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Nuclear War Theme Parks: Mass Destruction for the Whole Family

By John Laforge | CounterPunch | September 7, 2015

Plutonium was named after Pluto, “god of the underworld,” Hades, or hell. It was created inside faulty reactors, concentrated, and machined by US scientists into the most devastating and horrifying of all weapons. Photos of what the Manhattan Project’s plutonium bomb did to human beings at Nagasaki prove the point. There is radioactive blowback in the fact that the thousands of tons of plutonium created since 1945 is so dangerously hot and long-lived that, like the underworld itself, nobody knows how to handle it at all — except maybe to trivialize it.

Hoping perhaps to show that the bomb from hell can be transformed from a vengeful, self-destructive, nightmare demon, into a benign, peace-loving, fairy-tale prince, nuclear propagandists and their friends in Congress are establishing nuclear war theme parks — without the taint of mass destruction — at former bomb factories and nuclear weapons launch pads all across the country.

Tours are being offered at the “B Reactor,” on the Hanford Reservation in Washington State which in 2008 was declared a National Historic Landmark. Plutonium production reactors for the nuclear arsenal were sloppily operated there for decades, releasing large amounts of radioactive fallout and causing permanent tainting of groundwater which now threatens the Columbia River—cover it up, make it a destination.

A National Wildlife Refuge has been established at Rocky Flats, Colorado, outside Denver, where the machining of plutonium for nuclear bomb cores has poisoned dozens of square miles.

Near Fargo, North Dakota, the State Historical Society has acquired a deactivated Minuteman missile launch control center, dubbed it “Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Site,” and opened it to tourism.

In South Dakota, a retired launch control center is now the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site and is run by the National Park Service. With enough willful blindness — that if looked at squarely, might be considered a kind of devil worship — visitors may go underground and personally simulate a missile launch. “Satan laughing with delight.”

Outside Tucson, Arizona, you can tour the Titan Missile Museum which opened in 1986 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994.

At White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, six hours from Washington, DC, the Greenbrier hideaway was built by the Eisenhower Administration as a nuclear war fallout shelter for 1,000 people — including members of Congress and their families. The bunker came with a generator, a 60-day supply of food, a hospital, kitchen, dining room, waste-disposal, and a dental operating room. Of course, a nuclear attack on Washington would have rendered evacuation impossible, the airport a smoldering ruin, and the trains unworkable. Now deactivated and elegantly restored, the site is making money by charging visitors for tours.

In 2011, then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar recommended to Congress that a national historic park be established to honor the Manhattan Project — the secret program whose atom bombs killed 140,000 people at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki. National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis said then in a press release, “Once a tightly guarded secret, the story of the atomic bomb’s creation needs to be shared with this and future generations.” Jarvis insults our intelligence by feigning ignorance of the vast literature concerning the development and use of nuclear weapons which is available in any good library — histories based on formerly classified documents that demolish the official government myth — that the Bomb “ended the war” and “saved lives.”

These nuclear war theme parks are part of a deliberate attempt to trivialize nuclear weapons and to dumb down popular understanding of their environmental and human health legacy. After employing hellish mythology to manufacture real massacres so vast that governments might quake, it wasn’t too big a leap for the same scientists to follow Hiroshima and Nagasaki with 16,000 human radiation experiments on US citizens, 100 atmospheric bomb tests, deliberate mass venting of radiation, intentional “test-to-failure” reactor meltdowns, and ocean sinkings of tons of rad’ waste and entire navy propulsion reactors. All this coldblooded recklessness severely and permanently endangers human, animal and environmental health, because radiation in the body in cumulative doses attacks the gene pool in multi-generational perpetuity. Enormous radiation releases by commercial reactors and nuclear waste sites — at Windscale, Chelyabinsk, Tomsk, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, etc. — have resulted directly from the nuclear weapons program first unveiled in a show of butchery, and later peddled like laundry soap to an uninformed public as a “peaceful atom” that would bring “electricity too cheap to meter.” We now know the nuclear age will bring a never-ending due bill too gargantuan to quantify.

