War

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The Plan Acccording to U.S. General Wesley Clark (Ret.) | YouTube

In an interview with Amy Goodman on March 2, 2007, U.S. General Wesley Clark (Ret.), explains that the Bush Administration planned to take out 7 countries in 5 years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Lybia, Somalia, Sudan, Iran.

We didn’t have to invade them, but just throw out their governments and divide the countries with the help of destabilisation.

  • Iraq – ✓[2003]
  • Afghanistan – ✓ [2001]
  • Libya – ✓ [ The fall of Gaddafi 2011 ]
  • Sudan – ✓[Divided last year in two states after US sponsored terrorism.]
  • Somalia – ✓ [US puppets in government]
  • Lebanon – [In progress right now. The Syrian war is spreading across the borders just last week]
  • Syria – [In progress right now. US financed terrorism]
  • Iran – The final stage. And it will be loud one.
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The Idea of Enemies is Killing Us | Baltimore Chronicles

By Deb Reich

“In a globally internetworked world, we are all going to learn to work together because there’s no viable alternative.”

Consider this: The “enemies paradigm” and the perspective it represents are obsolete. We humans on this Earth are in the process of moving onward, beyond that worldview, into a different era. In the new era, there will still be groups of people we may see as our adversaries, but they will not be enemies. There will still be bad problems, but we will solve them more ably, working together with the people we used to think of as our enemies. In a globally internetworked world, we are all going to learn to do this because there’s no viable alternative. It begins with adopting a different mental map.

The organizing principle of the new mental map is the idea of No More Enemies. It belongs to everyone on the planet. It’s a simple idea, really. The concept of “enemies” is no longer serving humanity. It has, demonstrably, become very destructive and is overdue for retirement. The old enemies-oriented worldview is being displaced by emergent new paradigms of partnership, shared responsibility, and co-evolving. Humanity is struggling to redesign itself, using new tools. New technologies of medical imaging, for instance, give us a crucial biofeedback loop to evaluate the impact of our own thoughts and cultural habits on our health, our behavior, our society, our planet. That gives us new information to help us co-redesign our way of understanding and interacting with our world. The evidence is there in plain sight…we just have to connect the dots.

“We, the people, are not the problem. The problem is the paradigm: the enemies paradigm.”

As a Jewish American Israeli woman who has spent years living and working with Muslim and Christian Arabs in Israel/Palestine, I know what I’m talking about. We, the people, are not the problem. The problem is the paradigm: the enemies paradigm.

Many of us have already discarded the enemies-based map of reality. We know that we have like-minded partners elsewhere in the Middle East, and far beyond. Our shared mantra, from Rela Mazali: We refuse to be enemies. We are trying to swing the regional momentum away from violence and fear and toward pluralism and equality. But history, the educational system, industry, army, religious extremism and government are all against us (so far). What we mainly have is our vision of a different way: No More Enemies.

“In Israel, successive governments have built a gigantic wall of brutality in the vain hope of protecting the folks on one side from the aspirations on the other side: never a sustainable strategy.”

In Israel, successive governments have built a gigantic wall of brutality in the vain hope of protecting the folks on one side from the aspirations on the other side: never a sustainable strategy. Our wall is like all such walls: constructed and funded by successive regimes, meant to keep at bay those whom the authorities wish to exclude, and to intimidate those who dissent. This wall is made of cement and electronic sensors and barbed wire, but the mortar binding it is made of powerful existential anxieties, of memories of historical suffering and injustice, and of continuing bloodshed mixed with fear, fear, fear.

And now—inevitably—there is this global picket line that has sprung up around Israel in response. BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions), the Palestinian-led boycott movement is a call for equal rights for every person in this land and is supported worldwide by hundreds of thousands of people across a broad political spectrum. Most of them can agree on little else; oppression often makes strange bedfellows. Although not a boycott enthusiast, I have publicly supported this one as a nonviolent way of leveraging policy change here—because the alternative (business as usual) will be much worse for everyone concerned, long-term.

