LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Archive of "War" Category
Rise Up Against World War Three
Michel Chossudovsky analyzes the coming war with Iran.
(Hat tip to The Burning Platform)
Source: DefenseLINK-Unified Command Plan
World War III Scenario
“The World Commanders’ Areas of Responsibility” (See Map above) defines the Pentagon’s global military design, which is one of World conquest. This military deployment is occurring in several regions simultaneously under the coordination of the regional US Commands, involving the stockpiling of US made weapons systems by US forces and partner countries, some of which are former enemies, including Vietnam and Japan.
The present context is characterized by a global military build-up controlled by one World superpower, which is using its numerous allies to trigger regional wars.
In contrast, the Second World War was a conjunction of separate regional war theaters. Given the communications technologies and weapons systems of the 1940s, there was no strategic “real time” coordination in military actions between broad geographic regions
Global warfare is based on the coordinated deployment of a single dominant military power, which oversees the actions of its allies and partners.
With the exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Second World War was characterized by the use of conventional weapons. The planning of a global war relies on the militarization of outer space. Were a war directed against iran to be launched, it would not only use nuclear weapons, the entire gamut of new advanced weapons systems, including electrometric weapons and environmental modification techniques (ENMOD) would be used.
(Lila: My emphasis)
The United Nations Security Council
The UN Security Council adopted in early June a fourth round of sweeping sanctions against The Islamic Republic of Iran, which included an expanded arms embargo as well “tougher financial controls”. In a bitter irony, this resolution was passed within days of the United Nations Security Council’s outright refusal to adopt a motion condemning Israel for its attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters.
Both China and Russia, pressured by the US, have endorsed the UNSC sanctions’ regime, to their own detriment. Their decision within the UNSC contributes to weakening their own military alliance, the Shanghai Cooperation organization (SCO), in which Iran has observer status. The Security Council resolution freezes China and Russia’s respective bilateral military cooperation and trade agreements with Iran. It has serious repercussions on Iran’s air defense system which in part depends on Russian technology and expertise.
The Security Council resolution grants a de facto “green light” to wage a pre-emptive war against Iran.
The American Inquisition: Building a Political Consensus for War
In chorus, the Western media has branded Iran as a threat to global security in view of its alleged (non-existent) nuclear weapons program. Echoing official statements, the media is now demanding the implementation of punitive bombings directed against Iran so as to safeguard Israel’s security.
The Western media is beating the drums of war. The purpose is to tacitly instill, through repeated media reports, ad nauseam, within people’s inner consciousness, the notion that the Iranian threat is real and that the Islamic Republic should be “taken out”.
A consensus building process to wage war is similar to the Spanish inquisition. It requires and demands submission to the notion that war is a humanitarian endeavor.
Known and documented, the real threat to global security emanates from the US-NATO-Israel alliance, yet realities in an inquisitorial environment are turned upside down: the warmongers are committed to peace, the victims of war are presented as the protagonists of war. Whereas in 2006, almost two thirds of Americans were opposed to military action against Iran, a recent Reuter-Zogby February 2010 poll suggests that 56 % of Americans favor a US-NATO military action against Iran.
(Lila: In spite of this clear evidence that the average man is a lump of dough you can push and pull, people on the left actually seem to think that anything given the direct assent of the “people” is somehow beyond criticism.
The truth is otherwise. Direct democracy in large states leads almost invariably to despotism. The mobs need a Messiah and once they have one, they’ll rush after him even if it’s over a cliff, as long as he tells them what they want to hear).
Building a political consensus which is based on an outright lie cannot, however, rely solely on the official position of those who are the source of the lie.
The antiwar movement in the US, which has in part been infiltrated and co-opted, has taken on a weak stance with regard to Iran. The antiwar movement is divided. The emphasis has been on wars which have already occurred (Afghanistan, Iraq) rather than forcefully opposing wars which are being prepared and which are currently on the Pentagon’s drawing board. Since the inauguration of the Obama administration, the antiwar movement has lost some of its impetus.
Moreover, those who actively oppose the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, do not necessarily oppose the conduct of “punitive bombings” directed Iran, nor do they categorize these bombings as an act of war, which could potentially be a prelude to World War III.
The scale of antiwar protest in relation to Iran has been minimal in comparison to the mass demonstrations which preceded the 2003 bombing and invasion of Iraq.
The real threat to global security emanates from the US-NATO-Israel alliance.
The Iran operation is not being opposed in the diplomatic arena by China and Russia; it has the support of the governments of the frontline Arab states which are integrated into the NATO sponsored Mediterranean dialogue. It also has the tacit support of Western public opinion.
We call upon people across the land, in America, Western Europe, Israel, Turkey and around the world to rise up against this military project, against their governments which are supportive of military action against Iran, against the media which serves to camouflage the devastating implications of a war against Iran.
The military agenda support a profit driven destructive global economic system which impoverishes large sectors of the world population.
Lila: Obviously, I don’t agree that profits are driving this expansion. If anything, war without end is bankrupting the state, despite the profits it might bring to individual corporations or individuals.
This war is sheer madness.
World War III is terminal. Albert Einstein understood the perils of nuclear war and the extinction of life on earth, which has already started with the radioactive contamination resulting from depleted uranium. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
The media, the intellectuals, the scientists and the politicians, in chorus, obfuscate the untold truth, namely that war using nuclear warheads destroys humanity, and that this complex process of gradual destruction has already commenced.
When the lie becomes the truth there is no turning backwards.
When war is upheld as a humanitarian endeavor, Justice and the entire international legal system are turned upside down: pacifism and the antiwar movement are criminalized. Opposing the war becomes a criminal act.
The Lie must be exposed for what it is and what it does.
It sanctions the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children.
It destroys families and people. It destroys the commitment of people towards their fellow human beings.
It prevents people from expressing their solidarity for those who suffer. It upholds war and the police state as the sole avenue.
It destroys both nationalism and internationalism.
Breaking the lie means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force.
Lila: Yes, it’s a criminal project, but the quest isn’t so much for profits (as socialists like Chossudovsky see it) but for domination. It is the lust to dominate that is the basis, the desire to impose one’s own will on reality. This is not the logical result of capitalism, properly understood, but the logical result of statism..
This profit driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies.
Let us reverse the tide.
Challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corproate lobby groups wich support them
Break the American inquisition.
Undermine the US-NATO-Israel military crusade.
Close down the weapons factories and the military bases.
Bring home the troops.
Members of the armed forces should disobey orders and refuse to participate in a criminal war.
My Comment:
In the 1990s, the neoconservative Project for the New American Century announced that “full spectrum dominance” was the goal of the Anglo-Zionist empire. Now we see another chapter of that ambitious plan unfold. First there was Iraq, then, Af-Pak; now it’s Iran. The next will be Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with the other Arab states falling along the way, it seems.
Yet, even now, anyone who analyzes this hegemonic project as a reality is told he is a conspiracist or anti-American or anti-Semite.
Confirming that these are simply propaganda terms, here’s Rand Institute analyst Laurent Murawieck’s power point presentation to the Defense Policy Board (July 10, 2002). At the time it was dismissed as Strangelovian and outlandish. Read today, it seems like nothing more than an outline of the last seven-eight years and an announcement of what’s in store for the years to come.
In the presentation, Murawiec champions a takeover of Saudi Arabia and in his last slide, titled “Grand strategy for the Middle East,” summarizes the steps involved:
- Iraq is the tactical pivot
- Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot
- Egypt the prize
Whatever you think of this sweeping vision, in 2010, eight years later, it sounds less outre by the day..
CIA Funds Both Sides Of War, Uses NY Times For Psyops (Yawn)
David DeGraw at Alternet.org describes how US intelligence ishas been behind both sides of the war on terror and how the media aids the war effort with calculated psyops like the recent “finding” of mineral deposits in Afghanistan that was trumpeted in the New York Times. (more…)
Helen Thomas: An Appreciation
Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, at Foreign Policy Journal, (via Counterpunch), June 16, 2010:
“The propagandists for the Israel Lobby, who occupy the Wall Street Journal editorial page while pretending to be journalists, are determined to remove Helen Thomas from the annals of journalism. In case you have already forgotten, a few days ago the distinguished career of Helen Thomas, the 89-year-old doyen of the White House Press Corps, was ended by the Israel Lobby, which made an issue about her opinion that immigrant Jews should leave Palestine and go back to their home countries.
Indian versus Israeli Reactions To Provocation
The Great Bong on the difference between the Indian and the Israeli approach to provocation:
“As someone primarily interested in sub-continental politics, what is most interesting for me however, more than the role of Turkey, is the difference between India and Israel in their reactions to provocation, being in similar boats—- — democratic countries with strong militaries, surrounded by antagonistic countries on many sides, eager to provoke them to conflict over disputed territories.
War: Survival Of The Unfittest
“Only in the case of primitive peoples does war lead to the selection of the stronger and more gifted, and that among civilized peoples it leads to a deterioration of the race by unfavorable selection.”
Through Cowardice We Shall All Be Saved
Cinematical.com (via Greg at Our Holy Cause) has a synopsis of the underrated 1964 movie, “The Americanization of Emily,” with its ironic antiwar message: (more…)
Experts Trumpet ISI-Taliban Link As Excuse For US “Counter-Measures”
Shock. Pakistani intelligence (the ISI) might be involved with the Taliban.
When the obvious is stated with all the fanfare of a papal decree from such organs of the ruling class as the London School of Economics and our own JFK School of Government (Harvard), can military action be far behind? File this along with my previous post, Mad Dog alerts.
The Associated Press reports (June 13, 2010):
“Pakistan’s main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group’s leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, said a research report released Sunday.
Alleged Israeli Agent Arrested Over January Killing Of Hamas Leader
Raf Sanchez at Times Online June 12, 2010:
“An alleged Israeli agent wanted in connection with the killing of a Hamas leader in Dubai has been arrested in Poland.
A man using the name of Uri Brodsky is suspected of having supplied a fake German passport to a member of the Mossad assassin squad that was said to responsible for the slaying of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in January. German authorities issued a European-wide arrest warrant and he was picked up by Polish authorities earlier this week, said a spokesperson for the German federal prosecutor’s office which is seeking his extradition.”
Read the rest of this article at The Time Online (UK)
Mad Dogs Alert: Saudis To Give Israelis Airspace To Attack Iran
Hugh Tomlinson at The Times Online, June 12, 2010:
“Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal.
In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran.
To ensure the Israeli bombers pass unmolested, Riyadh has carried out tests to make certain its own jets are not scrambled and missile defence systems not activated. Once the Israelis are through, the kingdom’s air defences will return to full alert.”
Read the rest of this article at The Times Online
Israel: Future Turkish Defense Of Aid Ships Will Be Act Of War
“Israeli Army commander and top Likud member Uzi Dayan today warned on Israeli Army Radio that Israel would consider any attempt by the Turkish military to protect future aid ships from attack an “act of war.” With Israeli protesters already condemning Erdogan, is war on the table?
Esau And Jacob In The Middle East
“In one of the most poignant moments in the Torah, after Isaac tells Esau, his son, that his brother Jacob has stolen the blessing, Esau burst into wild and bitter sobbing and said to his father,
“Have you but one blessing? Bless me too, my father” (Genesis 26:38)
Glenn Greenwald: US No Different From Israel
“One can express all sorts of outrage over the Obama administration’s depressingly predictable defense of the Israelis, even at the cost of isolating ourselves from the rest of the world, but ultimately, on some level, wouldn’t it have been even more indefensible — or at least oozingly hypocritical — if the U.S. had condemned Israel? After all, what did Israel do in this case that the U.S. hasn’t routinely done and continues to do?
Spilling The Wrong Blood
From Lynda Brayer, a human rights lawyer living in Haifa, Palestine, who is an active participant in the One State in Palestine movement and supports the Return of Palestinian Refugees to Palestine.
“Furthermore, what exacerbates the image problem for the Israeli government is that it is no longer Arab blood that has been spilt, but nice “white” or “European” blood that, in the West, is different from Arab or Muslim blood. The international reverberations and the trial against Israeli officials in the case of Rachel Corrie, who was deliberately murdered by an Israeli bulldozer driver for attempting to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home, should have provided sufficient warning to the Israeli regime of what is now about to unfold. Having chosen to confront the flotilla, it has now fallen into the proverbial biblical pit of its own making!
Gaza Flotilla Like Jewish Refugees In Exodus Says Former Mossad Agent
Victor Ostrovsky in SpyTalk at The Washington Post:
“The Israeli commando attack on a civilian flotilla was “so stupid it is stupefying,” says former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky. Ostrovsky spent six years in the Israeli navy, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander before Mossad recruited him in 1982. He quit after four years and in the 1990s he wrote two highly critical, first-person books about the intelligence service.
