By Francis Boyle
October 20, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Israel’s Likudnik Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached into his bag of Zionist tricks and pulled out a brand-new demand that had never surfaced before in the history of the Middle East Peace Process going all the way back to their beginning with the negotiation of the original Camp David Accords conducted under the personal auspices of U.S. President Jimmy Carter in 1978: The Palestinians must recognize Israel as “the Jewish State.” Not surprisingly, the Zionist controlled and funded Obama administration publicly endorsed this latest roadblock to peace that was maliciously constructed by Israel.
Netanyahu deliberately shifted the goal-posts on the Palestinians. It would be as if the United States of America demanded that Iran recognize it as the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) State as a condition for negotiating and then concluding any comprehensive peace settlement with it. Of course such demands are racist and premeditated non-starters to begin with.
Netanyahu’s racist ultimatum would lead to the denationalization of the 1.5 million Palestinians who are already less than third-class citizens of Israel and set the stage for their mass expulsion to the Palestinian Bantustan envisioned by Netanyahu as the “final solution” to Zionism’s “demographic problem” created by the very existence of the Palestinians. This racist and genocidal demand would also illegally terminate the well-recognized Right of Return for five million Palestinian refugees living around the world as required by U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194(III) of 1948, by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 13(2) (1948), and by general principles of public international law, international humanitarian law, and human rights law.
This would doom all prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians forever, and pave the way for the creation of “Greater Israel” dominating the entire former Mandate for Palestine, both of which objectives have been the intention of Netanyahu and Likud all along.
But if Netanyahu is really serious about Israel being recognized internationally as “the Jewish State” then there is a simple manner by which this universal diplomatic status can instantly be achieved unilaterally and without the consent of the Palestinians. Under basic principles of international law, every state is free to change its own name if it so desires: e.g., from Congo to Zaire then back to Congo. Therefore Israel is free to change its name to Jewistan -- the State of the Jews.
Thereafter every state in the world that has diplomatic relations and treaty relations with Israel will henceforth necessarily have to recognize it as Jewistan -- the State of Jews -- and deal with it as such by that name on a daily basis. The name of Jewistan would automatically replace the name of Israel in the United Nations System, at all other concerned international organizations, and on all bilateral and multilateral treaties to which Israel is currently a contracting party. Indeed, in the aftermath of its serial genocidal atrocities perpetrated against the Palestinians and the Lebanese, Israel has quite understandably been seeking to “re-brand” itself. Jewistan is Israel’s perfect new moniker.
In fact, Israel has never been anything but a Bantustan for Jews setup in the Middle East by the White racist and genocidal Western colonial imperial powers in order to serve as their racist attack dog and genocidal enforcer against the Arab and Muslim world. From the very moment of Western imperialism’s genocidal conception of Israel in 1947-1948, Israel has historically always functioned as Jewistan – the world’s Bantustan for the Jews. So Israel might as well finally change its name today to Jewistan, own up to its racist birthright, and make it official for the rest of the world to acknowledge.
Of course, all the Black Bantustans in racist criminal apartheid South Africa were eventually dismantled and no longer exist. The same will eventually happen to the racist criminal apartheid Jewish Bantustan in the Middle East no matter what name they call themselves. Actually, Jewistan/Israel is more closely analogous to the genocidal Yugoslavia that collapsed as a State, lost its U.N. membership, and no longer exists as a State for that precise reason.
In either event, when this Israeli Bantustan for Jews predictably collapses as a State, all the Palestinian refugees living in their Diaspora around the world will be able to return to their homes as guaranteed by Resolution 194. Such is the ultimate solution for securing the Palestinian Right of Return under International Law. In the meantime, the Palestinians should sign nothing with Jewistan/Israel and let this Bantustan for Jews collapse of its own racist and genocidal weight. Good riddance!
FRANCIS A. BOYLE is a leading American expert in international law. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
He served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court. He served as legal adviser to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993. In 2007, he delivered the Bertrand Russell Peace Lectures. Previous Russell Lecturers have included E.P. Thompson, Elena Bonner, Edward Said, Ramsey Clark, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Joseph Rotblat, Johan Galtung, and Noam Chomsky.
Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign and is author of, inter alia, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, Foundations of World Order, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, Destroying World Order, Biowarfare & Terrorism and Tackling America’s Toughest Questions.
He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
The CIA, the KKK and the USA
by Sherwood Ross
Global Research, October 15, 2010
By assigning covert action roles to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it is as if the White House and Congress had legitimized the Ku Klux Klan to operate globally. That's because the CIA today resembles nothing so much as the "Invisible Empire" of the KKK that once spread terror across the South and Midwest. Fiery crosses aside, this is what the CIA is doing globally.
The CIA today is committing many of the same sort of gruesome crimes against foreigners that the KKK once inflicted on Americans of color. The principal difference is that the KKK consisted of self-appointed vigilantes who regarded themselves as both outside and above the law when they perpetrated their crimes. By contrast, the CIA acts as the agent of the American government, often at the highest levels, and at times at the direction of the White House. Its crimes typically are committed in contravention of the highest established international law such as the Charter of the United Nations as well as the U.S. Constitution.
What's more, the "Agency," as it is known, derives its funding largely from an imperialist-minded Congress; additionally, it has no qualms about fattening its budget from drug money and other illegal sources. It is a mirror-image of the lawless entity the U.S. has become since achieving superpower status. And it is incredible that the White House grants license to this violent Agency to commit its crimes with no accountability. The Ku Klux Klan was founded shortly after the end of the U.S. Civil War. Klansman concealed their identities behind flowing white robes and white hoods as they terrorized the newly emancipated blacks to keep them from voting or to drive them from their property.