Clearly, things in Israel and Palestine have gone horribly wrong over the years. There has been heroism, and barbarism, on every side (all exhaustively documented). A vast river of self-righteous rhetoric has flowed under the bridge. None of that has mended what’s wrong here, and the situation is surely not going to fix itself. By rejecting Wallmania and working together, however, we can transform this scenario and get a life for us and our neighbors. The dissidents next door are equally committed. Maybe you’ve seen some of them on TV recently. This is deep change coming, which is why it evokes a backlash. We say: No fear. No more enemies.

“Palestinian nonviolence is not new.”

Did you know that the nonviolent Palestinian independence movement is not new? It is not new but it has been successfully smothered for decades, both by the somewhat discredited romance with “armed struggle” and by Israeli government repression. No longer. As its leaders are jailed, harassed, and even killed, this movement only grows stronger. In recent years, significant segments of Palestinian civil society, including young people, have indeed renounced violence. They have renounced it in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. They have done so sincerely, authentically, publicly, and repeatedly until, right now, there may be more Palestinians than Israelis deeply committed to nonviolent change. And—despite the militants who get all the headlines—the Palestinian people’s commitment to nonviolence seems to be increasing, week by week, while the trend in Israel, sadly, seems to be going the other way.

“The world finally seems to be waking up to the fact that justice for Palestinians is an urgent existential necessity—for Palestinians, for Israelis, maybe for the planet.”

The Israeli elite (like other entrenched elites hereabouts) is frightened, and that is dangerous. It’s important for people abroad not to demonize ordinary Israelis now, now that the world finally seems to be waking up to the fact that justice for Palestinians is an urgent existential necessity—for Palestinians, for Israelis, maybe for the planet. The Israeli people need your tough love, not your condemnation. The Israeli legislature, seemingly lacking any imaginative scheme for a different and more constructive shared future with the neighbors, is working hard to criminalize domestic dissent here. And the harder it works to do that, the more unequivocally we who dissent are obliged to declare where we stand.

We stand with all our Palestinian and Israeli sisters and brothers who refuse to be enemies. We stand with the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions of compassion. We stand with the peaceful protestors and nonviolent demonstrators and former combatants who have laid down their guns and are risking their lives for a different future, unarmed. We stand with Palestinians in refugee camps and in the diaspora who have waited for two or three generations now, for a chance to come back home. They are people, people like us, and they are homesick. Why do so many Israelis and Jews abroad insist on seeing them as a threat? They are a huge, untapped resource of vibrant human energy waiting to be allowed the chance to contribute to a more beautiful, more egalitarian, and more sustainable community in Israel/Palestine.

The song humanity needs to be singing now, in our region and elsewhere, is called No More Enemies. The history it will celebrate has only just begun to unfold. This is the new Exodus. As it moves us out of the old landscape of enemies and into new and unknown territory, maybe the right troubadour will appear who can find the words and melody for this song, and help us sing it. In harmony.

Source: Baltimore Chronicle

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Fresh Violence Rages in Libya | Al Jazerra

Libyan forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi are waging a bloody operation to keep him in power, with residents reporting gunfire in parts of the capital Tripoli and other cities, while other citizens, including the country’s former ambassador to India, are saying that warplanes were used to “bomb” protesters.

A Palestinian student holds up a placard displaying the Libyan flag flanked by the Tunisian (left) and Egyptian (right) flags during a protest against Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi in Gaza City on Tuesday. (AFP/Mahmud Hams) Nearly 300 people are reported to have been killed in continuing violence in the capital and across the north African country as demonstrations enter their second week.

Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, has warned that the widespread attacks against civilians “amount to crimes against humanity”, and called for an international investigation in possible human rights violations.

Witnesses in Tripoli told Al Jazeera that fighter jets had bombed portions of the city in fresh attacks on Monday night. The bombing focused on ammunition depots and control centres around the capital.

Helicopter gunships were also used, they said, to fire on the streets in order to scare demonstrators away.

Several witnesses said that “mercenaries” were firing on civilians in the city, while pro-Gaddafi forces warned people not to leave their homes via loudspeakers mounted on cars.

