Obama’s Empire

Asked why the US has a vast network of military bases around the world, Pentagon officials give both utilitarian and humanitarian arguments. Utilitarian arguments include the claim that bases provide security for the US by deterring attack from hostile countries and preventing or remedying unrest or military challenges; that bases serve the national economic interests of the US, ensuring access to markets and commodities needed to maintain US standards of living; and that bases are symbolic markers of US power and credibility – and so the more the better. Humanitarian arguments present bases as altruistic gifts to other nations, helping to liberate or democratise them, or offering aid relief. None of these humanitarian arguments deals with the problem that many of the bases were taken during wartime and “given” to the US by another of the war’s victors.

Critics of US foreign policy have dissected and dismantled the arguments made for maintaining a global system of military basing. They have shown that the bases have often failed in their own terms: despite the Pentagon’s claims that they provide security to the regions they occupy, most of the world’s people feel anything but reassured by their presence. Instead of providing more safety for the US or its allies, they have often provoked attacks, and have made the communities around bases key targets of other nations’ missiles. On the island of Belau in the Pacific, the site of sharp resistance to US attempts to instal a submarine base and jungle training centre, people describe their experience of military basing in the Second World War: “When soldiers come, war comes.” On Guam, a joke among locals is that few people except for nuclear strategists in the Kremlin know where their island is.

As for the argument that bases serve the national economic interest of the US, the weapons, personnel and fossil fuels involved cost billions of dollars, most coming from US taxpayers. While bases have clearly been concentrated in countries with key strategic resources, particularly along the routes of oil and gas pipelines in central Asia, the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa, from which one-quarter of US oil imports are expected by 2015, the profits have gone first of all to the corporations that build and service them, such as Halliburton. The myth that bases are an altruistic form of “foreign aid” for locals is exploded by the substantial costs involved for host economies and polities. The immediate negative effects include levels of pollution, noise, crime and lost productive land that cannot be offset by soldiers’ local spending or employment of local people. Other putative gains tend to benefit only local elites and further militarise the host nations: elaborate bilateral negotiations swap weapons, cash and trade privileges for overflight and land-use rights. Less explicitly, rice imports, immigration rights to the US or overlooking human rights abuses have been the currency of exchange.

The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous. The social problems that accompany bases, including soldiers’ violence against women and car crashes, have to be handled by local communities without compensation from the US. Some communities pay the highest price: their farmland taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supplies, their neighbours imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on US military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. The US military has repeatedly interfered in the domestic affairs of nations in which it has or desires military access, operating to influence votes and undermine or change local laws that stand in the way.

[,,,] The US has responded to action against bases with a renewed emphasis on “force protection”, in some cases enforcing curfews on soldiers, and cutting back on events that bring local people on to base property. The department of defence has also engaged in the time-honoured practice of renaming: clusters of soldiers, buildings and equipment have become “defence staging posts” or “forward operating locations” rather than military bases. Regulating documents become “visiting forces agreements”, not “status of forces agreements”, or remain entirely secret. While major reorganisation of bases is under way for a host of reasons, including a desire to create a more mobile force with greater access to the Middle East, eastern Europe and central Asia, the motives also include an attempt to prevent political momentum of the sort that ended US use of the Vieques and Philippine bases. READ REPORT

Iran: Which side are you on continued…

 

 Okay, the battle on the ‘left’ concerning who to support in Iran appears to come down to the following:

On the one hand we appear to have those who say that the mass demonstrations are solely the result of the West’s attempts to undermine and overthrow the existing regime, utilizing a ‘colour revolution’ similar to those used in the Ukraine and Georgia. And there can be no doubt that Western intelligence agencies are up to their necks in destabilization strategies (see below). If this is indeed true the question to ask is: Have Western agencies fomented or exploited the opposition and to what degree has it been a success as measured by the mass demonstrations and by elements of the Left supporting the demonstrations?

On the other side as it were, are those who say there is no foreign intervention, the mass movement is wholly indigenous and reflects growing opposition to the theocracy, or at the very least Western machinations are only incidental to the situation. A good example of this approach is advocated by Hamid Dabashi in his essay ‘Left is wrong on Iran’ where he says,

‘The US Congress, prompted by AIPAC (the American Israel Political Affairs Committee), pro-war vigilantes lurking in the halls of power in Washington DC, and Israeli warlords and their propaganda machinery in the US, are all excited about the events in Iran and are doing their damnedest to turn them to their advantage. The left, indeed, has reason to worry. But having principled positions on geopolitics is one thing, being blind and deaf to a massive social movement is something entirely different, as being impervious to the flagrant charlatanism of an upstart demagogue like Ahmadinejad. The sign and the task of a progressive and agile intelligence is to hold on to core principles and seek to incorporate mass social uprising into its modus operandi. My concern here is not with that retrograde strand in the North American or Western European left that is siding with Ahmadinejad and against the masses of millions of Iranians daring the draconian security apparatus of the Islamic Republic.’ — ‘Left is wrong on Iran’

The problem with this approach is that reduces the issues down to a one-dimensional ‘for or against’ analysis, for although some on the left are supporting Ahmadinejad, this is not the be all and end all of the debate. I for one, see the situation as more complex than either supporting or opposing Ahmadinejad, after all the ‘official opposition’ led by Musavi is exploiting the situation every bit as much as Ahmadinejad is, tapping into the discontent felt by many, especially the secular (Westernized?) strand of Iranian society. And it would be foolish let alone naive to assume that Western support for Musavi is predicated on the West’s desire for democracy to break out in Iran. READ ON

VIDEO-Afghanistan: US up to its ears in trouble-Margolis: The US is not just fighting the Taliban, they are fighting the Pashtun people

Watch this Real News video

The Truth about Flu Shots

On June 11, 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it had declared “Level 6” pandemic emergency with regard to the “swine flu.” Shortly thereafter, on cue, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that we should expect mass vaccination in this country to begin as early as September, 2009. We have been covering the development of the global pandemic preparedness machinery in The IO since June, 1998. It is our belief that this machine has been in motion since March 28, 2009 and will not be stopped; that the global influenza pandemic the CDC and WHO have been predicting (planning) for at least a decade will be declared—whether people are pandemically sick and dying or not—and the global mass vaccination campaign for which they have been preparing since the 1970s swine flu fiasco will commence—soon. It is absolutely crucial that you share the following information with your friends, family and both elected and appointed bureaucrats within your community.  read on

Vaccine May Be More Dangerous Than Swine Flu

[…] This virus continues to be an enigma for virologists. In the April 30, 2009 issue of Nature, a virologist was quoted as saying,“Where the hell it got all these genes from we don’t know.” Extensive analysis of the virus found that it contained the original 1918 H1N1 flu virus, the avian flu virus (bird flu), and two new H3N2 virus genes from Eurasia. Debate continues over the possibility that swine flu is a genetically engineered virus.

 

Naturally, vaccine manufacturers have been in a competitive battle to produce the first vaccine. The main contenders have been Baxter Pharmaceuticals and Novartis Pharmaceuticals, the latter of which recently acquired the scandal-ridden Chiron vaccine company. Both of these companies have had agreements with the World Health Organization to produce a pandemic vaccine.

 

The Baxter vaccine, called Celvapan, has had fast track approval. It uses a new vero cell technology, which utilizes cultured cells from the African green monkey. This same animal tissue transmits a number of vaccine-contaminating viruses, including the HIV virus.

 

The Baxter company has been associated with two deadly scandals. The first event occurred in 2006 when hemophiliac components were contaminated with HIV virus and injected in tens of thousands of people, including thousands of children. Baxter continued to release the HIV contaminated vaccine even after the contamination was known.

 

The second event occurred recently when it was discovered that Baxter had released a seasonal flu vaccine containing the bird flu virus, which would have produced a real world pandemic, to 18 countries. Fortunately, astute lab workers in the Czech Republic discovered the deadly combination and blew the whistle before a worldwide disaster was unleashed.

 

Despite these two deadly events, WHO maintains an agreement with Baxter Pharmaceuticals to produce the world’s pandemic vaccine.

 

Novartis, the second contender, also has an agreement with WHO for a pandemic vaccine. Novartis appears to have won the contract, since their vaccine is near completion. What is terrifying is that these pandemic vaccines contain ingredients, called immune adjuvants that a number of studies have shown cause devastating autoimmune disorders, including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and lupus.

 

Animal studies using this adjuvant have found them to be deadly. A study using 14 guinea pigs found that when they were injected with the special adjuvant, only one animal survived. A repeat of the study found the same deadly outcome.

 

So, what is this deadly ingredient? It is called squalene, a type of oil. The Chiron company, maker of the deadly anthrax vaccine, makes an adjuvant called MF-59 which contains an ingredient of serious concern–squalene. A number of studies have shown that squalene can trigger all of the above-mentioned autoimmune diseases when injected.

 

The MF-59 adjuvant has been used in several vaccines. These vaccines, including tetanus and diphtheria, are the same vaccines frequently associated with adverse reactions.

 

I reviewed a number of studies on this adjuvant and found something quite interesting. Several studies done on human test subjects found MF-59 to be a very safe immune adjuvant. But when I checked to see who did these studies, I found—to no surprise—that they were done by the Novartis Pharmaceutical Company and Chiron Pharmaceutical Company, which have merged. They were all published in “prestigious” medical journals. Also, to no surprise, a great number of studies done by independent laboratories and research institutions all found a strong link between MF-59 and autoimmune disease  read article

Shame on Canada, Coup Supporter

For the first time in decades, the world’s eyes are on Honduras, a tiny country many Canadians know for those little stickers on exported bananas and the surplus of coffee it floods onto the global market each year. The world is less aware of the ongoing role that the Canadian government and Canadian mining companies play in pushing many Hondurans further into poverty.  read more

Honduran Violence, U.S. Aid Test Obama’s Global Image

From ofamerica.wordpress.com:

[…..] The Obama Administration has chosen to respond to the crisis in a manner that will signify little to millions watching the bloodshed taking place in Honduras; While nobody in the hemisphere wants the return of the actions of the Bush era, many already believe that the Obama Administration’s inactions mean that the “new” or fundamental “change” Obama promised during his also widely-viewed Summit of the Americas speech last April adds up to little more than this: more militarismo, but with a smile.

For example, rather than officially declare and denounce the Honduras putsch as a “coup”, which would, among other things, trigger a cutoff of military and other aid, the Obama Administration has instead chosen the symbolic act of suspending joint military operations.

In a region where U.S. military aid, U.S. military training and U.S. political support for dictatorships responsible for killing, torturing and disappearing millions are at the heart of why Obama needed urgently to signal a “new” U.S. policy, Obama’s continued “Si Se Puede” (Yes We Can) to continued military aid for such human rights violation-plagued governments as those of Colombia,Mexico and Honduras will only tarnish his and the U.S.’ image in the region.

The President’s inability or unwillingness to call for an immediate suspension of U.S. military aid is already raising questions about the motives and role of Obama Administration operatives likeHugo Llorens, the current U.S. Ambassador to Honduras.

From 2002-2003 – the year many in Latin America condemned the attempted military coup in Venezuela – Llorens was the Director of Andean Affairs at the National Security Council (NSC).

Llorens was charged with advising then President Bush and his National Security Advisor on issues pertaining to Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. Although Llorens and the Obama Administration do not recognize the current government, they did, apparently, know that the coup in Honduras was going to take place.

That the Obama Administration knew of the coup and did not cutoff aid immediately after it took place, makes its claims that it tried to “stop” the coup seem naive, at best.

