Why Is Anyone Still Catholic?

 

For any Catholics who might be reading this, I have a question for you:

Why are you still Catholic?

Presumably, I don’t have to tell you about the rash of child-rape scandals in the Catholic Church. I don’t have to tell you about the cover-ups, the shielding of child rapists in the priesthood from law enforcement, the deliberate shuttling of child-raping priests from town to town to protect them from exposure — thus enabling them to continue raping children. I don’t have to tell you about the Church using remote, impoverished villages as a dumping ground for priests who raped children. I don’t have to tell you that this wasn’t a few isolated incidents: it was a widespread, institutional practice, authorized by high-level Church officials. Including Cardinal Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — who, among other actions taken to protect child-raping priests, delayed the dismissal of a child rapist in the priesthood… for the “good of the universal Church.”

And presumably, I don’t have to tell you about the Church’s response as this scandal has been exposed. I don’t have to tell you that, overwhelmingly, they have stonewalled, rationalized, deflected blame. I don’t have to tell you about the Church’s, “Come on, the kids weren’t that young, most of them were over 11” defense, or their, “Hey, everyone else is doing it” defense. I don’t have to tell you how they’ve equated the accusations against the Church with anti-Semitism. I don’t have to tell you how they’ve blamed the child-rape scandal on gays, the media, the Devil , even the rape survivors themselves. (No, really. From the Bishop of Tenerife: “There are 13-year-old adolescents who are underage and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what’s more wanting it, and if you are careless they will even provoke you.”) I don’t have to tell you that the Church is opposing a measure extending the statute of limitations on child rape. I don’t have to tell you about the Pope’s dismissal of the child-rapist-protection accusations as, quote, “petty gossip.”

And I’m just focusing on the child rape scandal. I’m not even talking today about the other recent scandals in the Church: the gay prostitution ring, the Church banning the use of condoms in Africa to prevent the spread of AIDS, the rape of nuns by priestsand the ignoring/ concealment thereof.

If these scandals had taken place in any organization other than a religious one — would you still be part of it?…....READ FULL ARTICLE 

Pope Benedict XVI exposed in a monstrous international criminal cover-up: call to criminally prosecute Pope Benedict at the International Criminal Court

[..] Carefully crafted apologies that accept no blame and scripted public relations meetings with a few selected abuse survivors will not solve the crisis facing the reactionary leadership of the church.

[…] This demand for justice erupting from below has now done the unthinkable. It has exposed the role of the present pope, Pope Benedict XVI, in a monstrous international criminal cover-up. […]

The church hierarchy, in fighting to defend its undisputed authority, wealth and privilege, has demanded absolute silence, threatened excommunication of those raising the charges and demanded that secular officials comply. This effort to maintain the absolute authority of the priesthood is part of a larger internal struggle over whose interests this powerful religious institution should serve.

This international scandal rocking the Catholic Church now involves detailed evidence of tens of thousands of cases of child rape and sexual abuse, committed by thousands of priests. The charges span decades. The struggle erupted in its fiercest form in cities that previously had the strongest religious believers in the U.S. Next it broke out in Ireland, followed by Italy and then parts of Germany with large Catholic populations.

What is new and now receives almost daily media coverage is the evidence seeping out from every side showing the personal responsibility of the present Pope Benedict XVI in decades of suppression, cover-up and quiet reassigning of sexual predators. The strongest condemnations are coming from those who still consider themselves part of the Catholic Church.

Liberal Catholic theologian Hans Keung described Pope Benedict XVI’s role in allowing the abuse to flourish, covering it up and ordering silence: “There was not a single man in the whole Catholic Church who knew more about the sex-abuse cases than him, because it was ex officio (part of his official role).  …  He can’t wag his finger at the bishops and say, you didn’t do enough. He gave the instruction himself, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and repeated it as Pope.”

The National Catholic Reporter editorialized on March 26: “The Holy Father needs to directly answer questions, in a credible forum, about his role  —  as archbishop of Munich (1977-82), as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1982-2005), and as pope (2005-present)  —  in the mismanagement of the clergy sex abuse crisis.”

Before his elevation to the top of the Catholic hierarchy in April 2005, Pope Benedict XVI was known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. His opponents referred to him as a pit bull and as “God’s rottweiler.” Ratzinger was an extremely right-wing political appointee of Pope John Paul II, who was determined to enforce discipline, conformity and church authority in an institution in the midst of a profound upheaval.

For 24 years Ratzinger headed the most powerful and historically repressive institution in the Catholic Church, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This body was known for centuries as the Holy Office of the Inquisition. It was the church institution responsible for establishing religious courts for the charging and torture of tens of thousands of people accused of witchcraft and heresy. It led the pogroms and mass expropriations of Jews and Muslims. Through this office within the church Pope John Paul II tried to install a modern-day Inquisitio

Documents expose vast cover-up

The scale of the criminal international conspiracy of silence to protect serial molesters and to put church interests ahead of child safety and well-being was fully revealed over the past year in the handling of sexual abuse in Ireland, an overwhelmingly Catholic country. read on

An Act Of War: The US Congress is Actively Pushing for War on Iran

I object to this entire push for war on Iran, however it is disguised. Listening to the debate on the Floor on this motion and the underlying bill it feels as if we are back in 2002 all over again: the same falsehoods and distortions used to push the United States into a disastrous and unnecessary one trillion dollar war on Iraq are being trotted out again to lead us to what will likely be an even more disastrous and costly war on Iran. The parallels are astonishing. […..] This legislation, whether the House or Senate version, will lead us to war on Iran. .  read on

VIDEO: “Nuclear Terrorism”: US administration is interested in creating an environment which will justify a possible nuclear attack on Iran

the US is the most dangerous threat to global security and what this conference aims at achieving is to diffuse this understanding. It’s a PR campaign which seeks to present the nuclear threat in some distorted way, so that people who listen to the media report will believe that Al-Qaeda, Bin Laden and global terrorism is the issue, rather than the strategic objectives of the US which include now the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.”

 “At this stage the US administration is not interested in negotiating, it is interested in creating an environment which will justify a possible nuclear attack on Iran,” concluded Chossudovsky.  Watch Video

Pope Benedict and the Roman Catholic Church: Worst Credibility Crisis Since Reformation

Hans Küng says […] There is no denying the fact that the worldwide system of covering up cases of sexual crimes committed by clerics was engineered by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger (1981-2005). During the reign of Pope John Paul II, that congregation had already taken charge of all such cases under oath of strictest silence. Ratzinger himself, on May 18th, 2001, sent a solemn document to all the bishops dealing with severe crimes ( “epistula de delictis gravioribus” ), in which cases of abuse were sealed under the “secretum pontificium” , the violation of which could entail grave ecclesiastical penalties. With good reason, therefore, many people have expected a personal mea culpa on the part of the former prefect and current pope. Instead, the pope passed up the opportunity afforded by Holy Week: On Easter Sunday, he had his innocence proclaimed “urbi et orbi” by the dean of the College of Cardinals.

Pope Benedict has made worse just about everything that is wrong with the Roman Catholic Church and is directly responsible for engineering the global cover-up of child rape perpetrated by priests, according to this open letter to all Catholic bishops       Read full letter

Is Canada Fighting an Imperialist War in Afghanistan?

Recently a small group of professors at the University of Regina suggested that Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan was an act of imperialism and should not be glorified. The professors were vigorously attacked by Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, a number of Conservative Members of Parliament, and a long list of editorial writers, columnists and directors of news in the mainstream Canadian media.

On this subject, a new group of scholars argues that the United States is a major imperial power, dominating the world, and this is a good thing. These would include Antonia Negri, Michael Hardt, Deepak Lal and Naill Ferguson. Canadian Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, is often seen as part of this group. Samuel P. Huntington, the eminent U.S. scholar, writes that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are part of the “war of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam, and there is no question who we should support. READ ON

The Politics of Counting Dead Afghan Civilians

“The American public is conditionally tolerant of [military] casualties and consistently indifferent to collateral damage” Dr. Karl P. Mueller, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base
The liberal and ex-radical supporters of Obama have been mesmerized by the Obama-McChrystal news management effort. McChrystal proclaims reducing civilian casualties is critical to the US/NATO counterinsurgency war effort and at the same time greatly increases the use of secretive US Special Operations troops. These forces are linked with deadly night-time, out-of-sight killer raids, the results of which go largely unreported.[12] The media parroted the U.S/NATO fiction that the Marja assault in February 2010 was a military success, when in fact it was a successful information battle.[13]

 read on

Hamid Karzai: Our Man in Kabul

With his volatile mix of dependence and independence, Hamid Karzai seems the archetype of all the autocrats Washington has backed in Asia, Africa, and Latin America since European empires began disintegrating after World War II. When the CIA mobilized Afghan warlords to topple the Taliban in October 2001, the country’s capital, Kabul, was ours for the taking — and the giving. In the midst of this chaos, Hamid Karzai, an obscure exile living in Pakistan, gathered a handful of followers and plunged into Afghanistan on a doomed CIA-supported mission to rally the tribes for revolt.  It proved a quixotic effort that required rescue by Navy SEALs who snatched him back to safety in Pakistan.