Israeli’s Raid Gaza Aid Ships; Nine Dead; Massive Protests In Turkey
AP reports on an Israeli raid on ships carrying aid to Palestine:
“JERUSALEM – Israeli naval commandos stormed a flotilla of ships carrying aid and hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists to the blockaded Gaza Strip on Monday, killing nine passengers in a botched raid that provoked international outrage and a diplomatic crisis.
Dozens of activists and six Israeli soldiers were wounded in the bloody predawn confrontation in international waters. The violent takeover dealt yet another blow to Israel’s international image, already tarnished by war crimes accusations in Gaza and its 3-year-old blockade of the impoverished Palestinian territory.
State Terror: How Soviet “Socialist” Police Fueled Pogroms
(Cont). The Truth about the Kielce Pogrom:
“The Soviet strategists who were in control of Poland saw significant advantage in fostering an animosity between Jewish and gentile Poles. This animosity was used as a tool to aid in the subjugation of Poland early in its capture into the Soviet empire in 1944. After World War II, Soviet machinations in this regard succeeded in converting the image of Jewish victims of German-Nazi genocide into the image of Jewish oppressors (Kersten, p. 130). This was purposely done to put the Polish gentile population between “a rock and a hard place.” Polish gentiles were left with two options: either don’t respond to the Soviet oppression, or respond to the Soviet oppression and thus appear to be anti-Semitic.
Although the image of Jews as oppressors was spread beyond Poland, this phenomenon was very noticeable in Poland, where there was a steady flow of news and often well-substantiated (if sometimes exaggerated) rumors of executions of anti-communist Poles by Jewish executioners serving in the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. Kersten describes this unfortunate development when Soviet policies created the impression that Jews played the main role in the subjugation of Poland and other satellite countries to the communist system. At the same time, the communist propaganda machine equated opposition to the “socialist” regimes with anti-Semitism. So, if a Polish person opposed the socialist Sovietization of Poland, that person was branded as an anti-Semite. This smoke screen was used successfully to obscure the reality of the Soviet subjugation of Poland by the Soviet Union.
The Soviet terror apparatus in Poland included the so-called Polish military counterintelligence. It was initially integrated with the Soviet Smersh [Death to Spies] organization directed against German spying and subversion. However, when the front crossed the prewar Polish territory, Smersh was used increasingly against the significant Polish resistance to Soviet domination. In November 1944, the Polish section of Smersh became renamed Informacja, in which Col. Checinski later served for 10 years. Informacja remained under the close supervision of Smersh and was at first headed by Soviet Col. Nicolai Kozhushko. Soviet officers assigned to the Polish army were considered vulnerable to Polish influence and were under close surveillance by a special Informacja [Information] department. Informacja was clearly a Soviet-led force, not at all an independent force loyal to Poland.
At the time of the most intensive terror, between 1944 and 1955, Smersh used its Informacja branch to have agents pose as members of the military prosecutor’s office. They used this apparatus to conduct political trials in military courts in Poland. Tortured witnesses were “prepared” for these trials and later were secretly executed “to remove any trace of the provocation” (Checinski, p. 57). In that period, of the 120 officers serving in Informacja, only about 18 were Polish-born. Most of these 18 were Polish Jews and the rest were Soviet citizens, some of them Jews.
The Soviets were creative in inventing their own opportunities to manufacture conflict between Polish Jews and gentiles. For example, it was Soviet policy in Poland to change Yiddish names of Jews into Slavic-Polish names. This practice was resented by both Jewish and gentile Poles. An American journalist, Samuel Loeb Shneiderman, who visited Warsaw in 1946, wrote in his book “Between Fear and Hope” (New York, 1946) that under the cover of Polish names Jews were continuing their ethnic identity and must have felt like their ancestors forced into conversion to Christianity during their persecution in Spain (Kersten, pp.76, 108). The name-changing became widespread. It served to deprive the Jews of their cultural heritage in order to form a “progressive Jewish nation,” to use Stalin’s expression.
Checinski describes how Stalin ordered the NKVD to prepare a civilian network of police terror and repression, called the UB [Urzad Bezpieczenstwa), to work in parallel with the Informacja in Poland. The "Polish intelligentsia boycotted the security service, which was treated with universal contempt as an instrument of foreign domination" (Checinski, p. 61). Thus, the NKVD, despite its deep-rooted anti-Semitism, "could not do without Jews. Jewish officials were often placed in the most conspicuous posts; hence they could easily be blamed for all of the regime's crimes" (Checinski, p. 62). The Soviet strategy of using people with striking Semitic features as the most visible executioners of Soviet policy in Poland was also aimed at presenting understandable anti-communist feelings within Poland as anti-Semitism. In 1945, the upper echelons of the terror apparatus were staffed with Jews. This created the appearance that many Jews in Poland were members of the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. A public proclamation, made at a convention of Jewish members of the ruling communist party [PPR, Polska Pania Robotnicza] on October 7-9, 1945, stated that in postwar Poland, conditions were created for the Jews to find an outlet for their political, social, and national ambitions. Needless to say, neither Poles nor Jews trusted this official statement. The Zionists openly advocated a massive emigration to Palestine (Kersten, p.80), which for different reasons was also desired by the Soviet leadership.”
and
” Is hatred for a person simply because of his ethnicity more acceptable today, as long as the object of the hatred is a Pole rather than a Jew? And once it is decided that it is important to instill hatred against members of a given ethnic group, can there be any limit to the perpetration of lies, myths, and mischaracterizations to drive the hatred home? And once ethnic hatred is started and nurtured in a people, where will it end? The Holocaust itself unfortunately provides one answer, one such ending point.”
Anti-Polonism Is Not The Answer To Anti-Semitism
Iwo Cyprien Pogonowski on anti-Polonism in the writing of WW II history:
“These animosities [from WW II], in order to live on, have to be carefully cultivated in younger people by those who may feel their interests are served by doing so. Surprisingly, there have been systematic attempts by some to keep these animosities alive by devising mythological accounts of what happened preceding World War II, during the War, and in the aftermath of the War. Even more surprisingly, some of these mythologies have been advanced by people from groups who were victimized in the War, people who should have the strongest vested interest in the truth being propagated.
There are many versions of these mythologies, but one in popular currency in mid-1990’s North America distills roughly to this: an outside force known as the Nazis forcibly gained control of Germany and under totalitarian military rule forced a policy of war and ethnic hatred and extermination on a frightened but generally unwilling German populace. According to this myth, the real story of genuine ethnic hatred can be found among Jewish people and gentiles who lived in Poland, whose alleged long-standing animosity pre-dated the War, and extends beyond the end of the War to this day. The myth-speakers claim that the Polish nation was the true anti-Jewish state, and that atrocities perpetrated on countless Jewish people on Polish soil in German-occupied Poland were carried out with great relish by a willing Polish populace that was tired of dealing with a Jewish sub-culture that had been already relegated to ghettos prior to the War. The existence of the myth of non-support by the German people of the actions of the Nazi regime even motivated the title and thesis of a recent doctoral dissertation turned into book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1996.) Goldhagen documents the involvement of ordinary Germans in carrying out what today are referred to as Nazi atrocities.
As Goldhagen was clarifying the role of the Germans, others were perpetuating the myths. In April, 1996, propagation of the anti-Polish myth was advanced by the film “Shtetl,” shown on Public Television in the United States. The film falsely suggests Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Through its own baseless and malicious claims about Polish people, the film is unwittingly a study of the encouragement of ethnic hatred by Jewish people toward Polish gentiles. Israeli students in the film are shown making a series of claims, sometimes gleefully, about alleged Polish involvement in the Holocaust, including attempts to shift the blame for Nazi crimes from German people to Polish people. The students even mocked Polish rescue efforts, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the Germans punished Polish gentiles collectively for providing any form of assistance to Jewish people, or even for not turning them in.
The film “Shtetl” focused negatively on the local Catholic church and priest several times. In actual well-documented fact, Polish gentiles helped Jewish people in Poland extensively during World War II. This assistance included the hiding of tens of thousands of Jewish people in the homes of Polish gentiles, which put the gentiles’ entire families at risk of death. Several thousand Polish gentiles, including men, women, and children, were burned alive or otherwise summarily executed for the crime of hiding or assisting Jews. As an example of local Catholic Church involvement, it is ironic that the wartime pastor of the very Catholic church that was featured in the film was murdered because he was assisting Jews. His name was Father Henryk Opiatowski of Bransk. Yet, Father Opiatowski was never mentioned in the film! In no other country during the war were people subjected to death in this way for providing assistance to Jewish people. These students of the Holocaust were certainly taught how anti-Semitism produced six million Jewish deaths in the Holocaust; apparently they did not also learn how anti-Polonism produced three million Polish gentile deaths during the occupation–the Polish aspect of the Holocaust. Since the students in the film Shtetl were not eyewitnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust, they may very well be a window into the way the Holocaust is being taught in some Jewish homes and schools. If the purpose of teaching about the Holocaust is to never forget how ethnic hatreds can be nurtured to the point of destroying a people (and it should be), then Holocaust teaching will fail if along the way it teaches young Jewish people to hate Polish people.
There is another example of an obstacle to Jewish-Polish goodwill that is perhaps more significant and potentially longer-lasting in promoting ethnic hatred by Jewish people towards Polish people than the film Shtetl. It is an exhibit in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., that falsely presents events that occurred in Kielce, Poland in 1946 as part of the Holocaust. It refers to the clearly Soviet-staged violence in Kielce as a “Polish pogrom.” [The Museum has changed the text since this writing.] To many visitors of the Holocaust Museum, the exhibit by its very inclusion seems to suggest that after the end of World War II, a liberated Polish populace chose to continue Hitler’s work of exterminating Jewish people. The study you are now reading examines these events in Kielce, and shows that the suggestions of a Polish-led extension of the Holocaust are patently false. The Kielce Pogrom had nothing to do with the German-engineered Holocaust. It had everything to do with the Soviet-engineered strangulation of the Polish nation.
Like all effective myths, those related to World War II have some elements of truth underlying them. In conjunction with the construction of these myths, though, actual facts and events have been distorted or misrepresented, and certainly the contexts within which they occurred have been falsely stated. Sadly, the distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods are sometimes purposely and systematically advanced by those who feel a need to humiliate the Polish nation and members of the Polish ethnic group from around the world. Those who today seek to humiliate or destroy people because of their ethnic association are kindred spirits to those who sought to humiliate or destroy people because of their ethnic association in the World War II era. Let me say unequivocally: anti-Semitism in the World War II era or now is wrong and it is evil. On the flip side of the coin bearing the image of anti-Semitism is the image of anti-Polonism. The coin of anti-Semitism cannot be melted down and destroyed without also melting down and destroying anti-Polonism.
I will state up front that I have a vested interest in the truth about World War II and its aftermath being clearly illuminated. I am a veteran of 64 months of imprisonment in Gestapo prisons, concentration camps, and death marches. My own ordeal, and the suffering and death of many of my Polish and Jewish friends and prison-mates, not to mention the sacrifices made by the young men who fought and died as soldiers, will have been rendered meaningless if the hatred of Jewish people by the Nazi leadership and various members of the German nation are simply replaced by hatred of Polish people by Jewish people, or vice-versa. Those who even today perpetuate myths and misconceptions about animosities associated with World War II and its aftermath are not merely bearing false witness–they are willing accomplices to the spirit of hatred of World War II, a frightening spirit embodied in its purest evil form by Adolf Hitler.
I have seen, first hand, the disgusting, murderous results of ethnic hatred. I have devoted the latter part of my life to writing about the long-term coexistence of Polish Jews and gentiles within Poland, and am committed to trying to help diffuse animosities stemming from World War II. In this spirit of friendship and respect, I wrote and had published earlier this decade a documentary history entitled “Jews in Poland: The Rise of Jews as a Nation From Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel.” If World War II presented any lessons to the people of the world, it showed what can eventually happen if ethnic animosities are allowed to fester and grow.
The study you are now reading is a quest for Polish-Jewish reconciliation. For it to be successful, those who would join this quest must have one thing in common: respect for the truth. As part of this quest, I will address how Jewish-Polish animosities have been cultivated in the aftermath of the War, and in particular how Soviet actions and Soviet-induced events and situations contributed to or drove the process of cultivating the animosities. In particular, I will take the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Kielce Pogrom to discuss this event in detail and use it as a basis for discussion of the larger geopolitical situation. This study deals primarily with the results of Soviet-institutionalized hatred and the Soviet crime of provoking situations purposely designed to sour Polish-Jewish relations. In general, the public in Western countries knows very little about the specifics of these types of Soviet misdeeds……..
A “pogrom”, a Russian word that translates to “devastation, ” is defined as “an organized massacre, especially of Jews in Russia, such as 1881, 1903, and 1905.” (The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language, 1989.) Anti-Jewish violence in Russia was usually started with ‘a false accusation that a ritual murder had been perpetrated on Christian children by local Jews. Violence directed against Jewish people that occurred on July 4, 1946, in the town of Kielce, referred to as the Kielce Pogrom, is aptly named for several reasons. For one, it was indeed organized. And as it will be explained in detail, it was organized by the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus in Poland, a captured country which was under Soviet occupation at the time. This pogrom, although not on Russian soil, was arranged by a totalitarian leadership centered in Russia and it was started with the same technique of planting a false accusation that a ritual murder had been perpetrated on Christian children. And as even the common dictionary definition shows, this is not the first time Russians have instigated this type of activity.