Last month, thanks largely to Senators from nuclear weapons states Tennessee and New Mexico, a Manhattan Project National Historical Park was officially authorized. Oddly, three proposed sites for this “park” are secret sections of the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tenn., off limits to the public.

In view of the fact that the Manhattan Project’s atomic bombings of Japanese cities were not merely unnecessary but known in advance not to be necessary, the United States should be making formal apologies to the victims and their survivors in Japan, and offering reparations to them, not glorifying the planning, preparation and commission of mass destruction.

September 7, 2015 Posted by | Militarism, Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

White House: Russian Military Action Against ISIS in Syria Would be ‘Destabilizing’

By Daniel McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | September 4, 2015

Today’s lesson in how propaganda works: The rumor mill turns a trickle of a story early this week about “thousands” of Russian soldiers deploying to Syria any day — a wholly unsourced story originating on an Israeli website — into a torrent of hyperventilating about the “Russian invasion” of Syria.

Today neocon convicted felon Eliot Abrams took to the Council on Foreign Relations website to amplify the Israeli article (again with no sources or evidence) to a whole new and more dramatic article ominously titled “Putin in Syria.” Abrams adds “reporting” by Michael Weiss, who has long been on the payroll of viscerally anti-Putin oligarch Michael Khodorkovsky, without revealing the obvious bias in the source. Never mind, all Weiss adds to Abrams’ argument is that the Pentagon is “cagey” about discussing Russian involvement in Syria before again referencing the original (unsourced) Israeli article.

See how this works? Multiple media outlets report based on the same totally unsourced article and suddenly all the world’s writing about the Russian invasion of Syria.

Now the White House has gotten into the game. According to an article by Agence France Press, the White House is “monitoring reports” that the Russians are active in Syria.

What reports? The article does not say nor does the White House. Presumably the White House is referring back to the original (unsourced) Israeli article.

But in the category of never let a good “crisis” go to waste, the White House, which began bombing Syria last August in violation of both international and US law, has declared that any Russian involvement in the Syria crisis would be “destabilizing and counterproductive.”

Apparently a year of US bombs is not “destabilizing.”

This is where the hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife. The US is illegally bombing Syria, illegally violating Syrian sovereignty, illegally training and equipping foreign fighters to overthrow the Syrian government, and has backed radical jihadists through covert and overt programs.

ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria were solely the products of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq under false pretenses — the lies of the neocons — and after a year of US bombing ISIS seems as strong as ever while scores of civilians are killed by US attacks.

All of this is perfectly fine and should never be questioned. But even the hint that the Russians, who have had to contend with their fair share of radical Islam and are much closer to Syria than the US, may have an interest in joining the fight against ISIS is met with hysterical reproaches by a White House that admits it has no evidence.

What is the White House afraid of? While the stated goal of the Obama Administration is to defeat ISIS, the real, long-term goal is to overthrow Assad. The Russians disagree with the US insistence that Assad’s departure must be the starting point of any political settlement of the crisis. The Russians have long ago come to understand that Assad may be key to saving Syria from the kind of jihadist chaos that has engulfed Libya after its “liberation” by the US and its allies.

That is why the US government is flirting with the (unsourced Israeli) rumors of a massive Russian invasion of Syria. Regurgitated cries that the Russians are coming may serve to divert attention from another failed US intervention in the region.

One might think that if the US was serious about defeating ISIS it would welcome involvement from Russia and Iran, both of which would like nothing more than to see the back of the Islamic State. One might think if the US was serious about defeating ISIS it would rethink its “Assad must go” policy and allow the one force that has the most incentive to defeat ISIS — the Syrian Arab Army.

Yet the US will only work with the same states that have trained, funded, and turned a blind eye to the radical Islamic fighters as they have poured into Syria over the past four years — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, etc.

Conspiracy-minded people must be wondering why the US is so reluctant to accept assistance from forces that so earnestly and with such military capacity seek the end of ISIS while partnering with those forces that have done so much to create ISIS.