Desperate for a reliable post-invasion ally, the Bush administration engaged in what one expert has called“bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting” to install Karzai in power.  This process took place not through a democratic election in Kabul, but by lobbying foreign diplomats at a donors’ conference in Bonn, Germany, to appoint him interim president. When King Zahir Shah, a respected figure whose family had ruled Afghanistan for more than 200 years, returned to offer his services as acting head of state, the U.S. ambassador had a “showdown” with the monarch, forcing him back into exile.  In this way, Karzai’s “authority,” which came directly and almost solely from the Bush administration, remained unchecked. For his first months in office, the president had so little trust in his nominal Afghan allies that he was guarded by American security.

In the years that followed, the Karzai regime slid into an ever deepening state of corruption and incompetence, while NATO allies rushed to fill the void with their manpower and material, a de facto endorsement of the president’s low road to power. As billions in international development aid poured into Kabul, a mere trickle escaped the capital’s bottomless bureaucracy to reach impoverished villages in the countryside. In 2009, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan as the world’s second most corrupt nation, just a notch below Somalia.

As opium production soared from 185 tons in 2001 to 8,200 tons just six years later — a remarkable 53% of the country’s entire economy — drug corruption metastasized, reaching provincial governors, the police, cabinet ministers, and the president’s own brother, also his close adviser. Indeed, as a senior U.S. antinarcotics official assigned to Afghanistan described the situation in 2006, “Narco corruption went to the very top of the Afghan government.”  Earlier this year, the U.N. estimated that ordinary Afghans spend $2.5 billion annually, a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product, simply to bribe the police and government officials.  

Last August’s presidential elections were an apt index of the country’s progress. Karzai’s campaign team, the so-called warlord ticket, included Abdul Dostum, an Uzbek warlord who slaughtered countless prisoners in 2001; vice presidential candidate Muhammed Fahim, a former defense minister linked to drugs and human rights abuses; Sher Muhammed Akhundzada, the former governor of Helmand Province, who was caught with nine tons of drugs in his compound back in 2005; and the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, reputedly the reigning drug lord and family fixer in Kandahar. “The Karzai family has opium and blood on their hands,” one Western intelligence official told the New York Times during the campaign.

Desperate to capture an outright 50% majority in the first round of balloting, Karzai’s warlord coalition made use of an extraordinary array of electoral chicanery. After two months of counting and checking, the U.N.’s Electoral Complaints Commission announced in October 2009 that more than a million of his votes, 28% of his total, were fraudulent, pushing the president’s tally well below the winning margin. Calling the election a “foreseeable train wreck,” the deputy U.N. envoy Peter Galbraith said, “The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.”

Galbraith, however, was sacked and silenced as U.S. pressure extinguished the simmering flames of electoral protest.  The runner-up soon withdrew from the run-off election that Washington had favored as a face-saving, post-fraud compromise, and Karzai was declared the outright winner by default. In the wake of the farcical election, Karzai not surprisingly tried to stack the five-man Electoral Complaints Commission, an independent body meant to vet electoral complaints, replacing the three foreign experts with his own Afghan appointees. When the parliament rejected his proposal, Karzai lashed out with bizarre charges, accusing the U.N. of wanting a “puppet government” and blaming all the electoral fraud on “massive interference from foreigners.” In a meeting with members of parliament, he reportedly told them: “If you and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban.”

Amid this tempest in an electoral teapot, as American reinforcements poured into Afghanistan, Washington’s escalating pressure for “reform” only served to inflame Karzai. As Air Force One headed for Kabul on March 28th, National Security Adviser James Jones bluntly told reporters aboard that, in his meeting with Karzai, President Obama would insist that he prioritize “battling corruption, taking the fight to the narco-traffickers.” It was time for the new administration in Washington, ever more deeply committed to its escalating counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, to bring our man in Kabul back into line.

A week filled with inflammatory, angry outbursts from Karzai followed before the White House changed tack, concluding that it had no alternative to Karzai and began to retreat.  Jones now began telling reporters soothingly that, during his visit to Kabul, President Obama had been “generally impressed with the quality of the [Afghan] ministers and the seriousness with which they’re approaching their job.”

All of this might have seemed so new and bewildering in the American experience, if it weren’t actually so old.  read full article

United States, once again, reserves the right to a “pre-emptive” nuclear attack because it owns the world?

Obama asserts that both “the United States and Israel are very concerned over Iran’s behaviour”, neglecting to mention that while Iran is a party to the NPT and the target of inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Israel has never signed the NPT and possesses a powerful nuclear arsenal that was never subjected to international inspection. And while Iran has no nuclear weapons, Israel keeps about one hundred of them aimed at Iran and other countries in the region.

The same thing can be said about the United States’ other ally, Pakistan, that is the owner of nuclear weapons but has never adhered to the NPT. To the question regarding Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile, on which the United States has so far spent at least 100 million dollars to “secure”, Obama replied “I’m not going to talk about the details of Pakistan’s nuclear”. This confirms that the new nuclear strategy of the United States continues to apply the usual double standard criteria.

These are not the only ambiguities. While, on the one hand, he proclaims the reduction of nuclear weapons, on the other hand, President Obama declares that “we maintain a potent deterrent” and “we invest in improved infrastructure to ensure the safety, security and reliability of our nuclear weapons”. And as he announces the “limitation” on the use of nuclear arms, White House officials are saying that the new strategy allows for “nuclear reprisals against a biological attack”: in other words, against a nonnuclear country accused, possibly on the basis of “evidence” provided by the CIA, of having carried out or attempted to carry out a biological attack against the United States.

Moreover, to the question regarding the new generation of “conventional” weapons that the United States is developing, blurring the boundary between conventional and nuclear weapons, Obama retorted that he didn’t intend to get into details. He adopts the same attitude when it comes to U.S. nuclear arms in Europe. In respect of the anti-missile “shield” that the U.S. intends to deploy in Europe, threatening to compromise the new START treaty, Obama chooses to remain silent. However, one who does speak out – and it’s a cold shower – is Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who, two days before the Prague Summit, warned that “Moscow reserves the right to withdraw from the new START if the impact of the anti-missile “shield” to be set up by United States significantly outweighs the efficiency of Russia’s nuclear strategic potential” [2].

read article

Obama Threatens Iran with Nuclear Weapons: Tehran’s Response.

Following the US President Barack Obama’s remarks that America will not restrict conditions of using nuclear weapons against Iran and North Korea, Khazaee sent a letter to the presidents of the UN Security Council Yukio Takasu and General Assembly Ali Treki and the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and said threats of the US officials against Iran are inhuman and go against international rules and commitments.

The full text of the letter follows:

The Pedophile Pope and his failing public relations project could be hampered by the Pinocchio syndrome

While the  Rat’s nose grows the Church’s public relations engine failed to dupe the public into falling for the whining Vatican’s, “representative of god on earth” claiming similarities with the  six million Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Not only is Ratzinger known as the Nazi Pope because of his Hitler Youth internship , Jewish leaders are well aware of the Catholic Church’s collaboration with the Nazi death machine and their Holocaust Museum  has documents and photos to prove this. The Church’s apologies for this Nazi collaboration are seen as not only insincere but just another in an unbroken line of cover-ups. Now this failed public relations ploy was not only  stupid but both insensitive and uncaring, it was  also probably expected after the Church’s deception for decades regardingt its unwritten policy to lie about  the organized sexual exploitation of children.  One of the topics not discussed in investigating the RAT’S culpability is in regards to his approving a legion of pedophile fixers.  The documentary, Sex Crimes and the Vatican  interviews  Patrick Wall, a former Benedictine monk who became the Vatican approved enforcer of crimen sollicitationis in his Minnesota diocese.

The Vatican approved a legion of Enforcers of Crimen Sollicitationis.                                                                                                                                                 When a priest was accused of sexual abuse, the abuser was slipped quietly away, and an appointed enforcer of Crimen Sollicitationis was moved in. That is really the ultimate definition of success for the church, when it comes to a case of sexual abuse of a minor, that no one ever finds out about it, that it gets shut down, that it’s kept quiet. If a pay off is needed, or if some kind of a settlement is needed, it’s done. There is no policy to help the victims, there is absolutely no policy to help those who are trying to help the victims, and there is an unwritten policy to lie about the existence of the problem. Then, as far as the perpetrators, the priests, when they’re discovered, the systemic response has been not to investigate and prosecute, but to move them. To move them from one place to another in a secret way, and not reveal why they’re being moved. There is total disregard for the victims, total disregard for the fact that you are going have a whole new crop of victims in the next place -sending priests, who they know have abused children in the past, to new parishes and new communities, and more abuse happens. This is all over the world, the same pattern and practice exists no matter what country you go to.

The  Catholic Church is guilty of engaging in a clear crime against humanity: the organized sexual exploitation of children. Murder, torture and child rape are not new to the Roman Catholic church, nor will these obscenities stop, since the church is above the law and accountable only to itself. And yet, for all its worldly power, the Vatican is tottering under the impact of  the recent media coverage not only of the proof of Vatican complicity but obvious failing attemps to lie and avoid accountability.

Canada: It’s not really about jobs

Richard Sanders writes that If governments were serious about increasing employment, they would invest more in socially-useful, labour-intensive sectors of the economy, not the war industries.

Over the decades, many studies have proved that military spending is among the worst methods ever conceived for putting people to work. Research by the U.S. Institute for Policy Studies, in 2007, found that, for every billion dollars shovelled into war industries, 8,555 jobs are created. This pales in comparison to investments in other industries. For example, 50% more jobs are generated for every billion invested in home construction (12,804) and health care (12,883), while twice as many jobs are created in education (17,687), and 2.3 times as many in mass transit (19,795).

