of no concern for us.

The megarich financier class gets richer while ordinary people get poorer. The megarich, investment capitalists and bankers, get bailed out by poor people’s sacrifices, and arms dealers get rich by killing the poor, here allegedly being heroes, and abroad by being evil cowards blowing up our heroes to defend their land and homes. All is fair in war, as far as the rich are concerned, providing that the profits roll in. I wonder what they would do if we rebelled. Would they shoot rebels? It is what they have usually done. Does anyone seriously think they are different now?

Help the Heroes Day?

In the UK we are coming to the end of “Help the Heroes Day”, a day of fundraising for the charity, Help the Heroes, recently started by an army officer to provide for war wounded soldiers. It has had vast media coverage in its short life and has raised an enviable amount of money, money at least that the Royal British Legion (poppy day) might envy, since it was set up for the same purpose.

Well, no one would disagree with helping seriously hurt people, would they? but, beside the British Legion, the UK has, or had, a comprehensive National Health Service (the NHS) for which we all pay a National Insurance Stamp while we are working which entitles, or entitled, us to free health care, a basic pension in our old age so that we are not destitute or forced to beg, and benefits when we are sick or unemployed, for the same reasons. Soldiers, of course, were entitled to all of this together with any special care the government or military were willing to provide for the wounded, together with what the RBL provided on top.

The issue I have is that all the publicity that the new charity has received is more than simple advertising for a good cause, it is tantamount to a military and militarization campaign across the country.

Take the word “heroes”. Is it proper to call these soldiers “heroes”? A hero these days is considered simply to be someone who is courageous, and I don't doubt that soldiers involved in active service are courageous. But with this definition so too are many others, and among them are people who the public would not agree were heroes. The 9/11 attack involved people willingly driving aeroplanes into high buildings with death a sure consequence. These people were courageous, and so must have been heroes. Were they?

Then again, when we fight a war we fight an enemy who are also facing us as their enemy, and they too are facing death, just as our soldiers are. They too are courageous, so must be heroes, mustn't they?

Indeed, in the middle of the twentieth century we lost many myriads of heroes facing the Axis powers, Germany, Japan and Italy, and 55 million people in total lost their lives on both sides, soldiers and civilians. Were they all heroes?

Surely, a hero is not just brave, a hero is also noble, so we can count out the 9/11 bombers, and soldiers who are fighting for any cause that is itself not noble, like the fascist soldiers of Germany and Italy, and the soldiers of imperial Japan. They were all invading foreign countries and killing innocent civilians in those countries to make them submit to the conqueror. We are not like that. We do not send troops into foreign countries to make other people submit to us, do we?

By now, I hope you have got my point. Soldiers who are forcing themselves into the homes of innocent people in a foreign country can hardly be regarded as doing anything noble, they are not being heroes. They are acting like Nazis. We are not fighting them because their governments, with the support of their people, have invaded our country. The government of Afghanistan is in place because the US has put it there. The leader of the Iraqis was in place because the US had put him there. We are killing innocent farmers and their wives and children while fully aware that most of them would prefer it if we just went away.

The whole point of the current militarization campaign is to condition us to permanent warfare, just as the people of the US have been conditioned, and just as George Orwell prophesied. We are not helping heroes, and if we want to help heroes, we would do much better to force our governments not to make young men into heroes, dubious as the title is, by killing innocents abroad. Young men would be better served by an anti-war movement, not one that gives help too late to young people with shattered bodies all for a political myth.

All we have to do to see the injustice of it is to imagine that a foreign army was raiding our houses at dawn, killing or detaining our fathers and sons, and killing or raping our mothers and sisters, and all on some pretext given them by a few extremists. That is what we fought the Nazis and the Japanese to stop. But we are now doing it ourselves, and calling our bullying troops, when they suffer in retaliation, “heroes”.

Are we to suppose that we would not fight back if we were invaded and misused by some foreign bullies? Have Americans so completely forgotten that they set up their own state by fighting off the invading soldiers of the British that they are now repeatedly determined to bully other people into submission?