September 7, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Three Treasury Secretaries Laughing It Up Over Income Inequality

“Former Treasury Secretaries on the Global Economy” April 27, 2015
http://www.c-span.org/video/?325566-3…
Former Treasury Secretaries Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, and Robert Rubin talked about about global economic trends, public finance and capital markets. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, moderated.

The Global Economy: A Conversation with Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin” was a luncheon program of the 18th annual Milken Institute Global Conference held April 26-29, 2015, at the Beverly Hilton.

Robert Rubin
Former Treasury Secretary
Clinton Administration, 1995-1999

Henry Paulson
Former Treasury Secretary
Bush Administration, 2006-2009

Timothy Geithner
Former Treasury Secretary
Oabma Administration, 2009-2013

Sheryl Sandberg
Former Chief of Staff to Treasury Secretary
Larry Summer, Clinton Administration, 1996-2001
Facebook Chief Operating Officer

September 7, 2015 Posted by | Economics, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, Video | | 1 Comment

Why do Police Ignore Federal Guidelines and Shoot at Moving Vehicles, Killing Occupants?

By Noel Brinkerhoff and Steve Straehley | AllGov | September 7, 2015

Federal guidelines recommend police avoid shooting into moving vehicles because innocent people can be killed and it’s ineffective at stopping cars. Police continue to use this deadly tactic, however.

An investigation by The Guardian found at least 30 incidents in 2015 of police firing their weapons into moving cars or trucks, killing at least one person each time.

Black men made up more than 25% of those, although they comprise only 6% of the driving-age population, Jon Swaine, Jamiles Lartey and Oliver Laughland wrote.

The British newspaper reported police involved in those shootings justified the use of deadly force by claiming the vehicles they shot at posed a threat to them or their colleagues. But The Guardian found almost all of the incidents were examples of police ignoring federal guidelines that say officers should open fire only if a driver presents a separate deadly threat, such as a gun. In the cases examined by the newspaper, none of those killed were pointing guns at police, and in only three cases were police aware there was a weapon in the vehicle.

“If an officer puts himself in a position where they have no alternative but to use deadly force, they will use deadly force,” Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told The Guardian. “What you really want them to do is think ‘I should not stand in front of this car. I should not put myself in a position where I have no alternative.’”

The U.S. Department of Justice does not recommend shooting into moving cars because experts say it is widely viewed as ineffective for stopping oncoming vehicles, and doing so poses risks to innocent parties. Police departments in Denver, New York City, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Miami Beach, Los Angeles and Albuquerque, among other cities, heed this recommendation.

Others haven’t adopted it. Police in Indianapolis, for example, have twice in recent months shot and killed drivers in their cars. That department’s policy states that police may fire into vehicles if it’s “reasonably perceived that the vehicle is being used as a weapon against the officer or others.”

To Learn More:

Moving Targets (by Jon Swaine, Jamiles Lartey and Oliver Laughland, The Guardian )

Should Police Shoot at Moving Cars? (by Michael Anthony Adams, Indianapolis Star )

Denver Police Change Policy on Shooting at Cars (by Noelle Phillips, Denver Post )

Police Shoot to Death One Unarmed Person Every 3 Days in U.S. (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )

Police Officer Goes on Trial for Firing 49 Shots at Two Unarmed Drug Users (by Danny Biederman and Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )

September 7, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

SodaStream to shut down West Bank factory, new factory near planned township where Bedouins are being forcefully transferred

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IMEMC News & Agencies | September 6, 2015

SodaStream announced, today, that it will finalize the closure of its West Bank factory in two weeks.

SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum commented, earlier, that the boycott only had a “marginal” effect on their business and accused the movement of “antisemitism”, PNN reports.

Mahmoud Nawajaa, The Palestine Boycott National Committee (BNC) General Coordinator, said:

“Coming just as French multinational Veolia has abandoned the Israeli market following a 7-year campaign against its support for settlements that cost it billions of dollars, SodaStream’s announcement today provides further proof that the BDS movement is increasingly able to hold corporate criminals to account for their role in Israeli apartheid and colonialism.

