Despite opposition, Finland proceeds with Israel arms deal
By Bruno Jäntti | The Electronic Intifada | 20 July 2011
Despite an unprecedented public outcry, Finland’s Ministry of Defense is set to go ahead with a controversial collaboration with Israeli arms companies deeply involved in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. Finland is turning to Israel for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) — commonly known as a “drones” — in a deal with more than 17 million euros.
On 10 October last year, the main Finnish daily and the largest subscription newspaper in the Nordic countries Helsingin Sanomat published in its Sunday edition a full page article titled “Israel, Our Brother-in-arms” (“Aseveljemme Israel“ [PDF]).
With the newspaper’s one million-strong Sunday circulation, the Helsingin Sanomat article was the most prominent of the many reports dealing with Finland’s arms trade with Israel. Among the factors giving impetus to the article was a petition of more than a hundred Finnish dignitaries from the arts, sciences and politics calling for the immediate discontinuation of Finnish-Israeli arms trade and military technology cooperation in all forms (“Vetoomus Suomen ja Israelin asekaupan lakkauttamiseksi,” via ICAHD Finland).
During the months that followed, the number of signatories grew from 100 to more than 250. Among those insisting on a cessation of all forms of military cooperation with Israel are Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja, world-renowned expert on international law Martti Koskenniemi and the most distinguished Finnish filmmaker of all time, Aki Kaurismäki. They were joined by more than forty professors, a number of Finlandia Prize winners, Finnish MEPs and MPs, stage and film directors, actors, writers and scholars. The petition encompasses an impressive and exhaustive array of the who’s who in Finnish arts, sciences and politics.
Moreover, earlier this month, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) issued a call for “an immediate and comprehensive military embargo on Israel” similar to the one that had been imposed on apartheid South Africa. The call, which marked the seventh anniversary of the still unenforced International Court of Justice decision declaring Israel’s wall in the West Bank illegal, was endorsed by Nobel Peace Prize winners Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire, Betty Williams and Adolfo Perez Esquivel.
It has also been endorsed by the European Network Against Arms Trade.
The two Israeli finalists in the Finnish UAV bid
In June, the Ministry of Defense announced that it had chosen the two finalists in a UAV tender worth more than 17 million euros for 30-45 unmanned systems. Both finalists are Israeli military technology manufacturers, and the winner will be announced in November.
The companies competing for the Finnish UAV contract are Bluebird Aero Systems and Aeronautics Defense Systems. Both BlueBird and Aeronautics are candid and vocal about their partnership with the Israeli military as this is what the companies regard as a decisive advantage over their competitors in the multi-billion euro international arms markets.
On its website, a BlueBird video commercial states: “BlueBird’s mini-electrical UASs [unmanned aerial systems] are combat-proven, flying with the Israeli Air Force, Israeli MOD [Ministry of Defense], US Special Forces and others while continually demonstrating reliable performance and outstanding results” (the video is also on Youtube).
Among the many links between Bluebird and the criminal actions of the Israeli military, Bluebird’s UAVs were used in air strike executions perpetrated in Gaza by the Israeli Air Force, according to the watchdog group Who Profits? (BlueBird Aero Systems company page on whoprofits.org)
As for the “outstanding results” and “reliable performance,” the Israeli military killed at least 87 civilians in more than forty UAV attacks during the three week long assault on Gaza that begin on 27 December 2008, according to a June 2009 report by Human Rights Watch which cited evidence from B’Tselem, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (“Precisely Wrong – Gaza Civilians Killed by Israeli Drone-Launched Missiles”).
Likewise, Aeronautics’ UAVs were also reportedly used during Israel’s three week-long assault on the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, Aeronautics is one of the companies that have created a perimeter-control system for the illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The company is also developing hi-tech systems with military applications, such as perimeter control radar systems and bomb fuses.
Aeronautics also holds shares in Controp Precision Technologies which has sold electro-optical intrusion detection systems for the illegal wall Israel has built inside the occupied West Bank. Additionally, Controp is running a joint project with the off-road utility vehicle manufacturer Tomcar and the private Israeli military powerhouse Elbit Systems, developing a UAV for military purposes, and selling cameras for UAVs used by the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to Who Profits? (see the Aeronautics Defense Systems listing on whoprofits.org).