That the Administration may not cutoff aid even after coup-appointed Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Ortez described President Obama as “ese negrito que no sabe nada de nada” (that little black boy who knows nothing about nothing) is to add political insult to tragic injury before a hemispheric audience; That Obama may not cutoff military aid even after Sunday’s increased bloodshed adds even graver injury to that insult.  read more

Full Spectrum Dominance-video interview on “The Real News”

Full Spectrum Dominance, is Pentagonese for the basic military doctrine in the era of the post-Cold War, since 1990. The idea is that the United States’ military power projection will control the oceans, control the land areas of this planet, will control space, outer space and cyberspace—in other words, control everything on the face of the earth. And the idea of totalitarian democracy, one of the weapons in the Pentagon arsenal has been and is very much so today the idea of fomenting various RAND Corporation techniques for internal destabilization and regime change. Some people call them the “color revolutions”, such as you had in Ukraine in 2004 or in the Republic of Georgia. You had an attempt on that in Moldova, a country where most people in the West never even could find on a map. But you’ve had these attempts to destabilize. And there’s a pattern to this in the entire post-Cold War period. And the idea is, for the Pentagon, for the Washington military-industry complex, the Cold War never ended. The objective is to, as Brzezinski said in his 1997 book The Grande Chess Game, the objective of United States power projection is to prevent the cohesion of economic powers throughout Eurasia, that is, Russia, China, the Central Asian countries, the Middle East oil-producing countries, that would have enough raw material resources, enough population, enough scientific know-how to be independent of the domination of the United States. And that would essentially mean the end of the American hegemony of the post-1945 era. So totalitarian democracy is the Pentagon template for creating pseudo-democratic revolutions, quote-unquote “democratic” in the sense that the Greek oligarchs used the term “democracy” as a mob rule against their opponents, inciting the mobs to topple their rivals. And what in fact is created, as you see in the case of Georgia under Saakashvili, the darling boy of Washington after 2004, here you have a thug who’s every bit as dictatorial as Shevardnadze was, this post-communist president of Georgia, but he’s Washington’s thug, he’s Washington’s dictator. And that’s the template of totalitarian democracy: to create this full-spectrum dominance.  WATCH VIDEO

No sign Iran seeks nuclear arms: new IAEA head

Global Research, July 6, 2009

Reuters – 2009-07-03

The incoming head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Friday he did not see any hard evidence Iran was trying to gain the ability to develop nuclear arms.  “I don’t see any evidence in IAEA official documents about this,” Yukiya Amano told Reuters in his first direct comment on Iran‘s atomic program since his election, when asked whether he believed Tehran was seeking nuclear weapons capability. Current International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei said last month it was his “gut feeling”Iran was seeking the ability to produce nuclear arms, if it desired, as an “insurance policy” against perceived threats. “I’m not going to be a “soft” Director-General or a “tough” Director-General,” Amano told Reuters, when asked how he would approach Iran and Syria, both subject to stalled IAEA probes. Amano, a veteran Japanese diplomat, won over the agency’s member states on Friday, including developing countries which had tried to thwart his bid for the politically-sensitive post. Amano is regarded as a reserved technocrat who would de-politicize the IAEA helm after 12 years of direction by ElBaradei, an outspoken Nobel Peace laureate. He retires in November. Diplomats say the IAEA cannot afford weak leadership or a governing body polarized between nuclear “have” and “have not” nations at a time of danger to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Amano was only narrowly elected as Director-General on Thursday, but the win was sealed by acclamation at a closed-door meeting of the IAEA’s 146 members on Friday. INDEPENDENCE “The Director-General of the agency is an independent person. I will continue to be independent from any group, any region,” Amano told reporters after the meeting. Amano got the strongest backing from Western states keen for the IAEA to toughen steps against the spread of nuclear arms. But his rise has worried developing nations who see the non-proliferation maxim being used as an excuse to deny them a fair share of nuclear know-how. Iran has exploited such tensions, winning sympathy in the developing world, by arguing that to stop uranium enrichment as major world powers demand would violate its sovereignty, stunt its energy development and perpetuate inequality. The enrichment process can be configured to produce fuel either for nuclear power plants or weapons. Iraninsists its programme is only aimed at producing nuclear power. To produce a nuclear weapon Iran would have to adjust its enrichment plant to yield bomb-ready nuclear fuel and miniaturize the material to fit into a warhead — steps that could take from six months to a year or more, analysts say. It would also have to kick out IAEA inspectors and leave the NPT. Amano told reporters he would do his utmost to implement IAEA safeguard agreements in Iran and Syria. He also said there was hope for future agency work in North Korea, which told IAEA inspectors to leave in April and which has since carried out a nuclear test. It fired four short-range missiles on Thursday. “I expect sincerely that (six-party diplomatic) talks will resume because only dialogue is the way for a solution,” Amano said. “Upon the decision of…talks, I expect that the IAEA will be able to play an important role in the verification of nuclear issues in North Korea.”

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 , Reuters, 2009  The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=14248

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The Mousavi campaign in Iran and the lessons of past “color revolutions”

The political movement of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, named the “Green Wave” due to its campaign color, has striking parallels with the US-backed “color revolutions” in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine.

Like the campaigns to bring to power pro-US regimes in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004), the campaign around Mousavi has been backed by powerful sections of the Iranian establishment and supported by Washington, the US media and the European powers. As in Tehran, better-off layers of the urban middle classes dominated the large opposition protests in Tbilisi and Kiev.

In the absence of a socialist alternative, the masses of Iranian workers and poor voted for the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has built a base of support among them by adopting a populist persona, denouncing corruption within the clerical elite, and providing a measure of social welfare assistance. The working class remained aloof from the anti-Ahmadinejad protests, seeing nothing to support in the pro-market policies of Mousavi.

As with the opposition movement headed by Mousavi, the opposition movements in Georgia and Ukraine styled themselves as democratic, while promoting pro-market economic policies and the opening of the countries to Western investment.

Mousavi is a longstanding figure within the existing regime and is a proven defender of the interests of the Iranian bourgeoisie. Considered a protégé of Iran’s first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, Mousavi was prime minister from 1981 to 1989, overseeing the suppression of left-wing movements and presiding over the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in the devastating war with Iraq.

Mousavi’s 2009 presidential campaign and the subsequent protests were backed by sections of Iran’s business and religious elite, such as former president and billionaire Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and former president Mohammad Khatami.

To the extent that students and others sincerely opposed to the repressive Ahmadinejad regime became involved in the “green revolution” demonstrations, they were channeled behind a section of the Iranian ruling class. It is critical for Iranian workers and youth to make a political assessment of the experiences of the international working class, especially in those countries where pro-US governments have been brought to power under the guise of a democratic revolution.

Georgia

 

The “Rose Revolution” in Georgia saw a pro-US faction of the country’s ruling elite break away from the then-president, Eduard Shevardnadze, to assume the leadership of a supposedly democratic opposition.

A former top Stalinist bureaucrat and the Soviet Union’s foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev, Shevardnadze… read on

Iraq: A failed imperialist venture

By Haroon Siddiqui

Global Research, July 4, 2009

The Star – 2009-07-02

American troops were not welcomed with flowers in Iraq but their departure from cities and towns has been. Iraqis celebrated National Sovereignty Day Tuesday as U.S. troops were yanked out of populated centres and put into remote bases. In time, even that hidden presence will begin to grate on the Iraqis, just as a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia had spurred Osama bin Laden and others. Yet this limited troop pullout is being hailed as a triumph. One is reminded of Richard Nixon’s 1973 boast of “peace with honour” in Vietnam. The 1973 Paris treaty that led to the U.S. troop withdrawal was a face-saving formula. In Iraq, too, the U.S. has little choice but to get out. Not only did the Iraqi invasion and occupation prove the limits of military power, it also exposed how incapable America has become at nation-building. Its postwar incompetence was stunning. America plunged Iraq into chaos, shattered the infrastructure and destroyed the society, reducing human beings to their basest instincts. They turned on each other and found safety only in family, tribe, clan and sect. Shiites and Sunnis, who had lived together for ages, ethnically cleansed each other’s neighbourhoods, which to this day remain separated by barricades, walls and checkpoints. Having unleashed the forces that put Iraq’s three main communities at war with each other, the U.S. toyed with the idea of dividing the country into the Kurdish north, a Sunni centre and a Shiite south, much like the British had divided India in two in 1947. Having created the chaos, violence and jihadism, the U.S. said, in colonial fashion, it had to stay to curb the chaos, violence and jihadism. Having crippled the state, it had no choice but to prolong the occupation until the natives were ready to govern themselves. Iraq exhausted America more than the 1917-32 British invasion and occupation sapped the British. It also created killing fields on a vast scale. Yet Iraqis have been brushed out of the American narrative – Iraq is free of Saddam Hussein, it is democratic, it is stabilized, it is this and it is that. There’s nary a mention of how many Iraqis are dead (between 100,000 and 1.2 million, depending on who’s counting), how many maimed (not known), how many displaced (4 million), and how many tortured with Saddam-like methods in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere (not known). Besides the damage to U.S. credibility, and not just in the Muslim world, the Iraq adventure empowered Iran far more than the U.S. would ever acknowledge. Finally, the quest for oil may also turn out to be a mirage. This week, Iraq’s oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, a U of T graduate, put development rights up for international bidding. No more no-bid contracts for U.S. firms, unlike under the Bush-Cheney domain. Nor did George W. and Dick get what they wanted out of the Status of Forces Agreement. Passed by the Iraqi parliament last fall, it stipulates that all U.S. troops must be out by Dec. 31, 2011. No U.S. military operation can be carried out without Iraqi consent (a provision Hamid Karzai can only dream of). Iraqi soil cannot be used by the U.S. to launch a war on any neighbour (Iran). Iraq is the imperial adventure that both Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff, one a neo-con hawk and the other a liberal hawk, fully backed. A monumental failure in judgment, their common stance was, and remains, an affront to the collective will of Canadians.

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 Haroon Siddiqui , The Star, 2009  The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=14231

© Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca Web site engine by Polygraphx Multimedia © Copyright 2005-2007