And what of 9/11 itself? Is that a sufficient pretext for killing tens of thousands of foreign people who had no part in the original monstrous plot? Indeed, if we had already shown our own lack of basic justice for others by supporting oppression of poor Arabs, are we supposed to stand by and expect them not to want to retaliate against the mean spirited unfairness of our own previous actions.

You can keep whipping your dog to keep it cowed, but when it gets the courage to bite you, whose fault is it? If we treat these poor foreign farmers like dogs then we can expect to get bitten, and there is nothing noble or heroic about beating innocent animals or humans that have done us no harm, and who could not kill and maim our dubious “heroes” if they were not there to be harmed.

We still need to oppose foreign wars, and not be beguiled by bogus sentimentality disguising military propaganda. Help our heroes by stopping foreign wars and bringing them home before they are wrecked.

War Criminal Blair Tries to Buy Redemption

Catholic Demon tries to buy Sainthood.

This man along with his master, George Bush, went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, causing the deaths of myriads of innocent people, and disrupting and destroying  what had been a stable country, albeit under a dictator supported for decades by the US. He has reaped his reward addressing conventions of rich Republicans, advising banks and businesses, getting unknown expenses and no one knows what other rewards as a so called Middle East ambassador for Israel the United Nations, and now getting an advance on his memoirs of around £5 million. This latter sum and any additional royalties from the book, he has donated to a military charity for damaged servicemen, of which there are quite a number to add to those who are dead. Some of the families of dead soldiers say this is blood money.

Charles Taylor, a petty but cruel dictator of another country, Liberia, is standing trial for much lesser crimes than Blair and Bush, supporting the bloody rebellion in neighboring Sierra Leone, financed allegedly by “blood diamonds”, where Blair, attempting to imitate his heroine, petit bourgeois Tory shopkeeper, Margaret Thatcher, by sending in a British battalion, got his first taste for military glory.

If this petty murderer is standing trial, then why isn’t Blair and his puppet master G W Bush. Impeach the War Criminals and have them face a judge and jury too.

True Messianic Jews Oppose Zionism!

Rabbi Moses Jakubowicz has a short article on the website, True Torah Jews against Zionism entitled “Judaism is a Religion—Not a Race”. Throughout history, whoever joined the Jewish religion was called a Jew, no matter what his race, and whoever abandoned the Holy Torah was not considered a Jew. In fact, the biggest names in Jewish history were converts or descendants of converts—King David, Zipporah, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Meir, Shmaya and Avtalyon. Jewish people suffered many a time from fanatically religious governments who expelled or killed whoever refused to adhere to their religious belief, during the Middle Ages. Judaism is therefore a religion, not a race.

Now, Jewish people suffer from the world’s misunderstanding of the distinction between Judaism and Zionism. It is Zionists, for their own political and financial advantage, who have made Jews into a race. They have also changed the Torah, a book of divine law which teaches fairness, peace and piety, into propaganda for their political goals, and their claim to Palestine, helping to foment antisemitism, which is their intention. Jew hating drives Jews to Israel!

When Bush visited Israel, in 2008, several rabbis of the extremist Zionist settler community wrote asking the US President not to put any pressure on the Israeli leadership to yield land concessions to the Palestinian Authority. Yet, this is land Zionist Jews took from the Palestinians in the first place. They explained that he would be asking Israel to make concessions to terrorists while the US itself had announced a war on terror! Yet, Jewish terrorists, like those responsible for the bombing of the King David Hotel, drove out the Arabs so that the land would be free for grabbing by the Zionists, allegedly with biblical authority.

These Zionist rabbis compared the US President to Nebuchadnezzar and Titus, respectively the Babylonian king and the Roman general who became emperor of Rome, each of whom destroyed Jerusalem, implying that Bush would be doing the same. They ended:

You must surely remember that America does not benefit from causing damage, Heaven forbid, to the Jewish people and its land. If you help the wholeness of our holy land, we promise you and your country endless blessings.