But, besides creating more jobs, investing in social sectors provides much-needed benefits for those who are putting up the cash. So, while grubstaking war industries generates far fewer jobs and provides no social services whatsoever, it also takes a terrifying toll on civilians who comprise 80% of the casualties in modern wars. This creates more enemies and makes us less secure.

As Canadian Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie noted: “Every time you kill an angry young man overseas, you’re creating 15 more who will come after you.” Leslie did not calculate how many enemies are created by killing women and children.

Make no mistake: war is big business. It generates profits not only for war industries, but also for corporations benefiting from regime changes that we force upon other societies. War is indeed about making the world peaceful and secure — not for us, but for the corporations that — while plundering natural and human resources — are running roughshod over the world.

read the article

Pope Ratzinger and the Bushes: Two Peas In a Pedophile Protection Pod

A Newsday article from 2005 details the dirtbags, including Neil Bush, who served on Pope Ratzinger’s ‘ecumenical foundation’ — all protected from on ‘High.’ Also in 2005, Pope Rat asked US President [sic] George W. Bush to ‘declare the pontiff immune from liability’ in a lawsuit that accused him of conspiring to cover up the molestation of three boys by a seminarian in Texas. In September 2005, the U.S. asserted that the lawsuit should be dismissed, as the Pope enjoys immunity as head of state of the Holy See . read article

Pope’s Easter Message: continuation of the Catholic Church’s unwritten policy to lie about the organized sexual exploitation of children.

 

Pope’s message? I saw it for what it is- another predictable Catholic distraction to avoid accountability and a continuation of the Catholic Church’s unwritten policy to lie about  the organized sexual exploitation of children.

The Vatican Heirachy, and this so called “Nazi Pope” is head of the modern day papal inquisition, The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But the fact that the Pope personally shielded child raping priests in his home archbishopric of Munich, and is the author of the Vatican’s standing policy requiring that Bishops conceal evidence of sexual abuse by priests, has made him personally complicit in obstructing justice and engaging in a clear crime against humanity: the organized sexual exploitation of children. He was responsible for creating and enforcing…crimen sollicitationis’ (crime of solicitation) where Catholic

Priests invoked one of the most powerful tenets of the Catholic faith – To bar the vctim (innocent children) or his abuser from ever speaking out. This oath of silence was part of the secret church decree called ‘crimen sollicitationis’ (crime of solicitation). The directive was written in 1962, and Catholic bishops worldwide are ordered to keep it locked away in the church safe. It instructs them on how to deal with priests who solicit sex from the confessional. But it also deals with any obscene external acts with youths of either sex. Child abuse. Originally written in Latin it imposes the strictest oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest dealing with the allegation, and any witnesses. Breaking that oath means instant banishment from the Catholic Church – excommunication.

 The procedure was intended as a blueprint for cover-ups. The man in charge of enforcing it for 20 years was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Pope . In 2001 he created the successor to the decree. In spirit it was the same, overarching secrecy with a threat of excommunication. He sent a copy to every Bishop in the world. But now he ordered that the Vatican must have what it calls ‘exclusive competence’. In other words, all child abuse allegations must go exclusively to ROME. It is all controlled by the Vatican, and at the top of the Vatican is the Pope.  So Joseph Ratzinger was at the middle of this for most of the years the Crimen was enforced and hee created the successor to the Crimen

The Vatican approved a legion of Enforcers of Crimen Sollicitationis. When a priest was accused of sexual abuse, the abuser was slipped quietly away, and an appointed enforcer of Crimen Sollicitationis was moved in. That is really the ultimate definition of success for the church, when it comes to a case of sexual abuse of a minor, that no one ever finds out about it, that it gets shut down, that it’s kept quiet. If a pay off is needed, or if some kind of a settlement is needed, it’s done. There is no policy to help the victims, there is absolutely no policy to help those who are trying to help the victims, and there is an unwritten policy to lie about the existence of the problem. Then, as far as the perpetrators, the priests, when they’re discovered, the systemic response has been not to investigate and prosecute, but to move them. To move them from one place to another in a secret way, and not reveal why they’re being moved. There is total disregard for the victims, total disregard for the fact that you are going have a whole new crop of victims in the next place -sending priests, who they know have abused children in the past, to new parishes and new communities, and more abuse happens. This is all over the world, the same pattern and practice exists no matter what country you go to.

The  Catholic Church is guilty of engaging in a clear crime against humanity: the organized sexual exploitation of children. Murder, torture and child rape are not new to the Roman Catholic church, nor will these obscenities stop, since the church is above the law and accountable only to itself. And yet, for all its worldly power, the Vatican is tottering under the impact of  the recent media coverage not only of the proof of Vatican complicity but obvious attemps to lie and avoid accountability.

Jesus had a simple remedy for child abusers, if you believe the Bible:

“It would be better if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, rather than that he should harm one of these little ones.” (Luke 17:2)

The solution to all this evil:

1. Tax the churches: Revoke the charitable tax-exempt status of the Roman Catholic Church, nationalize all church property and land, audit and assess all payments owed by these churches to the people and indigenous nations since their inception, and return all lands and effects stolen by these churches from native people.

2. Revoke the legal charters and legislation governing the Roman Catholic, and thereby end their official, legal status.

3. End diplomatic recognition of the Vatican and expel the Papal Nuncio.

4. Separate church and state: no funding for religious schools or churches, no religious oaths or functions connected to the state, no state protection for clergy or churches (ie, revoke sections 176 and 296 of the Criminal Code of Canada).

5. Establish a public, international inquiry into crimes of these churches against all innocent childrenof all ethnic backgroundsespecially native people, including in Indian residential schools, with the power to subpoena, try and jail offenders.

6. Refuse to Cooperate with Genocidal Institutions -Boycott the Catholic Church

7. Refuse to attend their services or rent their facilities, or if you do attend, withhold from them all donations, tithings and bequests. 

8.Hold protests, memorial vigils and civil disobedience actions at these churches

 9.Publicly identify and perform citizens’ arrests on those priests responsible for these crimes 

Thank you Kevin Annett For your research on the Genocidal practices of  the Catholic Church and excuse me for taking liberties with your information.

Catholic Sex Abuse Scandal: no child left behind or no child’s behind left?

The cowardly, patriarchal Catholic leadership maintained a massive cover up of child sex abuse in epidemic proportions for decades while shuttling pedophile priests from church to church. Allegations of church-based sex abuse are increasing across Europe, including in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland. New abuse allegations have surfaced in Brazil, home of the world’s largest Catholic population.

Serious accusations have rocked the Irish church since the U.S. scandal broke. But it was not until the middle of last year — when a government report detailing Irish clergy child abuse was released — that the extent of the problem was entirely clear. The report alleged 2,000 cases of abuse over a 60-year period. A second government investigation, released by the Irish government in November 2009, fanned the flames by revealing the collusion of Irish police in systematically covering up cases of child abuse by Dublin clergymen. For Ireland, this is only the latest part of the clergy abuse saga — the Associated Press reports that since the mid-1990s there have been nearly 15,000 complaints leveled against the church — with legal claims topping $1.5 billion.

THE NETHERLANDS

The scandal: In late February, a Dutch radio station and newspaper  broke the story  of alleged abuse in Dutch Catholic boarding schools in the 1960s and 70s. The last Catholic boarding school may have closed in 1981, but victims have not forgotten their traumatic experiences. Once again, the trickle of a few lone voices surged into a torrent — nearly  200 allegations  surfaced in the weeks following the radio program. Victims told stories of priests who shamed them into thinking they had done something wrong, which accounted for their silence. Even when accusations were leveled, priests tended to brush off evidence.

AUSTRIA

The scandal: In early March, the head of a Benedictine monastery in Salzburg confessed to sexually abusing a child more than 40 years ago, before he was ordained. His offer to resign was immediately accepted. A few days later it was reported that another priest in southeast Austria was suspected  of having abused approximately 20 children in his parish. Anonymous accusations of abuse at a boarding school at Mehrerau Abbey  have also been confirmed and allegations  of abuse within the world-famous Vienna Boys’ Choir have also surfaced.

GERMANY

The scandal: The latest and most salient crisis is now taking place in Germany, where allegations of abuse have surfaced this year for the first time. At least 300 cases of abuse have emerged, and elite Jesuit boarding schools across the country have been accused of mistreating pupils. Eighteen of the 27German archdioceses are now being investigated for child abuse while the German Justice Ministry says that Vatican secrecy has hamperedinvestigations for the past decade.

Such explosive accusations are a direct attack on Pope Benedict himself, who has been criticized for sending a confidential letter  in 2001 to every Roman Catholic bishop, advising them to keep allegations of sexual abuse secret for at least 10 years. The letter went on to say that investigations into abuses would be done internally. The German cases have been particularly dangerous for the pope, who was the bishop of Munich from 1977 to 1981. Already he has been accused of allowing a priest who was a known molester to continue serving. Even the pope’s older brother, Father Georg Ratzinger, has been accused of allowing abuses to occur at a school choir he directed from 1964 to 1994.

Revelations of abuse in Germany, particularly in the Munich archdiocese while Benedict was the archbishop, have seemingly put a lid on the argument by some in the Roman Catholic Church that sexually abusive priests were an American aberration, the result of lax morals and overblown news coverage in the United States.