Residents of the Tajura neighbourhood, east of Tripoli, said that dead bodies are still lying on the streets from earlier violence. At least 61 people were killed in the capital on Monday, witnesses told Al Jazeeera. Read more…

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U.S. Military Intervention in Egypt: A Chapter in America’s Saudi Arabian End-Game | Collapse.net

By Dale G. Sinner

US military intervention in Egypt is prompting speculation over motives. Extraction of American citizens is the stated objective, but does evacuating the American expat community in Egypt warrant the flotilla of US warships recently positioned in the Suez Canal?  Does evacuating this expat community warrant the helicopters, Special Forces squads, and 2,200 Marines aboard those ships?  Here in the land of endless budget cuts, the obvious answer is “doubtful”.

While protests flare across North Africa, why would the US stir up already seething anti-American sentiment in the region with such a move?  Could today’s intervention lead to a long-term, “stabilizing” US presence in Egypt? Or could these events presage something far greater?  What of Egypt’s neighbor to the East – Saudi Arabia – home to a quarter of world oil reserves?

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is clearly defying US pressure to step down from an office he’s held for nearly 30 years.  Continued port strikes and unrest threaten vital ship traffic along the Suez Canal, and the likelihood of imminent military extraction of American citizens may present a tantalizing opportunity for oil elites to close the circle around the Arabian peninsula and place a major US force presence in Egypt – a presence with a potentially ominous goal: the eventual destabilization and Balkanization of the Arabian peninsula.

The Saudi royals are clearly opposed to US intervention in Egypt.  See here, here, and here.  This opinion regarding US meddling is understandable, as even the slightest provocation could spark similar civilian revolt on the Saudi side of the Red Sea.

US forces were evicted from Saudi Arabia in mid-2003 and relocated to neighboring Qatar, but material and troop strength in US CENTCOM’s theatre of operations – including the permanent US “mega bases” in Iraq, might suggest a more lucrative alternative to Iran as the central target of US military strategic planning (see map below). 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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Grayson’s Smart Calculus Makes War Cost Real for Taxpayers | Common Dreams

BY JOHN NICOLS

Congressman Alan Grayson is at it again. This time, the Florida Democrat who shook up the health-care debate by saying Republicans were the real death-panel party and who shook up the bank reform debate by leading (with Texas Congressman Ron Paul) the “Audit the Fed” fight, is shaking up the debate about so-called “emergency” supplemental spending to fund the occupations of foreign lands.

Grayson’s mad because the Pentagon and its allies in the White House (be they Bush and Cheney or Obama and Biden) keep demanding tens of billions in additional allocations to fund the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. And they do so in a manner that makes debate difficult and dissent rare.

But Grayson is out to provoke a debate – and he is definitely dissenting.

“What George Orwell wrote about in 1984 has come true. What Eisenhower warned us about concerning the ‘military-industrial complex’ has come true,” the congressman argues. “War is a permanent feature of our societal landscape, so much so that no one notices it anymore.”

Grayson proposes to change this circumstance with a bill he has introduced: “The War Is Making You Poor Act.”

“The purpose of this bill is to connect the dots, and to show people in a real and concrete way the cost of these endless wars,” he explains.

To make the cost of war real for working Americans, Grayson performs a simple calculus:

“Next year’s budget allocates $159,000,000,000 to perpetuate the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s enough money to eliminate federal income taxes for the first $35,000 of every American’s income. Beyond that, (it) leaves over $15 billion to cut the deficit.

“And that’s what this bill does. It eliminates separate funding for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and eliminates federal income taxes for everyone’s first $35,000 of income ($70,000 for couples). Plus it pays down the national debt.”

The congressman is betting – with good reason –that the key to opening up a real debate about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is to make real the cost of these occupations to American families.