These Zionist “rabbis” think they are God, trading his blessings for land, like beads to a savage. Rabbi Jakubowicz accused the authors of this letter of being rabbis in name only. They presumed to speak in the name of the Jewish religion, but the world must not allow itself to be fooled. They were “politicians and militants advancing their own agenda, for which they are distorting the Holy Torah and by doing so they are jeopardizing the Jewish people in the entire world as the Zionists did in the Second World War”.

Zionists desperately drum up support for Israel in the US, and try to convince Jews that they should be in Israel fighting to evict the Arabs. The pressure against Iran regarding their alleged nuclear weapons program is orchestrated by US Zionists and Israel, just as there was an orchestrated campaign of lies against Iraq, on the grounds of WMD which were never found. They simply did not exist, and the weapons inspectors had said they did not, and needed only a short while more to prove it conclusively. Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful, and has made several proposals regarding it that would be acceptable to any reasonable power.

Despite the pressure and propaganda, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have emigrated to other countries with no plans to return. “Jews against Zionism” says the Zionist Absorption Ministry, once famous for bringing millions of Jews to the State of Israel and providing them with housing and employment, has said that around 20,000 Israelis emigrate each year. 650,000 Israelis live abroad, 450,000 in North America. The Ministry is struggling unsuccessfully to recover these expatriates.

All these former Zionists have admitted their mistake in setting up the state of Israel contrary to what observant Jews consider God’s will. These true Jews think it was a grave error to want to anticipate God’s plan and try to force God’s redemption before its time. The Zionists ought to hear the prophet Yirmiyahu, who says in the name of God:

They have left Me, the source of fresh water, to dig themselves broken pits that will not hold water.

Yirmiyahu, Jeremy 2:13

Only when God is ready will Jews see the fulfilment of the verse:

And those redeemed by God will return and come to Zion with song, with eternal happiness on their heads.

Yishaya 35:10

The objection of true Jews to Zionism is twofold:

1. Zionism, by advocating a political and military end to the Jewish exile, denies the divine basis of the Jewish Diaspora. Jews are in exile because God decreed it, and may emerge from exile solely by divine redemption. All human efforts to alter this divine command must end in failure and bloodshed. History repeatedly bears out this teaching.
2. Zionism has created a pseudo-Judaism with nationalism being a new secular foundation of Jewish identity, not God and his law. So, Zionism and Israel have persistently tried, by persuasion and coercion, to replace a divine and Torah centered understanding of Jewishness with an armed material militancy.

No reasonable and intelligent Jew—and Jewish culture has always produced plenty of people meeting these criteria—would want to stay in Israel for a second, if they were not fanatical Zionists, utterly indoctrinated by them, or feel trapped in a lobster pot. Jews are citizens of the world, and have always been. Israelis should be proud to be Diaspora Jews, like their ancestors, millions of whom died for the right to free thought, benefiting the whole world. Proper Jews, the true Jews of the Torah, still looked forward to the messianic age, when Jerusalem would be “a house of prayer for all nations” (Isaiah 56:7). Zionists should abandon the false and ungodly state of Israel—at least until the the Jewish Messiah has announced his presence!

The Rules of Chaos in Afghanistan Today

Stephen Vizinczey wrote “The Rules of Chaos”, a much quoted book, which considered the problems offered by the Vietnam War. So Vizinczey can claim some authority as an analyst of American political and military strategies. An article by him in the UK Daily Telegraph, a broadsheet not known for leaning leftwards, had the headline:

Afghanistan is an unwinnable war, and our leaders know it. The only consequence of long-term conflict in Afghanistan, and anywhere else, is to increase the number of our enemies

For Vizinczey, the war in Afghanistan was lost long ago. The reason is one that is so plain to see that it is surprising Americans have not worked it out for themselves, even the rednecks with the IQ of a passenger pigeon who often call themselves Republicans. It is what Vizinczey calls an iron law of human conflict—almost everyone hates it when foreigners occupy their country forcing them to do what they do not want to do. People like to rule themselves, and anyone in a democracy ought to be glad to let them get on with it. Not Americans, though. They suffer from a self centered blindness that allows them to see good only in their own acts, however barbarous they might be, and blinds them to the complaints of others that they are indeed acting barbarously.