They also have brought the crisis to Benedict’s doorstep, with the news that, as archbishop of Munich, he approved the transfer of an abusive priest from another jurisdiction, and that later, as the church’s top doctrinal official, he was in a position to know about a Wisconsin case in which the church failed to defrock a child-molesting priest. The New York Times reported that Benedict, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had been copied on a memo notifying him that Father Peter Hullermann was being reassigned to pastoral work even as Hullermann was undergoing therapy for pedophilia. Hullermann was later convicted of molesting boys. 

An earlier New York Times article, which said Ratzinger, as the church’s top doctrinal official in the 1990s, had failed to act against the Wisconsin priest, who was believed to have abused as many as 200 deaf boys from the 1950s to the 1970s

“The focus now is on Benedict,” or Ratzinger as he was previously known-” A  famous Catholic protege of  the Hitler-Youth or the Nazi Pope as he is often called”   worked fist in glove with the Nazis. This decrepit old  pedophile supporter,  revered by pious catholics as God’s earthly spokespreson,  has both lied & denied responsibility for the world wide massive cover up of child sex abuse by Catholic heirachy(himself) and clerics. While there is enough evidence to convict the ailing necromancer it seems unlikely that their is enough international will present to really challenge the Catholic state whose ambassadors sit in powerful positions in governments around the globe.

Sex Crimes and the Vatican is a documentary about a former Catholic priest at the centre of Ireland’s biggest child abuse enquiry. The scandal exposed details of a secret Vatican decree- No mistake, but part of a secret church directive which sheltered the perpetrators, and silenced the victims of abuse . . The church knew Father Fortune was a paedophile, but failed to inform the police. Instead it hid him from the authorities/ moved him from Parish to Parish. He was finally exposed, and killed himself on the eve of his criminal trial. Along with the BBC, Colm began investigating who’d been responsible for helping him evade detection. It turned out to be the most senior church figure in the diocese, the Bishop of Ferns Doctor Brendan Comiskey. During this documentary the Bishop was confronted on BBC Television and within weeks of his denial of any involvement Bishop Comiskey was summoned to Rome and resigned as bishop.

a government inquiry called the Ferns report followed and when published exposed a cover up involving more than just one priest.

The Ferns report makes disturbing reading. It details allegations of the rape and abuse of over 100 girls and boys, made against 26 priests from this small, rural diocese. It says that there was a culture of secrecy, and a fear of scandal, that led Bishops to place the interests of the Catholic church ahead of the safety of children. The report was the first to link the churches behaviour to a secret Vatican decree for dealing with paedophile priests.

Instead of going to the authorities, after the victim sought another priest to report the abuse to – the priests invoked one of the most powerful tenets of the Catholic faith – To bar the vctim (innocent children) or his abuser from ever speaking out. This oath of silence was part of the secret church decree called ‘crimen sollicitationis’ (crime of solicitation). The directive was written in 1962, and Catholic bishops worldwide are ordered to keep it locked away in the church safe. It instructs them on how to deal with priests who solicit sex from the confessional. But it also deals with any obscene external acts with youths of either sex. Child abuse. Originally written in Latin it imposes the strictest oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest dealing with the allegation, and any witnesses. Breaking that oath means instant banishment from the Catholic Church – excommunication.

 The procedure was intended to protect a priests reputation until the church had investigated. But in practice it offered a blueprint for cover-ups. The man in charge of enforcing it for 20 years was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man made Pope last year. In 2001 he created the successor to the decree. In spirit it was the same, overarching secrecy with a threat of excommunication. He sent a copy to every Bishop in the world. But now he ordered that the Vatican must have what it calls ‘exclusive competence’. In other words, all child abuse allegations must go exclusively to ROME. It’s all controlled by the Vatican, and at the top of the Vatican is the Pope. So Joseph Ratzinger was at the middle of this for most of the years the crimen was enforced. He created the successor to crimen, and now he’s the Pope. This all says that the policy and the systematic approach has not changed.

At the same time as the scandals were erupting in Ireland in 2002, hundreds of cases were emerging here in the United States. A US report tells us that almost four and a half thousand US priests have been accused of raping or sexually abusing children.

 Its epicentre was Boston. The same stories repeated time and again. The church quietly shifting accused priests from parish to parish. Allegations of a systematic cover-up.  Patrick Wall, a former Benedictine monk who became the Vatican approved enforcer of crimen sollicitationis in his Minnesota diocese.He

was part of the system that was getting chewed up and being used deceptively, and it was a real dark night of the soul. Everything that he had trained for, you know, well over a decade to do, he found out that he wasn’t working for a holy institution but an institution that was wholly concentrated on protecting itself

 When a priest was accused of sexual abuse, the abuser was slipped quietly away, and Father Patrick was moved in.

Cos most of the cases never saw the light of the day, hence they were successful. That is really the ultimate definition of success for the church, when it comes to a case of sexual abuse of a minor, that no one ever finds out about it, that it gets shut down, that it’s kept quiet. If a pay off is needed, or if some kind of a settlement is needed, it’s done. He had a $7 million budget in 1996 to do such things. And.. but the thing that we had to have was a confidentiality order where it absolutely had to be agreed that everything was quiet. And you work with the victims as best you can, but the ultimate desire is to maintain stability, peace and calm, and the biggest thing you have to do is absolutely shut down the scandal.

 Disillusioned, Father Patrick left the priesthood and joined lawyers acting for victims. There’s no policy to help the victims, there’s absolutely no policy to help those who are trying to help the victims, and there’s an unwritten policy to lie about the existence of the problem. Then, as far as the perpetrators, the priests, when they’re discovered, the systemic response has been not to investigate and prosecute, but to move them. To move them from one place to another in a secret way, and not reveal why they’re being moved. So there’s total disregard for the victims, total disregard for the fact that you’re gonna have a whole new crop of victims in the next place. Now this is just… this is not in the United States where this is happening. This is all over the world. You see the same pattern and practice no matter what country you go to.

 We may be thousands of miles away from Rome, but this place is directly linked to the Vatican. What gets me is it’s the same story every time and every place. Bishops appoint priests, who they know have abused children in the past, to new parishes and new communities, and more abuse happens. 

The Catholic church has 50 million children within its world-wide congregation.

The Vatican has no child protection policy. The only policy they have is to protect the perpetrators,.. to protect the Vatican, to cover this up, to keep it as deeply buried in secrecy as possible, and to prevent as much damage to the institution as possible. So it’s damage control.

Ratzinger’s instruction to send all allegations of child abuse to the Vatican is proving frustrating for police and social workers trying to catch and jail priests

RICK ROMLEY
Former Phoenix District Attorney
I will tell you that the secrecy, the… I mean the obstruction that I saw during my investigation was unparalleled in my entire career as a DA here in Phoenix Arizona. It was so difficult to obtain any information from the church at all. In fact we knew of certain meetings that had taken place, and yet no documentation was ever produced to be able to, you know, show that that meeting had even occurred. The Vatican’s official line is that it’s sex crime code is purely for internal use, and not intended to hinder civil investigations.

You know, when we started looking at it I mean it was really interesting. I mean we came across, in the canons for the church, that there are supposed to be secret archives to where this type of material is to provided and not given to civil authorities no matter what the circumstances. We had information that there is an instruction from the Nuncio, who is Ambassador status, to shift all this, you know, incriminating type of information to him because under our.. under the law we could not subpoena that material because he would have protected status as an Ambassador from the Vatican. I think that that’s really what the story is. Is that the church.. the church’s failure to acknowledge such a serious problem. But more than that, it is not a passiveness. It is a.. it was an openly obstructive way of not allowing civil authorities to try to stop the abuse within the church. I mean they fought us every step of the way.suspected of abuse.

 The Vatican, the moral compass of the Catholic church, may well be holding evidence of other child abusing priests from around the world. But instead of cooperation and transparency, many feel the church’s directives create obstruction and cover up in practice. There’s one man who has the power to change that.

 Ratzinger, who now is Pope, could tomorrow get up and say ‘here’s the policy for throughout the church. Full disclosure to the civil authorities. Absolute isolation and dismissal of any convicted cleric. Complete openness and transparency. Complete openness of all financial situations. Stop all barriers to the legal process. Completely cooperate with the civil authorities everywhere.’ He could do that. 

Watch the full documentary or read the transcript

•    

Web Exclusive: US-China: Provoking the Creditor, Hugging the Holy man

On the one hand, a United States military driven empire, which focuses on conquering Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, backs the ambitions of a militarist Israel, seeks marginal client states in Latin America and militarizes Pakistan, Colombia and Mexico.

On the other hand, China deepens its economic ties with dynamic Asian countries; increases its oil links with Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Gulf States, Venezuela, Russia and Angola; displaces the US as the leading trading partner of Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile; and increases its trade and investment links with Southern Africa in minerals and related infrastructure projects. The contrast is striking.

China’s global economic expansion is confronted by US military encirclement, diplomatic provocations and a massive anti-Chinese propaganda campaign designed to deflect US public attention from the extreme imbalances in its domestic economy. Instead of looking inward to understand why the US is declining, the Obama regime encourages the public to blame China’s supposedly unfair trade policies, its ‘restrictive’ investment policies, its manipulated currency rate and its tough response to secessionist movements funded by the US.