“The costs of the war have been rendered invisible. There’s no draft. Instead, we take the most vulnerable elements of our population, and give them a choice between unemployment and missile fodder. Government deficits conceal the need to pay in cash for the war,” explains Grayson, with a reference to the mounting trade deficit with China. “We put the cost of both guns and butter on our Chinese credit card. In fact, we don’t even put these wars on budget; they are still passed using ’emergency supplemental’. A nine-year ’emergency.’” Read more…

Source: Common Dreams

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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

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The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (Film)

Co-winner of this years Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review (and one of their Five Best Documentaries of the Year), Winner of the Special Jury Award at IDFA, and in contention for the years Best Documentary Oscar, The Most Dangerous Man in America tells the story of Daniel Ellsberg, a high-level Pentagon official and Vietnam War strategist, who in 1971 concluded that the war is based on decades of lies and leaks 7,000 pages of top secret documents to The New York Times, making headlines around the world.

A riveting story of how this one mans profound change of heart created a landmark struggle involving Americas newspapers, its president and Supreme Court. With Daniel Ellsberg, Patricia Ellsberg, Tony Russo, Howard Zinn, Hedrick Smith, John Dean, and, from the secret White House tapes, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who called Ellsberg the most dangerous man in America.

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The War on Consciousness | Awaken in the Dream

BY PAUL LEVY

We are truly in a war. It is not the war we imagine we are in, which is the way our true adversaries want it. It is not a foreign war against a foreign enemy. It is a war on consciousness, a war on our own minds. The global war on terror that is being fought around the world is an embodied reflection in the material world of a deeper, more fundamental war that is going on in the realm of consciousness itself.

We have the most criminal regime in all of our history wreaking unspeakable horror on the entire planet, while simultaneously waging war on the consciousness of its own citizens – US. If we aren’t aware of this, we are unwittingly playing into, supporting and complicit in the evil that is being perpetrated in our name.

A government’s war on the consciousness of its own citizens is by no means unique to the Bush administration. Abusing power over others so as to limit their freedom is an archetypal process that has been endlessly re-enacted by governments throughout history in various forms. With the Bush administration, however, the pathological aspect of this process has become so exaggerated and amped up to such a degree that it is just about impossible not to notice its staggering malignancy. With the Bush administration, the underlying evil that has played out in our government over many years is becoming overwhelmingly obvious for all to see. With the Bush administration, the underlying evil that informs systems of government that are based on “power over” instead of “liberty for” is coming out from hiding in the shadows. Instead of being acted out underground, our government is acting out this evil above ground, in plain sight for all who are courageous enough to look.

Impeaching Bush and Co. ultimately won’t change anything unless we deal with the corrupt powers which control and direct them. George Bush is just a finger-puppet of the hidden hand which animates him. Bush only has apparent power, as he himself is a minion of far more powerful predator-like forces whose nefarious interests he serves. Whether we call it the illuminati, the global elite, a shadow government, or a secret cabal, there is no doubt that there are darker, self-serving forces that have insinuated themselves into and taken over our government. The terrorists that we should be worried about are domestic terrorists who are actually implementing their agendas from deep within our very system of government itself.

The United States Government itself has become a “front” for the underlying military-industrial-financial crime syndicate that animates it. This is not to say that there aren’t many good, well-meaning people in our government – they are simply prohibited by the very nature of the corrupt system they are in from reforming it. Our system of government is rigged in such a way so that there is no way to transform the system within the system itself.

The underlying core of our government has become rotten such that the entire operation simply feeds into and is an expression of the same underlying corruption. All of the scandals continually coming out are like the superficial skin rash of a much deeper systemic disease, like a cancer that is infecting the greater body politic. Citizens who are not aware of our government’s insidious intrusions into our lives are unwittingly feeding the corruption they are looking away from in their very act of looking away.

The “powers” that have taken over our government have become concentrated and centralized in just a few elite hands, proving how easy it is for the few to control the many. They almost control all the levers of power: financial, political and judicial. In this war on consciousness, these powers-that-be are using the most advanced mind-control technology that our world has ever known to make its takeover complete. The essence of mind-control is information control, which is one thing our overly secretive current administration is very good at. Read more…

Source: Awaken in the Dream