Deepening ties with human rights violators
Israel is investing extraordinary resources in military exports and, as a result, a stunning 80 percent of Israel’s military production is exported to foreign markets. Last year, Israel exported military equipment for more than 5.1 billion euros. The defense budget of Finland, by comparison, is approximately 2.7 billion euros. Therefore, the total value of military exports from Israel is roughly twice the defense budget of Finland (in spite of Israel’s GDP being smaller than that of Finland). Furthermore, Israel’s defense budget is 3.5 times that of Finland.
Israel is regarded as arguably the most militarized state in the world (see Martin van Creveld’s The Sword and the Olive: A Critical History of the Israeli Defense Force, 1998, p. 123) with a sizable private military industry fully intertwined with the Israeli army, police and intelligence agencies, all of which are involved in blatantly criminal activities.
Finnish policy makers’ choice to persistently offer new military contracts to Israel is part of the legitimization of Israeli illegalities and a culture of unaccountability, which are characteristic of the EU and US’ approach toward Israel. The military trade with Israel doesn’t quite contribute to the ending of the conflict, either, yet this is officially the stated aim of the Finnish government’s Middle East policy.
As the total value of the arms trade between Finland and Israel approaches 200 million euros, the continuing military transactions have imposed collective responsibility and therefore complicity on Finnish taxpayers. The links between the Finnish taxpayer to the longest illegal and ongoing military occupation in the post-Second Word War era are sealed by the UAV contract. At what point exactly Finnish decision-makers start to pay heed to public opposition with the military trade with Israel remains to be seen.
Bruno Jäntti is the founder of ICAHD Finland, the Finnish branch of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He can be reached at brunojantti (at) yahoo dot com.
German government to subsidize sale of sixth submarine for Israel
IRNA | July 17, 2011
Berlin — German tax payers are to foot part of the bill for the highly controversial sale of a sixth submarine to Israel, the Hamburg-based news magazine Der Spiegel said in a report on Sunday.
The German government is to allocate 135 million euros from next year’s defense budget to pay for the Dolphin-class submarine, estimated to cost around 500 million euros.
The deal was apparently sealed during the latest Israel visit of German Defense Minister Thomas de Maziere.
Germany is already paying one-third of the one billion euro price tag for the fourth and fifth Dolphin submarine which are currently still being built for Israel.
Berlin subsidized also the first three submarines which it delivered to Israel in 1999 and 2000, having paid around 550 million euros (1.1 million D-Mark).
Germany has played a major role in arming the Israeli navy over the past 12 years.
The German government has kept silent on its military deals with the Zionist regime, refusing to reveal any details of the contract.
A hardline supporter of Israel, Germany, has become a major arms supplier of the illegal Jewish state despite a constitutional ban to send arms to crisis regions.
There are no official statistics available on the sale of German weapons to Israel as almost all arms exports to the Zionist regime are shrouded in extreme secrecy.
German arms deliveries to Israel between 1998 and 2001 reached reportedly around 900 million US dollars.
Finding Order in the Orwellian Chaos
By Eric Blair | Activist Post | April 10, 2011
It has become nearly impossible to determine the “truth” in our increasingly chaotic world. Reality is seemingly being twisted and flipped on its head in this rapid unfolding of multi-front crises. The world is facing a new world war in the Arab world, nuclear holocaust from the Fukushima meltdown, total economic collapse/takeover, and a stunning rise in the cost of essential commodities.
In each case, the public is being told directly the opposite of basic human understanding. In fact, it’s so blatant that it appears to be a test to see how fast and far the collective human psyche can be warped. George Orwell would be impressed with the level of doublespeak manipulation that has taken place concerning these recent catastrophic events.
War is now classified as a humanitarian action. Nuclear radiation is now good for your health. Private and government financial collapse is the fault of the taxpayer. And the price for food and oil are dependent on gambling, not actual supply and demand.