“SodaStream may wish to try and smear our movement, but it is clear that BDS campaigning and the Scarlett Johansson controversy has persuaded retailers across Europe and North America to drop SodaStream and contributed to SodaStream’s share price to tumble by half in the space of a year.

“Even when this closure goes ahead, SodaStream will remain implicated in the displacement of Palestinians. Its new Lehavim factory is close to Rahat, a planned township in the Naqab (Negev) desert, where Palestinian Bedouins are being forcefully transferred against their will. Sodastream, as a beneficiary of this plan, is complicit with this violation of human rights.

“Israel willfully destroys the Palestinian economy in the West Bank, leading to unemployment and economic crisis. The way to tackle this is to challenge Israel’s system of colonialism and apartheid.

“The BDS movement is opposed to all forms of racism, including anti-semitism and Islamaphobia.”

The BNC is the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC), the broad coalition of Palestinian civil society organisations that works to support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

September 7, 2015 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel Slammed Over Plans to Demolish 17,000 Palestinian Buildings

Sputnik – 07.09.2015

Israel has plans to demolish 17,000 Palestinian-owned buildings located on mostly occupied land of the West Bank, a UN report has revealed, with concerns the demolitions will cause poverty and leave many families in a “state of chronic uncertainty”.

A report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) concluded that as a result of new and outstanding demolition orders, up to 17,000 structures, including houses, sheds and animal shelters could be knocked down, despite the fact that 77 percent of the buildings are located on privately owned Palestinian land.

The structures under the threat of demolition are located in Area C, a zone in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank where the state of Israel retains full security and administrative control.

Around 300,000 Palestinians live in Area C, which covers 60 percent of the West Bank, and is also the location of many Israeli settlements with a population of around 360,000 — which are deemed illegal under international law.

Close to 4,500 demolition orders are to affect the land of Palestinian Bedouins, who human rights activists say are under threat of losing their homes in exchange for more Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The UN report raised concerns about the impacts such proposed demolitions might have on Palestinians living in affected areas.

“These orders heighten the vulnerability of thousands of poor Palestinian households, some of whom are at imminent risk of forcible displacement.”

It also pointed out that the manner in which demolition orders are handled adds to the suffering of locals.

“Structures built without permits are regularly served with demolition orders. While only a minority of the orders issued are executed, these orders do not expire and leave affected households in a state of chronic uncertainty and threat,” the report found.

“Where the orders have been implemented, they have resulted in displacement and disruption of livelihoods, the entrenchment of poverty and increased aid dependency.”

‘Nearly Impossible’ Permits

While Israeli officials claim that the buildings are under threat as a result of not having the correct planning permission, others point out the extreme difficulty many face in trying to secure proper construction permits.

According to data from the governing body in charge of affairs in the West Bank — the Israeli Civil Administration — Palestinians submitted 2,020 applications for building permits in Area C between 2010 and 2014, while only 33 were approved.

The report said that planning and zoning rules made “it is nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain building permits in most of Area C.”

Israeli officials have been accused of widespread discrimination over their treatment of Palestinians in Area C, with only one percent of the zone legally earmarked for Palestinian development.

This is contrasted to the 235 illegal Jewish settlements and outposts that have been constructed in the area in recent years. Many critics have argued that while authorities are harshly critical of Palestinian constructions, they turn a blind eye to any potential breaches in Jewish settlements.

The report follows international outrage over Israeli plans to demolish the West Bank village of Khirbet Susiya in July, with EU officials specifically asking Israel to stop the “forced transfer of population and demolition of Palestinian housing” in the area.

September 7, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , , | 1 Comment

NATO overcharged by £460m for fuel during Afghan war, MoD investigates

RT | September 7, 2015

Military police are examining claims that a defense contractor overcharged the armed forces by hundreds of millions of pounds for fuel during the war in Afghanistan.

An audit by NATO, which ran the operations in Afghanistan, suggests the alliance was overcharged by £460 million (US$700 million) by contractor Supreme Group.

Britain is thought to have paid for about 10 percent of the fuel used in Helmand Province, southern Afghanistan, during the conflict, meaning it could have been ripped off by up to £46 million, sources told the Telegraph newspaper.