In the Kielce Pogrom, an uprising occurred over the span of many hours that resulted in the death of 41 Polish citizens: 39 Jews, and two gentiles. It was a horrible crime, and regrettably, there was some complicity among a very small number of gentile Poles in this inexcusable violence. These Polish criminals, as will be pointed out, were tried and convicted for their crimes. The reports, however, of the involvement of a mob of 15,000 cheering Polish citizens are completely untrue. Also, the idea that the uprising was of a spontaneous nature is also untrue. As it will be shown in this study, this event was carefully provoked and staged by the Soviet occupiers at that time. This event was staged to achieve specific political purposes dictated by Moscow’s global strategy including Europe and the Middle East.
THE SOVIET-NAZI PARTNERSHIP
Why would Soviets want to stage an uprising that would embarrass Poland? After all, didn’t both Poland and the Soviets fight alongside of Britain and the other allies in World War II? Didn’t Hitler’s German army invade both Poland and the Soviet Union, and isn’t “the enemy of my enemy my friend?”
There is general public awareness that the United States and the Soviet Union were World War II partners in the Allied fight against Nazi Germany. Many fewer, however, are aware of the nearly two-year Nazi-Soviet partnership embodied in the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, which was signed on September 28, 1939. It divided all of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union and contained secret provisions for the mutual extermination of potential Polish opponents of both Germany and the USSR. Both Germany and the USSR agreed to control their respective parts of Poland. This meant taking all necessary measures to contain and prevent the emergence of any potential Polish actions toward either Germany or the USSR, and then communicating with each
other on the progress made toward the goals of the treaty. The treaty lasted until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Soviet hostility toward Poland and the desire of the USSR to control as much Polish territory as it could continued beyond the German invasion of Poland.The Soviets implemented their part of the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty by executing 21,857 members of the Polish leadership community, including many Jewish people. Katyn, in what is now Bielarus, contained the graves of 4443 such men and became a symbol of the mass execution of members of the upper echelon of Polish society in the Spring of 1940 At the same time Germany ran a parallel operation with the code name Aktion AB [Auserordentliche Befriedungsaktion, which translates to "extraordinary pacification"], culminating in the execution of about 20,000 Polish professionals.
Because of the German-Soviet Treaty to divide Poland among themselves, the Eastern half of Poland was under Soviet, not German, rule from September, 1939 to mid-1941. During that time, there were many Jewish people who collaborated with the Soviet terror apparatus against the conquered Polish state. Among the many eyewitnesses to those events is the famed Polish courier Jan Karski, who was made an honorary citizen of Israel for his efforts to worn an unresponsive West about the fate of Poland and Polish Jewry. In February, 1940, Karski reported: “Jews are denouncing Poles to the secret police and are directing the work of the communist militia from behind the scenes. Unfortunately, one must say that these incidents are very frequent.” (Report to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London.)
Hundreds of published accounts, including Jewish ones, confirm that Jews were involved in the roundups of Polish soldiers and officials (e.g., at Rozyszcze and Kowel), the jailing and executions of Poles (e.g., at Lwow and Czortkow), and in policing the deportation of Poles, in cattle cars, to the Gulag (e.g., from Gwozdziec). By the time the Germans attacked their erstwhile Soviet ally in mid-1941, over one million Poles had been deported to distant and probable deaths from towns like Bransk. All of this occurred before the Jewish Holocaust got underway. Naturally, these events had a significant impact on Polish attitudes, though that was not the only factor influencing them…..”
Chinese Propaganda Tactics: Conquering Guo
“Borrow the resources of an ally to attack a common enemy. Once the enemy is defeated, use those resources to turn on the ally that lent you them in the first place.”
—- Chinese strategies for creating chaos, “Obtain Safe Passage To Conquer The State of Guo“
UK Foreign Office Warning to Travelers About Israeli Passport Forgery
I didn’t have time to complete this post from a week ago, but with the really bizarre story of the Polish plane, I thought I should revisit it, as is:
At the end of March, Haaretz (March 31) reported that the British Foreign Office issued a travel advisory last week to citizens traveling to Israel and Palestine, “hours” after it decided to expel an Israeli diplomat.
“The risk applies in particular to passports without biometric security features,” the warning on the [UK foreign office] Web site said. “We recommend that you only hand your passport over to third parties including Israeli officials when absolutely necessary.”
This follows confirmation last week that killers of a Hamas operative in Dubai used forged passports from multiple countries, including the UK, Australia, France, Ireland, and Germany.
An editor at the Guardian notes that this is the lowest point in Anglo-Israeli relations since 1988, when an Israeli diplomat was expelled for being an agent of the Mossad.
Current relations with Israel are already strained, because senior Israeli officials visiting the UK have been threatened with arrest for alleged war crimes.
[Note:
The Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed in January in a hit that Dubai police have said they are 99 percent certain was the work of Israel's spy service, Mossad. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied this.
Dubai has named 27 alleged conspirators in the pursuit and killing of the Palestinian, and has claimed that they used fraudulent British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports to enter and depart from Dubai. More than half of the people identified share the names of foreign-born Israeli nationals].
Earlier, UK foreign secretary David Miliband had said there were “compelling reasons” to believe Israel was responsible and had called the use of 12 forged British passports “intolerable,” according to an earlier report by the BBC (March 23).
Meanwhile, Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, confirmed there would be no diplomatic retaliation, but expressed disappointment at Miliband’s decision. Israel has previously said there is no proof it was behind the killing at a Dubai hotel.
Israel claims the Australians are also going to follow suit, says this report:
“Official Israeli sources told The Australian newspaper that there is a high chance that Australia will follow Britain’s lead and also expel a high ranking Israeli diplomat. “It appears that Israeli officials have received indications in Canberra that Australia is preparing to expel a diplomat,” it said in the newspaper.”
Meanwhile, according to The Australian (March 31) ECAJ president Robert Goot told The Australian: “I think it would be an extreme reaction or possibly an overreaction (to expel an Israeli diplomat). The Jewish community would hope the Australian government might adopt a more nuanced position, depending on the outcome of the (Australian Federal Police) investigation.”
That’s not likely, now that former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky has told ABC Radio that the spy agency had used Australian passports for previous operations before last month’s hit on a top Hamas commander in Dubai that has been blamed on Israel. (see the Sydney Morning Herald (Feb 26, 2010)
Israel has previously dismissed claims from Ostrovsky, who has detailed various accusations against the country in his books. He said Mossad prefers to use “false flag” passports, as Israeli papers frequently invoke suspicion in the Middle East.
“They need passports because you can’t go around with an Israeli passport, not even a forged one, and get away or get involved with people from the Arab world,” he said.
“So most of these (Mossad) operations are carried out on what’s called false flag, which means you pretend to be of another country which is less belligerent to those countries that you’re trying to recruit from.”
Ostrovsky said Mossad had a “very, very expensive research department” dedicated to manufacturing the fake documents which simulates different types of paper and ink.
The Australian newspaper also said Ali Kazak, a former Palestinian representative to Australia, had warned in 2004 that a Mossad agent in Sydney had obtained 25 false Australian passports.
According to The Age (Feb 26, 2010), in Dec 2004, a second secretary in the Israeli embassy in Canberra was recalled because he was suspected of ties to passport fraud in New Zealand, where in March 2004 two suspected Mossad agents were convicted for fraudulently trying to get local passports. The New Zealand case eventually led to the downgrading of diplomatic ties and the canceling of Israeli PM Moshe Katsav’s visit.
The same report notes that Mossad used forged Canadian passports in 1997 in a bungled plot to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshal.
Then, as now, the Israeli prime minister, who has to approve all assassination attempts, was Benjamin Netanyahu.
Polish President Lech Kaczynski Killed In Plane Crash
[Note: The video is from Russia Today, which some claim contains Russian disinformation].
Update: Russian investigators say that there was nothing wrong with the landing instruments on the plane and that it was pilot error that caused the crash. Also, it seems that the number of bodies found is 96.
Update 8:
At Asia Times, M. K. Bhadrakumar notes that as the so-called “color” revolutions in Central Asia (Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan) have all gradually become undone, Kyrgyzstan has become destabilized, leaving the whole region from Af-Pak to Kyrgyzstan, on the very borders of China, volatile.
Point two. Like it or not, the US needs cooperation with Russia to help it out here before the excursion in Afghanistan is concluded, say, in 2011. It also needs help, as NATO expands into Central Asia, to contain both China and India, and (possibly) play them off against each other.
A strongly anti-Russian, reactionary Pole, like Kaczynski, might have been a very disturbing factor, a thorn also in the side of the much more tractable Polish PM, Donald Tusk.
Point three.
Tusk is on more amicable terms both with the Obama administration and with Russian PM Putin, with whom he met separately at Katyn last week. Tusk is also more Euro-friendly.
Point four. With Iran cementing natural gas deals not only with Pakistan, but with China and India (over US objections), and with a Euroskeptic Polish president (Kaczynski) making unexpected overtures to Russia, America’s power/leverage vis-a-vis Russia might suddenly seem less certain on both fronts, eastern and western, especially with the Russian natural gas pipeline in the Baltic, an initiative that tends to increase Russian influence in Europe.
Point five. The recent discovery of huge reserves of natural gas in Poland has foreign corporations scrambling for drilling rights there. That makes Poland a much bigger player in the region, especially in its ability to help or hurt a European recovery. Take that into account along with the recent devaluation of the Zloty, which is regarded as helpful to Polish exporters and the economy, but bad for Europe..
Update 7:
On April 8 Obama signed a new arms reduction treaty with Dmitri Medvedev (President of Russia) and met with East European heads of state, including Donald Tusk (Polish PM) to discuss the future of NATO and to allay fears Eastern Europe might have over the US-Russia deal.
In December 2009 Obama asked for stronger Polish support in Afghanistan
Update 6:
The more I think about it, the more this crash looks odd to me.
Digging for more information, I find the following:
Donald Tusk, the PM, was much less antagonistic to Russia and much more supportive of free market policies and integration of the country into the EU than Kaczynski.
From wiki:
“After being elected prime minister, relations between Tusk and President Lech Kaczynski were often acrimonious due to different political ideologies and the constitutional role of the
presidency. Using presidential veto powers, Kaczynski blocked legislation drafted by the Tusk government, including pension reform, agricultural and urban zoning plans, and restructuring state television.[16]Tusk and Kaczynski repeatedly sparred over issues ranging from European integration, homosexuality, foreign policy, to constitutional issues, with Tusk taking more socially liberal opinions than the conservative Kaczynski.
In his premiership, Tusk has proposed various reforms to the Polish constitution. In 2009, Tusk proposed changes to the power of the presidency, by abolishing the presidential veto”
It’s wholly plausible that as the second and worse leg of the economic crisis unfolds, and as sovereign default threatens several countries in Europe, a less prickly person as president of Poland might have seemed an attractive option to NATO.
Of course, at this point, all this is no more than speculation…
Update 5:
Former Czech president, Vaclav Havel comments on mounting speculation over the bizarre crash:
‘That speculation [that it was sabotage and not an accident] will influence the elections,’ he said, predicting some Poles would see an analogy to the 1943 plane-crash death of Wladyslaw Sikorski, Poland’s premier-in-exile. Some believe that Sikorski’s plane was deliberately brought down.
Update 4:
Eyewitness accounts says no explosion:
“A witness named himself Roman said he was washing his car in the village near the airport, when he saw a plane crashed down in the woods. “It was foggy here at that time, I couldn’t see it very clearly. I didn’t hear any explosion, but saw a lot of smoke. The plane flew forward a distance after one of the wings had been knocked off by the trees. Then the other wing also broke down, and the plane crashed in the woods 300 to 400 meters away from the airport, ” Roman recalled. A Xinhua reporter at the site saw pieces of the plane wreckage scattering in the sealed-off woods, where four rescuers were carrying out a body from the wreckage.”
One police officer pointed at a topless white birch tree about 300 meter away and told Xinhua that it was the first tree hit by the plane. Behind it, a number of treetops were cut off straight in the accident.”
Another eyewitness account says there was an explosion (Lila: this contradicts the other account, but that could be because the witness was closer to the crash).
The explosion was apparently so powerful that pieces were scattered near the outskirts of the town at a distance of a mile.
The plane is said to have crashed about half a mile on the runway. Some sections of the plane burned for more than an hour.
Update 3:
Some background on energy rivalry between Russia and Poland, which as focused on natural gas reserves/pipe line deals that had recently been cemented.