In the end the US will not resolve its budget deficits and trade imbalances, not to mention its endless imperial wars, by pandering to self-described divine rulers, like the Dali Lama, and provoking a dynamic economic power such as China. Nor can Washington escape its profound economic imbalances by catering to Wall Street speculators and ignoring the decline of America’s productive forces. Drones, military surges and surrogate puppet armies engaged in endless wars are no match for the surging investments, robust developing markets and joint ventures linking China with the dynamic emerging economies of the world. read article

Obama Inc. Triumphs: Kucinich Folds His Hand on Health Care

Kucinich had been given an offer that he felt he could not refuse.The Obama administration has finished the job it started in January, 2009: crush the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to clear the way for corporate governance. Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s was the last Left opposition to Obama’s toxic health care legislation. “Once Obama’s private insurers’ bailout bill is in place, it will be almost impossible to dismantle in the foreseeable future.”

“There is nothing for a true progressive to do in Obama’s Democratic Party.”

The last Left Democrat in the U.S. Congress has folded his hand [2], crushed by Wall Street’s servant in the White House, Barack Obama.

Until Wednesday morning, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich was the only opposition from the Left still holding out against Obama’s private insurance subsidy bill – a massive redistribution of wealth [3] to Wall Street masquerading as health care reform. The bill was long ago stripped of any fig leaf of a “public option,” and now awaits passage in its pure form – the formal establishment of a private health care system in which the people are forced to finance the profits of some of the biggest players in the Wall Street casino, the insurance corporations. Far from a step forward towards a society in which health care is every person’s right, the Obama bill is a huge step backward in the opposite the direction from which the entire industrialized world has been traveling. Obama’s so-called reform is in fact, a defeat of the dream of universal health care.     read

U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan are committing atrocities, lying, and getting away with it

Jerome Starkey recently reported for The Times of London about a night raid on Feb. 12 in which U.S. and Afghan gunmen opened fire on two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials — an atrocity which NATO’s Afghanistan headquarters then tried to cover up. Now, in a blistering indictment of both NATO and his own profession, Starkey writes for Nieman Watchdog that the international forces led by U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal are rarely called to account because most reporters are too dependent on access, security and the ’embed culture’ to venture out and see what’s happening for themselves. read

Helen Thomas on her one question for Obama

DC’s most experienced journalist says Obama lost credibility when he dodged question on Israeli nukes. Read on

Covering up American War Crimes, From Baghdad to New York

Posted by Charles Glass on March 22, 2010

“The US government does not want it known that it was using chemicals on human beings in a country whose leader it overthrew ostensibly because he retained the capacity to do the same thing.”

…. remember when the US denied Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons on its Kurdish citizens. In those days, Saddam was an American ally. When freelance journalist Gwynne Roberts brought back the soil samples from Hallabja that proved Saddam has gassed the Kurds, the US blamed the Iranians. That assessment became inoperative when condemning Saddam was politically useful. Now that the US has been caught using chemicals in the same country that the monster Saddam did, it admits using them on “insurgents” but not on civilians. It is hard in a city to blast chemicals at the people with guns and miss those who don’t have any. No matter. The US and Iraqi governments are blocking an investigation that would prove one way or another that White Phosphorous did any harm to Iraqi mothers and their children. It’s unlikely they’ll receive a cent for the next fifty years, if ever. But why the hell isn’t this a big story?  Read Article

Have a Nice World War, Folks

By John Pilger

Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of “defence” Robert Gates complains that “the general [European] public and the political class” are so opposed to war they are an “impediment” to peace. Remember this is the month of the March Hare.

According to an American general, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a “war of perception”. Thus, the recent “liberation of the city of Marja” from the Taliban’s “command and control structure” was pure Hollywood. Marja is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and parades of flag-wrapped coffins through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical propaganda exercise.

“War is fun”, the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is revealed as having no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one “who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to values” (Hugo Young, the Guardian) compared with today’s public reckoning of a liar and war criminal.

Western war-states such as the US and Britain are not threatened by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested Israel’s assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police “kettled” (corralled) thousands, first-offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry custodial sentences. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime.

Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, like Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of famous writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the “market” or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them have spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq’s clean water system and lead to “increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease”. So the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, noted Unicef, of the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently has no name.

Norman Mailer once said he believed the United States, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a “pre-fascist era”. Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. “Fascism” is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is “more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent.”

This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state with the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced perhaps, but the results are both unambiguous and familiar. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior United Nations officials in Iraq during the American and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.

In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud “our boys”. The candidates are almost identical political mummies shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite loves America because America allows it to barrack and bomb the natives and call itself a “partner”. We should interrupt their fun.

http://www.johnpilger.com

Honduras 100 Days of Resistance Pt1-Video

Fault Lines’ Avi Lewis reports on polarization and power in the Americas- watch video

Honduras 100 Days of Resistance- Part 2- Video

Fault Lines’ Avi Lewis reports on polarization and power in the Americas- Watch Video

UK/USA made use of Uzbek torture- Video

Former Brit ambsdr Craig Murray says UK and USA sent prisoners to Uzbek to be tortured-watch video

D’Escoto: “The UN has failed”

Outgoing General Assembly prez says most powerful are to blame for UN failure to address war and poverty  watch The Real News

D’Escoto Pt.2: On Palestine and the UN

Outgoing General Assembly prez tells niece, after UN inaction on Gaza, “I feel like I’m in a cesspool” wach The Real News

D’Escoto on the US in the age of Obama

Americans need the courage to form a “new mindset”  watch The Real News

Media Distortion: Killing Innocent Afghan Civilians to “Save Our Troops”

 the U.S/NATO presence in Afghanistan is not about peace-keeping but rather about a foreign occupation; and those fighting such occupation are neither terrorists nor insurgents but rather the resistance (though maybe not our preferred type of resistance). A strange thing happened during the last twenty years: any force opposing U.S. geo-political designs around the world is now labeled terrorist. As Mike Davis so tellingly pointed out, the car bomb or suicide-bomber is the air force of the poor.[4] The Axis armies of mid-twentieth century were never labeled terrorist. You see this war is as much about words, meanings, images and information as it is about IED’s and GPS-guided bombs.

Those who write of Obama that “when it comes to international affairs, he will be a huge improvement on Bush” demonstrate the same willful naivety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton – and Tony Blair…Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a black man is irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of 500lb bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses…(Bush press spokesman) Scott McClellan has called “complicit enablers” – journalists who serve as little more than official amplifiers. Having declared Afghanistan a “good war”, the complicit enablers are now anointing Barack Obama as he tours the bloodfests in Afghanistan and Iraq. What they never say is that Obama is a bomber. [17]  read on

Obama Sets Up Killer Drone Raid over Pakistan Despite Civilian Deaths

By Sherwood Ross

Global Research, October 20, 2009

Since taking office, President Obama has sanctioned at least 41 Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed between 326 and 538 people, many of them, critics say, “innocent bystanders, including children,” according to reliable reports. The drone is a remotely controlled, unmanned aircraft. “Even if a precise account is elusive,” writes Jane Mayer in the October 26th The New Yorker, “the outlines are clear: the C.I.A. has joined the Pakistani intelligence service in an aggressive campaign to eradicate local and foreign militants, who have taken refuge in some of the most inaccessible parts of the country.” Based on a study just completed by the non-profit, New America Foundation of Washington, D.C., “the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President,” Mayer reports. In fact, the first two strikes took place on Jan. 23, the President’s third day in office and the second of these hit the wrong house, that of a pro-government tribal leader that killed his entire family, including three children, one just five years of age. At any time, the C.I.A. apparently has “multiple drones flying over Pakistan, scouting for targets,” the magazine reports. So many Predators and its more heavily armed companion, the Reaper, are being purchased that defense manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, of Poway, Calif., can hardly make them fast enough. The Air Force is said to possess 200. Mayer writes, “the embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force.” Today, Mayer writes, “there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official U.S. policy.” And according to Gary Solis, who teaches at Georgetown University’s Law Center, nobody in the government calls it assassination. “Not only would we have expressed abhorrence of such a policy a few years ago; we did,” Solis is quoted as saying. David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency warfare authority who co-authored a study for the Center for New American Security, of Washington, D.C., has suggested the drone attacks have backfired. As he told The New Yorker, “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.” And because of the C.I.A. program’s secrecy, Mayer writes, “there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war.” The New Yorker further reports the Obama Administration has also expanded the sphere of authorized drone assaults in Afghanistan. An August Senate Foreign Relations Committee report said the Pentagon’s list of approved terrorist targets held 367 names and included some 50 Afghan drug lords “who are suspected of giving money to help finance the Taliban,” Mayer reports. She quotes the Senate report as stating, “There is no evidence that any significant amount of the drug proceeds goes to Al Qaeda.” It is the military’s version of the drone assaults that operates in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the C.I.A.’s drones hunt terror suspects in countries where U.S. troops are not based and is “aimed at terror suspects around the world,” Mayer writes. The C.I.A. effort was launched by Obama’s predecessor, and a former aide to President George W. Bush says Obama has left nearly all the key personnel in place. Running the C.I.A. program is a team of operators that handle Predator flights off runways in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once aloft, the Predators are passed over to controllers at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., who maneuver joysticks and monitor events from a live video feed from the drone’s camera. The magazine article reports the government plans to commission “hundreds more” of the drones, including “new generations of tiny ‘nano’ drones, which can fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.” Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based writer who formerly worked for the Chicago Daily News and other major dailies. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article. To become a Member of Global Research The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author’s copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com  www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner. For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com © Copyright Sherwood Ross, Global Research, 2009  The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=15745

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Obama and the Nobel Prize: When War becomes Peace, When the Lie becomes the Truth

We are the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US in partnership with NATO and Israel has launched a global military adventure which, in a very real sense, threatens the future of humanity.