The aim of some New York Moslems to demolish an old tenement and convert it into a Moslem center, including a mosque, has some other New Yorkers objecting on the grounds that it is an insult to 3000 dead Americans, killed in the 9/11 atrocity of 2001. The Moslems wanting to build the Islamic center are not the ones who killed the 3000 Americans—they are, in fact, mainly Americans themselves. The Americans who object think it is insensitive that Moslems want to build a mosque so close to “ground zero”. As ever, these Americans can only see the motes in the eyes of the Moslems they consider as their antagonists. They never see the beams in their own eyes.

An imam suggested that Americans had some responsibility for the original atrocity, but few of them could see that, and accused him of being a terrorist himself! Killing 3000 innocent people is an incomprehendable and unpardonable act, but the killing of 2,000,000 Vietnamese was a shocking failure of “the good guys’” will. It is not at all evil to kill 2,000,000 peasants in a foreign land—their own—but to have the temerity to mount an effective retaliation when the Americans had used Zionists for decades to kill and humiliate Moslems in Palestine labels all Moslems as terrorists and their sympathizers. Americans cannot see that what is good for the goose is good also for the gander.

Why then does Obama persist in protracting the agony? Ignorance, perpetuated by the baneful influence of the US megarich class via their ownership of the media, the op-ed influence of their gentlemen servants among the academies, and the open scheming of the Washington caste of professional politicos. That is the thinking of the otherwise thoughtless, conditioned Pavlovian style. The ignorant majority, taking all its cues from the megarich, then forces any progressive US presidents to go with its views. Needless to say, this majority is gung ho about foreign invasions, persuaded that they are angels and the rest of the world are devils.

Obama continues the Afghan war because too many Americans have been persuaded by the gaggle of oil barons and gunrunners that rule the country that just one more push will bring victory. More troops are sent, more money spent on armaments, and energy demanding manufacturing, keeping the gunrunners and oil moguls happy, and US unemployment lower than the depression levels it would otherwise reach. No one seems to think the whole country, not to mention the peasants of Afghanistan, and unfortunates elsewhere suffering US torture and oppression, would be better off if workers manufactured socially useful products by working in health and welfare.

Vizinczey pointed out that there has to be a shared purpose between a population and the invading armies for an invasion to triumph. When the Americans fought in Europe, they were not fighting the people, who were themselves thoroughly opposed to the Nazi occupation. The Americans fought for over a decade in Vietnam and lost because they were fighting practically the whole people, not—as the propaganda made out—an invading army from the north, the communists. The situation was the same in Iraq, even though there was at first a considerable body of people glad to be shut of Saddam. The long period of US sanctions that had not harmed Saddam or his own cronies but only ordinary Iraqi children, the old, and the poor, alienated many. Subsequent murderous attacks like that on Fallujah alienated the rest.

It is still the same in Afghanistan. The propaganda story is the usual manifest rubbish, so easily believed by the brain dead redneck, that outsiders called Al Qaida, were causing the trouble, and the people welcomed them being attacked by the allies. As there turned out to be no one from Al Qaida conveniently handy to shoot, soon the enemy had become the Taliban, but they too were outsiders, or at least were morally—most people, especially women and children, did not want them to resume their oppressive rule. But the US soldier has never been bothered to distinguish one gook or raghead from another.

Now there are few Afghans who do not support the Taliban, because everyone wants the US and its allies out, and it is the Taliban who are determined enough to try to effect their eviction. Even Afghan soldiers are not interested in serving the putridly corrupt Hamid Karzai government, favored by the Americans. Why should it come as a shock that Afghan soldiers turn around and shoot the occupiers? These are the impatient ones. The patient ones are simply waiting until they get some autonomy, then they will get rid of the corrupt Karzai, and use their weapons to revert to home rule!

