Terrorism

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After Weeks of Revolution, ‘Day of Cleaning’ in Cairo | AOL News

At the epicenter of the protest that brought down the three-decade regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, young men and women took to the streets again today — only this time, with a different agenda. Armed with brooms, gloves and trash bags, they launched a massive cleanup following 18 straight days of unrest that debilitated the country.

“We’re taking care of the square, and then we’ll clean up the whole country,” Mohammed El Tayeb said while standing amid the volunteer cleaning crews sweeping up Tahrir Square. “This is a beautiful country. Now it’s ours and we’re going to take care of it.”

Across the crowded square, young men walked with paper signs taped to their chests that read: “Sorry for the disturbance, we’re building Egypt.” After days of protests that had such names as the “Day of Rage” and “Day of Millions,” today’s gathering was called the “Day of Cleaning.” A new era has dawned upon the country of 80 million. Read more…

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The Worldwide Network of US Military Bases: The Global Deployment of US Military Personnel | Global Research

By Prof. Jules Dufour

Editor’s Note: The Worldwide control of humanity’s economic, social and political activities is under the helm of US corporate and military power. Underlying this process are various schemes of direct and indirect military intervention. These US sponsored strategies ultimately consist in a process of global subordination.

Where is the Threat?

The 2000 Global Report published in 1980 had outlined “the State of the World” by focusing on so-called  “level of threats” which might negatively influence or undermine US interests.

Twenty years later, US strategists, in an attempt to justify their military interventions in different parts of the World, have conceptualized the greatest fraud in US history, namely “the Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT). The latter, using a fabricated pretext  constitutes a global war against all those who oppose US hegemony. A modern form of slavery, instrumented through militarization and the “free market” has unfolded.

Major elements of the conquest and world domination strategy by the US refer to:

  1. the control of the world economy and its financial markets,
  2. the taking over of all natural resources (primary resources and nonrenewable sources of energy). The latter constitute the cornerstone of US power through the activities of its multinational corporations.

Geopolitical Outreach: Network of Military Bases

The US has established its control over 191 governments which are members of the United Nations. The conquest, occupation and/or otherwise supervision of these various regions of the World is supported by an integrated network of military bases and installations which covers the entire Planet (Continents, Oceans and Outer Space). All this pertains to the workings of  an extensive Empire, the exact dimensions of which are not always easy to ascertain.

Known and documented from information in the public domaine including Annual Reports of the US Congress, we have a fairly good understanding of the structure of US military expenditure, the network of US military bases and  the shape of this US military-strategic configuration in different regions of the World.

The objective of this article is to build a summary profile of the World network of military bases, which are under the jurisdiction and/or control  of the US. The spatial distribution of these military bases will be examined together with an analysis of the multibillion dollar annual cost of their activities.

In a second section of this article, Worldwide popular resistance movements directed against US military bases and their various projects will be outlined. In a further article we plan to analyze the military networks of other major nuclear superpowers including  the United Kingdom, France and Russia.

I. The Military Bases

Military bases are conceived for training purposes, preparation and stockage of military equipment, used by national armies throughout the World. They are not very well known in view of the fact that they are not open to the public at large. Even though they take on different shapes, according to the military function for which they were established; they can broadly be classified under four main categories: a) Air Force Bases; b) Army or Land Bases; c) Navy Bases and; d) Communication and Spy Bases. Read more…

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The Poetry of Death: Patterns of State Terror | Baltimore Chronicle

BY CHRIS FLOYD

The found poetry of state terror continues its strange mutilations of the English language. The bizarre verbal heavings of Donald Rumsfeld, for example, are rightly celebrated as choice examples of the genre. And noted English playwright David Hare once fashioned a whole play built largely on the “thought-tormented music” wrought from verbatim transcripts of the principal authors of the war crime in Iraq.

In this regard, as in almost every aspect of the Terror War, “continuity” has been the hallmark of the Obama Administration. But we would do the progressive, forward-looking president a grave disservice if we were to imply that this dynamic, historic figure has confined himself to mere continuity. No, in field after field of governmental endeavor, Barack Obama has striven mightily not just to uphold the many authoritarian and militarist innovations of the Bush Administration, but to expand them-increasing their scope and depth, codifying, normalizing and making permanent many practices which his predecessors had enshrouded with ambiguity, deception and deliberate murk. Bush and Cheney were afflicted with a vestigial embarrassment at the howling illegality and constitutional subversion of many of their Terror War policies, and seemed to fear these acts would provoke some kind of public outcry or political controversy-or even prosecution-should they be made too explicit.