At this critical juncture in our history, the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President and Commander in Chief Barack Obama constitutes an unmitigated tool of propaganda and distortion, which unreservedly supports the Pentagon’s “Long War”:  “A War without Borders” in the true sense of the word, characterised by the Worlwide deployment of US military might. 

Apart from the diplomatic rhetoric, there has been no meaningful reversal of US foreign policy in relation to the George W. Bush presidency, which might have remotely justified the granting of the Nobel Prize to Obama. In fact quite the opposite. The Obama military agenda has sought to extend the war into new frontiers. With a new team of military and foreign policy advisers, the Obama war agenda has been far more effective in fostering military escalation than that formulated by the NeoCons.

Since the very outset of the Obama presidency, this global military project has become increasingly pervasive, with the reinforcement of US military presence in all major regions of the World  and the development of new advanced weapons systems on an unprecdented scale. 

Granting the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama provides legitimacy to the illegal practices of war, to the military occupation of foreign lands, to the relentless killings of civilians in the name of “democracy”. read article

Ellsberg: From Vietnam to Afghanistan-Video

NO VICTORY LIES AHEAD IN AFGHANISTAN, American troops no less than hundreds of thousands will achieve any kind of success!

watch The Real News

US-NATO Using Military Might To Control World Energy Resources

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s 2009 Year Book documented that international military expenditures for 2008 reached $1.464 trillion. The denomination in dollars is germane as the United States accounted for 41.5 percent of the world total.

Earlier this month the Congressional Research Service in the U.S. reported that American weapons sales abroad reached $37.8 billion, or 68.4 percent of all global arms transactions. The next largest weapons supplier was Italy at $3.7 billion, less than one-tenth the U.S. amount. Russia was third at $3.5 billion. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, however, asserted that Germany had superseded Britain and France and become the world’s third largest weapons exporter. 

Western nations in general and the U.S. overwhelmingly among them dominate the global arms market.

21st century weaponry is daily more technologically advanced, more linked with computer networks and satellite communications, and progressively approaching a blurring of conventional and strategic, terrestrial and space-based capabilities.

And in the U.S. and allied nations the notion of so-called preemptive warfare has advanced precariously to include cyber and satellite attacks that can cripple a targeted nation’s communications, control and air defense centers, thus rendering it both helpless and toothless: Not able to fend off attacks and unable to retaliate against or even forestall them with a secure deterrent force.

The vast preponderance of American and other NATO states’ arms are sold to nations neither in North America and Europe nor on their peripheries.

They are sold to nations like Saudi Arabia, India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Egypt, Taiwan, South Korea, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Kuwait, the Philippines, Morocco and other Western client states and military outposts far removed from the much-vaunted Euro-Atlantic space.

The weapons along with the military technicians, trainers and advisers that inevitably accompany them are spread throughout nations in geostrategically vital areas of the world, near large oil and natural gas reserves and astride key shipping lanes and choke points. In many instances Western-fueled arms buildups are accelerating in nations bordering Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela. Geopolitics in its most transparent, cynical and brutal manifestation   read more

Robert Fisk’s World: Everyone seems to be agreeing with Bin Laden these days

Obama and Osama are at last participating in the same narrative. For the US president’s critics – indeed, for many critics of the West’s military occupation of Afghanistan – are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama’s (and their) greatest enemy.

 

There is a growing suspicion in America that Obama has been socked into the heart of the Afghan darkness by ex-Bushie Robert Gates – once more the Secretary of Defence – and by journalist-adored General David Petraeus whose military “surges” appear to be as successful as the Battle of the Bulge in stemming the insurgent tide in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq.

No wonder Osama bin Laden decided to address “the American people” this week. “You are waging a hopeless and losing war,” he said in his 9/11 eighth anniversary audiotape. “The time has come to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby.” There was no more talk of Obama as a “house Negro” although it was his “weakness”, bin Laden contended, that prevented him from closing down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In any event, Muslim fighters wold wear down the US-led coalition in Afghanistan “like we exhausted the Soviet Union for 10 years until it collapsed”. Funny, that. It’s exactly what bin Laden told me personally in Afghanistan – four years before 9/11 and the start of America’s 2001 adventure south of the Amu Darya river... read on

There’s Virtually Zero Percent Chance of There Ever Being a Real Afghan Army — So What’s the Pentagon Talking About?

In Washington, calls are increasing, especially among anxious Democrats, for the president to commit to training ever more Afghan troops and police rather thansending in more American troops. Huge numbers for imagined future Afghan army and police forces are now bandied about in Congress and the media — though no one stops to wonder what Afghanistan, the fourth poorest country on the planet, might actually be like with a combined security force of 400,000. Not a “democracy,” you can put your top dollar on that. And with a gross national product of only $23 billion(a striking percentage of which comes from the drug trade) and an annual government budget of only about $600 million, it’s not one that could faintly maintain such a force either. Put bluntly, if U.S. officials were capable of building such a force, a version of Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule for Iraq would kick in and we, the American taxpayers, would own it for all eternity.

[…] On the other hand, not to worry. As Ann Jones makes clear in her revelatory piece below, the odds on such an Afghan force ever being built must be passingly close to nil. Such a program is no more likely to be successful than the massively expensive Afghan aid and reconstruction program has been.

The big Afghanistan debate in Washington is not over whether more troops are needed, but just who they should be: Americans or Afghans — Us or Them. Having just spent time in Afghanistan seeing how things stand, I wouldn’t bet on Them.

Frankly, I wouldn’t bet on Us either. In eight years, American troops have worn out their welcome. Their very presence now incites opposition, but that’s another story. It’s Them — the Afghans — I want to talk about.

Afghans are Afghans. They have their own history, their own culture, their own habitual ways of thinking and behaving, all complicated by a modern experience of decades of war, displacement, abject poverty, and incessant meddling by foreign governments near and far — of which the United States has been the most powerful and persistent. Afghans do not think or act like Americans. Yet Americans in power refuse to grasp that inconvenient point.  read on

CIA Torturers Running Scared

by Ray McGovern

For the CIA supervisors and operatives responsible for torture, the chickens are coming home to roost; that is, if President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder mean it when they say no one is above the law – and if they don’t fall victim to brazen intimidation.

Unable to prevent Holder from starting an investigation of torture and other war crimes that implicate CIA officials past and present, those same CIA officials, together with what those in the intelligence trade call “agents of influence” in the media, are pulling out all the stops to quash the Justice Department’s preliminary investigation.

In what should be seen as a bizarre twist, seven CIA directors — including three who are themselves implicated in planning and conducting torture and assassination — have asked the President to call off Holder.

Please, tell me how could the whole thing be more transparent    read on

Troops ransack Afghan hospital: Swedish charity

Global Research, September 8, 2009

AFP – 2009-09-07

A Swedish charity has claimed that foreign troops entered its hospital in Afghanistan, smashed doors and tied up staff and patients’ relatives, violating agreements between aid workers and the military. The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan (SCA) said troops entered the hospital in Shaniz, in Wardak province south of Kabul, late on Wednesday “without giving any reason or justification”. “They searched all rooms, even bathrooms, male and female wards,” the SCA said in a statement on its website, quoting country director Anders Fange. “Rooms that were locked were forcefully entered and the doors of the malnutrition ward and the ultrasound ward were broken by force to gain entry. “Upon entering the hospital they tied up four employees and two family members of patients at the hospital. SCA staff as well as patients, even those in beds, were forced out of rooms (and) wards throughout the search,” it said. Describing the incident as unacceptable, the SCA said the military action was “a clear violation of globally recognized humanitarian principles about the sanctity of health facilities and staff in areas of conflict”. It said it also breached civil-military agreements between non-governmental organisations and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which along with the US has more than 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan. The incident lasted two hours, after which the troops “issued verbal orders” that any patient who might be an insurgent must be reported to coalition forces. An ISAF spokesman said an investigation had been launched but no information would be available until it was completed. The SCA has been operating in Afghanistan since the 1980s, working in 16 provinces mostly in the east, in education, health and disability. News of the incident comes after a NATO air strike in the northern province of Kunduz early on Friday that officials have said killed or injured 90 people. That incident reignited anger among ordinary Afghans about what can be heavy-handed tactics by foreign troops fighting a resurgent Taliban militia that have refined their tactics and are killing record numbers of international soliders.

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Escalation of the Afghan War? US-NATO Target Russia, China and Iran

The United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are expanding their nearly eight-year war in Afghanistan both in scope, with deadly drone missile attacks inside Pakistan, and in intensity, with daily reports of more NATO states’ troops slated for deployment and calls for as many as 45,000 American troops in addition to the 68,000 already in the nation and scheduled to be there shortly.

The NATO bombing in Kunduz province on September 4 may well prove to be the worst atrocity yet perpetrated by Western forces against Afghan civilians and close to 20 U.S and NATO troops have been killed so far this month, with over 300 dead this year compared to 294 for all of 2008.

The scale and gravity of the conflict can no longer be denied even by Western media and government officials and the war in South Asia occupies the center stage of world attention for the first time in almost eight years.

The various rationales used by Washington and Brussels to launch, to continue and to escalate the war – short-lived and successive, forgotten and reinvented, transparently insincere and frequently mutually exclusive – have been exposed as fraudulent and none of the identified objectives have been achieved or are likely ever to be so. Osama bin Laden and Omar Mullah have not been captured or killed. Taliban is stronger than at any time since their overthrow eight years ago last month, even – though the name Taliban seems to mean fairly much whatever the West intends it to at any given moment – gaining hitherto unimagined control over the country’s northern provinces.