It’s simple enough—every enemy killed in a foreign country increases the number of enemies exponentially. In Afghanistan, the parents, the in-laws, the relatives of the dead, turn against the West. They may not take up arms and they may not join the Taliban, but they will certainly not oppose anybody who wants to kill the men who killed their loved ones.

Stephen Vizinczey

The military documents revealed by Wikileaks show what is obvious to everyone except a Yankee—Nato has been promoting Islamism by the day. Vizinczey argues that Bush would never have started the Aghan war without a deep faith in US invincibility. Faith, for a lunatic Christian, like Bush, and many more uncritical Americans is the appropriate word. They entertain the belief that “the good guy always wins”. Like the neoconservative belief that the truth is what you decide it to be, this is utterly self destructive. It requires the facts to be ignored in favor of hope and prayers—it conditions them to disregard all contrary evidence, just as Bush did over Saddam’s WMD.

The idiotic excuse for the war is the supposed necessity of defeating terrorists at source. Yet the terrorists who have been found in the UK have all been British Moslems, mainly of Pakistani descent. At home, terrorists can be tailed, their phones tapped, they can be seen on surveyance cameras, their language is our own. Were they to succeed, their success does not get them allies but angers the mass of the people. The truth is that we can fight terrorists here at home because the people are predominently on the side of legality, even the Moslems, reluctant though some are to accept that the Quran can be read in shocking ways by extremists.

In the UK only lunatics support bombing innocent people as long as we have effective democratic methods of protest available. The similar but more serious threat from the northern Irish nationalists, who felt they were justified in bombing because the political system of northern Ireland had been heavily weighted against them, did not cause anything like the panic in government circles as the present Islamist threat, despite being more destructive. In fact, in the streets, neither threat bothered many people at all. London had been blitzed by Hitler and had not yielded. A few IRA bombs was unlikely to cause a panic. The same remains true of the Islamic threat.

The real danger has always been that governments will suppress democratic rights in the so called war against terrorism to such an extent that Parliament and the police lose popular backing. Then either the government falls, or it becomes utterly oppressive. That is now a much greater danger than any threats from terrorists.

US Middle Class ready to Revolt against Wall Street Parasites and Financial Terrorists

The Max Keiser Report 65

WikiLeaks Leaks the Truth about the Afghan War

WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers’ website, feels threatened by US counterintelligence designs. It is reported in www.france24.com that WikiLeaks twittered:

If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our April 5 film. And you know who is responsible.

The film, Pentagon Murder Cover-up, apparently shows US military personnel killing civilians and journalists in Afghanistan. While the British media constantly publish propaganda featuring our “brave heroes” being paraded through Wootten Bassett in hearses, they say nothing about the many hundreds of Afghans being killed each month, most of whom are innocent. Weeping British mothers bewail their dead sons, but seem not to give a thought to the sons and mothers being killed daily by our heroes. WikiLeaks has a reputation for reliability, having been given a prize as Best New Media by The Economist in only 2008.

The US intelligence agency, in a classified document, described WikiLeaks as “a threat to US troops abroad”, but WikiLeaks published the report, forcing the Department of Justice to confirm the story was true. The report described ways to bring down the website. The report also lists embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks—U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq and violations in the attack on Fallujah, as well as human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.

Oceania, a Quarter Century after 1984, the USA

In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, he describes a superstate called Oceania where truth and lies are indivisible, so that lies become truth when they passed into history, and peace is not peace but a permanent war. Oceania used to be thought of as being the USSR, but obviously it was not. What then was Oceania? What is it? The USA!