Corrupt election campaign unfolds in US-occupied Afghanistan

By James Cogan

Global Research, July 3, 2009

Amid the chorus of denunciations in US and European ruling circles over the alleged theft of the Iranian elections, the Obama administration and its NATO allies are presiding over an election campaign in Afghanistan that is as corrupt as it is illegitimate.   The campaign for the August 20 presidential election officially began last month with 41 registered candidates, but it is little more than political theatre. The result has effectively been decided by previous US policy, sordid factional deals between a number of Afghan powerbrokers and an electoral system that facilitates vote rigging and voter intimidation.   The government created by the US invasion was based on giving control over various regions of the country to the ethnic Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and Pashtun warlords who collaborated with the overthrow of the Taliban. Hamid Karzai, a representative of the pro-monarchist Popalzai branch of the Pashtun Durrani tribe, was installed as a figurehead president in 2002. Real authority, however, has been exercised by the US and NATO forces and the regional powerbrokers.   The result has been what US intelligence agencies described last year as “rampant corruption”. David Davis, a conservative British politician, observed after a fact-finding tour to Afghanistan that the country “appears to have been run for the financial benefit of 20 families… who are old-time warlords and faction leaders responsible for past atrocities”.   Ministers, governors and military commanders sell contracts and positions to the highest bidder. Police and public servants openly demand pay-offs and bribes. Numerous figures within the state apparatus are believed to be involved in Afghanistan’s vast illegal trade in opium and heroin, including Karzai’s brother, who controls areas of Kandahar province. Large amounts of international aid and so-called reconstruction funds have vanished into the pockets of government officials and local tribal leaders.   As the war dragged on and the consensus emerged during last year’s US elections that more American troops would have to be sent, there were indications that US policymakers were considering installing a more authoritative figure than Karzai as the head of their puppet regime.   Despite faithfully serving US interests, the Afghan president had at times angered the US military by mildly criticising the slaughter of civilians with air strikes and other operations. More importantly, he had not emerged as a respected figure among any significant section of the Afghan people. Instead, his general subservience to a brutal foreign military occupation and the corruption of his government had contributed to popular support for the Taliban and other insurgent movements.   The dilemma facing the US/NATO occupation in the lead-up to the Afghan elections, however, is that no-one among the list of potential alternative presidents has any more credibility than Karzai. They are either warlords guilty of human rights abuses or individuals who are viewed as even more open agents of the US government.   A poll conducted by the right-wing International Republican Institute found that just 31 percent of the respondents intended to vote for Karzai, compared with over 50 percent in the 2005 elections. His closest challenger however, former foreign minister Abdullah, polled only 7 percent. The third-placed contender registered barely 3 percent.   Senior New York Times foreign correspondent Dexter Filkins, who has covered the Afghan war since 2001, commented last month: “Some American officials express resignation that they may be stuck with him [Karzai] for the next five years. Indeed, the Obama administration appears to have begun preparing for that prospect.”   With at least the implicit consent of the Obama White House, Karzai has struck alliances with various warlords who can guarantee he wins the vote in the regions under their control.   His nominee for the post of first vice president is Mohammad Qasim Fahim, whose ethnic Tajik movement lords over much of north-eastern Afghanistan and whose militiamen make up a large proportion of the Afghan army. A 2005 Human Rights Watch report named Fahim as one of the commanders who ordered the “intentional killing of civilians, beating of civilians, abductions based on ethnicity, looting and forced labour” during the 1990s Afghan civil war.   Karzai has re-nominated Karim Khalili for the post of second vice president, in order to secure the support of ethnic Hazara powerbrokers in the central provinces of Afghanistan. Khalili, who commanded Hazara militias during the civil war, is also suspected of ordering atrocities against ethnic Pashtun civilians.   In the main provinces of the Pashtun south—large areas of which are actually controlled by Taliban insurgents—Karzai has secured the backing of some key pro-occupation powerbrokers.   In Kandahar, his family and tribal loyalists have influence. In Helmand, the former governor, suspected drug baron and Karzai ally Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, still retains considerable authority. In the south eastern province of Nangarhar, Pashtun warlord and governor Gul Agha Sherzai, a man with a bloody history in the 1990s when he was in control of Kandahar, has also endorsed Karzai. Earlier this year, Gul was touted in US ruling circles as a possible alternative president.   In the Uzbek-populated areas of northern Afghanistan, Karzai is relying on one of the country’s most despotic figures to deliver votes: Abdul Rashid Dostum. During Afghanistan’s tortured 30 years of war, Dostum served in the Soviet occupation forces and backed the pro-Moscow Najibullah government before switching sides. He joined with the US-backed Islamist militias that overthrew Najibullah, then was part of the fierce factional rivalry for power in Kabul before the Taliban finally took control.   By 2001, Dostum was part of the US-backed Northern Alliance that overthrew the Taliban regime. His militia and American special forces committed one of the worst war crimes of the Afghanistan invasion. Following the capture of the city of Kunduz in November 2001, they sealed hundreds of Taliban prisoners inside shipping containers and left them to die in blistering heat.   Karzai will not only benefit from his alliances with the warlords, but his ability to use the state apparatus to assist his campaign. In the last election in 2005, he blatantly awarded development projects to areas where he needed to consolidate support. The state-owned media gave him biased coverage and 75 percent of air time.   If these factors are not sufficient to guarantee Karzai’s victory, there is ample opportunity for wholesale fraud. A report this month by the International Crisis Group (ICG) pointed to the scale on which it may take place. Over 17 million voting cards have been issued in a country where half the population of 30 million is under the voting age, vast areas are under the control of the Taliban and women are culturally pressured not to participate.   In other words, a large number of people are likely to hold multiple cards. In the eastern province of Nuristan, for example, which has an estimated adult population of 130,000 and a large Taliban presence, there are 443,000 registered voters. The adult population of approximately 130,000 in the Tajik province of Panjshir has spawned 190,000 registered voters.   Tens of thousands of women are believed to have been registered to vote via their husbands or male relatives. The men will use the women’s cards to cast additional votes, with the knowledge and acquiescence of local ballot officials. According to the ICG, the female turnout in Paktika province in the 2005 elections was so “unbelievably high” that the figures were never officially released.   On February 1, Barack Obama remarked in an interview that the US could not “rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy”. An accurate and honest statement would have been that his administration’s only concern is that the Afghan government is subservient to American imperialist interests.   In the final analysis, the August 20 elections in Afghanistan are being held only to sustain the fiction in the US and NATO countries that the war has some noble agenda, not the predatory motive of geo-political control over strategic territory in resource-rich Central Asia. The result will have no credibility or legitimacy.

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 James Cogan, World Socialist Web Site, 2009  The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=14211

© Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca Web site engine by Polygraphx Multimedia © Copyright 2005-2007

Giving Honduras the Haiti Treatment

WITH THE OVERTHROW OF PRESIDENT MANUEL ZELAYA, Honduras has fallen under military rule of the kind that dominated the Central American nation from 1963 to 1981. The man named by Honduras’s Congress to serve out the remainder of Zelaya’s term, Robert Micheletti, will of course claim that civilians are still in charge. But when soldiers oust a sitting president and decide who his successor will be, it is the soldiers that rule.

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Two hundred soldiers came in the night to overpower President Zelaya’s guard, and bundle him off for a flight to Costa Rica. The kidnapping was somewhat reminiscent of the seizure of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, by U.S. troops back in February, 2004.  The United States claimed it was saving Aristide from death at the hands of gunmen armed and organized by…the United States. Aristide was sent to the French-dominated Central African Republic.

–

After the military put Honduran President Zelaya on a plane to Costa Rica, they claimed he had signed a letter of resignation. That’s the same lie told by organizers of the U.S.-backed coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, back in 2002. Chavez returned to power with the help some elements of the military and hundreds of thousands of his supporters in the streets  read article

The US and the Honduran coup

Revelations of US complicity with Honduran coup leaders comes at an inopportune time for Washington. It is waging a campaign to weaken or topple Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wrapping itself in invocations of democracy and alleging that Ahmadinejad stole the June 12 election in Iran.

The administration is relying on the US media to limit the political damage resulting from its role in the Honduran coup and the exposure of its hypocrisy in relation to the Iranian elections. In contrast to the media’s coverage of Iran, there have been few breathless reports, amateur videos or Twitter feeds coming from Tegucigalpa.

The US role in Honduras must be appraised in the historical context of Washington’s violent and oppressive relations with Central America and its longstanding ties to the most reactionary forces in the region. As political and economic tensions mount, the big landowning and corporate interests and the US-trained officer corps in America’s traditional “back yard” fear the effects of populist appeals against US imperialism by left-nationalist figures like Chávez and Zelaya.

During the debate over Honduras’ joining ALBA, anti-Zelaya Honduran deputy Marta Lorena Alvarado attacked Chávez and warned, “We are allowing a man with a strange ideology to make his way into our population and into our manner of seeing Honduras’ history.”

Considering just the post-World War II period, the US and Honduran ruling elites have collaborated in huge crimes against the Central American masses. In the US-engineered 1954 coup against Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, Honduras served as a base and training camp for a CIA “rebel force” on Guatemala’s southern border. The US intervention in Guatemala would ultimately provoke a series of civil wars prosecuted by US-backed anti-communist death squads, lasting over 30 years and claiming 200,000 lives, according to US figures.

In 1963, Honduran President Ramón Villeda was overthrown by military officers led by General Oswaldo López Arellano. US President John F. Kennedy then decided to end US adherence to the Betancourt doctrine, which held that the US should not recognize extra-constitutional governments. López Arellano called elections in 1971 but lost. He regained power through another coup in 1972.

The US responded to the 1979 overthrow of the Somoza family in neighboring Nicaragua by setting up the anti-communist Contra insurgency, which it funded in violation of US laws banning aid to the Contras. Based in Honduras, the Contras fought a war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas that lasted until 1987, costing 60,000 casualties and displacing 250,000 people.

Seen in the context of Honduras’ historical role as a center of US-backed counterrevolution, the ouster of Zelaya constitutes a sharp warning to the working class in the Americas. Prompted by concern over the political ramifications of Zelaya’s links to Venezuela, a US-backed coup in Honduras could well be the signal for a broader regional campaign by US imperialism against Venezuela and allied regimes throughout the continent.  read more

Color Revolutions, Old and New

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, July 1, 2009

In his new book, “Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order,” F. William Engdahl explained a new form of US covert warfare – first played out in Belgrade, Serbia in 2000. What appeared to be “a spontaneous and genuine political ‘movement,’ (in fact) was the product of techniques” developed in America over decades.

In the 1990s, RAND Corporation strategists developed the concept of “swarming” to explain “communication patterns and movement of” bees and other insects which they applied to military conflict by other means. More on this below.

In Belgrade, key organizations were involved, including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), and National Democratic Institute. Posing as independent NGOS, they’re, in fact, US-funded organizations charged with disruptively subverting democracy and instigating regime changes through non-violent strikes, mass street protests, major media agitprop, and whatever else it takes short of military conflict.

Engdahl cited Washington Post writer Michael Dobbs’ first-hand account of how the Clinton administration engineered Slobodan Milosevic’s removal after he survived the 1990s Balkan wars, 78 days of NATO bombing in 1999, and major street uprisings against him. A $41 million campaign was run out of American ambassador Richard Miles’ office. It involved “US-funded consultants” handling everything, including popularity polls, “training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count.”

Thousands of spray paint cans were used “by student activists to scrawl anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia,” and throughout the country around 2.5 million stickers featured the slogan “Gotov Je,” meaning “He’s Finished.”

Preparations included opposition leader training in nonviolent resistance techniques at a Budapest, Hungary seminar – on matters like “organiz(ing) strike(s), communicat(ing) with symbols….overcom(ing) fear, (and) undermin(ing) the authority of a dictatorial regime.” US experts were in charge, incorporating RAND Corporation “swarming” concepts.

GPS satellite images were used to direct “spontaneous hit-and-run protests (able to) elude the police or military. Meanwhile, CNN (was) carefully pre-positioned to project images around the world of these youthful non-violent ‘protesters.’ ” Especially new was the use of the Internet, including “chat rooms, instant messaging, and blog sites” as well as cell phone verbal and SMS text-messaging, technologies only available since the mid-1990s.

Milosevic was deposed by a successful high-tech coup that became “the hallmark of the US Defense policies under (Rumsfeld) at the Pentagon.” It became the civilian counterpart to his “Revolution in Military Affairs” doctrine using “highly mobile, weaponized small groups directed by ‘real time’ intelligence and communications.”

Belgrade was the prototype for Washington-instigated color revolutions to follow. Some worked. Others failed. A brief account of several follows below.

read article

The Honduran coup: another US destabilization operation

Since Sunday, a tense standoff has continued between the army and pro-Zelaya demonstrators outside the presidential palace. On Monday there were reports of tear gas attacks on demonstrators.

Zelaya has vowed to return to power, and the coup has been condemned by the US, the European Union, the OAS, the United Nations and the leaders of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Colombia and other countries allied with the Zelaya regime, who met Sunday night in Managua.

Chavez has, justifiably, cast the coup as an overt threat to his regime. He has charged the US with complicity, alleging involvement by Otto Reich, a long-time anti-Castro operative and favorite of anti-Castro exiles in Miami. Reich played a key role as a Reagan administration State Department official in the Iran-Contra conspiracy, in which Reagan authorized secret funding for the anti-Sandinista Contras, in violation of the Boland amendment which had been passed by Congress banning US aid to the Contra death squads.

Reich was one of a number of Iran-Contra veterans who were appointed to government posts in the administration of George W. Bush, serving as assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs.

The US used southern Honduras as the base of operations for its proxy war in the 1980s against the left nationalist, Cuban-allied regime in neighboring Nicaragua.

There are parallels in the Honduran events to the abortive 2002 US-backed coup against Venezuela’s Chavez. The current US ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, undoubtedly played a significant role in that failed attempt to oust an elected Latin American president.