“Without consulting the Poles, Mr. Schroder (former German chancellor) had supported a major Russian-German gas pipeline, called Nord Stream, now being built under the Baltic Sea. For the first time, Russia could send gas directly to Western Europe, reducing its dependence on Poland, Belarus and the Baltic States as transit countries for sending Russian gas to its lucrative European markets.When the deal was struck between Mr. Schroder and then-President Vladmir Putin in September 2005, some Polish politicians said it was the beginning of a new Russian-German alliance.” (Lila: This would bring back to many Poles the history of German-Russian collusion at Gdansk to divide Poland)
“American technology to produce shale gas is unleashing a scramble for drilling rights in Poland, where experts believe vast reserves of unconventional gas exist that could help to weaken Russia’s grip on Europe’s energy supplies.
(Lila: Russia supplied 33% of European oil in 2009 and cut supplies to Ukraine during a fight over prices)
ConocoPhillips is poised to launch Poland’s first shale gas drilling programme next month near Gdansk on the Baltic coast. Two other American oil groups — Exxon-Mobil and Marathon — and Talisman Energy, of Canada, are set to follow. The technology has transformed America’s energy industry and driven gas prices to their lowest level in years.”
Update 2:
“In one of those rare moments of unity, the National Bank of Poland and the Polish government agreed on the need to weaken the Polish zloty, which over recent weeks has rebounded close to its pre-crisis strength. The currency’s strength is now seen a possible threat to economic recovery. After several verbal interventions over the past few days, the central bank intervened with real money Friday, for the first time in more than a decade.”
Update 1 (the following is paraphrased from a Polish newspaper that I translated with Google translator):
Smolensk’s Severny airport was, until October 15, the 103rd airport Military Transport Aviation Regiment. And, half an hour before the presidential plane landed, a military plane, Ilyushin Il-76, from Moscow, which was carrying a branch of the Federal Protection Service officers (the equivalent of BOR-u), tried to land. The pilot, originally from Smolensk was thoroughly familiar with local conditions and tried to land twice, before returning to Moscow. A Pole living in a hotel near the site says that the left wing hit a tree and the plane fell to the ground and disintegrated, immediately catching fire. Emergency services on the spot appeared after several minutes.
[Lila: Now this part sounds a bit odd to me, although it could just be confusion at the scene of an accident].
The Russians stated that it made no sense to send ambulances to the site, since everyone was dead. The crash occurred in the forest, and the Russian services couldn’t enter the disaster area because of the mud at the site.
[Lila: How could they be so sure everyone was dead, especially, when many more bodies were recovered than were on the flight list (132 bodies versus 89 on the list)?]
ORIGINAL BLOG POST
Accident, Sabotage, or False Flag?
MSNBC reports that Polish President (from 2005-2010) Lech Kaczynski (1949-2010) and top Polish military and civilian leaders, historians, and activists were killed when the presidential plane crashed on landing in thick fog in Smolensk in western Russia on Saturday, killing 130, according to this report.
(Other reports have placed the death toll at 96, 97 88 (the number on the passenger list according to the Poles), 132, and 135).
Communication with the plane was lost at 10:50 local time (0656 GMT).
Pravda.ru says the plane came down at 11 AM local time about 1.5 km from the airport and 225 km from Moscow.
The Governor of Smolensk told official media there were no survivors of the crash and that the plane had clipped the top of the trees, crashed, and then broken into pieces.
Preliminary data collected show that the plane hit the treetops while approaching the airport in bad visibility, says an official with the Russian general prosecutor’s office, according to ITAR-Tass news agency, (reported by CBS).
A spokesman for the Smolensk regional government said publicly that air traffic controllers there had advised the pilot not to land in the thick fog at the military airport and to divert to Moscow or to Minsk (the capital of Belarus) instead.
BBC reported that Russian PM Putin visited the scene of the crash and said he would personally supervise the investigation. He also said the investigation would be a joint Polish-Russian investigation. The Russian emergency ministers said both of the plane’s information recorders (black boxes) had been found and would be examined.
The Polish group was on its way to the 70th anniversary of the massacre at Katyn forest near Smolensk, when thousands of Polish officers (including some who were also Jewish) were killed by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in 1940.
My Comment 2:
The significance of Katyn was that it was blamed on the Nazis by the Soviets, and, that despite this betrayal of its own ally, Poland, the US continued to treat the Soviets preferentially and cover-up for it.
Furthermore, at the end of WW II, the western powers again betrayed Poland - over whom the war was supposed to have been fought - by allowing it remain under the Soviet sphere of influence.
So, Katyn is not simply about Poland and Russia, as nation states, it’s also, equally, about Poland’s betrayal by the US and the Allies.
And it’s about the Polish Catholic suspicion of the atheistic Bolsheviks who primarily carried out the massacres ….
Religion, ethnicity, and nationalism all converge in this profound national trauma.
It’s important to remember that President Roosevelt officially rejected the conclusion of his own research team, and stated he was convinced that the Nazis were culpable. That is, he sided with Stalin against the Poles. And he actually ordered that the report that he himself had commissioned be suppressed. It was only more recently that the true history of the massacre of the flower of Poland by the Soviet NKVD has become common knowledge. This secret history is vital to understanding the symbolism involved in this crash.
This is not just about Poland and Russia. It is about the anti-Communist and anti-Nazi feelings of Catholics in Poland and their betrayal by the West.
Smolensk is only 11/2 hours away from Warsaw and the symbolism of the crash has struck many people, including former President Kwasniewski, who called Katyn “cursed.”
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called it the most tragic event of Poland’s post-World War II history, according to BBC.
My Comment 1:
1. It’s very strange that so many of the top brass would be on a single flight, especially on a plane as known for being unreliable and dangerous as the Soviet built Tupolev-154, which has suffered 16 crashes since 1994 (AP).
According to the Aviation Safety Network, there have been 66 crashes involving Tu-154 in the last 40 years, 6 in the last 5 years alone, and Aeroflot has withdrawn its Tu-154 fleet from service, although the TU-154 used to be the workhorse of the Soviets and the eastern bloc in the 1970s and 1980s. The Polish government had been thinking of replacing the planes for flights carrying government officials, but didn’t have the money for it.
Wouldn’t high level personnel have normally been booked on separate flights to avoid difficulties in the military/government in case of an accident? This particular plane was also 26 years old, had been overhauled recently at a Russian aviation facility, and had only few hours on it.
However, the Russian facility Aviakor has said that the plane was in good condition for the flight.
Another aviation expert also told Al-Jazeera that the TU-154 can operate in extreme weather conditions and can land on an unpaved airstrip. He believes the crash was a “fluke”.
2. How is it that the information that the president’s wife had an uncle who was killed at Katyn was so widely and uniformly known that it appeared in a majority of global reports about the crash?
(Katyn is a national symbol of WW II and the anti-Communist struggle and stirs deep nationalistic feelings in Poland).
Another oddity in the media reports was the varying numbers given for the dead, when according to early reports, the Russians were able to collect all the bodies, and had verified that all on board had died. In that case, why such different numbers?
Also, how is it that the original flight list was for only 89 people (one didn’t show up)? How did some 30 plus extra passengers apparently fly…or is this a reference to something else?
3. What a bizarre coincidence that several people whose death would be calculated to arouse nationalist remembrance of the past (Katyn, communist crimes, Solidarity), should all die on a trip to Katyn, along with significant members of the political and military establishment? The people who died were all people significant to Poland’s anti-communist history. Kaczynski and his twin brother, Soviet era child actors, both played important roles in Polish politics.
“The twins (Kaczynski and his brother) pushed unashamedly for conservative values and a righting of historical wrongs with 20th century foes Russia and Germany in ways that ruffled feathers and often seemed out of step with the times,” says the WSJ.
The BBC noted that Kaczynski was a right-wing Catholic, who opposed rapid free-market reforms and favored retaining social welfare programs:
“He had advocated a right-wing Catholic agenda, opposed rapid free-market reforms and favoured retaining social welfare programmes.”
The LA Times noted his campaign against liberal sexual mores:
“At home, Kaczynzki, who was mayor of Warsaw before becoming president, sought to expose former communists and cleanse what he and his brother regarded as pervasive liberalism. He took a hard line against homosexuality and often assailed the media over salacious magazines and TV shows. His critics regarded him as a politically dangerous mix of Polish nationalism and religious conservatism.”
“The president was a conservative and a lifelong skeptic of Russia with many detractors at home and abroad.”
Consider also this piece of symbolism, among many other coincidences:
“Rossiya-24 showed footage from the crash site, with pieces of the plane scattered widely amid leafless trees and small fires burning in woods shrouded with fog. A tail fin with the red and white national colors of Poland stuck up from the debris.”(BBC)
4. In case this proves not to be an accident, Poles might be tempted look to the FSB (and Putin) as the possible culprit, since the plane was recently overhauled in Russia. Yet, Russia is unlikely to have downed a Polish plane with top military and civilian commanders on its own territory. That would be a political and military blunder almost unthinkable.
5. Exploring another angle, it’s been known for a while now that the CIA has a presence in Eastern Europe, as also suggested in a piece I wrote in 2005 on CIA black sites there.
Poland is a staunch ally of the US in other areas as well, thus provoking some dislike in Russia:
“The European Union member nation of 38 million people sent troops to the U.S.-led war in Iraq and recently boosted its contingent in Afghanistan to some 2,600 soldiers.
U.S. Patriot missiles are expected to be deployed in Poland this year. That was a Polish condition for a 2008 deal — backed by both Kaczynski and Tusk — to host long-range missile defense interceptors. The deal, which was struck by the Bush administration, angered Russia and was later reconfigured under President Barack Obama’s administration. Under the Obama plan, Poland would host a different type of missile defense interceptors as part of a more mobile system and at a later date, probably not until 2018.” (CNN)
Russians also distrusted his advocacy of NATO membership for the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Georgia and his support of Georgian President Mikhael Saakashvili during the 2008 Russo-Georgian war (CS Monitor).
6. However, in recent times, relations with Russia had thawed:
“Polish-Russian relations had been improving of late after being poisoned for decades over the Katyn massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers.”(Stanford Advocate, April 10, 2010).
Last year in September, Russian PM Putin met Kaczynski in Gdansk (Danzig) on the anniversary of the Hitler’s invasion of Poland and had made partial amends for the USSR’s role in breaking up Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the Non-Aggression Treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939).
and this:
“Russia never has formally apologized for the murders but Putin’s decision to attend a memorial ceremony earlier this week in the forest was seen as a gesture of goodwill toward reconciliation. Kaczynski wasn’t invited to that event because Putin, as prime minister, had invited his Polish counterpart, Tusk.” (CBS) http://wcco.com/national/polish.Kaczynski.dead.2.1623978.html)
6. Exploring this from another angle, could this tragedy have anything to do with the another strange incident in Eastern Europe a few weeks ago?
Two Gulf Stream V type jets equipped with sophisticated intelligence equipment violated Hungarian laws by flying low into Hungary without landing and then flew 1300 miles over Turkey, Hungary and Romania and disappeared, all around the same time a Syrian-Hungarian man implicated in money-laundering was mysteriously killed in Budapest, in what some have suggested was a Mossad hit. That incidence should be read in light of the recent expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from the UK, and the threat of diplomatic sanctions against Israel in Australia, following the revelation that the Mossad had forged multiple passports from different countries in carrying out the killing of a Hamas operative in Dubai, earlier this year.
But Kaczynski was on very good terms with the Jewish community in Poland, once almost wiped out by the Holocaust. In 2008, he became the first head of state to attend service at a synagogue in Poland, and before that, as mayor of Warsaw, he donated land for a projected museum on Jewish history. Israel and the Jewish community expressed deep shock at the deaths and called Kaczynski a great leader.
That would seem to make him an unlikely target for an Israeli false-flag operation.
Update: AP has a list of the top officials and political significant people who died in the crash. Here are some of them:
Lech Kaczynski (President), Maria Kaczynska (his wife), Andrzej Kremer (deputy foreign minister and chief of staff), General Franciszek Gagor (army chief of staff since 2006, Polish rep at NATO, 2004-06), General Andrzej Blasik (head of airforce, trained in Montgomery, Alabama in 2005), (Vice-Admiral Andrzej Karweta, Navy Chief since 2009, served as Supreme Allied Command Atlantic, Norfolk, Virginia, 2002-05), Gen. Tadeusz Buk (land forces commander, 2009, commander of Polish troop in Iraq since 2007), Slawomir Skrzypek (president of the National Bank since 2007, close friend of the president), Alexander Szczyglo, head of National Security Office, former defense minister, Jerzy Szmajdzinski (opposition candidate for president, deputy parliamentary speaker, defense minister during Iraq war), Ryszard Kaczorowski (last president in exile, who passed on presidency to first democratic president Lech Walesa), Janusz Kurtyka (head of the state-run National Remembrance Institute, commemorating communist crimes), Anna Walentynowicz (Solidarity activist whose firing sparked the movement which led to Polish freedom), Piotr Nurowski (head of Poland’s Olympic Committee), Krystyna Bochenek (deputy parliamentary speaker)
Iraq War: Firing On Old Women And Taxis
Update: This comes from Glenn Greenwald. There’s been criticism by the Weekly Standard and others that WikiLeaks released an edited rather than a complete video. Greenwald says Wikileaks released both on the same site and the mistake arises from an erroneous statement in a NY Times piece on the subject.