But our cool, savvy and thoroughly post-postmodern president carries none of that dead lumber from our long-vanished past. Where Bush was content with smirks and hints about his assassination program, Obama is bold, sending his security chief to declare openly before Congress that the president now has the unrestricted right and power to murder anyone, Americans included, in cold blood, by the simple expedient of declaring his victim a suspected terrorist of some vague description. Whereas Bush and Cheney usually resorted to backroom bureaucratic knife-twisting or bombastic but empty public threats to try to silence and cow officials who expose high crimes of state, the Obama Administration brazenly brings down the draconian power of federal prosecution against whistleblowers. Our progressives-in-power will not just take away your government job or bluster at your editors if you give your fellow citizens a glimpse of the blood-soaked sausage-making that goes on behind the imperial curtain; no, they will put you in the penitentiary, to rot away with murderers and child abusers, which is where they rank all such treacherous tellers of truth.

So we should not be surprised to find the Obama Administration outstripping its mentors and models from the Bush years in the production of Orwellian nomenclature. Nor is it remarkable that these perversions of language are leading to further perversions of law, morality and plain common sense.

We refer to the recent story in the Los Angeles Times about the vast expansion of the CIA’s powers to murder people in Pakistan with missiles fired by robot drones. These remote-control killings were originally aimed at specific, known, named individuals suspected of being top “militant” leaders. But now, people are being targeted not because of any action they are known or alleged to have taken, but simply because they seem to fit an arbitrarily designated “pattern of life”-even if the remote-control killers don’t know the victim’s name. Read more…

Source: Baltimore-Chronicle

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15 years later, hear McVeigh’s confession | MSNBC

By msnbc.com

A new documentary about Timothy McVeigh, including never-before-heard audio of the terrorist, is stirring emotions even before it airs on msnbc to mark the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.

The audio, originally recorded by Buffalo News reporters Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck as part of interviews for the only authorized biography of the bomber, is likely to be received by audiences with mixed reactions.

In his own voice, McVeigh confesses to the bombings and recounts everything from his childhood in Buffalo, his time with the military during the Gulf War, his relationship with conspirator Terry Nichols, to the planning and execution of the attack that killed 168 lives and injured over 500 people.

The documentary, narrated by msnbc’s Rachel Maddow, has already provoked a strong discussion on Maddow’s blog, with viewers concerned that it might incite extremists.

“Some people will say they don’t want to hear anything about Timothy McVeigh and we respect their feelings on that,” says Herbeck. “But others are interested in hearing what made a terrorist tick.”

“[It’s an] oral blueprint of what turned one young man into one of the worst mass-murderers and terrorists in American history,” says Michel.

Michel and Herbeck received similar criticism after publishing the McVeigh biography “American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing” in 2001.

“A few of the victims were outraged by our book, and they went public with their feelings. They felt it was wrong to tell the story of a terrorist,” says Herbeck.

The authors considered releasing the interview audio to another film project at that time, but by then media interest and the national focus had changed in the aftermath of 9/11.

Maddow says she isn’t concerned that McVeigh will come across as a martyr to those who share his anti-government views. “McVeigh is profoundly unsympathetic — even repugnant —on his own terms, you don’t need to work to make him seem that way,” she says. “There’s a huge distance between the hero he is in his own mind, and how basely unheroic he seems to anyone hearing the tapes now. I personally am not a supporter of the death penalty… but hearing him talk, it’s hard not to wish him gone.”

“I was glad when he died. I will never forgive Timothy McVeigh,” says Janie Coverdale in the documentary. Coverdale lost her two grandsons, Aaron, 5, and Elijah, 2, in the building’s day care center.

Jennifer Rodgers, a first responder for the Oklahoma City Police Department in 1995, was interviewed for the documentary. She describes her feelings as “still raw… It just doesn’t seem like it was really that long ago.”

The documentary’s producer, Toby Oppenheimer, realizes he is touching a raw nerve in Oklahoma City and admits it was tough finding survivors to agree to be part of the msnbc film. “They understandably didn’t want to revisit the painful memories,” he says.

Maddow defended that this story is important now, on its own terms. “The Murrah Building bombing is the worst incident of domestic terrorism we’ve ever experienced as a nation,” she says. “ We owe pure remembrance of the date, and commemoration of the lives lost and changed. I think it’s also an appropriate occasion to talk about the threat of domestic terrorism. How strong is the threat now, 15 years after McVeigh? Are we heeding warning signs that may be out there now?”

Former President Bill Clinton, who oversaw the bombing’s recovery efforts and investigation, recently warned that there are frightening parallels between the current political tensions and the anti-government rage that preceded the 1995 attack.

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, he calls the demonization of government “dangerous” and says that some of the rhetoric legitimizes violence. “We can disagree with them [elected officials], we can harshly criticize them. But when we turn them into an object of demonization, we increase the number of threats.”

“There’s no question that the militia movement is on the rise again,” says Michel. “Some of the same factors that caused McVeigh to believe he had become disenfranchised from mainstream society are again in the mix: growing government regulations, lack of employment. Those are things McVeigh would cite if he were alive.”

Source: MSNBC