In 2002 and 2003, Llorens served as the director of Andean affairs on the Bush administration’s National Security Council (NSC). In that post, he was the principal adviser to the president and the NSC on issues relating to Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador.

Otto Reich was also implicated in the 2002 coup attempt. He met with Venezuelan opposition figures in the run-up to the attempted ouster of Chavez.

Reich is currently a board member of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, better known as the School of the Americas, located in Fort Benning, Georgia. Among the tens of thousands of Latin American military officers—and death squad leaders—who have been trained at the School of the Americas are two of the leaders of Sunday’s coup in Honduras, Army General Romeo Vasquez and Air Force General Luis Javier Prince Suazo.

Another graduate of the School of the Americas was Policarpo Paz Garcia, who ruled Honduras in 1980-82. Paz Garcia launched Battalion 3-16, one of the most feared death squads in Latin America.

Commenting on the calculations of the Obama administration, behind the official disapproval of the Honduran coup and the pro-democracy rhetoric, the intelligence web site Statfor on Monday noted that the US could exert irresistible pressure on Honduras to restore Zelaya to power, since the US provides the market for 70 percent of the country’s exports. “However,’” Stratfor wrote, “the aim of economic pressure would be for [interim President] Micheletti to make moves to support democracy, and open elections—such as those already scheduled for November 29—would easily appease the United States.”

The Washington Post reported that John Negroponte, the long-time US State Department official, said that Clinton’s remarks “appeared to reflect US reluctance to see Zelaya returned unconditionally to power.” The newspaper quoted Negroponte as saying, “I think she wants to preserve some leverage to get Zelaya to back down from his insistence on a referendum.”

Negroponte knows whereof he speaks. He was US ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s and virtually ran the US proxy war against Nicaragua that was based in Honduras.

It appears that the Obama administration is involved in an operation aimed at either permanently removing Zelaya or negotiating a return to power under conditions where his government would be weakened and its policies shifted in favor of US interests. This, in turn, would further US efforts to destabilize Chavez in Venezuela and shift the balance of power throughout Latin America.

The Obama administration has, however, learned something from the disastrous failure of the Bush administration’s botched coup against Chavez seven years ago. It is seeking to conceal its real aims behind formal opposition to the coup in Honduras and a public posture of fidelity to democratic elections.

Moreover, the US is in no position to openly support a coup in Honduras or maintain a public stance of neutrality under conditions in which it is waging a propaganda war and destabilization campaign in Iran based on allegations that the regime headed by President Ahmadinejad stole the June 12 election.

An unmistakable indicator of the real attitude of the Obama administration to the events in Honduras is the response of the US media. The media, led by the New York Times, immediately embraced the claims of the Iranian opposition that the election had been rigged and a coup had been carried out, without presenting any concrete evidence to support the allegations. It provided nonstop coverage of antigovernment demonstrations, and proclaimed the dissident faction of the clerical regime to be heading a “green revolution” for democracy.

In contrast, the US media has provided only minimal coverage of a real coup in Honduras. It has barely reported the police-state measures, arrests and beatings carried out by the Honduran military, and treated the anti-coup protests with utter indifference. On Monday evening, the events in Honduras were relegated to a mere mention on all three network news broadcasts, well behind the death of Michael Jackson.

What accounts for this stark contrast? The simple fact that the US government opposes the victor in the Iranian election and supports those who ousted Zelaya in Honduras. read article

Journalists Briefly Detained By Troops In Honduras

 Journalists Briefly Detained By Troops In Honduras 30 Jun 2009 Honduran troops detained seven international journalists covering the aftermath of a military coup Monday, freeing them unhurt a short time later. The government also took at least two television stations off the air and interrupted the broadcasts of others. At least 10 soldiers, most with rifles drawn, arrived at the hotel where journalists from The Associated Press and the Venezuela-based television network Telesur were staying and unplugged their editing equipment in an apparent attempt to stop their coverage of protests in support of deposed President Manuel Zelaya. One of the Telesur journalists was speaking on a telephone at the time of the detention, and AP’s Nicolas Garcia saw a soldier lightly slapping her hand so she would hang up. [See, in a *rightwing* coup, US media wh*res add words such as ‘lightly’ to describe physical force and ‘briefly’ to detainment. If this was *Iran,* we’d hear that the journalists were imprisoned for six centuries and the AP journalist had her skull bashed in rather than her hand getting ‘lightly slapped.’ BTW, where are the insipid little green Tweets about this coup and the wall-to-wall Faux News coverage of same? –LRP]

Oil and the Iraq “withdrawal”

By James Cogan

Global Research, June 30, 2009

World Socialist Web Site

It is fitting that today’s deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq’s cities coincides with a meeting in Baghdad to auction off some of the country’s largest oil fields to companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and British Petroleum. It is a reminder of the real motives for the 2003 invasion and in whose interests over one million Iraqis and 4,634 American and other Western troops have been killed. The Iraq war was, and continues to be, an imperialist war waged by the American ruling elite for control of oil and geo-strategic advantage.   The contracts will facilitate the first large-scale exploitation of Iraq’s energy resources by US and other transnationals since the country’s oil industry was nationalised in 1972. On offer are 20-year rights over six fields that hold more than five billion barrels of easily and cheaply extractable oil. In the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where foreign companies are already operating, the Norwegian firm DNO is now producing so-called “sweet oil” from a relatively small field at Tawke, at a cost of less than $2 a barrel.   In an apt analogy, Larry Goldstein of the US-based Energy Policy Research Foundation told the New York Times last week: “Asking why oil companies are interested in Iraq is like asking why robbers rob banks—because that’s where the money is.” Iraq’s total oil reserves are estimated to be at least 115 billion barrels. Its reserves of natural gas are at least 3.36 billion cubic metres.   Millions of people around the world understood in 2003 that the claims of the Bush administration and its international allies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism were threadbare lies promulgated to justify the plunder of the country’s oil wealth. The claim by the Obama White House that it is continuing the occupation to consolidate “Iraqi democracy” is also a lie.   The war driven by the decline of US global power and growing class tensions within the United States itself. The American capitalist elite believed that military domination in the Persian Gulf would give them access to lucrative resources, as well as a powerful lever against their main European and Asian rivals, who depend upon the region for critical supplies of energy. The militarist agitation surrounding the war was used to smother public disquiet and divert discontent away from the economic inequality that wracks American society.   It has taken more than six years of carnage—far longer than any pro-war analyst would have predicted—to establish the conditions where major corporations feel sufficiently confident to begin making substantial investments in Iraq’s oil industry. Iraqi resistance to the US invasion had first to be drowned in blood and the population reduced to a state of terror and insecurity.   The war has produced a litany of crimes, from the torture policy at Abu Ghraib and other prisons, to the destruction of cities such as Fallujah and the attack on densely populated suburbs like Sadr City; to the unleashing of Shiite death squads to depopulate the centres of Sunni resistance in Baghdad.   The country has been economically ruined. Unemployment and underemployment stand at between 30 and 50 percent. At least seven million people live on less than $2 a day, and malnutrition and disease are rampant.   The Shiite fundamentalist-dominated Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki presides over the misery of the population in exchange for US backing. It now has a bloated US-equipped military and police apparatus of over 630,000 armed men.   The repression of the Iraqi masses was the basis for the withdrawal timetable that was agreed to by the Bush administration in last year’s Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). US forces are deemed no longer needed to perform the frontline operations against what remains of the anti-occupation insurgency. Instead, units of the Iraqi army are to take over those tasks.   The bulk of the 130,000 American troops in Iraq have been pulled back to heavily fortified camps on the outskirts of the cities, or to the massive air bases that have been built at places such as Balad and Tallil. The SOFA permits them to remain until December 2011, by which time new arrangements for the long-term presence of US forces will have been worked out.   American commanders, while outwardly optimistic, have not been able to hide their apprehension over the withdrawal from the cities. To shore up the Iraqi army, some 10,000 US troops are currently embedded as “trainers” in its ranks—a number that will increase to over 50,000 over the coming months. Baghdad’s western suburbs have been creatively categorised as “outside” the urban area. Aircraft, helicopter gunships, artillery and rapid response units are on constant standby to assist Iraqi forces when needed.   The concerns are not only that insurgent groups will take advantage of the US withdrawal to regroup in Iraq’s cities and resume significant resistance to both the Maliki government and American troops. Both Washington and its puppet government are worried that the social plight of the Iraqi working class and popular opposition to the concessions Maliki is making to US imperialism and foreign capital could give rise to large-scale protests and unrest.   The Obama administration is acutely conscious that a large majority of Iraqis bitterly opposes the US presence in the country. Behind the scenes, it is reportedly pressuring Maliki to abandon a promise to hold a referendum on the Status of Forces Agreement, knowing that it would be overwhelming rejected.   There are also sharp disputes between the rival Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions of the Iraqi ruling elite over the allocation of oil revenues and other sources of wealth. The most explosive tensions centre on the insistence of the Kurdish autonomous region that it get control of the northern oilfields around the city of Kirkuk—two of which are among the six fields being offered for contract in this week’s auction.   The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) last week denounced the auction as “unconstitutional” and warned that companies are “ill-advised” to enter into any contract in Kirkuk to which the KRG is not also a party. The outbreak of an ethnic civil war in the north cannot be ruled out, nor can US military operations to suppress such a development.   US imperialism faces a debacle of its own making in Iraq. Amidst the meltdown of economic activity internationally, and the escalation of the US war in Afghanistan and its proxy war in Pakistan, a large proportion of the American military is still tied down by the conflict in Iraq and there is no end in sight. The Obama administration is nevertheless committed to continuing the occupation and realising the predatory objectives of the invasion—in which oil has always loomed large.

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  © Copyright James Cogan, World Socialist Web Site, 2009  The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=14176

© Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca Web site engine by Polygraphx Multimedia © Copyright 2005-2007

Obama Moves to Fund Iranian Dissidents.Despite Claims of Not Meddling, US to Send $20 Million to Opposition

By Jason Ditz

By Jason Ditz

Global Research, June 26, 2009

Antiwar.com

Despite President Barack Obama’s persistent claims that the United States is not meddling in the post-election furore in Iran, the administration is moving forward with plans to subsidize Iranian dissident groups to the tune of $20 million in the form of USAID grants. The program is not new, and the solicitation for the grant applications actually came under the Bush Administration. But with the deadline for submissions just four days away, the administration has a convenient excuse to subsidize opposition and dissident groups under the guise of promoting “the rule of law” in Iran. The White House and the State Department both defended the program, insisting it did not run counter to the administration’s pretense of neutrality. The administration declined to provide details of exactly which opposition figures it had been funding, however, citing “security concerns.” There is considerable criticism for this program, not just from the perspective of getting the US involved in the internal affairs of Iran, but also for the taint it places on various opposition groups and NGOs, whether they received any of the grant money or not.

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 Jason Ditz, Antiwar.com, 2009  The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=14118

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Jeremy R. Hammond: Has the U.S. Played a Role in Fomenting Unrest During Iran’s Election? Any knowledgeable observer would say yes, but that’s not the version you’ll hear on the US media.

One might be tempted to argue that the strategy for regime change implemented under the Bush administration that including funding for propaganda, support for Iranian dissident groups, and backing for anti-regime militants and terrorists has changed under the new administration of President Barack Obama. There is no evidence, many have pointed out, of U.S. meddling in the Iranian election.

 

But then, neither is there any clear indication that Obama ever revoked the policy strategy implemented under Bush. The most likely scenario is that Obama has put the military option favored by some in the Bush administration on the back burner in favor of other means to carry out a change of regime in Iran.