“The only problem with this? From the very beginning, WikiLeaks released the full, 38-minute, unedited version of that incident — and did so right on the site they created for release of the edited video. In fact, the first video is marked ”Short version,” and the second video — posted directly under it — is marked “Full version,” and just for those who still didn’t pick up on the meaning, they explained:
WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.
This is Bumiller’s fault for misleadingly suggesting that WikiLeaks failed to release the full video. I know she’s been notified by at least one NYT reader of her misleading sentences but has thus far failed to respond. Establishment media outlets can’t stand that WikiLeaks is breaking major stories and are trying — consciously or otherwise — to imply that they’re not as reliable as Real Media Outlets (hence, the “WikiLeaks edited the video to 17 minutes” without indicating that they released the full video). But this is exactly how clear falsehoods are manufactured and then spread.”
Update (Thanks to AD Niven):
The blog post below (April 6, 2010; see also the April 8, 2010 post) says the Wikileaks video was edited to make the event look less defensible.
(Lila: That’s the reason I didn’t post it…….I’ve been through this a number of times with “war footage”)
***********************************
The NY Times, in their story about the incident, spends paragraph after paragraph fretting that we killed a bunch of innocent men standing around doing nothing more than contemplating whether Grotius’ notion of jus ad bellum conflicted with that of Aquinas. Then they hit you with this seemingly important piece of information buried near the end:
“Late Monday, the United States Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, released the redacted report on the case, which provided some more detail.The report showed pictures of what it said were machine guns and grenades found near the bodies of those killed. It also stated that the Reuters employees “made no effort to visibly display their status as press or media representatives and their familiar behavior with, and close proximity to, the armed insurgents and their furtive attempts to photograph the coalition ground forces made them appear as hostile combatants to the Apaches that engaged them.”
I’d also direct you to Bill Roggio’s post on the subject if my own thoughts didn’t convince you that this was one of the worst smear jobs against our military based on zero evidence in the last decade.
Case closed.
Dahr Jamail in Truthout (hat-tip to Lawrence Vance at LRC blog):
“On Monday, April 5, Wikileaks.org posted video footage from Iraq, taken from a US military Apache helicopter in July 2007 as soldiers aboard it killed 12 people and wounded two children. The dead included two employees of the Reuters news agency: photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh.
The US military confirmed the authenticity of the video.
The footage clearly shows an unprovoked slaughter, and is shocking to watch whilst listening to the casual conversation of the soldiers in the background.
As disturbing as the video is, this type of behavior by US soldiers in Iraq is not uncommon.
Truthout has spoken with several soldiers who shared equally horrific stories of the slaughtering of innocent Iraqis by US occupation forces.
“I remember one woman walking by,” said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the US Marines who served three tours in Iraq. He told the audience at the Winter Soldier hearings that took place March 13-16, 2008, in Silver Spring, Maryland, “She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces.”
The hearings provided a platform for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to share the reality of their occupation experiences with the media in the US.
Washburn testified on a panel that discussed the rules of engagement (ROE) in Iraq, and how lax they were, to the point of being virtually nonexistent.
“During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot,” Washburn’s testimony continued, “The higher the threat the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond. Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and nudge, was to carry ‘drop weapons’, or by my third tour, ‘drop shovels’. We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body, and make them look like an insurgent.”
Hart Viges, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army who served one year in Iraq, told of taking orders over the radio.
“One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation…. One of the snipers replied back, ‘Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?’ The lieutenant colonel responded, ‘You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxicabs.’ After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment….”
Possible Mossad Links to Killing of Syrian Man In Hungary?
Last, week there was another killing suspected to be the work of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. This one was in Budapest, Hungary. The dead man was supposedly involved in money laundering. Hungarian officials have since played down the connection, but it was widely reported there, as well as in Israel and Russia.
“On Wednesday March 17, just after seven in the morning, Dr Bassam Trache, a 52-year-old veterinary surgeon with dual Syrian and Hungarian citizenship, was shot dead in his black Mercedes at a junction in Budapest’s 16th district. The killer grabbed a black briefcase from the car and made off on foot.
Dr Trache, it was revealed, operated a money-changing business. A few years ago he was acquitted in court of attempting to bribe - with jewellery and Arab cakes - the head of the Budapest police’s money-changing investigation division.
At first, his murder was regarded as yet another killing connected with the shady world of money-changing; in the past ten years, there have been no fewer than 123 murders connected with the business in Budapest.
But then a more fantastic theory to explain Dr Trache’s murder emerged.
It transpired that on the very day that Trache was killed, two Israeli Gulfstream V-type jets were spotted flying low over the Hungarian capital, leading to speculation that, just two months after the assassination in Dubai of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Syrian might have been the victim of a Mossad hit…..”
That’s from The First Post ( UK), which goes on to list some of the puzzling inconsistencies in the government’s statements that have been fueling the rumor.
“Last week, however, it was announced that a leading official of the NKH had been sacked, with a further four members of staff disciplined, over their failure to consult Hungary’s secret services before issuing a permit for the Israeli aircraft to enter Hungarian airspace.
And while Szollar claimed that Israel’s flying manoeuvres were merely “routine”, Hungary’s transport minister, Peter Honig, conceded that they were not fully in line with Hungarian laws. Then the Hungary’s HirTV claimed that the Israeli ambassador to Hungary, though denying the term “spy planes”, had referred to the planes as reconnaissance jets.”
The New York Post has reported that the Israeli ambassador told the Hungarian news agency MTI that the jets were on a diplomatic mission and were not spying. The NY Post said the Hungarian government had declined to comment on this response.
Another newspaper, MY Sun, reported that it was Hungarian officials who claimed the jets were on a diplomatic mission.
In a Reuters report, Hungarian spokesman Domokos Szollar stated that the jets were in “routine training” and Israel had cleared the overflights with Hungary two months in advance. Szollar explained the earlier confusion by officials as a case of bad internal communications. Apparently, the Hungarian defense department hadn’t been notified, and so, on first hearing of the flights, PM Gordon Bajnai had ordered an investigation.
The head of Budapest’s criminal investigations team, Zsolt Bodnar, reportedly dismissed allegations about a Mossad link as “fiction.”
I’m going ahead, nonetheless, and posting this video, because it happens to follow two far more substantial stories I’m also watching: the story about documented Mossad links to the murder of a Hamas operative in Dubai, as well as the possible Mossad ties of David Headley, the CIA operative who admitted to being guilty of the Mumbai terror attack of November 2008, at the time blamed on Islamicists. All three events together form a news story that’s quite riveting, especially since it accompanies the continual drum-beat for war with Iran. This story also suggests that any arrests for domestic terrorism need to be looked at with a great deal of skepticism, at this point.
At this point, I should repeat, the forgery of the passports in the killing of the Hamas official is documented; any ties to Headley are very plausible but so far unproven (and have not been reported in the mainstream press, for that’s worth); and the Hungarian story seems to be still in the “allegations” stage.
Barack Obama: The Case For Impeachment
David Lindorff lays out the grounds for impeaching President Obama:
Let’s start with the war in Afghanistan, which Obama has taken full ownership of with an escalation that will bring the number of US troops in that country (not counting mercenaries hired by the Pentagon and CIA) to 100,000 by this August.
The president has authorized the use of Predator drone aircraft for a program of bombing conducted against Pakistan which has illegally expanded the Afghan War into another country without any authorization from Congress. These pilotless drones are known to kill far more innocent bystanders than enemy targets, making them fundamentally illegal on principle as weapons. Furthermore, this wave of attacks in Pakistan is a war of aggression against another nation if the word “war” is to have any meaning at all, and as such it is illegal under the UN Charter. Indeed initiating a war of aggression against a country which does not pose an immediate threat to the invader is described in the Charter and in the Nuremberg Tribunal Charter as the gravest of all war crimes.
The president, as commander in chief, has also, in collusion with Attorney Eric Holder, blocked any prosecution of those who authorized and perpetrated torture against captives in the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, and the so-called War on Terror–notably Federal Appeals Court Judge Jay Baybee, and Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo, who as Justice Department attorneys authored the legal briefs justifying torture– and has in fact continued to permit the application of torture against captives. All of this is in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, which as a signed set of treaties, are part of the law of the United States. Under those treaties, failure on the part of those up the chain of command to halt or to punish those who commit torture are themselves guilty of the crime of torture.
As commander in chief, President Obama has also overseen a strategy in Afghanistan of expanded attacks on civilians in Afghanistan. As in Iraq under the Bush administration, this current phase of the war in Afghanistan is seeing more civilians killed than enemy combatants, because of the widespread use of weapons like helicopter gunships, aerial bombardment, fragmentation bombs, etc., as well as a tactic of night raids on housing compounds where insurgents are suspected of hiding–raids that frequently lead to the deaths of many women and children and innocent men. It is significant that even the recent execution-style slaying of nine students, aged 11-18, by US-led forces, has not led to an investigation or prosecution of a individual. Rather, the incident is being covered up and ignored, with the clear acquiescence of the White House and the leadership at the Pentagon.
It is also widely believed that under the command of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who is known to have directed a large-scale death-squad operation in Iraq before moving to his current position, a similar death-squad campaign of assassination is being conducted now in Afghanistan--a campaign that like the notorious Phoenix Program in the 1960s in Vietnam, is almost certainly resulting in the deaths of many innocent Afghans.
Domestically, the president has continued to allow the policy of detention without trial of hundreds of captives in Guantanamo Bay and other prisons, including Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and his director of national security has even stated that it is the policy of this administration that American citizens deemed by the administration to be enemy combatants or terrorists may be targeted for summary execution. Such officially sanctioned state murder is a blatant violation of the Constitution’s insistence that every American has a right to a presumption of innocence and to a trial by a jury of his or her peers.
The president has also continued and in some ways even expanded the Bush/Cheney administration’s program of warrantless spying by the National Security Agency on the electronic communications of millions of Americans. A part of that program, the monitoring of communications of a now defunct Islamic charity, was just declared illegal by a federal judge in a case that was brought against the Bush/Cheney administration, but which continued to be defended by the current administration. There has not been a decision as yet by the Obama administration about whether to appeal that decision. While the case in question does not represent a crime by the Obama administration, it is clear that it only represents the very tip of the huge iceberg of domestic spying, and the administration’s vigorous efforts to shut down this case or to win it are clear evidence that the NSA is continuing to do the same thing on a vast scale. In fact, the only reason this case even got to trial is because of a government error that resulted in a memo describing the monitoring being mailed inadvertently to the victims of the spying.
While we’re at it, I would also suggest that there is ample evidence to call for the impeachment of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who appears, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, to have colluded in an effort to cover up a massive fraud at Lehman Brothers, and who has subsequently as Treasurer, participated in unprecedented giveaways of taxpayer funds to several of the country’s largest banking institutions.
The above enumeration of criminal and Constitutional transgressions makes it clear that this president, like his predecessor, has, almost since his first day in office, continued down a road of criminal and unconstitutional behavior that threatens the survival of Constitutional government in the United States.
Let me state it simply: President Barack Obama, as well as Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Treasury Secretary Geithner, should be impeached for war crimes and high crimes against the Constitution.”
Mumbai Attack Suspect David Headley: Truth And Lies
Some background on suspected Mumbai conspirator, David Headley, in an interview in December 2009 on India’s ND TV with the Daily Beast’s Gerald Posner.
Headley Spy Case Raises Questions In India About CIA Role
Asia Times columnist M. K. Bhadrakumar writes that US citizen David Headley, a key player (Indian sources say, the mastermind), in the November 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack that killed 166 people* has reached a plea bargain with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that allows the US Government to hold back from producing evidence against him in a court of law that would have revealed details of his ties to US intelligence. [*163, according to the NY Times, March 26, 2010; 165, according to the Wash Po, March 27, 2010]
Headley will be protected from cross-examination by the prosecutor, and the 166 victims will not be represented by a lawyer at the Chicago trial that’s now commencing.
Nor can he be extradited to India or questioned by Indian agencies about his links to US and Pakistani intelligence.
(Note: He will be accessible to India through video conferencing, deposition, and Letters Rogatory)
Headley, the son of a former Pakistani diplomat and an American socialite from Philadelphia (according to the NY Times piece), was a drug-pusher in the 1990s who then went on to work for the Drug Enforcement Agency.
He’s said to have prepared for the attack with five visits to India between 2006 and 2008, each time returning via Pakistan and meeting with several handlers, some of whom included members of the terrorist group Lakshar-e-Toiba (LeT), which has close ties to Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence)
Headley has reportedly named five-six serving officers of the Pakistan army as among the leaders of the Karachi Project, which organizes attacks on India through fugitive Indian jihadis being sheltered in Karachi by the ISI and the LeT.