Opium cultivation and exports, virtually non-existent at the time of the 2001 invasion, are now at record levels, with Afghanistan the world’s largest narcotics producer and exporter.

The Afghan-Pakistani border has not been secured and NATO supply convoys are regularly seized and set on fire on the Pakistani side. Pakistani military offensives have killed hundreds if not thousands on the other side of the border and have displaced over two million civilians in the Swat District and adjoining areas of the North-West Frontier Province.

Yet far from acknowledging that the war, America’s longest since the debacle in Vietnam and NATO’s first ground war and first conflict in Asia, has been a signal failure, U.S. and NATO leaders are clamoring for more troops in addition to the 100,000 already on the ground in Afghanistan and are preparing the public in the fifty nations contributing to that number for a war that will last decades. And still without the guarantee of a successful resolution.

But the West’s South Asian war is a fiasco only if judged by what Washington and Brussels have claimed their objectives were and are. Viewed from a broader geopolitical and strategic military perspective matters may be otherwise. read on

Enduring Freedom until 2050

By Pepe Escobar 

 […] The US and its NATO allies will do – and spend – whatever it takes to implant military bases on the doorstep of both Russia and China and – Allah only knows – get their Trans-Afghan Pakistan gas pipeline on track. 

From November 2001 to December 2008, the Bush administration burned $179 billion in Afghanistan, while NATO burned $102 billion. Former NATO head Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the West would keep troops in Central Asia for 25 years. He was corrected by the British army’s chief of general staff, General David Richards: it will be 40 years. Expect the “evil”, fit Taliban – immune to global warming – to be fighting Enduring Freedom by 2050. 

read article

Afghanistan by the numbers

By Tom Engelhardt 

[..] While Americans argue feverishly and angrily over what kind of money, if any, to put into health care, or decaying infrastructure, or other key places of need, until recently just about no one in the mainstream raised a peep about the fact that, for nearly eight years (not to say much of the last three decades), we’ve been pouring billions of dollars, American military know-how, and American lives into a black hole in Afghanistan that is, at least in significant part, of our own creation. 

Imagine for a moment, as you read this post, what might have  happened if Americans had decided to sink the same sort of money – US$228 billion and rising fast – the same “civilian surges”, the same planning, thought and effort (but not the same staggering ineffectiveness) into reclaiming New Orleans or Detroit, or into planning an American future here at home. Imagine, for a moment, when you read about the multi-millions going into further construction at Bagram Air Base, or to the mercenary company that provides “Lord of the Flies” hire-a-gun guards for American diplomats in massive super-embassies, or about the half-a-billion dollars sunk into a corrupt and fraudulent Afghan election, what a similar investment in our own country might have meant. 

Ask yourself: Wouldn’t the US have been safer and more secure if all the money, effort, and planning had gone towards “nation-building” in America? Or do you really think we’re safer now, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7%, an underemployment rate of 16.8%, and a record 25.5% teen unemployment rate, with soaring health-care costs, with vast infrastructural weaknesses and failures, and in debtup to our eyeballs, while tens of thousands of troops and massive infusions of cash are mustered ostensibly to fight a terrorist outfit that may number in the low hundreds or at most thousands, that, by allaccounts, isn’t now even based in Afghanistan, and that has shown itself perfectly capable of settling into broken states like Somalia or well functioning cities like Hamburg. READ ON

Fifty questions on 9/11 by Pepe Escobar

 

It’s September 11 all over again – eight years on. The George W Bush administration is out. The “global war on terror” is still on, renamed “overseas contingency operations” by the Barack Obama administration. Obama’s “new strategy” – a war escalation – is in play in AfPak. Osama bin Laden may be dead or not. “Al-Qaeda” remains a catch-all ghost entity. September 11 – the neo-cons’ “new Pearl Harbor” – remains the darkest jigsaw puzzle of the young 21st century.  It’s useless to expect US corporate media and the ruling elites’ political operatives to call for a true, in-depth investigation into the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Whitewash has been the norm. But even establishment highlight Dr Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski, a former national security advisor, hasThe following questions, some multi-part – and most totally ignored by the 9/11 Commission – are just the tip of the immense 9/11 iceberg:. Now read fifty questions

 

GMO Scandal: The Long Term Effects of Genetically Modified Food on Humans

Scientific Tests Must Be Approved by Industry First

By F. William Engdahl

Global Research, July 29, 2009

One of the great mysteries surrounding the spread of GMO plants around the world since the first commercial crops were released in the early 1990’s in the USA and Argentina has been the absence of independent scientific studies of possible long-term effects of a diet of GMO plants on humans or even rats. Now it has come to light the real reason. The GMO agribusiness companies like Monsanto, BASF, Pioneer, Syngenta and others prohibit independent research. 

 

An editorial in the respected American scientific monthly magazine, Scientific American, August 2009 reveals the shocking and alarming reality behind the proliferation of GMO products throughout the food chain of the planet since 1994. There are no independent scientific studies published in any reputed scientific journal in the world for one simple reason. It is impossible to independently verify that GMO crops such as Monsanto Roundup Ready Soybeans or MON8110 GMO maize perform as the company claims, or that, as the company also claims, that they have no harmful side effects because the GMO companies forbid such tests!

 

That’s right. As a precondition to buy seeds, either to plant for crops or to use in research study, Monsanto and the gene giant companies must first sign an End User Agreement with the company. For the past decade, the period when the greatest proliferation of GMO seeds in agriculture has taken place, Monsanto, Pioneer (DuPont) and Syngenta require anyone buying their GMO seeds to sign an agreement that explicitly forbids that the seeds be used for any independent research. Scientists are prohibited from testing a seed to explore under what conditions it flourishes or even fails. They cannot compare any characteristics of the GMO seed with any other GMO or non-GMO seeds from another company. Most alarming, they are prohibited from examining whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended side-effects either in the environment or in animals or humans.

 

The only research which is permitted to be published in reputable scientific peer-reviewed journals are studies which have been pre-approved by Monsanto and the other industry GMO firms.

 

The entire process by which GMO seeds have been approved in the United States, beginning with the proclamation by then President George H.W. Bush in 1992, on request of Monsanto, that no special Government tests of safety for GMO seeds would be conducted because they were deemed by the President to be “substantially equivalent” to non-GMO seeds, has been riddled with special interest corruption. Former attorneys for Monsanto were appointed responsible in EPA and FDA for rules governing GMO seeds as but one example and no Government tests of GMO seed safety to date have been carried out. All tests are provided to the US Government on GMO safety or performance by the companies themselves such as Monsanto. Little wonder that GMO sounds to positive and that Monsanto and others can falsely claim GMO is the “solution to world hunger.”

 

In the United States a group of twenty four leading university corn insect scientists have written to the US Government Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) demanding the EPA  force a change to the company censorship practice. It is as if Chevrolet or Tata Motors or Fiat tried to censor comparative crash tests of their cars in Consumer Reports or a comparable consumer publication because they did not like the test results. Only this deals with the human and animal food chain. The scientists rightly argue to EPA that food safety and environment protection “depend on making plant products available to regular scientific scrutiny.” We should think twice before we eat that next box of American breakfast cereal if the corn used is GMO .

F. William Engdahl is author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. He may be contacted via his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

Iran/China and the New Silk Road-Pepe Escobar revisits the New Great Game, Part 4

After 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, the Chinese leadership was more than ready to counteract the US advancement in Eurasia – and turn it on its head. In the second part of this report, Pepe Escobar analyzes what’s at stake at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and what really matters for emerging global power China and regional power Iran: the Asian Energy Security Grid and the re-emergence of the fabled Silk Road, now as a vehicle for energy security as well as trade…WATCH

Blum’s Anti-Empire Report: No change under Obama

If you catch the CIA with its hand in the cookie jar and the Agency admits the obvious — what your eyes can plainly see — that its hand is indeed in the cookie jar, it means one of two things: a) the CIA’s hand is in several other cookie jars at the same time which you don’t know about and they hope that by confessing to the one instance they can keep the others covered up; or b) its hand is not really in the cookie jar — it’s an illusion to throw you off the right scent — but they want you to believe it….. READ ON

LIST OF U.S. GOVERNMENT ASSASSINATION PLOTS POST WWII

The U.S. bombing of Iraq, June 26, 1993, in retaliation for an alleged Iraqi plot to assassinate former president George Bush, “was essential,” said President Clinton, “to send a message to those who engage in state-sponsored terrorism … and to affirm the expectation of civilized behavior among nations.” *

Following is a list of prominent foreign individuals whose assassination (or planning for same) the United States has been involved in since the end of the Second World War. The list does not include several assassinations in various parts of the world carried out by anti-Castro Cubans employed by the CIA and headquartered in the United States.