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. He is the Supreme Commander of a country that fights a permanent war, yet it is peace, and Obama wins The Nobel Peace Prize for faithfully leading it, like his neofascist predecessor. Obama says the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. There was no such authority. It “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan to disorderly regions and diffuse enemies”, he tells us. A decade after invading Afghanistan, the President of Oceania says to the Afghans, “We have no interest in occupying your country”. US forces remain in Iraq, invaded with the support of the whole world after 9/11 except that it was not—all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup were overwhelmingly opposed to it, yet Iraqis and others remain in Guantanamo Bay. This is “global security”.

Another lie is that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden”, yet Pakistan, the adjacent country, said that the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, in 2001, and Oceania ignored them. Two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Bush administration told Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik that an American military assault would take place. The Taliban regime in Kabul, secretly supported by Clinton, was too unreliable to ensure America’s control over oil and gas pipelines in the Middle East.

Though we hear continuously from Oceania’s new President, and his surly puppet, Brown in the UK, that Afghanistan today is a “safe haven” for Al Qaida, General James Jones, a national security advisor, said in October there were less than 100 Al Qaida in Afghanistan, and US intelligence admits that all but a handful of “Taliban” are tribal rebels “opposing the US because it is an occupying power”. The war is a fraud, and, while in the UK, sycophantic media, notably the BBC, play upon the coffins of “our boys” being paraded through Wootten Bassett in Wiltshire on being flown in from Asia, no mention is made of the body count of the Afghans, over 1000 a month—all Taliban murderers of course, and deserving of it.

Meanwhile Americans do their utmost to set Afghan against Afghan just as they set Iraqi against Iraqi, Sunnis against Shia against Kurds, destroying communities that had once intermarried, ethnically cleansing the Sunni, driving millions abroad, and ravaging the country of Abraham, a multiethnic society which included Christians. So much for the Godliness of these self proclaimed lovers of God. They created a desert and called it peace. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite of peace was true.

The British in the nineteenth century and the Soviets in the twentieth century tried to tame Afghanistan and failed, though after terrible bloodshed in each case. Cemeteries are their memorials. In the latter case, the Taliban were armed and financed by the USA. Though Yankees are proud of their revolutionary past, they have all now adjusted comfortably to imperialism, and perpetual wars called peace. The old revolutionaries are now the neocolonialists. Yet barring superficial differences, people are the same everywhere, and these Asians, whether Vietnamese, Palestinians, Iraqis, or Afghans all do not differ a jot in wanting to defend their own land against the machinations of foreign powers, just as the American states did against the British.

Orwell was describing what has turned out to be the USA. Even then US propaganda was working overtime against Asia, then against the communist countries, who were never the threat they were painted as. Events have shown that the USSR was a paper tiger, if it was any sort of tiger at all, but the real monster is the USA, Oceania today, a military state inhabited by pious idiots and run by rich maniacs.

From an article by Jon Pilger

Blair Finally Admits He is a Liar and a Sociopath

Ex UK PM Tony Blair has just admitted, in a BBC interview, that he would have gone to war even if he had known Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. However he would have used “different arguments” to remove Saddam, he said, undermining his case that Saddam was a danger to everyone because of his threat of WMD, the case actually offered and rejected by many people worldwide by Blair and his puppet master Bush.

What Blair has done is admit, not only that he lied to Parliament and the British public about Saddam having WMD, but that he would have used different lies—these “different arguments”—if he had thought the WMD lie was inadequate.

Hans Blix, head of the UN weapons inspectorate in 2003, commented that Mr Blair’s confession had left a “strong impression of a lack of sincerity”, adding that the WMD argument was a “figleaf”. Blix's expressions “figleaf” and “strong impression of a lack of sincerity” are either euphemistic or sarcastic. He too thinks Blair was lying, and is an habitual liar.

From his own mouth Blair unwittingly confirms he is a sociopath, as AskWhy! has always maintained. Blair just cannot distinguish lies from truthful arguments. He should be impeached for leading the British into an illegal war which has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. Yet he thinks he can make his peace with his maker via Catholicism.