The Asia Times article goes on to ask some questions about the CIA’s possible involvement that are likely to strain US-Indian relations:
“How much did the CIA know?
The plea bargain details that while working as an American agent Headley attended at least five “training courses” conducted by the LeT in Pakistan, including sessions in the use of weapons and grenades, close-combat tactics and counter-surveillance techniques, from February 2002 until December 2003.Training courses in April and in December 2003 were each of three months’ duration and in such close proximity to the 9/11 attacks that it stretches credulity to believe the CIA didn’t care to know what their agent was doing in the LeT training camps.
Today, the heart of the matter is how much did the CIA know in advance about the Mumbai terrorist strike and whether the Obama administration shared all “actionable intelligence” with Delhi?
A senior Indian editor wrote on Sunday, “Headley … was convicted on drug charges and sent to jail in the US. We know also that he was subsequently released from jail and handed over to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which said that it wanted to send him to Pakistan as an undercover agent. All this is a matter of public record. What happened between the time the US sent Headley into Pakistan and his arrest at Chicago airport a few months ago? How did an American agent turn into a terrorist? The US will not say.”
Yet, cooperation in the fight against terrorism lies within the first circle of US-India strategic cooperation. The Mumbai attacks led to unprecedented counter-terrorism cooperation between India and the US - “breaking down walls and bureaucratic obstacles between the two countries’ intelligence and investigating agencies”, as a prominent American security expert, Lisa Curtis, underscored in US congressional testimony on March 11 regarding the Mumbai attacks and Headley.
To quote Curtis, “Most troubling about the Headley case is what it has revealed about the proximity of the Pakistani military to the LeT.”
Curtis put her finger spot on the US government’s deliberate policy to view the LeT through the prism of India-Pakistan adversarial ties. This is despite all evidence of the LeT’s significant role since 2006 as a facilitator of the Taliban’s operations in Afghanistan by providing a constant stream of fighters - recruiting, training and infiltrating insurgents across the border from the Pakistani tribal areas.
The US policy is impeccably logical. It prioritizes the securing of Islamabad’s cooperation on what directly affects American interests rather than squandering away Pakistani goodwill by Washington covering for the Indians.
This political chicanery lies at the core of the unfolding Headley drama. What emerges, even if one were to give the benefit of the doubt to the CIA, is that Headley was its agent but he possibly got involved with Pakistan-based terrorist organizations and became a double agent
No doubt, the US administration is behaving very strangely. It has something extremely explosive to hide from the Indians and what better way to do that than by placing Headley in safe custody and not risk exposing him to Indian intelligence?”
Blair’s “Oily” Deals Greased His Iraq War-Mongering
Turns out Tony Blair had his hand in the oil jar, while he was talking up the Iraq war….and after. The Daily Mail (UK) reports:
Last night Tory MP Douglas Carswell said of Mr Blair’s links to UI Energy Corporation: ‘This doesn’t just look bad, it stinks.
‘It seems that the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has been in the pay of a very big foreign oil corporation and we have been kept in the dark about it.
‘Even now we do not know what he was paid or what the company got out of it. We need that information now.
“This is revolving door politics at its worst. It’s not as if Mr Blair has even stepped back from politics, because he is still politically active in the Middle East.
‘I’m afraid I have no confidence at all in the committee that vets these appointments. It’s no good telling us these deals may be commercially sensitive - we are talking about the appointment of our former Prime Minister and the public interest, rather than any commercial interests, must come first.’
Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker said: ‘These revelations show that our former Prime Minister is for sale - he is driven by making as much money as possible.
‘I think many people will find it deeply insensitive that he is apparently cashing in on his contacts from the Iraq war to make money for himself.’
“The committee said yesterday that Mr Blair had taken a paid job advising a consortium of investors led by UI Energy in August 2008. The exact nature of the deal is unknown, but UI Energy is one of the biggest investors in Iraq’s oil-rich Kurdistan region, which became semi-autonomous in the wake of the Iraq war.
“Mr Blair’s fee has not been disclosed but is likely to have run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
“The secrecy is particularly odd because UI Energy is fond of boasting of its foreign political advisers, who include the former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and several prominent American politicians.
“Mr Blair successfully persuaded the committee that the appointment was ‘market sensitive’ and could not be made public.”
US Support For White Phosphorous In Gaza
Eileen Fleming in Op-Ed News:
“The Ileana Ros-Lehtinen/AIPAC driven House Resolution 867 boiled down to a call for censorship of the Goldstone Report without “any endorsement or further consideration” from the Obama Administration, rife with inaccuracies and undermines support for the universality of human rights.
“It is no surprise that Congress is trying to cover their culpable asses for during the 23 days of Israeli assault on Gaza, “Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus and DIME. The weapons required for the Israeli assault were decided upon in June 2008, and the transfer of 1,000 bunker-buster GPS-guided Small Diameter Guided Bomb Units 39 (GBU-39) were approved by Congress in September. The GBU 39 bombs were delivered to Israel in November (prior to any claims of Hamas cease fire violation!) for use in the initial air raids on Gaza. [1]
One of the few who have been to Gaza, Congressman Baird D-WA, wrote, “H.Res. 867 is very serious business. If, as Goldstone asserts and the evidence I have seen supports, there were in fact gross violations of international law and human rights on all sides, we cannot in good conscience support H.Res. 867.
“This is about much more than just another imposed political litmus test that we are all too often asked to perform. This is about whether we as individuals and this Congress as an institution find it acceptable to drop white phosphorous on civilian targets, to rocket civilian communities, to destroy hospitals and schools, to use civilians as human shields, and to deliberately destroy nonmilitary factories, industries and basic water, electrical and sanitation infrastructure. This is about whether it is acceptable to restrict the movement, opportunities and hopes of more than a million people every single day.
“At the end of the day, this is also about our own domestic security. If we are seen internationally as condoning violations of human rights and international law, if our money and our weaponry play a leading role in those violations, and if we reflexively obstruct the findings of someone with the credentials, history and integrity of Justice Goldstone, it can only diminish our international standing and our own security.“-Rep. Brian Baird (D) represents Washington’s 3rd district.” [2]
Army Suicide Level Rises to “Epidemic Levels”
Jason Ditz at Antiwar via Christian Peacenik:
“Calling 2009 a “painful year,” the US Army announced today that it faced a record number of suicides among Army personnel, with 160 active-duty soldiers taking their own lives.”
Christian Peacenik goes on to comment:
“This surpassed the previous record of 140 in 2008, and the previous record before that was 115 in 2007. The Army has been keeping track of suicides since 1980, with the level suddenly rising to epidemic levels in recent years.”
In an attempt to cope, many soldiers turn to drugs and alcohol, and many others, as Friday’s AP story reminds us, end up killing themselves. Needless to say, the effects of this psychological destruction remain even after one leaves the service. As Dahr Jamail points out, “A 2008 court case in California revealed a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) email that revealed 1,000 veterans who are receiving care from the VA are attempting suicide every single month, and 18 veterans kill themselves daily.”
But again, the American idiocracy, with all its meaningless symbols and gestures, doesn’t want to hear any of this. Which is why we need to bring this to the idiocracy’s attention and explain why it’s yet another reason to bring our troops home.”
The Demonic Style: Valentine On Military Historians, Avatars, and the CIA
Insight into why the revisionist media never ‘gets’ it:
“The extent to which this practice existed was revealed in 1975, when William Colby informed a congressional committee that more than 500 CIA officers were operating under cover as corporate executives and that 40 CIA officers were posing as journalists.
“When it comes to the CIA and the press, one hand washes the other. In order to have access to informed officials, reporters frequently suppress or distort stories. In return, officials leak stories to reporters to whom they owe favors.
Time To Talk About the Elephant
Crazy terrorist or method to his madness? When will the media start providing context?
From Mondoweiss:
“He [Balawi's brother] described Mr. Balawi as a “very good brother” and a “brilliant doctor,” saying that the family knew nothing of Mr. Balawi’s writings under a pseudonym on jihadi Web sites. He said, however, that his brother had been “changed” by last year’s three-week-long Israeli offensive in Gaza, which killed about 1,300 Palestinians….
Pankaj Mishra On The Strength Of Passivity
The old world, with its failures, weaknesses, and poverty, has at least a proper estimation of the limits of human action, says writer Pankaj Mishra in an oped in the New York Times, last August:
“India may have been passive after the Mumbai attacks. But India has not launched wars against either abstract nouns or actual countries that it has no hope of winning or even disengaging from. Another major terrorist assault on our large and chaotic cities is very probable, but it is unlikely to have the sort of effect that 9/11 had on America.
Doug Valentine: CIA Killings Spell Defeat In Afghanistan (Updated)
Update (January 12): In response to criticism (in the Comments) by a US military historian, I’ve posted a review of Avatar here at MBP, on January 11.
Update (January 12): Since this piece is so topical and sensitive, I´m taking the liberty of adding links to it, so that readers can do further reading on their own.Original Post:
“Douglas Valentine, author of the recently released account of the DEA, “The Strength of the Pack,” contributes this piece to The Mind Body Politic:
Disrupting the Accommodation: The CIA Killings Spell Defeat In Afghanistan
Why?
“Why?” The grieving family members ask. “Why did the terrorists kill our loved ones?” (more…)
War Without End, Amen..
“Bush’s rationale for attacking Afghanistan was spurious. Iranians could have made the same argument to attack the United States after they overthrew the vicious Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and the U.S. gave him safe haven. If the new Iranian government had demanded that the U.S. turn over the Shah and we refused, would it have been lawful for Iran to invade the United States? Of course not.
When he announced his troop “surge” in Afghanistan, Obama invoked the 9/11 attacks. By continuing and escalating Bush’s war in Afghanistan, Obama, too, is violating the UN Charter. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama declared that he has the “right” to wage wars “unilaterally.” The unilateral use of military force, however, is illegal unless undertaken in self-defense…….
…In his declaration that he would send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Obama made scant reference to Pakistan. But his CIA has used more unmanned Predator drones against Pakistan than Bush. There are estimates that these robots have killed several hundred civilians. Most Pakistanis oppose them. A Gallup poll conducted in Pakistan last summer found 67% opposed and only 9% in favor. Notably, a majority of Pakistanis ranked the United States as a greater threat to Pakistan than the Taliban or Pakistan’s arch-rival India.
Many countries use drones for surveillance, but only the United States and Israel have used them for strikes. Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times, “For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for targeted killings in a country where the United States is not officially at war.“
Barack Obama: The Looks That Kill
Insightful piece by Mary Rizzo in The Palestine Chronicle on the triumph of style over substance in the career of Barack Obama:
“In Afghanistan at least one hundred innocent civilians were killed by a few men flying US Air Force planes, and this was not an isolated attack, it is simply one that had been reported. This act, when done by the Republicans, was immediately condemned by those who consider themselves to be “anti-war”. The complaints never seemed to last longer than a few days and they had no practical efficacy whatsoever, but the feeling was that it was wrong, it was putting America in a worse position and that one should protest, not really for the Afghanis or Iraqis, but for the sake of the image of the USA. All of this has simply faded out because their man, the charming and attractive Obama is doing it, and his narrative of the Good War, they believe, is going to be enough to do the trick.
Certainly, there is nothing new about the utilisation of rhetoric and image to make effective propaganda. What would really be sad is if those who identify with Obama because of his attractive image identified with all the hypocrisy he represents, and the lack of awareness that he is as imperialistic and as warmongering as any president before him, none excluded. If looks could kill, they probably will.”
Muslims Should Withdraw Money from Swiss Banks..
“Turkish State Minister and Chief Negotiator for EU talks Egemen Bagis has urged Muslim nations to withdraw their money from Swiss banks.
Bagis’ comments came in response to a recently approved ban on the construction of new minarets in Switzerland.
Following a weekend referendum, the construction of any new minaret was declared illegal in Switzerland, a move which drew sharp criticism from Muslim and European countries, as well as the UN and the Vatican.”
No Check Points in Heaven
Palestinian activist Ramzy Baroud writes about his father’s struggles, and eventual death, in Gaza:
“My father’s reputation as an intellectual, his obsession with Russian literature, and his endless support of fellow refugees brought him untold trouble with the Israeli authorities, who retaliated by denying him the right to leave Gaza.
His severe asthma, which he developed as a teenager was compounded by lack of adequate medical facilities. Yet, despite daily coughing streaks and constantly gasping for breath, he relentlessly negotiated his way through life for the sake of his family. On one hand, he refused to work as a cheap labourer in Israel. “Life itself is not worth a shred of one’s dignity,” he insisted. On the other, with all borders sealed except that with Israel, he still needed a way to bring in an income. He would buy cheap clothes, shoes, used TVs, and other miscellaneous goods, and find a way to transport and sell them in the camp. He invested everything he made to ensure that his sons and daughter could receive a good education, an arduous mission in a place like Gaza.