1949 – Kim Koo, Korean opposition leader

1950s – CIA/Neo-Nazi hit list of more than 200 political figures in West Germany 
to be “put out of the way” in the event of a Soviet invasion

1950s – Chou En-lai, Prime minister of China, several attempts on his life

1950s, 1962 – Sukarno, President of Indonesia

1951 – Kim Il Sung, Premier of North Korea

1953 – Mohammed Mossadegh, Prime Minister of Iran

1950s (mid) – Claro M. Recto, Philippines opposition leader

1955 – Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India

1957 – Gamal Abdul Nasser, President of Egypt

1959, 1963, 1969 – Norodom Sihanouk, leader of Cambodia

1960 – Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem, leader of Iraq

1950s-70s – José Figueres, President of Costa Rica, two attempts on his life

1961 – Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, leader of Haiti

1961 – Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Congo (Zaire)

1961 – Gen. Rafael Trujillo, leader of Dominican Republic

1963 – Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam

1960s-70s – Fidel Castro, President of Cuba, many attempts on his life

1960s – Raúl Castro, high official in government of Cuba

1965 – Francisco Caamaño, Dominican Republic opposition leader

1965-6 – Charles de Gaulle, President of France

1967 – Che Guevara, Cuban leader

1970 – Salvador Allende, President of Chile

1970 – Gen. Rene Schneider, Commander-in-Chief of Army, Chile

1970s, 1981 – General Omar Torrijos, leader of Panama

1972 – General Manuel Noriega, Chief of Panama Intelligence

1975 – Mobutu Sese Seko, President of Zaire

1976 – Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica

1980-1986 – Muammar Qaddafi, leader of Libya, several plots and attempts upon his life

1982 – Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran

1983 – Gen. Ahmed Dlimi, Moroccan Army commander

1983 – Miguel d’Escoto, Foreign Minister of Nicaragua

1984 – The nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate

1985 – Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanese Shiite leader (80 people killed in the attempt)

1991 – Saddam Hussein, leader of Iraq

1993 – Mohamed Farah Aideed, prominent clan leader of Somalia

1998, 2001-2 – Osama bin Laden, leading Islamic militant

1999 – Slobodan Milosevic, President of Yugoslavia

2002 – Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Afghan Islamic leader and warlord

2003 – Saddam Hussein and his two sons

* Washington Post, June 27, 1993

Taken from  Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II
by William Blum, email: bblum6@aol.com

USA attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected.

For those of you who collect lists about splendid US foreign policy post-World War II, here are a few more that, lacking anything better to do, I’ve put together: Attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected. (See Addenda below, 2)

Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to
overthrow, a foreign government since the Second World War.

When a range of years is given, the effort to overthrow was
not necessarily an active operation each year of the period.

* = successful ouster of a government
China 1949, 1950s
Albania 1949-53
East Germany 1950s
Iran 1953  *
Guatemala 1954  *
Costa Rica mid-1950s
Syria 1956-7
Egypt 1957
Indonesia 1957-8
British Guiana 1953-64  *
Iraq 1963  *
North Vietnam 1945-73
Cambodia 1955-70  *
Laos 1958-60  *
Ecuador 1960-63  *
Congo 1960  *
France 1965
Brazil 1962-64  *
Dominican Republic 1963  *
Cuba 1959 to present
Bolivia 1964  *
Indonesia 1965  *
Ghana 1966  *
Chile 1964-73  *
Greece 1967  *
Costa Rica 1970-71
Bolivia 1971  *
Australia 1973-75  *
Angola 1975, 1980s
Zaire 1975
Portugal 1974-76  *
Jamaica 1976-80  *
Seychelles 1979-81
Chad 1981-82  *
Grenada 1983  *
South Yemen 1982-84
Suriname 1982-84
Fiji 1987  *
Libya 1980s
Nicaragua 1981-90  *
Panama 1989  *
Bulgaria 1990  *
Albania 1991  *
Iraq 1991
Afghanistan 1980s  *
Somalia 1993
Yugoslavia 1999
Ecuador 2000  *
Afghanistan 2001  *
Venezuela 2002  *
Iraq 2003  *

Arctic: Canada Leads NATO Confrontation With Russia

Continuing the pattern by top Canadian federal officials over the past year of issuing blunt and bravado statements aimed at Russia over the Arctic, on August 1 Defence Minister Peter MacKay was paraphrased as “warn[ing] Russia that Canuck fighter jets will scramble to meet any unauthorized aircraft” as a mainstream Canadian news agency less than delicately phrased it, and thundered that “Canadian fighter jets would scramble to ‘meet’ any Russian aircraft ‘approaching’ Canada’s airspace.” [1]

MacKay said that “We’re going to protect our sovereign territory,” [2] though transparently the message was directed solely against Russia, which in no manner endangers Canada’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and not the United States, which does.

In another account of MacKay’s comments, this time indicating that he was speaking in response to a report that Russia plans to drop a small detachment of paratroopers almost a year from now in a part of the Arctic it has internationally recognized rights to, the defence chief was quoted as saying “We have scrambled F-18 jets in the past, and they’ll always be there to meet them.” [3] 

He appears to have grabbed what passes in Ottawa as a rhetorical flourish from the wrong context, however, that of “protecting Canadian airspace” from Russian long-range bombers flying in international airspace in a fashion that doesn’t violate either Canada’s territory or any treaty or law. Though the same report concedes that “MacKay said there have been no recent intrusions of Russian bombers.” [4]

MacKay’s latest saber rattling is fully in keeping with a string of comparable diatribes from the trio of Canada’s prime, defence and foreign ministers going back a year to the five-day war between Georgia and Russia, revealingly enough.

Last August Prime Minister Stephen Harper accused Russia of reverting to a “Soviet-era mentality” and the next month MacKay followed suit with “When we see a Russian Bear [Tupolev Tu-95] approaching Canadian air space, we meet them with an F-18.” It’s now been nearly a year of Canada’s defence minister threatening Russia with F-18s, multirole fighter jets produced by Chicago-based Boeing. MacKay brandishing US warplanes is proper to the circumstances as he is also reflecting and representing American and NATO designs on the Arctic and against Russian claims and interests there.
  
This February Barack Obama paid his first visit outside the United States as president of the country, visiting Ottawa and Prime Minister Harper. The latter’s government chose that occasion to stage a contrived stunt that in a more serious situation would have signaled a lead-up to war or that could have precipitated one. Canada scrambled warplanes over the Arctic Ocean to intercept and turn back Russian bombers engaged in what since 2007 have been routine flights in neutral airspace.  

With the newly inaugurated American president present to guarantee maximum attention in the world media, the Canadian prime minister said, “We will defend our airspace, we also have obligations of continental defence with the United States. We will fulfil those obligations to defend our continental airspace, and we will defend our sovereignty and we will respond every time the Russians make any kind of intrusion on the sovereignty in Canada’s Arctic.” [5]

The Russian planes in question in no manner intruded into Canadian airspace and as such didn’t threaten the nation’s “sovereignty.”

That Harper highlighted “obligations of continental defence with the United States” in reference to the visit of the US president and some fantastical “threat” posed by a Russian bomber several thousand kilometers away from the Canadian capital where Obama was at the time perhaps was intended to both prove Ottawa’s value to its southern neighbor – after all, Harper and MacKay postured as having saved the American head of state from a fictitious Russian bombing run – and to demonstrate that as “continental defence” is a reciprocal affair the world superpower stood behind it in any future confrontation with Russia.

The third member of Canada’s bellicose triumvirate, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon, who while addressing Russia in March stated “Let’s be perfectly clear here. Canada will not be bullied,” at the end of this June referred to Canada as both an Arctic and an energy “superpower.”

A Canadian newswire service at the time wrote that “Downplaying Russia’s recent ‘jockeying’ for position in the emerging polar oil rush, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon has declared Canada an ‘Arctic superpower.'” [6]...READ

Iran/Russia – a deadly embrace Pt.1-Real News Video

The Bush administration has tried everything to drive a wedge between Iran and Russia – to no avail. The Obama administration now has to deal with some pretty established facts on the ground. In the first part of this report, Pepe Escobar analyzes the implications of the complex relationship between close allies Iran and Russia, articulated on three fronts: nuclear, energy security and weapons...WATCH

Iran/Russia – a deadly embrace Pt.2-Real News Video

The Bush administration has tried everything to drive a wedge between Iran and Russia – to no avail. The Obama administration now has to deal with some pretty established facts on the ground. In the first part of this report, Pepe Escobar analyzes the implications of the complex relationship between close allies Iran and Russia, articulated in three fronts: nuclear, energy security and weapons….WATCH

Iran/China and the New Silk Road-Real News Video

After 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, the Chinese leadership was more than ready to counteract the US advancement in Eurasia – and turn it on its head. In the second part of this report, Pepe Escobar analyzes what’s at stake at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and what really matters for emerging global power China and regional power Iran: the Asian Energy Security Grid and the re-emergence of the fabled Silk Road, now as a vehicle for energy security as well as trade.

Pepe Escobar revisits the New Great Game, Part 3…WATCH

Canada: New political powers to quarantine, invoke other measures, may be tested in flu outbreak

Canada: New political powers to quarantine, invoke other measures, may be tested in flu outbreak –The top health official can now quarantine the ill, interview anyone who has been in contact with a sick person and do anything else that could help prevent the spread of a virus. 02 Aug 2009 A resurgence of swine flu anticipated this fall could test new provincial powers that include being able to place sick people under quarantine in their homes and shut down schools. If Arlene King, Ontario’s chief medical health officer, believes people’s health is at risk, she has the power to “investigate the situation and take such action as he or she considers appropriate to prevent, eliminate or decrease the risk.” That could include closing schools, isolating the ill and forcing others to undergo medical exams. British Columbia brought in a new public health act last year which was described as giving health officials “stronger powers to protect the public against communicable diseases such as pandemic influenza.” Under the new act, the province can order vaccinations or examinations and quarantine people. Health officials can also enforce the act using peace officers, warrants and even court orders. READ