On Sunday, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) confirmed an investigation was underway.

In December 2014, the Amsterdam-based Supreme Group’s food business was found guilty of overcharging the US military for supplies during the Afghan war and paid fines of $389 million, the most ever paid by a defense contractor.

Supreme won and ran lucrative contracts for British and US forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan during the wars and currently provides fuel for the Royal Air Force (RAF) and food to the MoD on a global scale.

“We are committed to getting the maximum value for money for the taxpayer and will always seek to recover any overpayments,” a spokesman for the MoD told the Telegraph.

“We are aware of the allegations of overcharging by Supreme and we have referred the matter to the Ministry of Defence Police Criminal Investigation Department.”

“The issue continues to be addressed by NATO through follow-on reviews and investigations into the matter by Allied Command Operations,” a NATO spokesman told the paper.

“Part of unduly paid costs have already been recovered. The recovery process continues. This however remains a complex and lengthy process, whose specific details cannot be revealed until its completion.”

Outsourcing services previously controlled by the military has increasingly become a part of the MoD’s cost cutting measures.

September 7, 2015 Posted by | Corruption | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Turning the Cradle of Civilization Into its Graveyard

By Diana Johnstone | CounterPunch | September 7, 2015

Paris – This Monday, September 7, seven Syrian citizens go to court in Paris to pursue their civil suit against French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. The five men and two women all lost family members and close friends in massacres by armed rebels supported by Fabius in word and deed. They are asking for one euro of symbolic damages.

In the end the suit will almost surely be thrown out. The September 7 hearing is on an appeal against an earlier ruling that the courts cannot judge acts of the government in this case, even if the complaint is founded. And yet this futile lawsuit makes a crucial point that Western politicians and media would much prefer to ignore.

Western leaders share major responsibility for making much of the world unfit for normal human habitation. And so far, they are getting away with it. The massive refugee crisis swamping Europe is just the beginning of the troubles that these unscrupulous leaders have brought on their own countries.

Laurent Fabius can fairly be called a French neoconservative. His alignment with Israeli policies is seen in the fact that he was the most reluctant of the foreign ministers involved in the Iranian nuclear negotiations to agree to the final settlement.

He has been one of the most gung-ho advocates of regime change in Syria, a country long on the neocon hit list for its Arab nationalism and support for the Palestinian cause.

The Syrian plaintiffs note that:

* On May 29, 2012, Fabius declared that France would intervene against the Syrian regime.

* On August 17, 2012, Fabius declared that Syrian President Bashar el Assad “did not deserve to be alive on earth”.

* On December 14, 2012, speaking out against the Obama administration decision to designate the Al Nusra Front as a terrorist group, Fabius objected that the Al Nusra Front was “doing a good job on the ground”.

* On March 13, 2013, Fabius announced that France and Britain were going to deliver arms to the rebels.

As a group, the plaintiffs maintain that by his declarations, Foreign Minister Fabius stirred up civil war in Syria and encouraged armed rebel attacks against the existing government. Individually, each of the plaintiffs lost family members and close friends in armed attacks and massacres carried out by the al Nusra militia allied rebel groups.

Israel’s Ghastly Twin: the “Islamic State”

Under U.S. leadership and Israeli influence, French political leaders have championed “regime change” in Libya and Syria on the tacit assumption that civil war would be better for the people of those countries than living under a “dictatorship”. In practice, however, most people can get along better without a vote than without a roof over their heads. Or without their heads.

It is hardly surprising that the carefully filmed and diffused videos of “Islamic State” (IS) disciplinary methods have caused panic among people living in their path of conquest.

War causes people to become refugees. Western media pay close attention to refugees only when they like the “story”. Huge attention was paid to Kosovo Albanians fleeing temporarily from the 1999 NATO war against the Serbs, because those refugees could be described as victims of Serbian “ethnic cleansing” and thus as justification of the NATO war itself.

But no such media concern was aroused over the much greater number of refugees who fled from the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq and have never returned. Over a million Iraqi refugees fled into Syria, where they were well received.