Allowing it to operate in secret literally gives the CIA the mythical Ring of Gyges. In Plato's Republic, the owner of the ring had the power to become invisible at will. As Wikipedia puts it, Plato "discusses whether a typical person would be moral if he did not have to fear the consequences of his actions." The ancient Greeks made the argument, Wikipedia says, that "No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men." The CIA, like Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's NKVD before it, has provided modern man the answer to this question. Its actions illuminate why all criminal entities, from rapists and bank robbers, to Ponzi scheme swindlers and murderers, cloak themselves in secrecy.
There are innumerable examples of how American presidents have authorized criminal acts without public discussion that the preponderant majority of Americans would find reprehensible. Example: it was President Lyndon Johnson who ordered the CIA to meddle in Chile's election to help Eduardo Frei become president. If they had known, U.S. taxpayers might have objected to such a use of their hard-earned money to influence the outcome of another country's elections. But the public is rarely let in on such illegal foreign policy decisions.
Where the KKK after the Civil War terrorized blacks to keep them from voting, the CIA has worked to influence the outcome of elections all over the world through bribery and vote-buying, dirty tricks, and worse. According to investigative reporter William Blum in "Rogue State"(Common Courage Press), the CIA has perverted elections in Italy, Lebanon, Indonesia, The Philippines, Japan, Nepal, Laos, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Portugal, Australia, Jamaica, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, among other countries. If they had known, taxpayers might also object to the CIA's numerous overthrows of foreign governments by force and violence---such as was done in Iran in 1953 by President Eisenhower and Chile in 1973 by President Nixon.
Both overthrows precipitated bloodbaths that cost tens of thousands of innocent civilians their lives. Blum also lists the countries the CIA has attempted to overthrow or has actually overthrown. His list includes Greece, The Philippines, East Germany, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iraq, Viet Nam, Laos, Ecuador, The Congo, France, Cuba, Ghana, Chile, South Africa, Bolivia, Portugal, and Nicaragua, to cite a few. As I write, today, October 11th, 2010, Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina called on President Obama to revise U.S. (imperialist) policies toward Latin America. He questioned why the U.S. continues to plant its military bases across the region.
That's an excellent question. If the U.S. is a peace-loving nation, why does it need 800 bases the world over in addition to 1,000 on its own soil? Americans might recoil in disgust if they knew of the CIA's numerous assassinations of the elected officials of other nations. Is it any wonder Americans so often ask the question, "Why do they hate us?" As historian Arnold Toynbee wrote in 1961, "America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defence of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number."
The CIA's protective secrecy resembles nothing so much as the KKK, which proudly proclaimed itself "the Invisible Empire" and whose thugs killed citizens having the courage to identify hooded Klansmen to law enforcement officials. Today, it is our highest public officials that protect this criminal force, said to number about 25,000 employees. It is actually a Federal offense to reveal the identity of a CIA undercover agent---unless, of course, you happen to be I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and are employed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame to punish her husband Joseph Wilson for publishing a report that undercut the White House lie that Saddam Hussein had purchased "yellowcake" from Niger to fuel WMD. Today, high public officials direct the CIA's criminal policies and protect its agents' identities the better to enable them to commit their crimes.
According to journalist Fred Cook in his book "Ku Klux Klan: America's Recurring Nightmare" (Messner), "The Klan was inherently a vigilante organization. It could commit the most atrocious acts under the guise of high principle andperpetrators of those acts would be hidden behind white masks and protected by Klan secrecy... (The Klan) set itself up as judge, jury and executioner"---a policy adopted by the CIA today.
CIA spies have conducted their criminal operations masquerading as officials of U.S. aid programs, business executives, or journalists. Example: The San Diego-based Copley News Service's staff of foreign correspondents allegedly was created to provide cover to CIA spies, compromising legitimate American journalists trying to do their jobs. While the murders committed by the KKK likely ran into the many thousands, the CIA has killed on a far grander scale and managed to keep its role largely secret.
As Tim Weiner, who covered the CIA for the New York Times noted in his book "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" (Anchor): "In Guatemala, 200,000 civilians had died during forty years of struggle following the agency's(CIA) 1954 coup against an elected president." Weiner adds, "the CIA's officers in Guatemala still went to great lengths to conceal the nature of their close relations with the military and to suppress reports that Guatemalan officers on its payroll were murderers, torturers, and thieves." When it comes to murder, the CIA makes the KKK look like Boy Scouts.
Like the KKK, CIA terrorists operate above the law. KKK members committed thousands of lynchings yet rarely were its members punished for them. In 2009 at a speech at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, President Obama revealed he was not intent on punishing CIA agents for their crimes but would rather "look forward." This seemingly charitable philosophy may be driven by the fact that Obama worked for Business International Corporation, a CIA front, at least in 1983 and perhaps longer, and allegedly is the son of a mother and father both of whom also worked for the CIA, as did Obama's grandmother! I could find none of this in Obama's biography when he ran for the presidency, when a gullible American public elected a CIA "mole" to the White House.
Consider this, too: an agency President Truman feared would become "an American Gestapo" when he signed the enabling legislation into law in 1947 has become just that, and it casts a lengthy shadow over the White House. Ominously, it has in Barack Obama one of its own former employees sitting in the Oval Office---a man who, according to news reports, has vastly expanded the frequency of the CIA's assassinations by drone aircraft in Pakistan and who illegally claims the "right" to assassinate any American citizen abroad as well. What's more, from 1989 to 1993 George Bush Sr., the CIA's own former Director, sat in the White House.
