Tuesday 26th of November 2024

when will the bad dream end .....

when will the bad dream end .....

In a normal country, war is front-page news. It is a big deal to invade and bomb another nation. Most of the world's people can probably name all the foreign governments their own government is at war with.

If any other industrialized nation were bombing Pakistan, for example, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, the average taxpayer would be aware. It would be the biggest news story. If you are a typical person living in a normal country, and your government threatens to invade, say, Eritrea, you would probably hear something about it. And you would probably even want to know where Eritrea is on a map.

The United States is not a normal country. If it ever was one, it certainly isn't now. Its imperial foreign policy has long made it special, and now that it's the world's lone superpower - with an effective monopoly on aerial warfare, calling the shots as to who can have nukes, claiming the unilateral right to start wars against anyone - the U.S. government has become so belligerent, and especially in remote lands, that American wars have become routine, its casualties relegated to the back page.

This decade has obviously been especially bad. Nine years ago, the Twin Towers fell, the Pentagon was hit, and the United States, its government and political culture, fell under a spell of mass delusion that still shows no signs of abating. It has been nine whole years since 9/11, and it is starting to look like the "post-9/11" insanity that marked America under Bush has become a permanent feature of the American landscape.

When Will the Bad Dream End

down the road a bit .....

President Obama in warning against the Florida pastor's plan to burn the Koran stated,

"This is a recruitment bonanza for al Qaeda. You could have serious violence in places like Pakistan or Afghanistan. This could increase the recruitment of individuals who would be willing to blow themselves up in American cities or European cities."

It's funny how BO (or his predecessor) never cited past American government policies as being a recruitment bonanza for al Qaeda. Only a handful of misguided activists at the Florida church using their own property and their privately acquired copies of the Koran have such an effect in the President's view.

Here is a partial list of the past as well as some on-going American foreign policy interventions that - by official standards - have had no influence in empowering al Qaeda:

The combined British/American overthrow of the democratically elected head of state in Iran in 1953, replacing him with the hated Shah and his secret police who the U.S. trained to murder thousands of Iranians.

  1. In 1987 the U.S. militarily supported Saddam Hussein in the Iraqi war with Iran.
  2. In 1988 the U.S. ship Vincennes, stationed in the Persian Gulf, shot down a commercial jetliner, killing 290 Iranian civilians.
  3. After the Gulf War, the U.S. led an embargo against Iraq, allowing no humanitarian or medical aid. The results, according to UN estimates: 10,000 Iraqi deaths per month with the toll including more than 300,000 children. Then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright when asked said it was "worth it." Albright never retracted her statement nor was it ever repudiated by an American president.
  4. In 1998 President Clinton bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan. A number of totally innocent civilians were killed.
  5. European armies, rather than native peoples, drew many of the borders in North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and southwest Asia.
  6. The Saudi government, the Kuwaiti government, and the Afghani government are actively supported with foreign aid by the U.S. despite the fact that they routinely oppress their people.
  7. The war in Iraq since 2003 that has resulted in a minimum of 97,000 civilian deaths as well as the displacement of more than a million civilians.
  8. The war in Afghanistan since 2001 that has resulted in a minimum of 6,000 civilian deaths.
  9. Predator strikes in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.

But, again according to the official bi-partisan view, none of these actions have caused blowback against Americans or Europeans.

Finally, we know what the CIA meant when it coined the term "blowback" - hostility over Koran burning. Also, we now know what Noam Chomsky, 9-11; Rick Maybury, The Thousand Year War; Robin Wright, Sacred Rage; and Chalmers Johnson, Blowback must have had in mind when the penned their works.

It's refreshing to know that Koran burning is the provocation that incites the Islamic world and is the only thing we have to end to protect Americans from more terrorism - our imperialistic foreign policy, now under Barack Obama, can continue without any consequence whatsoever.

Jim Cox is a professor of economics and is the author of The Concise Guide to Economics and Minimum Wage, Maximum Damage.

fool's paradise .....

I believe America today is trapped inside a nightmare dystopian novel combining the worst of Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 where we are forced to endure perpetual war, pervasive surveillance and constant attempts at public mind control. The term "Pavlov's dog" usually describes the conditioning of individuals or a population who merely react to a repeated situation rather than using critical thinking.

This conditioning was a major theme of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World published in 1932 about a future totalitarian one-world state. Today a tragically similar environment allows a small group of elites to control and manipulate our nation to increase their enormous wealth through mercantilist central banking policies at the expense of our country, economy and citizens.

Now we are warned how 5 EU Airports Are Targets For A 'Commando-Like Attack' but how do we know this is a real threat based on actual intelligence instead of a false-flag operation to justify and create public support for expanded military action maybe in Pakistan?

Remember to date, the record for US intelligence getting anything right is very poor and on par with most government agencies and departments but they want us to believe they are doing better. Maybe it is time for more funding for their generally inept bureaucracies and they need a victory to justify their existence and additional funding or could this be CYA precaution in case the threat is real?

Daily we observe the apparent total incompetence of our Washington politicians, federal programs and actions here at home and abroad but they want us to believe in their latest terrorist attack warnings apparently planned by Osama bin Laden against European targets. From the news and background accounts in the establishment media, we are to assume the US State Department and intelligence services are right on top of the situation and getting even better. This should be expected as the War On Terror moves forward and our liberties and freedoms are forced to take a backseat for the duration of the conflict.