The situation in the Middle East is critical. Armed by leftover U.S. military equipment in Iraq, enriched by illicit oil sales, its ranks swollen by young Jihadis from all over the world, the Islamic State threatens the people of Lebanon and Jordan, already struggling to take care of masses of refugees from Palestine, Iraq and now Syria. Fear of the decapitating Islamic fanatics is inciting more and more people to risk everything in order to get to safety in Europe.

The Islamic State is truly the horrible enemy caricature of the “Jewish State”, another political entity based on an exclusive religious identity. Like Israel it has no clearly defined borders, but with a vastly larger potential demographic base.

The only force that can stop the Islamic State from expanding its fanatic rule over all of Mesopotamia and beyond is the Syrian State led by Bashar al Assad. The choice is not between Assad and “Western democracy”. The choice is between Assad and the Islamic State. But Western leaders have still not fully dropped their demented cry: “Assad must go!”

Refugees, Migrants and Terrorists

The results of this madness are washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean. Images and sentiment have replaced thinking about causes and effects. One photo of a drowned toddler causes a media and political uproar. Are people surprised? Didn’t they know that toddlers were being torn to pieces by U.S. bombing of Iraq, by U.S. drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen? What about the toddlers obliterated by NATO’s war to “free Libya” from its “dictator”?

The current refugee crisis in Europe is the inevitable, foreseeable, predicted result of Western policy in the Middle East and North Africa. Gaddafi’s Libya was the wall that kept hundreds of thousands of Africans from migrating illegally to Europe, not only by police methods but even more effectively by offering them development at home and decently paid jobs in Libya. Now Libya is the source both of economic migrants and of refugees from Libya itself, as well as from other lands of desperation. In order to weaken Sudan, the United States (and Susan Rice in particular) championed creation of the new country of South Sudan, which is not a country at all but the scene of rival massacres driving more and more fugitives toward unwelcoming countries.

The famous photo of little Aylan drowned in the Mediterranean is used very largely to make Europeans feel guilty. The leaders should indeed feel guilty – and not least the rich egomaniac Bernard-Henri Lévy, who prides himself on having talked the French government of Nicolas Sarkozy into starting war against Libya, where, he claimed, there were no Islamic extremists, but only pro-Westerners yearning for democracy. Thanks to NATO, Islamic extremists have since run roughshod over the whole country.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has agreed to take in eight hundred thousand Syrian refugees. This is admirable on humanitarian grounds. Germany is economically strong and demographically weak; with its gradually shrinking population, middle class Syrians, many of them terrified Christians, may seem to be a welcome addition to the population. But it deepens political divisions within Germany and in Europe.

This is particularly the case in the new EU countries of Eastern Europe. Starting with Hungary, their leaders are making it clear that those countries are above all concerned with their ethnic identity, and don’t want to take in a lot of people who don’t speak their language. Unlike countries of Western Europe, the Eastern European tier of ethnic states have no tradition of taking in immigrants and no ideological attachment to the Western human rights ideology. In Eastern Europe, “human rights” sounded good to use against Russia and the Soviet Union, but stops there.

The Greek crisis already put heavy strains on the unity of the European Union. For the first time, many people are questioning the whole idea. The crisis showed that there is no real sense of solidarity between the peoples of Europe; when it comes to the crunch, Germans are Germans and Greeks are Greeks, and “European” is an abstraction. The refugee crisis is showing new cracks in “European unity”.

Most of Europe today is suffering from massive unemployment, especially the Southern countries where refugees first land: Greece, Italy, Spain. European Union economic policies, already strangling Greece, do not favor job creation for hundreds of thousands of newcomers. Even professionally qualified refugees will find it difficult or impossible to get around rules protecting their professions in host countries. Most jobs they manage to get will probably be low level and illegal, undercutting wages and working conditions in the host countries.

Moreover, it is impossible in the present mass movement of people to distinguish “refugees” from economic “migrants” – that is, from men simply seeking better work opportunities. The EU today has little to offer then, and resentment of this unsought immigration is certain to improve the political fortunes of the nationalist right.