 

Whatever the case may be, given the record of U.S. interference in the state affairs of Iran and clear policy of regime change, it certainly seems possible, even likely, that the U.S. had a significant role to play in helping to bring about the recent turmoil in an effort to undermine the government of the Islamic Republic. read article

Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated “Color Revolution?” Is This the Culmination of Two Years of Destabilization?

by Paul Craig Roberts

A number of commentators have expressed their idealistic belief in the purity of Mousavi, Montazeri, and the westernized youth of Terhan. The CIA destabilization plan, announced two years ago (see below) has somehow not contaminated unfolding events.

The claim is made that Ahmadinejad stole the election, because the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted. However, Mousavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed. This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. It forces an early declaration of the vote. The longer the time interval between the preemptive declaration of victory and the release of the vote tally, the longer Mousavi has to create the impression that the authorities are using the time to fix the vote. It is amazing that people don’t see through this trick.

As for the grand ayatollah Montazeri’s charge that the election was stolen, he was the initial choice to succeed Khomeini, but lost out to the current Supreme Leader. He sees in the protests an opportunity to settle the score with Khamenei. Montazeri has the incentive to challenge the election whether or not he is being manipulated by the CIA, which has a successful history of manipulating disgruntled politicians.

There is a power struggle among the ayatollahs. Many are aligned against Ahmadinejad because he accuses them of corruption, thus playing to the Iranian countryside where Iranians believe the ayatollahs’ lifestyles indicate an excess of power and money. In my opinion, Ahmadinejad’s attack on the ayatollahs is opportunistic. However, it does make it odd for his American detractors to say he is a conservative reactionary lined up with the ayatollahs.

Commentators are “explaining” the Iran elections based on their own illusions, delusions, emotions, and vested interests. Whether or not the poll results predicting Ahmadinejad’s win are sound, there is, so far, no evidence beyond surmise that the election was stolen. However, there are credible reports that the CIA has been working for two years to destabilize the Iranian government.

On May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell ABC News.”

On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”

A few days previously, the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”

On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.”

The protests in Tehran no doubt have many sincere participants. The protests also have the hallmarks of the CIA orchestrated protests in Georgia and Ukraine. It requires total blindness not to see this.

Daniel McAdams has made some telling points. For example, neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman wrote the day before the election that “there’s talk of a ‘green revolution’ in Tehran.” How would Timmerman know that unless it was an orchestrated plan? Why would there be a ‘green revolution’ prepared prior to the vote, especially if Mousavi and his supporters were as confident of victory as they claim? This looks like definite evidence that the US is involved in the election protests.

Timmerman goes on to write that “the National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars promoting ‘color’ revolutions . . . Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.” Timmerman’s own neocon Foundation for Democracy is “a private, non-profit organization established in 1995 with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran.”

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Protests in Iran: Not Just About Stolen Votes

The socio-political problems facing the Iranian people will not be quelled with the declared election victory of either Ahmadinejad or Musavi. On the domestic front, both candidates have records of human rights abuses in their personal and political careers, both are extensions of the political establishment in Iran, and neither is calling for fundamental changes within the Iranian state.

As for international relations, both are willing to engage with the new American administration so long as the meeting is held without preconditions. And no doubt, President Obama will sit with either candidate (and Europe will follow suit) given the realization that stability in the Middle East is predicated upon Iranian participation. Granted, demonstrators are calling for an investigation into the election results with the contention that Musavi is the victor. But their chants, placards, writings, and their personal risks in demonstrating indicate that they are also calling for relaxed social laws, political freedoms and an end to the brutality of the Islamic regime.

As important is the realization that these protests are not a call for foreign intervention. Nor are they a call for increased economic and political strangulation of the Iranian state and people. Attempts, for example, by Canadian MPs to pressure and alienate Iran through parliamentary bills such as the Iran Accountability Act, which promote divestment from Iran to hold it accountable for its human rights violations, are counter-productive. They instead increase state pressure on voices in Iran calling for social and political freedoms. Such policies fail to recognize that the problems in Iran can only have a domestic solution, without interference from the imperialist powers, and that the Iranian people are the ones who can and must hold the regime accountable for its many violations.

Whether this is a revolutionary movement – and of what kind – is hotly debated, particularly among Iranians. The scenes and chants remind many activists of the political atmosphere in Iran in the late 1970s. However, the limited potential of these demonstrations in overthrowing the Islamic regime is well known to both protesters and the keen observer, given the state’s unequal access to arms and resources. That said, lessons from the last revolution forces the realization that we simply do not know where these protests will lead. Those truly in solidarity with the Iranian people must maintain a sober analysis regarding the demands of this movement, awareness of the machinations of imperial and regional powers, and pay attention to the political direction of its participants. • read article

Iran finds US-backed MKO fingermarks in riots

The terrorist Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) has reportedly played a major role in intensifying the recent wave of street violence in Iran. 

Iranian security officials reported Saturday that they have identified and arrested a large number of MKO members who were involved in recent riots in Iran’s capital. 

According to the security officials, the arrested members had confessed that they were extensively trained in Iraq’s camp Ashraf to create post-election mayhem in the country. 

They had also revealed that they have been given directions by the MKO command post in Britain. 

Street protests broke out after defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi rejected President Ahmadinejad’s decisive win in the June 12 election. His supporters have staged a series of illegal rallies ever since. 

Iran’s deputy police commander, on Saturday, warned against the mass gatherings, asserting that those who engage in any such actions would be severely reprimanded. 

Earlier on Saturday, MKO leader Maryam Rajavi had supported the recent wave of street violence in Iran during a Saturday address to supporters in Paris. 

Rajavi had reportedly described the MKO terrorists as the real winners of the Iranian election. 

The Mujahedin Khalq Organization is a Marxist guerilla group, which was founded in the 1960s.In the past two decades, MKO leaders have been resettled in the northern outskirts of Paris. 

The terrorists are especially notorious for taking sides with former dictator Saddam Hussein during the war Iraq imposed on Iran (1980-1988). 

The group masterminded a slew of terrorist operations in Iran and Iraq — one of which was the 1981 bombing of the offices of the Islamic Republic Party, in which more than 72 Iranian officials were killed. 

A 2007 German intelligence report from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has identified the MKO as a “repressive, sect-like and Stalinist authoritarian organization which centers around the personality cult of [MKO leaders] Maryam and Masoud Rajavi”. 

Anne Singleton, an expert on the MKO and author of ‘Saddam’s Private Army’ explains that the West aims to keep the group afloat in order to use it in efforts to stage a regime change in Iran. 

“With a new Administration in the White House a pre-emptive strike on Iran looks unlikely. Instead the MKO’s backers have put together a coalition of small irritant groups, the known minority and separatist groups, along with the MKO. These groups will be garrisoned around the border with Iran and their task is to launch terrorist attacks into Iran over the next few years to keep the fire hot,” she explains. 

“The role of the MKO is to train and manage these groups using the expertise they acquired from Saddam’s Republican Guard,” Singleton added. 

A May 2005 Human Rights Watch report also condemns the MKO for running prison camps in Iraq and committing human rights violations. According to report, the outlawed group puts defectors under torture and jail terms.

North Korea: “Sanity” at the Brink

 

Nations that chart a self-defining course, seeking to use their land, labor, natural resources, and markets as they see fit, free from the smothering embrace of the US corporate global order, frequently become a target of defamation. Their leaders often have their moral sanity called into question by US officials and US media, as has been the case at one time or another with Castro, Noriega, Ortega, Qaddafi, Aristide, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez, and others. 

So it comes as no surprise that the rulers of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) have been routinely described as mentally unbalanced by our policymakers and pundits. Senior Defense Department officials refer to the DPRK as a country “not of this planet,” led by “dysfunctional” autocrats. One government official, quoted in the New York Times, wondered aloud “if they are really totally crazy.” The New Yorker magazine called them “balmy,” and late-night TV host David Letterman got into the act by labeling Kim Jong-il a “madman maniac.” 

To be sure, there are things about the DPRK that one might wonder about, including its dynastic leadership system, its highly dictatorial one-party rule, and the chaos that seems implanted in the heart of its “planned” economy. 

But in its much advertised effort to become a nuclear power, North Korea is actually displaying more sanity than first meets the eye. The Pyongyang leadership seems to know something about US global policy that our own policymakers and pundits have overlooked. In a word, the United States has never attacked or invaded any nation that has a nuclear arsenal.  read more 

America’s Human Rights Record: New UN Report Denounces Washington

On May 26, the UN Human Rights Council issued a report titled “Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Including the Right to Development – Report of the Special Rapporteur (Philip Alston) on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.”

Alston was damning in his criticism regarding “three areas in which significant improvement is necessary if the US Government is to match its actions to its stated commitment to human rights and the rule of law:”

[…] In summary, Alston called America’s human rights record “deplorable,” and in need of major changes. In response, the Obama administration charged him with violating his mandate by accusing the US of failing to properly investigate allegations of unlawful US military killings in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Acting deputy at the US mission in Geneva, Larry Richter, said: “We do not believe that military and intelligence operations during armed conflict fall within the special rapporteur’s mandate.” Much more important is his lack of power to act on the crimes he discovered. Still he deserves credit for revealing what US authorities try hard to suppress and ignore.read details of investugatuons into abuses

Afghanistan’s Operation Phoenix

McChrystal is a hired gun, an assassin, a man known for committing war crime atrocities as head of the Pentagon’s infamous Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) – established in 1980 and comprised of the Army’s Delta Force and Navy Seals, de facto death squads writer Seymour Hersh described post-9/11 as an “executive assassination wing” operating out of Dick Cheney’s office.

A 2006 Newsweek profile called JSOC “part of what Vice President Dick Cheney was referring to when he said America would have to ‘work on the dark side’ after 9/11.” It called McChrystal then “an affable but tough Army Ranger” with no elaboration of his “dark side” mission.

In his May 17 article titled “Obama’s Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice,” James Petras called him a “notorious psychopath” in describing him this way:

His rise through the ranks was “marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building.”

His resume shows contempt for human life and the rule of law – a depravity Conrad described in his classic work, “Heart of Darkness:” the notion of “exterminat(ing) all the brutes” to civilize them, and removing lesser people to colonize and dominate them by devising battle plans amounting to genocide. article read

 

Torturing Democracy-3 part video

Watch The Program

Russia demands ‘patience’ on N Korea amid war fears

The US and South Korea are on high alert as a result of an announcement by the North that it had scrapped the treaty that ended the Korean war about 50 years ago. 

North Korea shut down its main reactor in Yongbyon in June 2007 and made a declaration of its nuclear assets a year later, in return for better relations with the US and financial aid. 

However, relations deteriorated again when the US did not deliver on its promised aid and then sponsored a UN Security Council resolution against North Korea when the country launched a rocket carrying a communications satellite in April 2009.  read

Who will Stand Up To America and Israel?”No countries on earth rival the US and Israel for barbaric murderous violence”

“Obama Calls on World to ‘Stand Up To’ North Korea” read the headline. The United States, Obama said, was determined to protect “the peace and security of the world.”

[…] Is this the same America that bombed Serbia, including Chinese diplomatic offices and civilian passenger trains, and pried Kosovo loose from Serbia and gave it to a gang of Muslin drug lords, lending them NATO troops to protect their operation?

Is this the same America that is responsible for approximately one million dead Iraqis, leaving orphans and widows everywhere and making refugees out of one-firth of the Iraqi population?

Is this the same America that blocked the rest of the world from condemning Israel for its murderous attack on Lebanese civilians in 2006 and on Gazans most recently, the same America that has covered up for Israel’s theft of Palestine over the past 60 years, a theft that has produced four million Palestinian refugees driven by Israeli violence and terror from their homes and villages?

Is this the same America that is conducting military exercises in former constituent parts of Russia and ringing Russia with missile bases?

Is this the same America that has bombed Afghanistan into rubble with massive civilian casualties?

Is this the same America that has started a horrific new war in Pakistan, a war that in its first few days has produced one million refugees?

“The peace and security of the world”? Whose world?  read article

Gen. Taguba Alleges Existence of Prisoner Rape Photos; White House Press Secretary Attacks … British Me

In a major story today, London’s Daily Telegraph quoted Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba describing photos (that the Obama administration is fighting to keep secret), which allegedly depict U.S. personnel raping prisoners, other sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube. “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency,” Taguba said. Put that statement against this one from the president: In defending his decision to fight the ACLU in its efforts to have the photos publicly released, Obama said on May 13, “I want to emphasize that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensation...read 

West Plots To Supplant United Nations With Global NATO

[…] “The world of the 192 UN member states has come to a fork in the road. One way leads to a world focused on the well being of society, conflict resolution and peace, i.e. to a life of dignity and human security with social and economic progress for all, wherever they may be as stated in the United Nations Charter. Down the other road is where the nineteenth century ‘Great Game’ for power will be further played out, a course which, in the twenty-first century, will become more extensive and dangerously more aggressive than ever.

“This road supposedly leads to democracy, but in truth it is all about power, control and exploitation.” [13]

Contrasting explicitly what the above excerpt had done tacitly, he remarked of his former employer and its would-be replacement:

“A comparison of the mandates of the United Nations and of NATO shows clearly how opposed the purposes of these two institutions are. In the 63 years of its existence, the United Nations mandate has remained the same.

“The United Nations was created to promote and maintain worldwide peace. NATO exists to assure the self-interest of a group of 26 UN member countries.” [14]

In a section of his article titled “21st century NATO incompatible with UN Charter,” von Sponeck added, “In 1999, NATO acknowledged that it was seeking to orient itself according to a new fundamental strategic concept. From a narrow military defense alliance it was to become a broad based alliance for the protection of the vital resources” needs of its members. Besides the defense of member states’ borders, it set itself new purposes such as assured access to energy sources and the right to intervene in ‘movements of large numbers of persons’ and in conflicts far from the boarders of NATO countries. The readiness of the new alliance to include other countries, particularly those that had previously been part of the Soviet Union, shows how the character of this military alliance has altered.”

“[T]he United Nations monopoly of the use of force, especially as specified in Article 51 of the Charter, was no longer accepted according to the 1999 NATO doctrine.

“NATO’s territorial scope, until then limited to the Euro-Atlantic region, was expanded by its member to encompass the whole world in keeping with a strategic context that was global in its sweep.” [15]

In a following section named “UN-NATO-accord: incompatible with UN Charter,” he exposed a clandestine accord signed between the secretaries general of NATO and the United Nations, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and Ban Ki-moon, respectively, on September 23, 2008, which “took place without any reference to the United Nations Security Council.

“In the generally accepted agreement of stated purposes, one reads of a
‘broader council’ and ‘operative cooperation, for example in ‘peace
keeping in the Balkans and in Afghanistan. Both secretaries general committed themselves to acting in common to meet threats and challenges.

“The UN/NATO accord is anything but neutral and will thus not remain without serious consequences.” [16]

Shortly after the unauthorized pact signed behind the backs of the UN Security Council, in addition to the General Assembly, by NATO chief Scheffer and Ban, who has proven to be as obsequious toward and obedient to the interests of the West as his predecessor had been, the Russian press reported:

“Russia’s representative to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, said that in the document there is not a single word on the UN’s leading role in ensuring stability in the world. 

“NATO and the United Nations have signed a new cooperation accord on prerogatives for UN member states – but have angered Russia by not telling them about it in advance.” [17]

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was similarly caught off guard and indignant alike, stating “”We knew that the UN and NATO secretariats were
drawing up an agreement. And we assumed that before the signing, its draft should be shown to the member states. But it never happened,” accusing Scheffer and Ban of operating secretly and in violation of UN norms.

“The Russian minister said that he discussed the problem with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. ‘I did not hear any reasonable explanations. It surprised me,’ said Lavrov….’We asked the leadership of the two secretariats what it might mean. We’re awaiting answers.'” [18]

Another Russian report added, “Russia has recently vented its displeasure over what it called the ‘furtive signature’ of a cooperation agreement between the secretariats of the United Nations and NATO, which took place late last month. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov complained that this country, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, was not even consulted on the matter.

“Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said recently that Moscow and other UN members had not been consulted on the essence of the UN-NATO cooperation agreement, although, he said, the document contained clauses that concern the prerogatives of UN member states.” [19]

A third source referred to Russian Foreign Minister spokesman Andrei Nesterenko who, in stressing that the surreptitious pact was “riding roughshod over Moscow’s interests,” affirmed that “a big question mark currently hangs over the professional skills of some UN officials, who try to involve the UN Secretary-General in covert activities.” [20]

An Azerbaijani news source added, “If the agreement, signed in September, is only confirming the status quo, it can be surprising why the information about it was not published on the NATO website, which even has a special section called ‘NATO’s relations with the United Nations.’ This fact perpetuates Russia’s perception of NATO as a hostile bloc.” [21]

In a news dispatch titled “UN and NATO team up behind Russia’s back,” Russian envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin – who was himself not informed of the backroom deal – said “NATO should fully acknowledge the UN’s universal role and not try to substitute UN functions.” [22]

In the article discussed earlier, Hans von Sponeck asked “Is the United Nations accord with NATO – a military alliance with nuclear weapons – in contradiction with Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, which requires that conflicts be resolved by peaceful means? Can UN and NATO actions be distinguished when three of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council are also NATO members? How can future violations of international law by NATO be legally prosecuted? Is an institution like NATO, which in 1999, without a UN mandate, unlawfully bombed Serbia and Kosovo, a suitable partner for the United Nations?” [23]

And in a section entitled “UN mandate makes NATO obsolete,” he finished with “Any evaluation of the UN/NATO pact must take into account that NATO is a relic of the Cold War; that NATO, as a Western alliance, is regarded with considerable mistrust by the other 166 United Nations member states; that a primary NATO aim is to assert, by military means, its energy and power interests in opposition to other United Nations member states and that the United States, a founding member of the NATO community, in the most unscrupulous ways, has disparaged the United Nations and broken international law. 

“It is urgent that one or several member states petition the International Court of Justice to rule on the interpretation of the UN/NATO pact of 23 September 2008, in conformity with the Courts statutes. 

“The people of the world have a right to request such a ruling and a right to expect an answer.” [24]  read full article

Abandon the Battlefield. “There’s No Way I’m Going to Deploy to Afghanistan”

Specialist Victor Agosto of the U.S. Army [….] I have concluded that the wars [in Iraq and Afghanistan] are not going to be ended by politicians or people at the top. They are not responsive to the people, they are responsive to corporate America.”

Agosto added, “The only way to make them responsive to the needs of the people is if soldiers won’t fight their wars, and if soldiers won’t fight their wars, the wars won’t happen. I hope I’m setting an example for other soldiers.” read on

Canadians talk to Americans about health care: Video from the Real News

While the debate over changes to the US health-care system continues, lobby groups are investing advertising dollars to get their point across. One such group, Conservatives for Patient’s Rights has released an advertisement outlining Canadian dissatisfaction with government run health care. The Real News Network invited Torontonians to respond. People from Toronto respond to a  deceptive US advertising campaign about the Canadian health-care system. Watch Video

America’s Nightmare: The Obama Dystopia. Manipulation, propaganda, imagery & PR wizardry

 

 

By Andrew Hughes

Global Research, May 23, 2009

After 8 years of the Bush-Cheney nightmare during which we saw the wanton destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, the cynical  negation of centuries of Law designed to protect the most basic human rights and a foreign policy worthy of Genghis Khan, there came along the “Great Black Hope” in the persona of Barack Obama. The collective world consciousness turned uncritically to what was presented as a new era for peace, change and trust in Government.  Never before had one witnessed such an accomplished use of manipulation, propaganda, imagery and public relations wizardry to sell the public a man who was to take the baton from Bush and run with it in the race to destroy the economy, the rights of the people and help birth a nation totally controlled by those who have always lurked in the shadows of power. “Change” was promised and was delivered in the form of a deepening of the already Dystopic  nightmare.  Promises were broken with no apology, the same creative legalese that infested the Bush administration, in the form of John Yoo and Alberto Gonzalez, was again used to deny justice to the inmates of Guantanamo, It was used to justify more torture, more destruction of the Constitution and more illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens.  The President that extended the hand of peace to the Muslim world has murdered hundreds of Pakistani men, women and children. The President who promised accountability in Government has filled his staff with lobbyists, banksters and warmongers. His Attorney General refuses to prosecute some of the worst war crimes committed in modern history and continues to give legal cover to criminals who tortured with impunity. The country has been further bankrupted by the continuing theft of taxpayer money as the Wall St. campaign donors receive their quid pro quo. Obama has stood by idly as Bernancke states that the private Federal Reserve is not answerable to either Congress of the American public. The U.S. taxpayer is now on the hook for $14.3 Trillion and rising. Foreclosures and unemployment are rising with no meaningful efforts by the administration to alleviate the symptoms, never mind the cause. The new image of America is one of tent cities, lengthening soup kitchen lines, sherrifs evicting countless thousands of young and old from their homes, once prosperous towns descending in to an eerie stillness and an increasingly disillusioned populace. The “War on terrorism” has mutated in to a control grid for an increasingly aware population. The foundation for this had already been put in place by Bush with the Patriot Act, Patriot Act 2, Military commissions act and numerous executive orders that strangled what was left of Posse Comitatus and the Constitution.  Homeland Security now defines “Terrorists” as those who believe in the Constitution, the first, second and fourth amendments. Returning veterans are being targeted for a denial of their second amendment rights. A  “Terrorist Watchlist” of more than a million and rapidly growing, is being used as the basis for denying citizens the rights to travel and to work.  Obama is now mulling over the idea of indefinite detention without trial for U.S. citizens. This, from a teacher of the Constitution ! Bills are in congress to criminalize free speech on the Internet via the Cyberbullying Act which will make hurting somebody’s feelings a felony. Just like the Patriot Act this will morph in to a criminalization of political free speech and any criticism of the Government. “Cyberterrorism” is being used as a pretext to bring government regulation to the the last stronghold of unbiased information. Washington has realized that it’s getting harder to get away with their Fascist agenda and are moving to control the field. The populace have become more aware of just what kind of “Change” Obama intended to deliver.  There has been a growing resistance on a state level with several invoking their 9th and 10th Amendment rights in a valiant attempt to stop the Federal Vampire from draining the last drops of blood, the last vestiges of Freedom and Hope.  This is the Dystopic Nightmare that America finds itself in today and each day brings new assaults on Freedom and Sanity. The framework for total control of the citizenry, the economy and the media is being built upon in a relentless aggrandization of Govermental power. Obama sits atop his new Empire still smiling that sickeningly disingenuous smile surrounded by his seasoned courtiers who have worked for decades to bring America in to this new era of the New World Order.

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 Andrew Hughes, Global Research, 2009  The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=13716

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Is Canada Becoming A Safe Haven For War Criminals?

World renowned, award winning journalist John Pilger commented on George Galloway’s autobiography: “Galloway’s work has saved countless lives, particularly in Iraq”. This is an accurate statement about the record of the five-times elected British MP who was described by Canadian Minister for Immigration Jason Kenny as “a threat to Canada’s security” and subsequently banned from entering Canada during March of this year. Juxtaposing the blood-soaked records of George W Bush and Bill Clinton – especially in relation to Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Somalia and elsewhere – with the unimpeachable record of George Galloway MP, the patent rudderless and deceptive nature of the current Canadian government and its media accomplices becomes transparent. The Canadian government evidently embraces the inane ethos: “if your going to kill, make sure you kill millions.” In other words, the tin pot tyrants like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein are to be demonized, subjected to show trials and marketed as a ‘threat’, while those who massacre and torture millions like Bush, Clinton, Rice and Cheney are to be venerated, ingratiated and granted VIP treatment if they choose to come to Canada at any time during their lucrative speaking tours.