Additionally, from 2001 to 2009, the CIA had that Director's son, George W. Bush, in the Oval Office giving the CIA a blank check after the 9/11 massacre. Bush Jr., according to The New York Times, in the summer of 1974 worked for Alaska International Industries, which did contract work for the CIA. The Times noted that this job did not appear in his biography when he ran for the White House in 2000, terming it "The Missing Chapter in the Bush Bio." Thus, two presidential candidates with CIA ties---Bush Jr. and Obama---both neglected to mention them. And in Bill Clinton, who presided from 1993 to 2001, the CIA had a go-along president who satisfied the Agency's blood-lust when he authorized the first illegal "rendition," a euphemism for what KKK thugs once knew as kidnapping and torture. Is there any question that the Agency has not played an influential, behind-the-scenes or even a direct role in the operations of the U.S. government at its highest level? It may indeed be a stretch to argue that the CIA is running the country but it is no stretch to say that year after year our presidents reflect the criminal philosophy of the Agency.
Other parallels with the KKK are striking. As Richmond Flowers, the Attorney General of Alabama stated in 1966, "I've found the Klan more than just another secret society... It resembles a shadow government, making its own laws, manipulating local politics, burrowing into some of our local law-enforcement agencies...When a pitiable misfit puts on his $15 sheet, society can no longer ignore him." Yet the descendants of those misfits have moved up today where they feel comfortable as operatives in the shadow government run by the White House. One of the CIA's illicit duties has been to serve as a conduit for funneling U.S. taxpayer dollars to corrupt dictators and strongmen bent on suppressing the popular will of their citizenry. As Noam Chomsky wrote in "Failed States" (Metropolitan/Owl), in Honduras, "military officers in charge of the battalion (3-16) were on the CIA payroll." This elite unit, he says, "organized and trained by the United States and Argentine neo-Nazis," was "the most barbaric of the Latin American killers that Washington had been supporting."
Like the KKK, the CIA kidnaps many of its victims with no thought ever of legal procedure. It exhibits utter disdain for the rights of those individuals, the sovereignty of foreign nations, or respect for international law. At least hundreds of foreigners, mostly from the Middle East, have been the victims of "renditions" just as the KKK kidnapped and flogged and lynched blacks, labor leaders, Catholics, Jews, or wayward wives whom it felt to be morally lacking. In September, 1921, The New York World ran a series exposing the KKK. It pointed out that, among other things, the KKK was violating the Bill of Rights wholesale. This included the Fourth amendment against "unreasonable searches and seizures," the Fifth and the Sixth amendments, guaranteeing that no one may be held without a grand jury indictment or punished without a fair trial. And these rights today are similarly trampled by the CIA against American citizens, not just foreigners.
Apparently, only foreign courts care to rein in the CIA. The 23 CIA agents that it took to render one "suspect" in Italy are wanted there by the magistrates. (The spooks, by the way, ran up some fabulous bills in luxury hotels on taxpayers' dollars in that escapade.) Former President Jimmy Carter wrote in his book "Our Endangered Values" (Simon & Schuster), the CIA transferred some of those it kidnapped to countries that included Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Jordan, and Uzbekistan where "the techniques of torture are almost indescribably terrible, including, as a U.S. ambassador to one of the recipient countries reported, 'partial boiling of a hand or an arm,' with at least two prisoners boiled to death." The KKK's methods of punishment were often as ugly: the brutal flogging of blacks in front of vicious crowds, followed by castration and burning their victims alive, and then lynching of the corpses. As for the CIA, "Why?" asks investigative reporter William Blum, "are these men rendered in the first place if not to be tortured? Does the United States not have any speakers in foreign languages to conduct interrogations?"
That the CIA is a terrorist organization was upheld in the famous "CIA On Trial" case in Northampton, Mass., in 1987, when a jury acquitted 14 protestors who tried to stop CIA recruitment on campus, according to Francis Boyle, the University of Illinois international law authority who defended the group. The defense charged the CIA was "an organized criminal conspiracy like the SS and the Gestapo." Boyle said, "You would not let the SS or the Gestapo recruit on campus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, so you would not permit the CIA to recruit on campus either."
Another shared characteristic of the KKK and CIA is greed, the desire to loot the hard-earned wealth of others. Often, Klansmen terrorized African-Americans who had amassed property to frighten them off their land. Law-abiding black citizens who had pulled themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps were cheated out of their homes and acreage by the night riders.
Similarly, the CIA across Latin America has aligned itself with the well-to-do ruling class at every opportunity. It has cooperated with the elite to punish and murder labor leaders and clergy who espoused economic opportunity for the poor. The notion that allowing the poor to enrich themselves fairly will also create more wealth for an entire society generally, including the rich, has not permeated CIA thinking. I emphasize what historian Toynbee noted: "America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defence of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for."(Italics added.)
In sum, by adopting the terrorist philosophy of the KKK and elevating it to the operations of government at the highest level, the imperial Obama administration, like its predecessors, is showing the world the worst possible face of America. Foreigners do not see the goodness inherent in the American people---most of whom only want a good day's pay for a good day's work and to educate their children and live at peace with the world. Every adult American has a solemn obligation to demand that its government live up to international law, punish the CIA criminals in its midst, and become a respected citizen of the world. This will not come to pass until Congress abolishes the CIA, putting an end to its KKK-style terrorism which threatens Americans as well as humankind everywhere.
Global Research, October 15, 2010
The CIA today is committing many of the same sort of gruesome crimes against foreigners that the KKK once inflicted on Americans of color. The principal difference is that the KKK consisted of self-appointed vigilantes who regarded themselves as both outside and above the law when they perpetrated their crimes. By contrast, the CIA acts as the agent of the American government, often at the highest levels, and at times at the direction of the White House. Its crimes typically are committed in contravention of the highest established international law such as the Charter of the United Nations as well as the U.S. Constitution.
What's more, the "Agency," as it is known, derives its funding largely from an imperialist-minded Congress; additionally, it has no qualms about fattening its budget from drug money and other illegal sources. It is a mirror-image of the lawless entity the U.S. has become since achieving superpower status. And it is incredible that the White House grants license to this violent Agency to commit its crimes with no accountability. The Ku Klux Klan was founded shortly after the end of the U.S. Civil War. Klansman concealed their identities behind flowing white robes and white hoods as they terrorized the newly emancipated blacks to keep them from voting or to drive them from their property.
Allowing it to operate in secret literally gives the CIA the mythical Ring of Gyges. In Plato's Republic, the owner of the ring had the power to become invisible at will. As Wikipedia puts it, Plato "discusses whether a typical person would be moral if he did not have to fear the consequences of his actions." The ancient Greeks made the argument, Wikipedia says, that "No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men." The CIA, like Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's NKVD before it, has provided modern man the answer to this question. Its actions illuminate why all criminal entities, from rapists and bank robbers, to Ponzi scheme swindlers and murderers, cloak themselves in secrecy.
There are innumerable examples of how American presidents have authorized criminal acts without public discussion that the preponderant majority of Americans would find reprehensible. Example: it was President Lyndon Johnson who ordered the CIA to meddle in Chile's election to help Eduardo Frei become president. If they had known, U.S. taxpayers might have objected to such a use of their hard-earned money to influence the outcome of another country's elections. But the public is rarely let in on such illegal foreign policy decisions.
Where the KKK after the Civil War terrorized blacks to keep them from voting, the CIA has worked to influence the outcome of elections all over the world through bribery and vote-buying, dirty tricks, and worse. According to investigative reporter William Blum in "Rogue State"(Common Courage Press), the CIA has perverted elections in Italy, Lebanon, Indonesia, The Philippines, Japan, Nepal, Laos, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Portugal, Australia, Jamaica, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, among other countries. If they had known, taxpayers might also object to the CIA's numerous overthrows of foreign governments by force and violence---such as was done in Iran in 1953 by President Eisenhower and Chile in 1973 by President Nixon.
Both overthrows precipitated bloodbaths that cost tens of thousands of innocent civilians their lives. Blum also lists the countries the CIA has attempted to overthrow or has actually overthrown. His list includes Greece, The Philippines, East Germany, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iraq, Viet Nam, Laos, Ecuador, The Congo, France, Cuba, Ghana, Chile, South Africa, Bolivia, Portugal, and Nicaragua, to cite a few. As I write, today, October 11th, 2010, Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina called on President Obama to revise U.S. (imperialist) policies toward Latin America. He questioned why the U.S. continues to plant its military bases across the region.
That's an excellent question. If the U.S. is a peace-loving nation, why does it need 800 bases the world over in addition to 1,000 on its own soil? Americans might recoil in disgust if they knew of the CIA's numerous assassinations of the elected officials of other nations. Is it any wonder Americans so often ask the question, "Why do they hate us?" As historian Arnold Toynbee wrote in 1961, "America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defence of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number."
The CIA's protective secrecy resembles nothing so much as the KKK, which proudly proclaimed itself "the Invisible Empire" and whose thugs killed citizens having the courage to identify hooded Klansmen to law enforcement officials. Today, it is our highest public officials that protect this criminal force, said to number about 25,000 employees. It is actually a Federal offense to reveal the identity of a CIA undercover agent---unless, of course, you happen to be I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and are employed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame to punish her husband Joseph Wilson for publishing a report that undercut the White House lie that Saddam Hussein had purchased "yellowcake" from Niger to fuel WMD. Today, high public officials direct the CIA's criminal policies and protect its agents' identities the better to enable them to commit their crimes.
According to journalist Fred Cook in his book "Ku Klux Klan: America's Recurring Nightmare" (Messner), "The Klan was inherently a vigilante organization. It could commit the most atrocious acts under the guise of high principle andperpetrators of those acts would be hidden behind white masks and protected by Klan secrecy... (The Klan) set itself up as judge, jury and executioner"---a policy adopted by the CIA today.
CIA spies have conducted their criminal operations masquerading as officials of U.S. aid programs, business executives, or journalists. Example: The San Diego-based Copley News Service's staff of foreign correspondents allegedly was created to provide cover to CIA spies, compromising legitimate American journalists trying to do their jobs. While the murders committed by the KKK likely ran into the many thousands, the CIA has killed on a far grander scale and managed to keep its role largely secret.
As Tim Weiner, who covered the CIA for the New York Times noted in his book "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" (Anchor): "In Guatemala, 200,000 civilians had died during forty years of struggle following the agency's(CIA) 1954 coup against an elected president." Weiner adds, "the CIA's officers in Guatemala still went to great lengths to conceal the nature of their close relations with the military and to suppress reports that Guatemalan officers on its payroll were murderers, torturers, and thieves." When it comes to murder, the CIA makes the KKK look like Boy Scouts.
Like the KKK, CIA terrorists operate above the law. KKK members committed thousands of lynchings yet rarely were its members punished for them. In 2009 at a speech at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, President Obama revealed he was not intent on punishing CIA agents for their crimes but would rather "look forward." This seemingly charitable philosophy may be driven by the fact that Obama worked for Business International Corporation, a CIA front, at least in 1983 and perhaps longer, and allegedly is the son of a mother and father both of whom also worked for the CIA, as did Obama's grandmother! I could find none of this in Obama's biography when he ran for the presidency, when a gullible American public elected a CIA "mole" to the White House.
Consider this, too: an agency President Truman feared would become "an American Gestapo" when he signed the enabling legislation into law in 1947 has become just that, and it casts a lengthy shadow over the White House. Ominously, it has in Barack Obama one of its own former employees sitting in the Oval Office---a man who, according to news reports, has vastly expanded the frequency of the CIA's assassinations by drone aircraft in Pakistan and who illegally claims the "right" to assassinate any American citizen abroad as well. What's more, from 1989 to 1993 George Bush Sr., the CIA's own former Director, sat in the White House.
Additionally, from 2001 to 2009, the CIA had that Director's son, George W. Bush, in the Oval Office giving the CIA a blank check after the 9/11 massacre. Bush Jr., according to The New York Times, in the summer of 1974 worked for Alaska International Industries, which did contract work for the CIA. The Times noted that this job did not appear in his biography when he ran for the White House in 2000, terming it "The Missing Chapter in the Bush Bio." Thus, two presidential candidates with CIA ties---Bush Jr. and Obama---both neglected to mention them. And in Bill Clinton, who presided from 1993 to 2001, the CIA had a go-along president who satisfied the Agency's blood-lust when he authorized the first illegal "rendition," a euphemism for what KKK thugs once knew as kidnapping and torture. Is there any question that the Agency has not played an influential, behind-the-scenes or even a direct role in the operations of the U.S. government at its highest level? It may indeed be a stretch to argue that the CIA is running the country but it is no stretch to say that year after year our presidents reflect the criminal philosophy of the Agency.
Other parallels with the KKK are striking. As Richmond Flowers, the Attorney General of Alabama stated in 1966, "I've found the Klan more than just another secret society... It resembles a shadow government, making its own laws, manipulating local politics, burrowing into some of our local law-enforcement agencies...When a pitiable misfit puts on his $15 sheet, society can no longer ignore him." Yet the descendants of those misfits have moved up today where they feel comfortable as operatives in the shadow government run by the White House. One of the CIA's illicit duties has been to serve as a conduit for funneling U.S. taxpayer dollars to corrupt dictators and strongmen bent on suppressing the popular will of their citizenry. As Noam Chomsky wrote in "Failed States" (Metropolitan/Owl), in Honduras, "military officers in charge of the battalion (3-16) were on the CIA payroll." This elite unit, he says, "organized and trained by the United States and Argentine neo-Nazis," was "the most barbaric of the Latin American killers that Washington had been supporting."
Like the KKK, the CIA kidnaps many of its victims with no thought ever of legal procedure. It exhibits utter disdain for the rights of those individuals, the sovereignty of foreign nations, or respect for international law. At least hundreds of foreigners, mostly from the Middle East, have been the victims of "renditions" just as the KKK kidnapped and flogged and lynched blacks, labor leaders, Catholics, Jews, or wayward wives whom it felt to be morally lacking. In September, 1921, The New York World ran a series exposing the KKK. It pointed out that, among other things, the KKK was violating the Bill of Rights wholesale. This included the Fourth amendment against "unreasonable searches and seizures," the Fifth and the Sixth amendments, guaranteeing that no one may be held without a grand jury indictment or punished without a fair trial. And these rights today are similarly trampled by the CIA against American citizens, not just foreigners.
Apparently, only foreign courts care to rein in the CIA. The 23 CIA agents that it took to render one "suspect" in Italy are wanted there by the magistrates. (The spooks, by the way, ran up some fabulous bills in luxury hotels on taxpayers' dollars in that escapade.) Former President Jimmy Carter wrote in his book "Our Endangered Values" (Simon & Schuster), the CIA transferred some of those it kidnapped to countries that included Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Jordan, and Uzbekistan where "the techniques of torture are almost indescribably terrible, including, as a U.S. ambassador to one of the recipient countries reported, 'partial boiling of a hand or an arm,' with at least two prisoners boiled to death." The KKK's methods of punishment were often as ugly: the brutal flogging of blacks in front of vicious crowds, followed by castration and burning their victims alive, and then lynching of the corpses. As for the CIA, "Why?" asks investigative reporter William Blum, "are these men rendered in the first place if not to be tortured? Does the United States not have any speakers in foreign languages to conduct interrogations?"
That the CIA is a terrorist organization was upheld in the famous "CIA On Trial" case in Northampton, Mass., in 1987, when a jury acquitted 14 protestors who tried to stop CIA recruitment on campus, according to Francis Boyle, the University of Illinois international law authority who defended the group. The defense charged the CIA was "an organized criminal conspiracy like the SS and the Gestapo." Boyle said, "You would not let the SS or the Gestapo recruit on campus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, so you would not permit the CIA to recruit on campus either."
Another shared characteristic of the KKK and CIA is greed, the desire to loot the hard-earned wealth of others. Often, Klansmen terrorized African-Americans who had amassed property to frighten them off their land. Law-abiding black citizens who had pulled themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps were cheated out of their homes and acreage by the night riders.
Similarly, the CIA across Latin America has aligned itself with the well-to-do ruling class at every opportunity. It has cooperated with the elite to punish and murder labor leaders and clergy who espoused economic opportunity for the poor. The notion that allowing the poor to enrich themselves fairly will also create more wealth for an entire society generally, including the rich, has not permeated CIA thinking. I emphasize what historian Toynbee noted: "America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defence of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for."(Italics added.)
In sum, by adopting the terrorist philosophy of the KKK and elevating it to the operations of government at the highest level, the imperial Obama administration, like its predecessors, is showing the world the worst possible face of America. Foreigners do not see the goodness inherent in the American people---most of whom only want a good day's pay for a good day's work and to educate their children and live at peace with the world. Every adult American has a solemn obligation to demand that its government live up to international law, punish the CIA criminals in its midst, and become a respected citizen of the world. This will not come to pass until Congress abolishes the CIA, putting an end to its KKK-style terrorism which threatens Americans as well as humankind everywhere.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
The Perfect Storm
By Robert Reich
October 19, 2010 "Robert Reich's Blog" -- It’s a perfect storm. And I’m not talking about the impending dangers facing Democrats. I’m talking about the dangers facing our democracy.
First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.
The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.
Who are these people? With the exception of a few entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, they’re top executives of big corporations and Wall Street, hedge-fund managers, and private equity managers. They include the Koch brothers, whose wealth increased by billions last year, and who are now funding tea party candidates across the nation.
Which gets us to the second part of the perfect storm. A relatively few Americans are buying our democracy as never before. And they’re doing it completely in secret.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates — without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They’re laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Maleck, whom you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon’s notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a third.
The Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission made it possible. The Federal Election Commission says only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.
We’re back to the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. The public never knew who was bribing whom.
Just before it recessed the House passed a bill that would require that the names of all such donors be publicly disclosed. But it couldn’t get through the Senate. Every Republican voted against it. (To see how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)
Here’s the third part of the perfect storm. Most Americans are in trouble. Their jobs, incomes, savings, and even homes are on the line. They need a government that’s working for them, not for the privileged and the powerful.
Yet their state and local taxes are rising. And their services are being cut. Teachers and firefighters are being laid off. The roads and bridges they count on are crumbling, pipelines are leaking, schools are dilapidated, and public libraries are being shut.
There’s no jobs bill to speak of. No WPA to hire those who can’t find jobs in the private sector. Unemployment insurance doesn’t reach half of the unemployed.
Washington says nothing can be done. There’s no money left.
No money? The marginal income tax rate on the very rich is the lowest it’s been in more than 80 years. Under President Dwight Eisenhower (who no one would have accused of being a radical) it was 91 percent. Now it’s 36 percent. Congress is even fighting over whether to end the temporary Bush tax cut for the rich and return them to the Clinton top tax of 39 percent.
Much of the income of the highest earners is treated as capital gains, anyway — subject to a 15 percent tax. The typical hedge-fund and private-equity manager paid only 17 percent last year. Their earnings were not exactly modest. The top 15 hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion.
Congress won’t even return to the estate tax in place during the Clinton administration – which applied only to those in the top 2 percent of incomes.
It won’t limit the tax deductions of the very rich, which include interest payments on multi-million dollar mortgages. (Yet Wall Street refuses to allow homeowners who can’t meet mortgage payments to include their primary residence in personal bankruptcy.)
There’s plenty of money to help stranded Americans, just not the political will to raise it. And at the rate secret money is flooding our political system, even less political will in the future.
The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.
We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.
October 19, 2010 "Robert Reich's Blog" -- It’s a perfect storm. And I’m not talking about the impending dangers facing Democrats. I’m talking about the dangers facing our democracy.
First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.
The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.
Who are these people? With the exception of a few entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, they’re top executives of big corporations and Wall Street, hedge-fund managers, and private equity managers. They include the Koch brothers, whose wealth increased by billions last year, and who are now funding tea party candidates across the nation.
Which gets us to the second part of the perfect storm. A relatively few Americans are buying our democracy as never before. And they’re doing it completely in secret.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates — without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They’re laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Maleck, whom you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon’s notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a third.
The Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission made it possible. The Federal Election Commission says only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.
We’re back to the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. The public never knew who was bribing whom.
Just before it recessed the House passed a bill that would require that the names of all such donors be publicly disclosed. But it couldn’t get through the Senate. Every Republican voted against it. (To see how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)
Here’s the third part of the perfect storm. Most Americans are in trouble. Their jobs, incomes, savings, and even homes are on the line. They need a government that’s working for them, not for the privileged and the powerful.
Yet their state and local taxes are rising. And their services are being cut. Teachers and firefighters are being laid off. The roads and bridges they count on are crumbling, pipelines are leaking, schools are dilapidated, and public libraries are being shut.
There’s no jobs bill to speak of. No WPA to hire those who can’t find jobs in the private sector. Unemployment insurance doesn’t reach half of the unemployed.
Washington says nothing can be done. There’s no money left.
No money? The marginal income tax rate on the very rich is the lowest it’s been in more than 80 years. Under President Dwight Eisenhower (who no one would have accused of being a radical) it was 91 percent. Now it’s 36 percent. Congress is even fighting over whether to end the temporary Bush tax cut for the rich and return them to the Clinton top tax of 39 percent.
Much of the income of the highest earners is treated as capital gains, anyway — subject to a 15 percent tax. The typical hedge-fund and private-equity manager paid only 17 percent last year. Their earnings were not exactly modest. The top 15 hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion.
Congress won’t even return to the estate tax in place during the Clinton administration – which applied only to those in the top 2 percent of incomes.
It won’t limit the tax deductions of the very rich, which include interest payments on multi-million dollar mortgages. (Yet Wall Street refuses to allow homeowners who can’t meet mortgage payments to include their primary residence in personal bankruptcy.)
There’s plenty of money to help stranded Americans, just not the political will to raise it. And at the rate secret money is flooding our political system, even less political will in the future.
The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.
We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The War On Terror
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Global Research
October 16, 2010
Does anyone remember the “cakewalk war” that would last six weeks, cost $50-$60 billion, and be paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues?
Does anyone remember that White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was fired by Dubya because Lindsey estimated that the Iraq war could cost as much as $200 billion?
Lindsey was fired for over-estimating the cost of a war that, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, has cost 15 times more than Lindsey estimated. And the US still has 50,000 troops in Iraq.
Does anyone remember that just prior to the US invasion of Iraq, the US government declared victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan?
Does anyone remember that the reason Dubya gave for invading Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, weapons that the US government knew did not exist?
Are Americans aware that the same neoconservarives who made these fantastic mistakes, or told these fabulous lies, are still in control of the government in Washington?
The “war on terror” is now in its tenth year. What is it really all about?
The bottom line answer is that the “war on terror” is about creating real terrorists. The US government desperately needs real terrorists in order to justify its expansion of its wars against Muslim countries and to keep the American people sufficiently fearful that they continue to accept the police state that provides “security from terrorists,” but not from the government that has discarded civil liberties.
The US government creates terrorists by invading Muslim countries, wrecking infrastructure and killing vast numbers of civilians. The US also creates terrorists by installing puppet governments to rule over Muslims and by using the puppet governments to murder and persecute citizens as is occurring on a vast scale in Pakistan today.
Neoconservatives used 9/11 to launch their plan for US world hegemony. Their plan fit with the interests of America’s ruling oligarchies. Wars are good for the profits of the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us in vain a half century ago. American hegemony is good for the oil industry’s control over resources and resource flows. The transformation of the Middle East into a vast American puppet state serves well the Israel Lobby’s Zionist aspirations for Israeli territorial expansion.
Most Americans cannot see what is happening because of their conditioning. Most Americans believe that their government is the best on earth, that it is morally motivated to help others and to do good, that it rushes aid to countries where there is famine and natural catastrophes. Most believe that their presidents tell the truth, except about their sexual affairs.
The persistence of these delusions is extraordinary in the face of daily headlines that report US government bullying of, and interference with, virtually every country on earth. The US policy is to buy off, overthrow, or make war on leaders of other countries who represent their peoples’ interests instead of American interests. A recent victim was the president of Honduras who had the wild idea that the Honduran government should serve the Honduran people.
The American government was able to have the Honduran president discarded, because the Honduran military is trained and supplied by the US military. It is the same case in Pakistan, where the US government has the Pakistani government making war on its own people by invading tribal areas that the Americans consider to be friendly to the Taliban, al Qaeda, “militants” and “terrorists.”
Earlier this year a deputy US Treasury secretary ordered Pakistan to raise taxes so that the Pakistani government could more effectively make war on its own citizens for the Americans. On October 14 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered Pakistan to again raise taxes or the US would withhold flood aid. Clinton pressured America’s European puppet states to do the same, expressing in the same breath that the US government was worried by British cuts in the military budget. God forbid that the hard-pressed British, still reeling from American financial fraud, don’t allocate enough money to fight America’s wars.
On Washington’s orders, the Pakistani government launched a military offensive against Pakistani citizens in the Swat Valley that killed large numbers of Pakistanis and drove millions of civilians from their homes. Last July the US instructed Pakistan to send its troops against the Pakistani residents of North Waziristan. On July 6 Jason Ditz reported on antiwar.com that “at America’s behest, Pakistan has launched offensives against [the Pakistani provinces of] Swat Valley, Bajaur, South Waziristan, Orakzai,and Khyber.”
A week later Israel’s US Senator Carl Levin (D,MI) called for escalating the Obama Administration’s policies of US airstrikes against Pakistan’s tribal areas. On September 30, the Pakistani newspaper, The Frontier Post, wrote that the American air strikes “are, plain and simple, a naked aggression against Pakistan.”
The US claims that its forces in Afghanistan have the right to cross into Pakistan in pursuit of “militants.” Recently US helicopter gunships killed three Pakistani soldiers who they mistook for Taliban. Pakistan closed the main US supply route to Afghanistan until the Americans apologized.
Pakistan warned Washington against future attacks. However, US military officials, under pressure from Obama to show progress in the endless Afghan war, responded to Pakistan’s warning by calling for expanding the Afghan war into Pakistan. On October 5 the Canadian journalist Eric Margolis wrote that “the US edges closer to invading Pakistan.”
In his book, Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward reports that America’s puppet president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, believes that terrorist bombing attacks inside Pakistan for which the Taliban are blamed are in fact CIA operations designed to destabilize Pakistan and allow Washington to seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
To keep Pakistan in line, the US government changed its position that the “Times Square Bombing” was the work of a “lone wolf.” Attorney General Eric Holder switched the blame to the “Pakistani Taliban,” and Secretary of State Clinton threatened Pakistan with “very serious consequences” for the unsuccessful Times Square bombing, which likely was a false flag operation aimed at Pakistan.
To further heighten tensions, on September 1 the eight members of a high-ranking Pakistani military delegation in route to a meeting in Tampa, Florida, with US Central Command, were rudely treated and detained as terrorist suspects at Washington DC’s Dulles Airport.
For decades the US government has enabled repeated Israeli military aggression against Lebanon and now appears to be getting into gear for another Israeli assault on the former American protectorate of Lebanon. On October 14 the US government expressed its “outrage” that the Lebanese government had permitted a visit by Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who is the focus of Washington’s intense demonization efforts. Israel’s representatives in the US Congress threatened to stop US military aid to Lebanon, forgetting that US Rep. Howard Berman (D,CA) has had aid to Lebanon blocked since last August to punish Lebanon for a border clash with Israel.
Perhaps the most telling headline of all is the October 14 report, “Somalia’s New American Primer Minister.” An American has been installed as the Prime Minister of Somalia, an American puppet government in Mogadishu backed up by thousands of Ugandan troops paid by Washington. (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)
This barely scratches the surface of Washington’s benevolence toward other countries and respect for their rights, borders, and lives of their citizens.
Meanwhile, to silence Wikileaks and to prevent any more revelations of American war crimes, the “freedom and democracy” government in DC has closed down Wikileaks’ donations by placing the organization on its “watch list” and by having the Australian puppet government blacklist Wikileaks.
Wikileaks is now akin to a terrorist organization. The American government’s practice of silencing critics will spread across the Internet.
Remember, "they hate" us because we have "freedom and democracy", First Amendment rights, habeas corpus, respect for human rights, and show justice and mercy to all.
Global Research
October 16, 2010
Does anyone remember the “cakewalk war” that would last six weeks, cost $50-$60 billion, and be paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues?
Does anyone remember that White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was fired by Dubya because Lindsey estimated that the Iraq war could cost as much as $200 billion?
Lindsey was fired for over-estimating the cost of a war that, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, has cost 15 times more than Lindsey estimated. And the US still has 50,000 troops in Iraq.
Does anyone remember that just prior to the US invasion of Iraq, the US government declared victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan?
Does anyone remember that the reason Dubya gave for invading Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, weapons that the US government knew did not exist?
Are Americans aware that the same neoconservarives who made these fantastic mistakes, or told these fabulous lies, are still in control of the government in Washington?
The “war on terror” is now in its tenth year. What is it really all about?
The bottom line answer is that the “war on terror” is about creating real terrorists. The US government desperately needs real terrorists in order to justify its expansion of its wars against Muslim countries and to keep the American people sufficiently fearful that they continue to accept the police state that provides “security from terrorists,” but not from the government that has discarded civil liberties.
The US government creates terrorists by invading Muslim countries, wrecking infrastructure and killing vast numbers of civilians. The US also creates terrorists by installing puppet governments to rule over Muslims and by using the puppet governments to murder and persecute citizens as is occurring on a vast scale in Pakistan today.
Neoconservatives used 9/11 to launch their plan for US world hegemony. Their plan fit with the interests of America’s ruling oligarchies. Wars are good for the profits of the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us in vain a half century ago. American hegemony is good for the oil industry’s control over resources and resource flows. The transformation of the Middle East into a vast American puppet state serves well the Israel Lobby’s Zionist aspirations for Israeli territorial expansion.
Most Americans cannot see what is happening because of their conditioning. Most Americans believe that their government is the best on earth, that it is morally motivated to help others and to do good, that it rushes aid to countries where there is famine and natural catastrophes. Most believe that their presidents tell the truth, except about their sexual affairs.
The persistence of these delusions is extraordinary in the face of daily headlines that report US government bullying of, and interference with, virtually every country on earth. The US policy is to buy off, overthrow, or make war on leaders of other countries who represent their peoples’ interests instead of American interests. A recent victim was the president of Honduras who had the wild idea that the Honduran government should serve the Honduran people.
The American government was able to have the Honduran president discarded, because the Honduran military is trained and supplied by the US military. It is the same case in Pakistan, where the US government has the Pakistani government making war on its own people by invading tribal areas that the Americans consider to be friendly to the Taliban, al Qaeda, “militants” and “terrorists.”
Earlier this year a deputy US Treasury secretary ordered Pakistan to raise taxes so that the Pakistani government could more effectively make war on its own citizens for the Americans. On October 14 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered Pakistan to again raise taxes or the US would withhold flood aid. Clinton pressured America’s European puppet states to do the same, expressing in the same breath that the US government was worried by British cuts in the military budget. God forbid that the hard-pressed British, still reeling from American financial fraud, don’t allocate enough money to fight America’s wars.
On Washington’s orders, the Pakistani government launched a military offensive against Pakistani citizens in the Swat Valley that killed large numbers of Pakistanis and drove millions of civilians from their homes. Last July the US instructed Pakistan to send its troops against the Pakistani residents of North Waziristan. On July 6 Jason Ditz reported on antiwar.com that “at America’s behest, Pakistan has launched offensives against [the Pakistani provinces of] Swat Valley, Bajaur, South Waziristan, Orakzai,and Khyber.”
A week later Israel’s US Senator Carl Levin (D,MI) called for escalating the Obama Administration’s policies of US airstrikes against Pakistan’s tribal areas. On September 30, the Pakistani newspaper, The Frontier Post, wrote that the American air strikes “are, plain and simple, a naked aggression against Pakistan.”
The US claims that its forces in Afghanistan have the right to cross into Pakistan in pursuit of “militants.” Recently US helicopter gunships killed three Pakistani soldiers who they mistook for Taliban. Pakistan closed the main US supply route to Afghanistan until the Americans apologized.
Pakistan warned Washington against future attacks. However, US military officials, under pressure from Obama to show progress in the endless Afghan war, responded to Pakistan’s warning by calling for expanding the Afghan war into Pakistan. On October 5 the Canadian journalist Eric Margolis wrote that “the US edges closer to invading Pakistan.”
In his book, Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward reports that America’s puppet president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, believes that terrorist bombing attacks inside Pakistan for which the Taliban are blamed are in fact CIA operations designed to destabilize Pakistan and allow Washington to seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
To keep Pakistan in line, the US government changed its position that the “Times Square Bombing” was the work of a “lone wolf.” Attorney General Eric Holder switched the blame to the “Pakistani Taliban,” and Secretary of State Clinton threatened Pakistan with “very serious consequences” for the unsuccessful Times Square bombing, which likely was a false flag operation aimed at Pakistan.
To further heighten tensions, on September 1 the eight members of a high-ranking Pakistani military delegation in route to a meeting in Tampa, Florida, with US Central Command, were rudely treated and detained as terrorist suspects at Washington DC’s Dulles Airport.
For decades the US government has enabled repeated Israeli military aggression against Lebanon and now appears to be getting into gear for another Israeli assault on the former American protectorate of Lebanon. On October 14 the US government expressed its “outrage” that the Lebanese government had permitted a visit by Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who is the focus of Washington’s intense demonization efforts. Israel’s representatives in the US Congress threatened to stop US military aid to Lebanon, forgetting that US Rep. Howard Berman (D,CA) has had aid to Lebanon blocked since last August to punish Lebanon for a border clash with Israel.
Perhaps the most telling headline of all is the October 14 report, “Somalia’s New American Primer Minister.” An American has been installed as the Prime Minister of Somalia, an American puppet government in Mogadishu backed up by thousands of Ugandan troops paid by Washington. (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)
This barely scratches the surface of Washington’s benevolence toward other countries and respect for their rights, borders, and lives of their citizens.
Meanwhile, to silence Wikileaks and to prevent any more revelations of American war crimes, the “freedom and democracy” government in DC has closed down Wikileaks’ donations by placing the organization on its “watch list” and by having the Australian puppet government blacklist Wikileaks.
Wikileaks is now akin to a terrorist organization. The American government’s practice of silencing critics will spread across the Internet.
Remember, "they hate" us because we have "freedom and democracy", First Amendment rights, habeas corpus, respect for human rights, and show justice and mercy to all.
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