There is another reason that many European citizens feel less than enthusiastic about welcoming hundreds of thousands of unknown foreigners into their communities. The Islamic State has openly boasted of sending terrorists into Europe among the refugees, with the clear intention of committing violent acts to destabilize the West. Of course, the threat of terrorism is being used cynically by governments to enforce police state measures, but that does not mean that the threat of terrorism is unreal. Unfortunately, it exists – thanks very largely to the policies of those very same Western governments.

The refugee crisis should be seen as the warning signal that the United States and its NATO allies – especially Britain and France – are bringing the world to a state of chaos that is going to keep spreading and that is approaching a point of no return.   It is quick and easy to break things. Putting them back together may be impossible. Civilization itself may be more fragile than it seems.

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book, Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton, will be published by CounterPunch in September 2015. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

September 7, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Guardian journalists can read minds

OffGuardian | September 7, 2015

In the daily media march to war with Syria, as Tony Abbott, Andrew Mitchell and the former arch-bishop of Canterbury all start tooting their war horns – it’s important to savour the little things.

Like complete and utter dishonesty in the media. For example The Guardian’s article on Ban Ki Moon says this in the subhead:

moononrussiachina

But then neatly side-steps the fact he never actually said this:

moononrussiachinahonest

I don’t think anymore need be said.

September 7, 2015 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Usual Warmongers

By Craig Murray | September 7, 2015

To many of us who have been in conflict zones without a sanitised cordon around us, and actually seen the effects close-up (and that excludes almost all of the political class), it is astonishing that the neo-cons constantly seek to promote war, any war. They just cannot sit comfortably unless we are blowing somebody, somewhere, limb from limb.

Little Aylan Kurdi and his family were fleeing Kobani, a town the US Air Force have been bombing relentlessly for weeks. Bombs are entirely agnostic over who they kill, and have not made life notably better for the population.

Yet the news media are now insistently beating the drum for British bombing in Syria. Who should be bombed exactly – ISIL or Assad – appears unimportant, so long as there is bombing. Indeed, the Murdoch Sky News, the Mail and the Blairites are contriving to build a narrative that Jeremy Corbyn, the SNP and bleeding hearts like myself are responsible for the death of little Aylan and hundreds like him, by unreasonable and inhuman opposition to a bit more bombing.

It is very reminiscent of the entirely fake narrative of a (non-existent) tank column sweeping down to massacre every civilian in Benghazi, to halt which we had to murder, by bombing, many thousands of civilians in Sirte, several hundred miles away and containing no tank columns. The people of Benghazi went on to show their gratitude by killing the US Ambassador, while Libya disintegrated into a violent mess with no effective government that could control activities like drug and people smuggling.

That worked well, didn’t it? Of course we should try something similar in Syria.

ISIL is a bastard child of the Iraq War. A bastard child of Bush and Blair. Its weapons are almost entirely American. Some have been captured from Iraqi forces, others were gifted to it by the Saudi/CIA sponsors of its original constituent parts. The countless deaths of children we inflicted by bombing in the Iraq war will fuel it for another two generations.

Never mind old bean. Nothing a spot more bombing won’t sort out, eh?

September 7, 2015 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | 1 Comment

Greece confirms US asked to close airspace to Syria-bound Russian aid flights

RT | September 7, 2015

The Greek Foreign Ministry has confirmed receipt of a request from Washington, asking that Russia be denied use of Greek airspace for aid flights to Syria, Reuters reported.

The announcement came from the Greek Foreign Ministry spokesman, who added the US request was being considered.

On Sunday, a diplomatic source in Athens told RIA Novosti that Greece had refused to close its airspace to Russian planes carrying humanitarian aid to Syria.

On Saturday, the US embassy asked the interim Greek government to prohibit flights of Russian aircraft in the Athens FIR, the country’s airspace. The Greeks refused, so as not to worsen relations with Russia, the source said.

The RIA source added that Russia had requested to use Greek airspace for humanitarian flights to Syria, September 1-24. Athens reportedly agreed.

September 7, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Phony Scarcity, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment