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War and Lies – Governments Lie, We Die
A look at the lies and propaganda used to start and maintain wars. From WWI up to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, soldiers have been duped into believing they are fighting for a “good” cause. Yet, as the wars have all been based on lies, all soldiers who have died have died needlessly. And of the ones who return, many are seriously ill from exposure to chemical and biological hazards, on top of being injected with multiple experimental and dangerous vaccines – the military are used as guinea pigs then kicked to the kerb by their government who then lie and cover up the issue.
The cries to war by governments haven’t always been unanimous. Many politicians have spoken out against it and been either ignored or ostracised. Ron Paul And Dennis Kucinich are two of these and are featured in this clip giving their stance against going to war.
War is only beneficial to those who create, steer and profit financially from the perpetual war machine – their hands are stained with the blood of millions. What, finally, is being attacked here is the Military-Industrial Complex. We need to pinpoint the Complex as being the criminal and mount an all-out attack on it and its supporters. It and its proponents have gotten away with mass murder for too long.
Shootings: A Symptom of how Afghanis view the Occupation
Many of us have probably viewed long coverage of the funerals of soldiers recently. The most recent deaths involved 5 British soldiers shot dead by an Afghan who they were apparently training as a Policeman.
With all the media pontificating about ‘vetting procedures’ and ’security’, is there any analysis of the likely fact that this incident is a symptom of how the Afghans in general feel about our presence there? The BBC’s report described the alleged attacker – an Afghan Policeman the British Forces were training, as an individual who had gone “Rogue”. An odd description to make of an individual in his own country being trained as a collaborator of the occupation forces.
One thing must be made clear: occupying armies do not have any rights. They do not have the right to be safe from being killed by someone who they thought they had turned into a pet policeman to serve the interests of a US puppet government and they do not have the right to be called ‘heroes’. They are paid enforcers for Imperialistic Aggression – there is nothing ‘heroic’ about our presence in Afghanistan.
The government and media would have us believe that the war we have started in this enormously ethnically diverse region is a black and white issue of good guys and bad guys: US/Nato Forces good, Taliban bad, Hamid Karzai and his armed forces & Police good, “al Qaeda” insurgents bad. The fact that we are propping up a puppet regime of some of the worst drug dealers and warlords in the region – every bit as unpleasant as the numerous factions of the Taliban – seems to be completely absent from media analysis, as is the salient fact that such a ‘government’ cannot possibly be described honestly as a ‘democracy’ – ‘Dictatorship Lite” would be more appropriate.
The deaths themselves, and the subsequent funerals, all become the opposite of what they should be: a distorted, drawn out exercise in propaganda to further the war resulting in even more tragic deaths based on nothing but lies, instead of a motive for the media to honestly analyse this conflict and seek a withdrawal. The jingoistic baying for blood in the tabloid press will even further divide the population at home.
The idea that murdering Afghan tribesman and bombing villages, while trampling all over the rights and dignity of the indigenous people will reduce the threat of terrorism in the UK is absurd. The opposite is true. The longer we stay, the more the Afghan people will turn against us in body as well as in mind. It is no argument to say ‘we need to stay to get the job done’. There is no ‘job’ – only the Hegemonic ambitions of the United States who seeks to control Central Asia and its important oil and gas reserves to fuel its continuing world power status and deny Russia and China those same resources.
Today, reports were coming in of the shooting dead of US soldiers in an army base on home soil by one Major Nidal Malik Hasan. What little has emerged indicates that this Muslim American of Middle Eastern origin, was suffering from racial abuse. Is it any wonder that such things happen when our soldiers are encouraged to dehumanise and kill muslims abroad? Is it any wonder that the victim of this abuse begins to see his ‘fellow’ soldiers as the enemy?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: afghanistan, geopolitics, wordpress political blogs
House Resolution designates Venezuela a state sponsor of Terrorism
At a time of growing US poverty, hunger, homelessness, and despair, imperial wars without end, and the Obama administration even worse than its predecessor, Venezuela …
Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: venezuela, wordpress political blogs
Make Wars History: A Civil Obedience Campaign
Make Wars History is an association of peace activists working to end war. Horrified at the casual way in which the US and UK Governments violated international law by waging war on Iraq and Afghanistan killing thousands of innocent people, peace activists set up an international civil obedience campaign to force Coalition Governments and leaders to obey the laws of war.
Politicians who start wars break the law and breach their oaths of office. To be effective the laws of war require politicians to obey them, police to enforce them, the public to uphold them and offenders to answer to them in court.
We will stop governments from waging war by ensuring that police arrest leaders who start wars, courts try politicians for complicity in war, taxpayers withhold taxes that pay for war, armed forces refuse to fight illegal war, businesses refuse to supply weapons of war, journalists tell the truth about war, the public learns the laws of war and Parliaments legislate to prohibit all war.
You can help by joining the world’s first civil obedience campaign pursuing the path of peace, justice and the rule of law.
Europe must stop being so submissive to US says Brussels Think Tank
In a week when European affairs are prominent, a study by an influential Brussels think tank suggests the EU is going about things the wrong way. The Europeans must stop being so submissive, they must present a united front on foreign policy and they must work toward a “post-American” state of affairs, the study says.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: european union, wordpress political blogs
Will the Empire end in Good Leadership or Blood?
“The silver lining is that we manage this [transition] with good leadership, consistent, sustained good leadership … it has to be twenty to twenty-five years of good leadership. Where we gonna find that with our political process?”
“Think about 2000, I sat there as a member of the Republican party and I said to myself, My god, three hundred million people in this country and all we can come up with is Al Gore and George W. Bush! My god, how do we change that? I think that’s part of the problem, that we have got to have sustained leadership. We’ve got to have good leadership and we’ve got to begin meeting these challenges.”
“If we want oil, if we want gas, if we want it for our allies — one of the things that wasn’t mentioned about Mohammed Mossadeq, in ‘53 Truman didn’t want to do it, Truman was adamantly opposed to it. Truman didn’t like the CIA very much. Read his editorial in the Washington Post, December 22, 1963, right after Kennedy was assassinated. Truman says, I didn’t recognize the CIA I created, that ain’t the CIA I created.”
“One of the reasons Eisenhower changed his mind, because Eisenhower came in opposed also, one of the reasons was a guy by the name of Allen Dulles at the CIA and a guy by the name of Winston Churchill who’d come back to power in the UK. And both were essentially saying not just that the Communists were coming … which was kind of farcical but they were saying the Marshall Plan, the Marshall Plan and England and England. Because this money was huge, coming from the AIOC into the coffers of the Europeans and part into England. And you needed cheap oil to fuel the recovery of England and the recovery of Europe after that very cataclysmic war for them. We were the only nation essentially that was unscathed. The rest of Europe and Japan were ruined, they had to start over again. So that was part of the motivation.”
“If part of the motivation is that we have to go after oil and gas in the world then, by god, we better start telling the American people about this, shouldn’t we? And we should give the American people, including you here tonight, a right to vote on this! And you should have the right to say, that’s not the way we want to do it.”
“I believe the blueprint is the better way to do it, I believe that we should deal with world leaders, that the marketplace … ought to designate where this goes and if it starts running out and we haven’t made the transition fast enough to the basket of energy resources that we’re gonna have to have it administered somehow and you don’t administer — as I was looking at doing in war planning in the US Pacific Command in the mid-’eighties by mounting the Arabian Peninsula with five million American soldiers, taking it over, putting the oil wells under the UN in a trusteeship and administering them for the world. That’s not the way to do it! You need to get talking beforehand, you need to get dealing diplomatically beforehand, you need to work on the problem. You do not need bombs, bullets and bayonets! And I’m a soldier up here telling you because soldiers die, soldiers get wounded. I tell my students that the most fateful decision a President can make is the decision to send young boys and young girls to die for state purposes. And something we forget, to kill others for state purposes. Even by DoD’s estimate we’ve killed one hundred thousand in Iraq. I think it’s more like three hundred thousand. We have sent the greatest refugee problem into Syria and Jordan that the world confronts right now … and where do you see it in an American newspaper? No one is reporting it.”
“How do we Americans get out of this mess? This fiscal mess, this war instrument, the highest use mess, this business of presidents thinking that the only disciplined instrument of national power they have lives in the Pentagon? It isn’t going to be because of President Obama, it isn’t going to be because of national security adviser Jim Jones, it isn’t going to be because of secretary Clinton, it’s only going to happen if we Americans say we’re fed up with it. It’s only going to happen if we begin to stop doing what we’ve been doing for the past, I don’t know, my lifetime, and I’ve been right there with you. We’ve been so damned apathetic about our government.”
…”And we have allowed power to be used and misused in this country, particularly since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. It’s been going on for a long time … Where is the debate going on, where is the discussion going on? It isn’t in the Congress of the United States. There are people over there who do not even realize that we are bankrupt. They think we can continue to print money because they’ve been printing money for so long that that is a lifestyle for them! The only way this is going to change is from the ground up. And we will be, let me say as cynically as I can, probably the first democratic republic possessed of an empire, commercial or territorial or otherwise, to resurrect itself from the ashes because history says we’re going down. That’s what history says. I dare you to name a single empire in human history that has survived. It is nowhere written in stone that the American empire will be exceptional.”
“So it’s about time we get busy and do everything in our power to make sure that whatever is happening happens so that our posterity which we seem to have forgotten about, so that our posterity survives with some prospects for the future … Collectively [our children] are going to have a lower standard of living. That’s the reality. Whether they turn that around so that their generation [and future] generations after them even have a place that is free, that is marked by democratic principles, that looks like a well-governed republic that isn’t dominated by its military, that isn’t physically irresponsible, it’s up to them. That’s the challenge they have. We have not left them, will not leave them a great opportunity in that regard. The challenge is much greater than it was for my generation or the generations before that, in my view.”
“This fiscal crisis … is more profound than 1929 and we will see the results of that slowly over the next five to ten years. It is going to be difficult, it is going to be challenging, it is going to be extremely hard. And Afghanistan and Iraq are going to be solved in that sense … all of these things are coming, all of these things can be dealt with, all of these things can be managed with good leadership. But most of all they require a vigilant, alert, constantly-watching , constantly-overseeing electorate. And that may be the greatest challenge of all.”
Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: geopolitics, oil and gas, usa, wordpress political blogs
USUK made use of Uzbek torture
Former British ambassador, Craig Murray, says UK and USA sent prisoners to Uzbekistan to be tortured
Here Craig Murray describes the US ally, Uzbekistan, as a totalitarian dictatorship left over from the former Brezhnev, Soviet regime which holds over ten thousand political prisoners. “They still operate the old, Soviet gulags.”
“Torture in Uzbekistan isn’t unusual. It happens to several thousands of people every year … The intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA and passed onto MI6 because MI6 and the CIA share all their intelligence.”
“When people were being tortured they were being told to confess to membership of Al Qaeda. They were being told to confess to have been in training camps in Afghanistan and told to confess to have met Osama Bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes. They spoke of Uzbeks having been in Al Qaeda, in training camps and meeting Osama Bin Laden. In fact we were now in 2002-2003 when we didn’t know where Osama Bin Laden was and the way he managed to see thousands of Uzbeks every year it would have been easier to track him down I felt!”
“It wasn’t hard to put two and two together and work out the fact that every political prisoner I knew of in Uzbekistan was tortured and the fact that we knew of what they were being forced to confess under this torture and the CIA material came up with the same, rather dodgy narrative. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together and realise that the intelligence material was coming from torture.”
“Before I did anything I wanted to make sure I was on safe ground so I asked my deputy to go to the American Embassy and say to them, ‘My ambassador is worried because he thinks your intelligence is coming from torture.’ She came back and reported to me the reply from the CIA head in the station at Tashkent [which] was, ‘Yes, of course it’s coming from torture, We don’t see that as a problem in the context of the war on terror.’”
“I did see that as a problem, particularly when I discovered that the CIA were bringing in people, flying in people to Uzbekistan and handing them over to the Uzbek security services … I falsely presumed that these people they were bringing in and handing over to the security services were Uzbeks who had been captured elsewhere and brought back to Uzbekistan. I did not realise that they were of many other nationalities being handed over to be tortured.”
“But they were being tortured, I knew, [but] that Uzbekistan was a destination for the extraordinary rendition system from all over the world I really didn’t quite realise at the time. We now know, following for example the Council of Europe’s investigation that 90% of the aeroplanes that stopped at the famous secret prison in Poland had Tashkent as their next destination.”
“I complained back to London. I said we’re getting this evidence from torture. It’s illegal, it’s immoral and it’s unreliable. It’s vastly exaggerating the strength of Al Qaeda in Central Asia … I got called back to London and I expected there to have a sensible talk about the merits and demerits of intelligence and how much evidence I had that it was obtained under torture. I was absolutely stunned, genuinely stunned –it changed my whole world-view in an instant– to be told that London knew that it was coming from torture, that it wasn’t illegal because our legal advisers thought that under the United Nations’ convention against torture it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn’t do the torture ourselves.”
Murray’s first-hand evidence clearly illustrates how Blair and the British government were complicit in Bush’s brutal, fake war on terror.
Craig Murray’s Blog
Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: 'war on terror', craig murray, uzbekistan, wordpress political blogs, torture, USUK, extraordinary rendition
The War Criminals Vote: Blair or Karadzic for EU President?
EU President? Where I come from decent people wouldn’t walk on the same side of the street as Tony Blair.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: eu presidency, tony blair, war crimes, wordpress political blogs
The Military-Industrial-Congressional Cabal, Part Two
“The Japanese and Chinese and others are paying for our wars. How much longer will they continue to do that? I’d submit that they won’t continue very much longer at all.”
“So we’re coming to a fiscal crisis point that will not only stop these two wars, regardless of what we think about them. It will probably stop us being able to do just anything overseas. You will probably see forces beginning to come home from Germany, from Korea and from other places where we have extended them to protect the peripheries of our empire. What I’m talking about, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the American empire.”
Wilkerson then goes onto confirm that the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is really about oil.
“So if there is a strategic reality for our being in that region, if that strategic reality is one that Cheney and Bush, and now apparently some members of the Obama administration, believe essential to the future of our allies — and yet our fiscal condition is going to compel us to retrench, where does that leave us?”
“Maybe you’re happy that we’re coming home, maybe you’re happy that the military is going to have to confront this fiscal situation? I am because I see a silver lining to this. I see a gradual movement away from being, shall we say, primus inter pares [first among equals] to being pares inter pares [equals among equals]. I see us moving away from being the hegemon of the world which was clearly the decision of the Bush administration when it published its national security strategy –look at section five– in 2001 and 2002 to being a cooperating, consulting, reasonably powerful and willing to lead when leadership is required, country.”
“Wow! Does that sound like America pre-WWII maybe, in a certain way? Does that sound like America living up to what it’s supposed to be, a democratic republic?”