I don't mean to be critical of "Washington intelligence" which is certainly an oxymoron in itself but they did miss the entire collapse of the Soviet Union. They also failed miserably regarding Iraq when they fell for the false intelligence of Saddam's WMD provided by Iran which allowed the United States to take out the primary military power and bulwark holding back a resurgent Iran.

No one wants to admit the truth of how Washington has spent from $1 to $3 trillion dollars, thousands of Americans killed with tens of thousands more wounded, not to mention over 100,000 Iraqi civilians while the real victor in the war, Iran never fired a shot or spent a dollar.

But they want you to know US intelligence is improving since we somehow determined that Osama planned the 9/11 terror attacks within 2 hours of the planes striking the World Trade Center. Now we can even tie Osama into future terror attacks, (although we can't find him or determine if he is alive) even before they take place.

How convenient Osama bin Laden has become when the Washington elites need to generate public support for an expansion of war and aggression. If an attack doesn't happen, I'm sure they will be able to capture, waterboard and convict a few wannabe terrorists and save the day for Europe and America. After all, there really are millions of extremists who want to do us harm primarily because of our military aggression and foreign policy. We will be told, the failed attack was planned by bin Laden and he is obviously in Pakistan since we can't find him in Afghanistan.

Therefore we will have reason to increase military incursions, drone attacks and continue to expand the Afghanistan war aimed at the Pashtun people there and in Pakistan. If a real or contrived terror attack actually happens, we still go into Pakistan with a European and American public clamoring with the aid of the media and neocon thinkers for vengeance and retribution.

I fear we are being conditioned for perpetual war abroad and a police state at home. Like Pavlov's dogs I'm salivating already but not because I'm hungry for war but rather because I long for peace.

Washington's Latest Terror Warning

crying wolf .....

A US terror alert issued this week about al-Qaida plots to attack targets in western Europe was politically motivated and not based on credible new information, senior Pakistani diplomats and European intelligence officials have told the Guardian.

The non-specific US warning, which despite its vagueness led Britain, France and other countries to raise their overseas terror alert levels, was an attempt to justify a recent escalation in US drone and helicopter attacks inside Pakistan that have "set the country on fire", said Wajid Shamsul Hasan, the high commissioner to Britain.

Hasan, a veteran diplomat who is close to Pakistan's president, suggested the Obama administration was playing politics with the terror threat before next month's mid-term congressional elections, in which the Republicans are expected to make big gains.

He also claimed President Obama was reacting to pressure to demonstrate that his Afghan war strategy and this year's troop surge, which are unpopular with the American public, were necessary.

"I will not deny the fact that there may be internal political dynamics, including the forthcoming mid-term American elections. If the Americans have definite information about terrorists and al-Qaida people, we should be provided [with] that and we could go after them ourselves," Hasan said.

"Such reports are a mixture of frustrations, ineptitude and lack of appreciation of ground realities. Any attempt to infringe the sovereignty of Pakistan would not bring about stability in Afghanistan, which is presumably the primary objective of the American and Nato forces."

Dismissing claims of a developed, co-ordinated plot aimed at Britain, France and Germany, European intelligence officials also pointed the finger at the US, and specifically at the White House. "To stitch together [the terror plot claims] in a seamless narrative is nonsensical," said one well-placed official.

Barack Obama Accused of Exaggerating Terror Threat

from the dark side .....

Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the "good guys" spreading "democracy" and "liberty" around the world. When the United States inflicts unnecessary death and destruction, it's viewed as a mistake or an aberration.

In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a "mistake" nor an "aberration" but rather conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the "dark side."

There is a dark - seldom acknowledged - thread that runs through U.S. military doctrine, dating back to the early days of the Republic.

This military tradition has explicitly defended the selective use of terror, whether in suppressing Native American resistance on the frontiers in the 19th Century or in protecting U.S. interests abroad in the 20th Century or fighting the "war on terror" over the last decade.

The American people are largely oblivious to this hidden tradition because most of the literature advocating state-sponsored terror is carefully confined to national security circles and rarely spills out into the public debate, which is instead dominated by feel-good messages about well-intentioned U.S. interventions abroad.

Over the decades, congressional and journalistic investigations have exposed some of these abuses. But when that does happen, the cases are usually deemed anomalies or excesses by out-of-control soldiers.

But the historical record shows that terror tactics have long been a dark side of U.S. military doctrine. The theories survive today in textbooks on counterinsurgency warfare, "low-intensity" conflict and "counter-terrorism."

Some historians trace the formal acceptance of those brutal tenets to the 1860s when the U.S. Army was facing challenge from a rebellious South and resistance from Native Americans in the West. Out of those crises emerged the modern military concept of "total war" -- which considers attacks on civilians and their economic infrastructure an integral part of a victorious strategy.

In 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman cut a swath of destruction through civilian territory in Georgia and the Carolinas. His plan was to destroy the South's will to fight and its ability to sustain a large army in the field. The devastation left plantations in flames and brought widespread Confederate complaints of rape and murder of civilians.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, Col. John M. Chivington and the Third Colorado Cavalry were employing their own terror tactics to pacify Cheyennes. A scout named John Smith later described the attack at Sand Creek, Colorado, on unsuspecting Indians at a peaceful encampment:

"They were scalped; their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word." [U.S. Cong., Senate, 39 Cong., 2nd Sess., "The Chivington Massacre," Reports of the Committees.]

Surprise - The Very Dark Side of US History