Has he noted that many Catholic mass murderers are now saints? Let us help him. All the best saints were martyrs. Let him be tried according to the law, something he denied many others, not only those who died but those he connived in torturing. Many of us would cheer to hear of his martyrdom, and that justice has been done. Impeach him!

Baha Mousa: Tortured to Death in Iraq

An inquiry into the killing of an Iraqi hotel worker, twenty six year old Baha Mousa, has heard he was arrested along with a number of other civilians by soldiers of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in Basra in 2003. It is a horrible and devastating story which should bring tears to the eyes of anyone reading it, tears of shame and humiliation at what was done to him in our name.

These Iraqi civilians were subjected to brutal and vicious abuse from British troops, were subjected to sensory deprivation techniques, kicked and beaten repeatedly. The inquiry saw video footage of hooded and bound prisoners being beaten and abused by Corporal Donald Payne of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. In his opening address to the inquiry, Rabinder Singh QC, representing Mr Mousa’s family, said:

Baha was a human being, yet to his guards he was known as “fat boy” or “fat bastard”.

Mr Mousa’s father is a colonel in the Iraqi police. While being tortured for 36 hours on the floor of a filthy toilet at a holding facility, Baha Mousa was heard to scream for respite, and say he thought he would die. Mr Singh read out the statement of another detainee, describing what were Mr Mousa’s last moments on the evening of the second day:

I heard Baha Mousa screaming, “Oh my God, I’m going to die, I’m going to die. Leave me alone. Please leave me alone for five minutes”.

After he had been tortured to death, Mousa’s body was released. He had suffered 93 separate injuries. Neither Mousa nor any other of the civilians detained had been tried or convicted of anything. He had recently lost his young wife to cancer and had been left working in a war zone with two motherless, and now fatherless, children.

Solicitor for the detainees Phil Shiner said the responsibility for Mr Mousa’s death rested at the highest level. He said the inquiry must establish:

How it came about that senior politicians, civil servants, lawyers and senior military personnel knew—or ought to have known—that British soldiers and interrogators were using coercive interrogation techniques in Iraq and thought these were permittable and lawful.

The use of hooding and other torture techniques were banned under the Geneva Convention, and outlawed by the UK Conservative Heath government, in 1972, following the use of sensory deprivation techniques during internment in Northern Ireland. Mr Singh wondered whether the use of these techniques had ever ceased:

In 2003, the so-called “conditioning” techniques were used in Iraq on civilians in the name of the people of Britain. Stress positions, hooding, sleep deprivation, food deprivation and noise all came back. Perhaps they never went away.

It is important not to fall into the trap of thinking that this case was simply one of indiscipline. This case is not just about beatings or a few bad apples. There is something rotten in the whole barrel.

For the abuse and murder of Baha Mousa and the indignities and outrages perpetrated on countless numbers of Iraqi victims, only one man has been found guilty of war crimes and that man, the only one who pleaded guilty, was sentenced to only a year in prison and dismissed from the service. Defence Secretary, Des Browne, admitted “substantive breaches” of parts of the European Convention on Human Rights that protect the right to life and prohibit torture, still no one in the army’s hierarchy has been identified as responsible and punished, though the Ministry of Defence agreed to pay out £2.83 million to those who were mistreated, accepting some culpability.

The Baha Mousa inquiry may provide some answers to what went wrong in the army’s chain of command. It may expose ignoble and immoral conduct among British soldiers, including senior officers, in wartime. And all three of the major parties supported the war. Though the Liberals made a token protest, it was not enough to exonerate them. The British public ought to recognize that politicians from all parties carry the guilt of the wounding and deaths of myriads of Iraqis.

But the army’s political masters, the Blair-Brown neo-Nazi concoction called the New Labour government, remain in power, the personal guilt of ministers unacknowledged, their draconian laws still on the statute book, and their own crimes still unpunished. We need to remove these criminals from office, and to send them to the law courts for judgement. We are supposed to know, from our experience of Naziism that military might ought not be used to achieve political objectives.