The Canadian parliament in its history has never stood in such public execration as it does contemporarily for both its tacit and overt support for some of the worst mass murderers ever to afflict humanity. War criminals emanating from Canada’s behemoth southern neighbour are apparently welcome to spread their malicious propaganda, leaving with a hansom speaker’s fee, all for the pleasure of the wealthy few who can afford the ticket to enter the Gestapo protected venues. In the past eight weeks there have been visits by George W Bush to Calgary (hosted by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce), Condoleezza Rice to Calgary (hosted by the so called U of C School of Public Policy) and imminently George W Bush and Bill Clinton plan to descend upon Canada again, as if it were merely the fifty-first state of the U.S.A, rather than a sovereign country with its own laws and international obligations.  

If Canada is indeed still a sovereign country certainly many of us are finding the boundaries opaque at best.  read

Slouching towards balkanization

 Balochistan has very attractive assets: natural wealth, scarce population, and a port, Gwadar, which is key for Washington’s New Great Game in Eurasia Pipelineistan plans. 

And it’s not only oil and gas. Reko Diq (literally “sandy peak”) is a small town in the deserted Chaghi district, 70 kilometers northwest of already remote Nok Kundi, near the Iran and Afghanistan borders. Reko Diq is the home of the world’s largest gold and copper reserves, reportedly worth more than US$65 billion. According to the Pakistani daily Dawn, these reserves are believed to be even bigger than similar ones in Iran and Chile. 

Reko Diq is being explored by the Australian Tethyan Copper Company (75%), which sold 19.95% of its stake to Chile’s Antofagasta Minerals. Only 25% is allocated to the Balochistan Development Authority. Tethyan is jointly controlled by Barrick Gold and Antofagasta Minerals. The Balochis had to have a serious beef about that: they denounce that their natural wealth has been sold by Islamabad to “Zionist-controlled regimes”. 

Washington is focused on Balochistan like a laser. One of high summer’s blockbusters will be the inauguration of Camp Leatherneck, a vast, brand new US air base in Dasht-e-Margo, the “desert of death” in Helmand province in Afghanistan. Quite a few of Obama’s surge soldiers will be based in Camp Leatherneck – a cross-border, covert ops stone’s throw from southeast Iran and Pakistani Balochistan. 

Under McChrystal, the new US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization top commander in Afghanistan, one should expect a continuous summer blockbuster of death squads, search-and-destroy missions, targeted assassinations, bombing of civilians and all-out paramilitary terrorization of tribal Pashtun villages, community leaders, social networks or any social movement for that matter that dares to defy Washington and provide support for the Afghan resistance. 

“Black Ops” McChrystal is supposed to turn former Chinese leader Mao Zedong upside down – he should “empty the sea” (kill and/or displace an untold number of Pashtun peasants) to “catch the fish” (the Taliban or any Afghan opposing the US occupation). There couldn’t be a better man for the counter-insurgency job assigned by Obama, Petraeus, Clinton and Holbrooke. 

American journalist Seymour Hersh has detailed how McChrystal directed the “executive assassination wing” of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command. No wonder he was a darling of former vice president Dick Cheney and secretary of defense Rumsfeld. The Obama administration’s belief in his extreme terrorization methods qualifies as no more than Rumsfeldian foreign policy. 

And McChrystal still has the luxury of raising any amount of calibrated hell in neighboring Balochistan to suit Washington’s plans – be they to provoke Iranians or incite Balochis to revolt against Islamabad.  read full article

Killing them softly with air strikes: Video

Pepe Escobar on how the rebranded “war on terror” is being sold as a PAKISTANI war. Still another US air strike killing dozens of civilians in Afghanistan, still another promise by the Pentagon to “investigate”, while in Washington President Obama hosts the AfPak summit with “Af” Hamid Karzai” and “Pak” Ali Zardari. Obama’s surge in Afghanistan will ensure a steady supply of “collateral damage”, even though sane military voices condemn “democracy at gunpoint” and Taliban “tacticians” mock Gen. David Petraeus’ counterinsurgency tactics. The Bush “war on terror” has been rebranded as “overseas contingency operations” (OCO) by the Obama administration. Pepe Escobar argues everything remains the same, but with a new twist: Washington selling OCO in AfPak to US public opinion not as an American war – but as a Pakistani war. Watch Video

Rethink Afghanistan (Part 3): The Cost of War : VIDEO

Rethink Afghanistan is a ground-breaking, full-length documentary focusing on the key issues surrounding this war. By releasing this film in parts for free online, we are able to stay on top of news of the war as it continues to unfold. We hope to raise critical questions regarding Afghanistan that Congress must address in oversight hearings, which inform the public and challenge policymakers. We strive for more discussion among experts on Afghanistan, like the debates seen below released in conjunction with our documentary campaign. WATCH

American Amnesia: We Forget Our Atrocities Almost As Soon as We Commit Them

The Torture Paradigm

Over the past 60 years, victims worldwide have endured the CIA’s “torture paradigm,” developed at a cost that reached $1 billion annually, according to historian Alfred McCoy in his book A Question of Torture. He shows how torture methods the CIA developed from the 1950s surfaced with little change in the infamous photos at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. There is no hyperbole in the title of Jennifer Harbury’s penetrating study of the U.S. torture record: Truth, Torture, and the American Way. So it is highly misleading, to say the least, when investigators of the Bush gang’s descent into the global sewers lamentthat “in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way.”

None of this is to say that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al. did not introduce important innovations. In ordinary American practice, torture was largely farmed out to subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly in their own government-established torture chambers. As Allan Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out: “What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system’s torture, which is done by foreigners under U.S. patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so.”

Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but “merely repositioned it,” restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. “[H]is is a return to the status quo ante,” writes Nairn, “the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more U.S.-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years.”

Sometimes the American engagement in torture was even more indirect. In a 1980 study, Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that U.S. aid “has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens,… to the hemisphere’s relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights.” Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same correlation, and also suggested an explanation. Not surprisingly, U.S. aid tends to correlate with a favorable climate for business operations, commonly improved by the murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists and other such actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights.

These studies took place before the Reagan years, when the topic was not worth studying because the correlations were so clear.

Small wonder that President Obama advises us to look forward, not backward — a convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten by them tend to see the world differently, much to our annoyance.  read

On the Unmasking of Demons: Yes We Must

We are a species of superstitious monkeys, in insectoid mutational phase, armed with mass-incineration weaponry, at the edge of a teeming galaxy. All of us are possessed by demons, a lying Legion of deceptions and delusions. Our Earth has maxxed-out on demonic monkeys and now She’s coughing out storms to flush our fires away.

So we’re all in a Panic. Or running for our lives, shivvering in the deep freeze, slogging through toxic flood waters. Deep in the Voodoo, shite out of luck, over the falls in a Titanic barrel of insane monkeys. Because our society is an onion of lies within lies, all ruled over by ominous wargods and mass-incineration weapons. We chatter on about superstitions and pseudo-news, nearly cut off from any natural identity. Our instincts have been hijacked and most of us are living like serfs in Roman-occupied city-ghettos. Being entrained to think we must kill to get our way. This is “God’s will”?  read

Classwar in America, the Ongoing Assault – From the Gilded Age to Tea Bagger Rage, a Romp through the Recent Episodes of the Class War in America

[…] We’re outsiders. The majority of Americans are outsiders looking in on the American dream, albeit a very shallow dream of owning things. They own. We owe. But we are a majority oppressed by our own shame nonetheless.

And as 32.55 million of us receive food stamps, and another 16 million of us are eligible for them, more than 25% of us earn poverty wages and more than 600,000 of us lose our jobs every month, the Obama Administration is leading the charge to push down the living standards of American workers, enforcing the strategy of the plutocracy by way of wage-cutting by Big Business. The Obama Administration has legitimized this with its demands on Chrysler and GM, where new-hires’ wages have been slashed by 50% and cost-of-living raises totally burned, obliterated.

In addition, wages have been lowered for Microsoft contractors, much of the newspaper industry and in many state and local governments. Honda, H-P, Best Buy and Fed Ex have announced wage cuts. Wages for temp workers are falling. Nineteen percent of American workers aged 29 or younger are unemployed. Incomes fell for the third consecutive month in March. Job losses and wage cuts have left American workers to balance on the knife edge of poverty, hunger and homelessness.

The Obama Administration’s enforcement of wage-cutting at Chrysler and GM echoes, exactly, the actions of Obama’s political idol, Ronald Reagan, whose destruction of PATCO was the opening shot for the government-sanctioned tsunami of union-busting and strike-breaking still in force, the leading edge of which is the effort to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act.

Our president has told us Americans should “consume less and save more”. His policies are forcing the majority of American workers to consume less and allowing the plutocracy to save more, stuffing it into those silk-lined pockets. “American” corporations are demanding unconscionable wage cuts while threatening workers with the outsourcing card and relying on co-opted union officials to sell out the rank and file.

And if we get hungry enough, or we start hurting enough to do some REAL protesting, here is where history kicks in. In the space of a few short years we lost JFK, RFK and MLK. Several students were killed at Kent and Jackson State. We backed off and didn’t look back at the history of the Class War in America, which is, after all, a “classless” society. We allowed the brutality with which the labor movement in America was always put down to remain buried.

Americans have learned that every time we rise up, we are viciously whipped back down, leading to an obedient, peasant mentality. We “know better” than to get uppity. We’ve become victims of Maggie Thatcher’s notorious TINA dictum, “there is no alternative.” We allow our children to be mis-educated, as we were, to pledge allegiance and abject obedience to nationalism, xenophobia and consumerism, to accept their place in the pecking order. We just knuckle under and get down to work. (If we’re still allowed to have a job.)

And we still have the nerve to pretend “it” can’t happen here. Benito Mussolini defined “it” best – “FASCISM should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”. But perhaps, since we’re mis-educated and TV-engineered to be less smart than artichokes, we’re able to ignore all the evidence we see around us, refusing to see what our own “lying” eyes are telling us. Maybe we’re just afraid. Not without good reason. But maybe we’re just not hungry enough. Yet. But in the event we finally get fed up with being economically waterboarded, when we’re sick of suffering real, not simulated, drowning as the value of our homes goes underwater, well the plutocracy is prepared for than eventuality. Their minions, the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress stand ready to put us down again, if need be, just like President Herbert Hoover sent Generals Patton and MacArthur, the 12th Infantry, the 3rd Cavalry and six tanks to charge into the Bonus Army with fixed bayonets and adamsite gas during the Depression.

Our own Dear Leaders have already brought combat-hardened troops back from Iraq to deal with us in case we cause “civil unrest”. Remember. Posse comitatus is history. Not to mention habeas corpus. And if our combat troops won’t turn on their own people, today’s Pinkertons, the hired contractor-killers of Blackwater (now Xe) will. They were on the job for the plutocracy in New Orleans after Katrina. That was just a dry run. They’re ready for you, too.

And if you further insist on getting a fair share of the wealth you produce with your labor, they’ll send you on a vacation – to one of Halliburton’s Holiday Hotels, constructed for FEMA under REX-84. This turned abandoned World War II German and Italian POW camps in the U.S. (Did you know we had these on American soil?), Japanese internment camps, closed army bases and mental institutions into detention camps, ostensibly for when we’re overrun by “illegal” aliens, but actually for the uppity. And they’re staffed and waiting for us where we will, perhaps help “American” transnationals achieve corporate nirvana – forced, no-wage labor. read full article

Did CBC Ombudsman cave to Israel lobby pressure? -A Video from The Real News

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land was broadcast on the French CBC on October 23, 2008, provoking a flood of complaints to the Canadian network. These complaints overwhelmingly took the network to task for running what they deemed to be a “pro-Palestinian” film, largely sidestepping the critically acclaimed 2004 documentary’s explicit focus on how pro-Israeli pressure groups methodically influence American media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

CBC management asked the network’s Ombudsman to launch a full-scale investigation into the substance of the complaints and the central charge that the film was unduly biased.