But when the Palestinian uprising of 1987 exploded, and our camp became a battleground between stone-throwers and the Israeli army, mere survival became Dad’s new obsession. Our house was the closest to the Red Square, arbitrarily named for the blood spilled there, and also bordered the ‘Martyrs’ Graveyard’. How can a father adequately protect his family in such surroundings? Israeli soldiers stormed our house hundreds of times; it was always him who somehow held them back, begging for his children’s safety, as we huddled in a dark room awaiting our fate. “You will understand when you have your own children,” he told my older brothers as they protested his allowing the soldiers to slap his face. Our ‘freedom-fighting’ dad struggled to explain how love for his children could surpass his own pride. He grew in my eyes that day.
It’s been fourteen years since I last saw my father. As none of his children had access to isolated Gaza, he was left alone to fend for himself. We tried to help as much as we could, but what use is money without access to medicine? In our last talk he said he feared he would die before seeing my children, but I promised that I would find a way. I failed.”
Memorial Day Salute
My Comment
I had a hard time finding a video that expressed my complicated feelings about the military, the war in Iraq, dead soldiers, dead civilians, militarism, patriotism, sacrifice and everything else that is part of Memorial Day.
There were the ‘patriotic’ videos - lots of images of the flag, with the eagle brooding above it. Marches, squadrons in flight, tanks rolling, symbols of victory, power, dominance. They didn’t suit. There are times to fight, but the last fifty odd years of fighting haven’t been defensive. We’ve had military adventures. We’ve had ideological battles. We’ve had covert operations. We’ve slaughtered and starved civilians, flattened cities, assassinated national leaders. What you think of these depends on your world view and your ability to stomach reality, but simple flag-waving doesn’t cut it.
Then I tried music. Maybe articulating what can’t be articulated was the problem. That didn’t work either. I tried country singers. They sounded sentimental and their nasal voices offered nothing of insight into the dark attraction of militarism. I tried Johnny Cash. But the old ragged flag didn’t do it for me. I tried swooping renditions of Amazing Grace. Too emotional. I wanted something drier and terser.
I thought of posting pictures of the actual war in Iraq - the dead and mutilated children, the bombed out buildings. But Memorial Day is the wrong day for that. There are times when conventions are right. Memorial Day is about the service men and women. I could make it something else. But that wouldn’t be right, coming from an immigrant. So I didn’t do it. Besides, wounds are wounds and deaths are deaths. Giving a voice to the American dead is not denying a voice to the Iraqi dead.
Anyway, Memorial Day is older than the Iraq War, so I shelved that idea.
I also couldn’t bring myself to do a piece about militarism, like Mike Gogulski at Nostate. Mike’s post from last year was a savage one - F*** the Troops. It was brave, but somehow it missed the point. Paying attention to the pain and suffering of the troops, their sacrifice, if you will, isn’t about supporting war or militarism or any of those things. It’s a human gesture. It may be, as he writes, that they sometimes died for unworthy goals and ends. It may be they’re sometimes complicit in whatever crimes were committed. It may also be that there were among them fools, opportunists, and thugs. That too is beside the point. But what the point is I’m unable to say. I just know it intuitively.
I liked the clips of buglers playing Taps best. There was a lonesome dignity to them. But they kept stopping in the middle, so I couldn’t use them. There was also one of a military salute, with gunfire, that I liked. War is about guns and death. At least one of the two should be on a Memorial Day video I thought.
Some of the more interesting videos were by peaceniks and antiwar activists. But I didn’t want to politicize this. Something from the Vietnam War also seemed too political. [I mean, political in terms of party politics]. Videos with mothers weeping, girls singing, crucifixes in the ground (what about the non-Christians and atheists?), all had little things about them I didn’t like. And they were about other people, not about the troops.
There was one video of an old vet reminiscing about his mates in World War II, which got close to the feeling I wanted to convey, but the commentary took a while to make its impact. And it was too understated. I wish there were more videos made by vets. I’d rather not take their own words or experiences away from them.
I had a thought after all of this. Everything has music behind it these days. We all live our lives as though an Oscar-winning soundtrack were playing behind us. We create story-lines even when there aren’t any. That’s human nature, and it may be our redemption, but it’s also a reason why we mythologize things.
In the end, I decided to just post a video of a memorial ceremony at Arlington. Some things can’t be expressed.
Over a Million Refugees in Somalia
In the news on Friday, May 22:
“Martin Bell, former BBC war correspondent and current UNICEF UK Ambassador for Humanitarian Emergencies, recently concluded a three-day trip to the north-east zone of Somali to report on the situation of children and women affected by conflict, drought, displacement and other hardships – and to shed light on UNICEF’s efforts to provide them with crucial services.
In Bossaso, one of the country’s busiest ports, Mr. Bell visited settlements for displaced people and saw firsthand the dire conditions in which they live. Displaced populations form a group of chronically vulnerable people here, lacking even the most basic social services and livelihood opportunities.
Bossaso hosts 27 camps where 40,000 people have sought refuge from other parts of the country. Over 1 million people in Somalia are internally displaced, mainly due to the conflict and insecurities in the central and southern regions..”More at Relief Web.
Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontieres reports that more than 270,000 have fled to Northern Kenya, to camps operated by the UN High Commission for Refugees, where rations have been cut by 30% and malnutrition runs at over 22%, well above the emergency threshold. That’s driving many of the refugees back to the war-zone.
My Comment
This was sent to me by a young Somali friend, who urges everyone to help in any way they can.
Now, my focus in this blog is on mass thinking, but the organization of crowds (through state propaganda, coercion, and surveillance) has as its other face, the dis-organization of crowds in times of crisis, often state-produced crisis, such as at New Orleans during Katrina, or here. Among people on the move in large groups, refugees are probably the largest group.
What is amazing to me about crowds of refugees is that they move peacefully, giving the lie to fear-mongering imagery of masses of people overwhelming civilization. That’s the sort of imagery usually conjured up by authoritarians when discussing mass migration or mass movement of any kind.Pakistani Strike Creates Nearly 1/2 Million Refugees
Hundreds of thousands of people have become refugees and scores of civilians (including children) killed during Pakistan’s latest offensive against what it terms extremist militants in the Taliban-held districts of Pakistan that border Afghanistan.
From a report on the weekend (May 9) by AP:
“The offensive has prompted the flight of hundreds of thousands of terrified residents, adding a humanitarian emergency to the nuclear-armed nation’s security, economic and political problems. Desperate refugees looted U.N. supplies in one camp, taking blankets and cooking oil….”
PM Gilani calls the full-scale offensive that was launched on Thursday at Washington’s behest
“a fight for the country’s survival.”
My Comment
Here’s a problem that’s festered decades. Why would a military solution work now when it hasn’t worked in all this time? That’s the blundering logic of the state. Defending against militants doesn’t justify creating what could amount to half-a-million refugees, by UN estimates and has the potential to destabilize what’s often considered the top “hot-spot” of the world - the Indo-Pak border and Kashmir.
At Cato, Malu Innocent has similar thoughts:
“Also, if America is worried about Pakistan’s imminent demise, U.S. policymakers and defense planners must understand that the coalition’s presence in Afghanistan threatens to further destabilize Pakistan. The vast majority of Pakistanis are not radical. But the spread of tribal militias in the northwest, tens of thousands of refugees (and certainly some militants) fleeing into major cities from aerial drone strikes, and widespread distrust of America’s intentions in the region, all place undue stress on a nation already divided, weak and fragile.”
Chinese and Russian espionage? (Updated)
In the news today, intelligence officials seem to have found evidence of Chinese/Russians mapping US infrastructure:
“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” a senior intelligence official told the Journal. “So have the Russians.”
The espionage appeared pervasive across the United States and does not target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official.
“There are intrusions, and they are growing,” the former official told the paper, referring to electrical systems. “There were a lot last year.”
The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama was not immediately available for comment on the newspaper report.
Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, “If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on.”
Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.
Protecting the electrical grid and other infrastructure is a key part of the Obama administration’s cybersecurity review, which is to be completed next week.
The sophistication of the U.S. intrusions, which extend beyond electric to other key infrastructure systems, suggests that China and Russia are mainly responsible, according to intelligence officials and cybersecurity specialists…..”
More here at Reuters.
My Comment
I am not sure what these “software tools” left behind were……and where they were left behind.
Since Homeland Security is a pervasive umbrella bureaucracy, it could refer to any part of government at any level.
Now, which companies are responsible for Homeland Security software and intelligence gathering? See below for information on CACI.
Notice also that intelligence is no longer afraid of any terrorists being behind this threat. They wouldn’t have the sophistication, say officials.
Oh really? But we’ve been orange and red-alerted for the past eight years about just that threat, haven’t we? And somehow, these same not competent terrorists managed to pull off 9-11, didn’t they? And elude the mighty forces of the US for years….despite our dominance in global electronic surveillance technology…
But now, suddenly, officials know right off the bat that terrorist couldn’t be behind this. Anyone else find that reasoning a bit suspect?
Please note, the officials who gave this information are not named in the piece. Would help if we could find out who these unnamed intelligence people and cyber-security experts are.
Update:
One of the most important, if not the most important, company involved in Homeland Security is CACI, a company I wrote about in LOE (it’s in the section that was cut out).
CACI’s chairman, Jack London, recently (March 24, 2009) addressed a symposium on asymmetric threats to US and Global Security in Arlington Virginia. His remarks included the following useful reference:
“Harvard professor, Joseph Nye, the man behind the term “soft power,” along with former deputy Secretary of State – and former CACI board member – Richard Armitage, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last year: “Smart Power is a framework for guiding the development of an integrated strategy, resource base and tool kit to achieve U.S. objectives, drawing on both hard and soft power.”
From the section cut out of LOE (this part completed around early 2005)
“We can monitor the entire globe,” says CACI’s CEO Jack London (21)
The depth of this penetration of government is not limited to telecommunications and intelligence. CACI also handles the Federal Aviation Administration’s global administrative-data network and runs a system for the Justice Department that lets lawyers pick through millions of documents for what they need. In July 2004 Transportation Services Administration, the villain of the pat-down searches abuse and an agency of Homeland Security, also became a new client. CACI’s “Knowledge Management” systems capture and convert data to digital format, publish on the internet, manage the Freedom of Information Act process and declassification, electronic information distribution, and related services for the entire Department of Justice (including the FBI, Tax, Drug Enforcement, and Immigration & Naturalization) Defense, Transportation, DHS Customs and Border Protection, and the Environmental Protection Agency, computer and interrogation services to the Defense Department, and other agencies. (22)
CACI is thus at the heart not only of military intelligence, but of internal security, internet technology, air transportation, and law enforcement at home. It encompasses the most vital powers of the state in an octopus-like penetration of populations abroad and at home.
The nerve center of this octopus coincides with power centers and power brokers in Tel Aviv and Washington….”
See also, this piece from December 2005, on CACI’s involvement in disinformation and what’s been called Defense Support for Public Diplomacy, a blending of diplomacy, information ops and psyops.
Now, from my previous posts, you know I believe that our dear leaders are cornered and that the end game is about to roll out. What could that be? Keep temporizing while grabbing more power, use the power to hide how much has been lost and by whom, whistle cheerfully and twist as many arms as possible to keep the vaudeville act going, meanwhile start fanning public anger against everyone possible, from random rich people, CEO’s, bonus recipients, immigrants, China, Russia, terrorists, socialists, communists, anyone in fact other than the specific group of financiers, regulators and politicians whose finger prints are on this mess. At some point, should things get bad enough, war will be declared. For further support for this take, check Jake Towne’s very detailed analysis of why the stimulus money just isn’t enough to do anything (with which I agree, in the sense that this isn’t a problem that can be fixed…however, I disagree that it won’t cause inflation - it will, eventually) and why war might be the avenue out.
March Madness in 2009….and in 1939
From a recent piece at Lew Rockwell, Nightmare on Wall Street
March Madness
Insurance giant AIG, already rescued by the public, comes back for more. The bill now totals almost $200 billion, nearly half of which goes to foreign banks, including the very banks that shaped government policy on the bank bail-out, a criminal conflict of interest.
- China and the US face off over US surveillance in Chinese waters, as well as over Chinese currency pegging
- The Bernie Madoff investigation reveals that family and friends of the ex-Nasdaq chief connived in his fraud, which prosecutors charge, has been going on since the 1980s. Money-laundering through an English bank is part of it.
- After three rescues, Citigroup ends up trading at around $1 and needing another round of government aid. That brings the government’s total commitment to Citi to over $300 billion.
- Net capital flows to the US turn negative, auto sales fall sharply, and pension-funding shortfalls are destroying company balance sheets.
- The Fed Reserve commits to buy $300 billion in Treasuries (creating $1 trillion in new money). The bond market reacts positively. But, in what seems like a warning from the other side of the Atlantic, when the Bank of England tries to auction British bonds, it fails to find enough buyers for the first time in seven years. The market is signaling its belief that the UK government is effectively bankrupt.
- Upward pressure on LIBOR, the London interbank offer rate, continues relentlessly. This is a measure of the willingness of banks to lend to each other and it’s showing severe credit market stress…..
*******
and,
“As reports about the AIG deal circulate and stir up public anger, the USNS Impeccable, a survey ship (read, spy-ship) faces off with Chinese ships in what the US claims are international waters off Hainan island. But the encounter is also within 200 miles of the Chinese coast, a zone China considers its exclusive economic zone. Hainan is also a key strategic base in the South China Sea and the location of China’s biggest submarine base. This comes just days after US military talks with China resume.
The US claims it’s a Chinese provocation, although it’s hard to believe that a Chinese spy ship snooping around Americans coasts would be greeted with brotherly love. It seems more likely to be a US provocation.
Notice that the incident reinforces Barack Obama’s provocative warnings to the Chinese about currency manipulation during the presidential campaign. Obama was apparently playing to the part of his base that is China-hawkish and protectionist. Notice that this is also a neo-conservative position, as human rights interventionists (let’s call them liberventionists) would like to see a tougher US posture in places like China and Darfur.
In short, the big government wing in both parties likes the “Chinese currency manipulation” motif……”
And in a recent piece at Lew Rockwell and Human Events, Pat Buchanan writes:
“Made a fool of by Hitler, baited by his backbenchers, goaded by Lord Halifax, facing a vote of no confidence, on March 31, 1939, Chamberlain made the greatest blunder in British diplomatic history. He handed an unsolicited war guarantee to the Polish colonels who had just bitten off a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Lunacy, raged Lloyd George, who was echoed by British leaders and almost every historian since.
With the British Empire behind it, Warsaw now refused even to discuss a return of Danzig, the Baltic town, 95 percent German, which even Chamberlain thought should be returned.
Hitler did not want a war with Poland. Had he wanted war, he would have demanded the return of the entire Polish Corridor taken from Germany in 1919. He wanted Danzig back and Poland as an ally in his anti-Comintern Pact. Nor did he want war with a Britain he admired and always saw as a natural ally.
Nor did he want war with France, or he would have demanded the return of Alsace.
But Hitler was out on a limb with Danzig and could not crawl back.
Repeatedly, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. Repeatedly, the Poles rebuffed him. Seeing the Allies courting Josef Stalin, Hitler decided to cut his own deal with the detested Bolsheviks and settle the Polish issue by force.
Though Britain had no plans to aid Poland, no intention of aiding Poland and would do nothing to aid Poland – Churchill would cede half that nation to Stalin and the other half to Stalin’s stooges – Britain declared war for Poland.
The most awful war in all of history followed, which would bankrupt Britain, bring down her empire and bring Stalin’s Red Army into Prague, Berlin and Vienna. But Hitler was dead and Germany in ashes….”
My Comment
In an earlier piece, Nationalization In a Time of Monopoly, I noted the ominous end game in which we’re finding ourselves:
“First, it [the state] creates debt everywhere until the capital base of the economy is destroyed and production is in tatters. Banks become bankrupt, except for those that have government connections and can consolidate. The monopolies have nothing to restrain their anti-market behavior and push their own agendas in concert with the state. With no limit to cheap credit, the money supply swells. Workers can no longer keep up with inflation. The lopsided development of the state sector crushes savings and production in the remainder of the economy. Jobs dwindle.
To supplement them, the corporate-state creates make-work programs on the domestic front. When bad times and discontent persist, it looks abroad.
Then comes war.
That is where nationalization in a time of monopoly will take us.” (Lew Rockwell, March, 2009)
*******
That warning cannot be emphasize enough. We meddle further at our own peril.
Beware any further ceding of power to the government.Before any more doing - undo, undo, undo.
Or , as Buchanan shows in his gripping time-line, when this end game rolls out, we will find that even countries that do not want war with us now, will be forced into it.
Greenspan Eggs On World War IV: China Versus US
Some more blows in the ongoing World War IV, known as the War on Terror to the masses. WW IV was always about the perception of the US (and the Anglosphere in general) that the growing economies of China, and to a lesser extent India, posed a threat to access to world resources. The War on Terror was simply a pretext to establish bases from which WW IV could proceed at a more comfortable pace.
Thus Alan Greenspan’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, blaming Asia, especially China, for the US housing bubble:
“The result was a surge in growth in China and a large number of other emerging market economies that led to an excess of global intended savings relative to intended capital investment. That ex ante excess of savings propelled global long-term interest rates progressively lower between early 2000 and 2005. That decline in long-term interest rates across a wide spectrum of countries statistically explains, and is the most likely major cause of, real-estate capitalization rates that declined and converged across the globe, resulting in the global housing price bubble…”
Read this along with remarks by Tim Geithner in the Obama administration that China was manipulating the yuan to help its exports ( a sentiment also voiced by Obama during the elections).
That’s the perspective from which the little fracas (actually it’s the biggest fracas between China and the US since 2001) in the South China Sea should be seen. The USNS Impeccable - a civilian ship under Navy control - was apparently conducting surveillance in what it claims was international waters (where US doctrine insists on international freedom to move) but within the 200 mile zone in which Chinese economic control obtains. Chinese vessels came within 25 feet of the US ship which sprayed them with water, and then left.
This week China will also be unveiling plans for an increase of 15% in its defense spending, including expansion of its naval capacity.
Propaganda Nation: Iraq War Coverage Still Skewed
“Claims that the mainstream media distorts the violence in Iraq are certainly correct, but not in the way that conservative pundits claim. The American press has systemically ignored, marginalized, or buried deep within their pages casualty reports indicating that hundreds of thousands, perhaps over one million Iraqis died during the occupation. What little reporting has been done on casualties focuses more on American lives. An analysis of the 2003-2005 period finds that the New York Times covered American casualties three times more than Iraqi civilian casualties. When violence against Iraqis has been reported, it typically portrays the victims of violence as the result of the actions of insurgents and militias, rather than also as the result of American bombing. This practice, contrary to conservative punditry claims, allows for the U.S. to be framed in a positive light, as a force fighting against civil war and sectarian violence, rather than one that is destabilizing Iraq through its own bombings (which are estimated to have killed tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands). Furthermore, when the media does report casualties in Iraq (in this case American ones), its reporting is heavily dependent upon the lead of the government itself. According to one study, 75 percent of the stories filed on American casualties in the New York Times from 2003 to 2005 were based exclusively on press releases from the Department of Defense. Statistically, the study showed that, as the DOD increased its press releases on casualties (during months when larger numbers of Americans were killed), the New York Times responded to increased DOD releases by increasing its own reporting on American deaths. During times when the DOD put out fewer releases, the New York Times responded accordingly by reducing its coverage. Coverage of violence, then, is heavily influenced by the government’s own actions and agenda….”
Anthony Di Maggio in Counterpunch
John Bolton Jokes About Nuking Chicago
Here’s John Bolton joking about a possible nuclear hit on Chicago at Think Progress.
Talk about irresponsible and dangerous blather by a man as responsible as any one for the Bush administration isolating itself in the world and increasing international tensions. First, the ‘Obama terrorist’ cover from his pals, then the ’shoot the chimp that wrote the stimulus bill’ joke, now ‘nuke Obama’s town’.
On the other side, Obama and Holder keep up the focus on race in another way.
We don’t need more race talk….and we don’t need any racial slurs or incitement either.
We need someone who can add up the figures and explain how this stimulus bill and the rest of the proposals coming out of the administration do anything but increase the power of the government and the kleptocrats.
Barack Obama Bombs Pakistan
“The CIA’s bombing campaign against al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan continued with two more attacks today, an indication, senior officials say, that President Barack Obama has approved the U.S. strategy that has killed at least eight of al Qaeda’s top 20 leaders since July 2008.
The two attacks today in Pakistan’s were the first since President Obama took office on Tuesday….”
More at the ABC blotter
Comment:
Hooray for change!
Note that Bush actually objected to bombing Pakistan without asking Musharraf’s permission, something Obama criticized. As this Huffington Post piece from last year points out, in this respect, Obama’s action today is worse than Bush’s and more in line with the CIA’s stated preference. (This is not an endorsement of Bush - at least, Obama got the country right).
Terror Wars: Mumbai Attacks Not About Kashmir
KABUL: Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said on Thursday international community should not link 26/11 attacks on Mumbai to the Kashmir dispute.
Addressing a joint press conference with his Afghan counterpart Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, Mukherjee said the international community has to take Mumbai attacks as a part of global terrorism,
Apparently referring to the recent statement made by the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on Kashmir suggesting terror attacks in south Asia would stop with the resolution of the Kashmir dispute, Mukherjee said: These attacks (on Mumbai) are not related to Jammu and Kashmir and are a part of global terrorism.”
More at The Jang News, Pakistan.
Comment:
What’s with Miliband? Whence this common-sense approach so conspicuously absent from that little unpleasantness in Mesopotamia this past - what is it? - half a decade?
Oh, I see. The Brits don’t want the Wogs* to step out of their carefully allotted place in the terror theater. Can’t have Gunga-Din getting a piece of the global terror racket. No, let the regional empires stick to the regional market. And let the Anglo-American Empire collect on the global terror trade - where you get the best prices and the highest return on your money.
*Westernized Oriental Gentlemen
814 Palestinians Dead So Far
“At least 814 Palestinians, roughly half of them civilians, have died since war broke out on Dec. 27, according to Palestinian medical officials. Thirteen Israelis, including 10 soldiers, have been killed.
Weary Palestinians watched from apartment windows as thousands of leaflets fluttered from aircraft with a blunt warning: Israeli forces will step up operations against Islamic militants who have unleashed a daily barrage of rocket fire on southern Israeli towns.
“The IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) is not working against the people of Gaza but against Hamas and the terrorists only,” the leaflets said in Arabic. “Stay safe by following our orders.”
The leaflets urged Gaza residents not to help Hamas and to stay away from its members. There was no immediate sign of an escalation, though earlier in the day, witnesses said Israeli troops moved to within one mile of Gaza City before pulling back slightly.
Israeli defense officials say they are prepared for a third stage of their offensive, in which ground troops would push further into Gaza, but are waiting for approval from the government. Early on Sunday, Israeli tanks were heard moving near the central Gaza border as Israeli artilley pounded the area, indicating the possibility of a larger operation.
Palestinian witnesses said Israeli forces fired phosphorus shells at Khouza, a village near the border, setting a row of houses on fire. Hospital official Dr. Yusuf Abu Rish said a woman was killed and more than 100 injured, most suffering from gas inhalation and burns. Israeli military spokesman Capt. Guy Spigelman categorically dened the claims.”
And this:
” The U.N. estimates two-thirds of Gaza’s 1.4 million people now lack electricity, and half don’t have running water.”
And the Independent breaks the numbers down:
“In the day’s bloodiest incident, an Israeli tank shell landed outside a home in the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya, killing nine people as they sat in their garden. They were all from the same clan, and, said health administrator Adham Hakim, their bodies were so mangled they were brought to hospital in the boot of a civilian car. Two were women and two were children. This wretched pair will be added to the nearly 300 Gaza children who have been killed by Israeli fire. In the perversely disproportionate mathematics of this conflict, 13 Israelis have been killed – four of them by militant rockets. According to the Hamas-run Palestinian health ministry, the overall death toll now exceeds 800, more than a third of them children. The United Nations corroborates this, a report two days ago from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs putting the number of children killed at 265. The Israelis respond that Hamas often uses schools and homes, and therefore are the ones bringing down fire on Gaza’s children. Last week, an Israeli attack outside a UN school killed nearly 40 people.”
Comment:
IDF math runs like this: 8 of us, 800 of you. 4 soldiers among us; 300 children among you. There is no way to call this war or reprisal. It is indiscriminate civilian massacre.
Change under Barack Obama
“When America’s new leader of “change” was informed of Israel’s massive air attack on the Gaza Ghetto, an area of 139 square miles where Israel confines 1.4 million Arabs and tightly controls the inflow of all resources–food, medicine, water, energy–America’s president-elect Obama had “no comment.” According to the Jerusalem Post ( December 26), “at 11:30 a.m., more than 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters swept into Gazan airspace and dropped more than 100 bombs on 50 targets. . . . Thirty minutes later, a second wave of 60 jets and helicopters struck at 60 targets . . . More than 170 targets were hit by IAF aircraft throughout the day. At least 230 Gazans were killed and over 780 were wounded . . .”
Paul Craig Roberts in Counterpunch
Not So Quiet On the Eastern Front….
WASHINGTON - U.S. authorities are investigating whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop computer during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack into Commerce computers, officials and industry experts told The Associated Press.
Surreptitious copying is believed to have occurred when a laptop was left unattended during Gutierrez’s trip to Beijing for trade talks in December, people familiar with the incident told the AP. These people spoke on condition of anonymity because the incident was under investigation….”
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