On December 8, 2008, the Ombudsman released her findings. She issued a report concluding that Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land should not have been shown on French CBC at all.

In response to the Ombudsman report, Sut Jhally, the executive director of the Media Education Foundation, the producer and distributor of the film, drafted and sent a detailed letter to the president of the CBC challenging the accuracy and professionalism of the Ombudsman report, and criticizing how CBC management handled the pressure they faced. watch

Pipeline-Istan: Everything You Need to Know About Oil, Gas, Russia, China, Iran, Afghanistan and Obama

 Why Afghanistan matters –– is simply not part of the discussion in the United States. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the liberation of Afghan women.) In part, this is because the idea that energy and Afghanistan might have anything in common is verboten.

And yet, rest assured, nothing of significance takes place in Eurasia without an energy angle. In the case of Afghanistan, keep in mind that Central and South Asia have been considered by American strategists crucial places to plant the flag; and once the Soviet Union collapsed, control of the energy-rich former Soviet republics in the region was quickly seen as essential to future U.S. global power. It would be there, as they imagined it, that the U.S. Empire of Bases would intersect crucially with Pipelineistan in a way that would leave both Russia and China on the defensive.

Think of Afghanistan, then, as an overlooked subplot in the ongoing Liquid War. After all, an overarching goal of U.S. foreign policy since President Richard Nixon’s era in the early 1970s has been to split Russia and China. The leadership of the SCO has been focused on this since the U.S. Congress passed the Silk Road Strategy Act five days before beginning the bombing of Serbia in March 1999. That act clearly identified American geo-strategic interests from the Black Sea to western China with building a mosaic of American protectorates in Central Asia and militarizing the Eurasian energy corridor.

Afghanistan, as it happens, sits conveniently at the crossroads of any new Silk Road linking the Caucasus to western China, and four nuclear powers (China, Russia, Pakistan, and India) lurk in the vicinity. “Losing” Afghanistan and its key network of U.S. military bases would, from the Pentagon’s point of view, be a disaster, and though it may be a secondary matter in the New Great Game of the moment, it’s worth remembering that the country itself is a lot more than the towering mountains of the Hindu Kush and immense deserts: it’s believed to be rich in unexplored deposits of natural gas, petroleum, coal, copper, chrome, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, zinc, and iron ore, as well as precious and semiprecious stones.

And there’s something highly toxic to be added to this already lethal mix: don’t forget the narco-dollar angle — the fact that the global heroin cartels that feast on Afghanistan only work with U.S. dollars, not euros.  READ FULL ARTICLE

Video: Ron Paul Questions Richard Holbrooke about Af-Pak Policy

At the House Foreign Relations Committee Hearing, Ron Paul questions Richard Holbrooke about US policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan. watch

Thoughts On The War Between The USA And Pakistan

Depending on which warmongers you listen to, you may be hearing that America must wage war against Pakistan in order to prevent the Taliban from conquering (or at least destabilizing) Pakistan and seizing the country’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, and/or to ensure that terrorists can never attack the United States as they did on September 11, 2001, and/or to eliminate the “safe havens” from which “insurgents” are attacking American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and/or because the Pakistani army hasn’t been able to defeat the scourge of terrorism all by itself.

But none of this makes any sense. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are under American control, as they have been since September of 2001. The “loose nukes” scenario, which the war against Pakistan is supposedly designed to prevent, is not only a thoroughly fictional argument, but a thoroughly cynical one as well.

If Pakistan’s nukes were not under American control, the Americans wouldn’t dream of attacking Pakistan. (If you’ve been paying attention for any of the previous six years, or six decades, you may recall that the US only attacks countries which have no chance to defend themselves, or to retaliate.)

Furthermore, an all-out attack on Pakistan by the US is more likely to cause fragmentation and destabilization in Pakistan than to bring peace and democracy. (Think of Iraq; think of Afghanistan.) So the idea that an American intervention is necessary to prevent a horrific outcome is equally false, and equally cynical. In fact, a horrific outcome — fragmentation and destabilization — is much preferred by the American warmongers, and that’s why they’re so intent on waging this war. It’s really quite simple, once you cut through all the propaganda.  read article

The Real Face Of War

This is the real face of war, which our engines of mass misinformation will never show you. We owe it to them, to those who died, those who were hideously maimed, to look at these uncompromisingly distressing images, and reflect upon this criminal madness, to ponder the reasons why such people were put, found themselves, in harm’s way…and who put them there…in the hope that eventually, more and more people will come to understand the actual mainsprings of war, to spot and reject the big lies the masses are constantly fed, and mobilize to make them-at last-a thing of the past.     look at pictures of war without the hollywood background music

read the full article here

Understanding North Korea

While many people can recite the anti-north Korea catechism – garrison state, hermit kingdom, international pariah – they’ll admit that what they know about the country, apart from the comic book caricatures dished up by the media, is fuzzy and vague. But this has always been so. As early as 1949, Anna Louise Strong could write that “there is little public knowledge about the country and most of the headlines distort rather than reveal the facts.” (3) Cumings dismisses US press reports on north Korea as “uninformative, unreliable, often sensationalized” and as deceiving, not educational.

 

One of the reasons the headlines distort, even today, especially today, can be summed up in a syllogism. World War II, as it was waged in the Pacific, was in large part a struggle between the dominant economic interests of the United States and the dominant economic interests of Japan for control of the Pacific, including the Korean peninsula. Japan had occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945, until it was driven out by the Korean resistance, one of whose principal figures was north Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, and the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific war. After Tokyo’s surrender, the US tried to assert control over Japan’s former colonial possessions, including Korea. Kim’s guerilla state upset those plans. The corporate rich and hereditary capitalist families that dominate both US foreign policy and the mass media recognize north Korea to be a threat to their interests. The DPRK condones neither free trade, free enterprise nor free entry of US capital. Were it allowed to thrive, it would provide a counter-example to US-enforced neo-liberalism, a model other countries might follow, a model revolutionaries, like Che, have found inspiration in. The headlines deceive, rather than educate, because north Korea is against the interests of those who shape them.

 

My perspective is not that of the mainstream or of the investors, bankers and wealthy families who, in multifarious ways, define it. I am not for subjugating north Korea, nor for sanctions or war or forcing north Korea to disarm, and I am certainly not for what John Bolton, US ambassador to the UN, once called Washington’s policy toward north Korea. Asked by the New York Times to spell out Washington’s stance toward the DPRK, Bolton “strode over to a bookshelf, pulled off a volume and slapped it on the table. It was called ‘The End of North Korea.'” “‘That,’ he said, ‘is our policy.'” (4) I do not believe that Kim Jong-il is insane. The insanity slur is a way of giving some substance to the perfectly ludicrous claim that north Korea is a danger to the world. It is not. The only threat north Korea poses is the threat of a potential self-defense to long-standing US plans to dominate the Korean peninsula from one end to the other. read on

In Washington, torture seems to be a bipartisan sport or Torture whitewash from The Dark Side

[…]
Everyone knew about the torture. Former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who along with Karl “Machiavelli” Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby was one of the leakers of the identity of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent Valerie Plame in the infamous Niger yellowcake affair, admitted to al-Jazeera that “in hindsight”, “maybe” he should have resigned. Former executive director of the 9/11 Commission Philip Zelikow, very close to secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, also has joined the swelling crowd of “I was against it, too, but in the end I did not resign”. 

More crucially, Armitage also told al-Jazeera why this may well end up being … just another whitewash. “I don’t think the members of the Senate particularly want to look into these things because they will have to look at themselves in the mirror. Where were they? … They were AWOL, absent without leave.” Nobody should expect madam speaker Nancy Pelosi to investigate herself. In Washington, torture seems to be a bipartisan sport. 

Armitage also told al-Jazeera how he and his then-boss, secretary of state Colin Powell, “lost” the battle to respect the Geneva Conventions during Bush’s first term. Japanese officers were tried for war crimes after World War II – by the United States – because they, among other practices, used … waterboarding. That does not seem to apply to Bush administration officials. Welcome to another instance of American exceptionalism.  READ REPORT

The Destabilization of Pakistan: Finding Clarity in the Baluchistan Conundrum

As in all of his analyses of the battle for Pakistan, Talha Mujaddidi 

provides a rare look into the internal struggle of the Pakistan people and the interference in their domestic affairs by the United States, India and other foreign elements. For those who are unfamiliar with the terms, places and names in this report, Talha provides a glossary at the end of the article. It is especially important that we learn and understand what is happening in Pakistan as Washington is opening up a new front in this country in their “war on terror”. – Les Blough, Axis of Logic Editor

---

(Source: PNAC)

April 23, 2009

Excerpt: “The problem for US is that BLA alone is not able to break away Baluchistan from Pakistan. Of the 5% population of Baluchistan they don’t even have support of 10% Balochi population. The Pakistan Army and ISI are resisting the assault in national and strategic interests of Pakistan. The Great Game of Brzezinski will surely continue in Baluchistan and rest of Pakistan, the people of Pakistan are ready to counter this great game now we need leadership and some courage. It will take some time to achieve courage and leadership but it will come eventually. Street revolutions are easy to carry out the hard part is the mental revolution. That is what is required right now to challenge the US global hegemony.”

Baluchistan is strategically located East of Iran and to the South of Afghanistan. It has a port at Gwadar that was built by China. Gwadar lies at the opening of Strait of Hormuz. Baluchistan has huge quantities of natural gas, and unexplored oil reserves. More importantly US wants to control the port of Gwadar, and eventually start their dream oil pipeline from Central Asia, through Afghanistan into Baluchistan and Gwadar. Baluchistan is the largest province of Pakistan in terms of area and it covers almost 48% of Pakistan’s area. But its population accounts for only 5% of the total population of Pakistan. Ethnically Baluchistan is divided into Balochs, and Pathans, followed by other small minorities. The state capital is Quetta, (recently termed as nerve center of Taliban by US Generals).

Like all histories in South Asia, or Middle East, the history of Baluchistan is long, complex, and would require a long article to cover all the details. So a brief synopsis is sufficient to get us rolling before we come to the point. read article

Media Disinformation: Reframing the War in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a “Class War”

[…] we may soon see state and media agencies in the U.S., UK, and Canada shifting their war propaganda to suggest that the Operation Enduring Freedom and NATO forces fight to usurp the Taliban’s claim as liberators of the poor in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This argument is as threadbare as the propaganda Western forces were acting as liberators of women, and it is equally as likely to fail.

The Obama administration is deploying a military surge in Afghanistan pushing the combined total of OEF and NATO forces in Central Asia close to the 100,000 mark. The OEF forces also seem to be in preparation for an escalation of military activities not only in Pashtun regions of Pakistan, but also in Balochistan. An attack on Baloch Pakistanis could draw Baloch insurgents from Iran and western Afghanistan into the war. This could provide a pretext to attack eastern Iran and establish OEF and NATO forces in the yet impenetrable Baloch province of Nimroz in the far west of Afghanistan.

An invasion of northern Pakistan seems ever more imminent, given the failures of escalating covert actions. State agencies and news media have for some time been fanning fears by suggesting Taliban forces will seize Pakistani nuclear arms. Since the first U.S. presidential debate, Obama has stated he would not hesitate to bomb Pakistan if Pakistani nuclear weapons fell into the wrong hands.

Westerners may be led to fear a class war led by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the way they were previously led to fear the Taliban as misogynist Islamists. However, the real reasons for the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, remain the same as ever, the geopolitical manoeuvrings of a superpower to maximise state power and facilitate the accumulation of capitalist wealth. •READ ARTICLE