Never before, that I and others can recall, have we been hit with so many crises at once with previously unacceptable explanations coming from the people’s supposed leaders. The U.S. president can now put American soldiers into combat and spend tax dollars on war without even consulting the citizens’ elected officials. The EPA can autocratically adjust acceptable radiation levels for human health despite all evidence to the contrary. The private bankers can demand bailouts and austerity cuts from an already ailing population who had nothing to do with their debts. The price of food and oil are allowed to be determined in Wall Street’s casino at the expense of humanity. And we’re being told it’s for our own good, our personal safety, and our economic security.
This insane warping of morals and common sense can only occur under the direction of a force which requires mass confusion and a compromise in human morality to accomplish an unpopular agenda. A force whose motto is “Order Out of Chaos.” A force whose deliberate purpose for creating such calamitous situations is more consolidated control. And clearly, it’s a force with great access to the mainstream media megaphone to propagate their desired reaction to these crises.
What’s different about these events compared to the past is their size, scope, and coalescence at the same time. What David Icke refers to as the “Totalitarian Tiptoe” in his explanation of the establishment’s creeping tyranny through problem-reaction-solution engineering of crises, has seemingly turned into the “Last Leap.” In other words, it can’t be more obvious that we’re quickly moving toward a malevolent global dictatorship with or without the acceptance of the masses. Yet, efforts to defuse and desensitize the population with morally-conflicting messaging appear to be intensifying.
In order to induce hypnosis, a hypnotist must overload the participant’s mind with unknown “message units” to trigger the primitive survival instincts of “fight, flight, or play dead.” As the mind attempts to interpret these foreign message units it becomes overwhelmed. The hypnotist then senses the peak of the overload and releases the subject to flee-and-play-dead with the command to “sleep.” However, it is likely that the participant would have chosen this path regardless of the command, because the participant began the process in a relaxed position and, as a domesticated animal, has certain preconditioning to escape to flight when overwhelmed.
Once in this state of message unit overload, the part of the mind required for critical thinking is defused and the subject is willing to accept nearly any suggestion — as comically seen in stage hypnosis shows. During this stage show by the elite, we have witnessed rabid anti-war liberals turn into lapdogs for preemptive killing. We’ve witnessed health community officials promote a variety of poisons as normal. And we’ve witnessed free market economists promote monopoly cartels as genuine capitalism.
Accepted knowns are remarkably easy to manipulate using suggestive messaging, especially if attached to a strong emotional response like fear. Make no mistake, this method is a well-understood science; being human, we are all certainly susceptible to these manipulative techniques. So how do we keep our moral bearings during this calculated onslaught of reprogramming?
First, we must recognize when fear, which is the most powerful of emotional triggers, is being used to influence our perception of a given policy, or reality in general. We must not allow ourselves to feel the fear, but instead recognize it as the tool of control that it is. Once mastered, you will notice other less-potent emotional triggers being aimed at convincing your mind to accept unknowns. You will be amazed at how many of your peers fall for it and will desperately try to argue that the fear justifies some inhumane action.
Secondly, it seems wise to drop our perceived meaning of all labels like Democrat or Republican, or capitalism or communism, etc. And we must stop rooting for a team or blindly following a leader based on certain labels. For example, does an aggressive war become righteous if a Democrat with a Peace Prize launches it? Or even if religious leaders promote its cause? Don’t be blinded by mindless groupthink that is often directed by authority in all its forms. Think for yourself.
Ultimately, we must narrowly focus our compass toward the core human beliefs of peace, love, and liberty. When our bias is always being pulled by those forces, we are less likely to be led off course. Believers in peace cannot possibly justify violence unless a direct threat requires immediate self-defense; and only then as a last resort. Believers in love respect their neighbors as equals and would never stand for injustices perpetrated against them — socially, economically, environmentally etc. Believers in liberty would rather die as a consequence of their own decisions than have their essential freedom confined by authority. Significantly, when our compass is dialed into these human principles, we’ll typically find ourselves in a polar conflict with the establishment version of events and desired solutions. These extreme opposite forces allow us to see the real agenda more clearly.
Recognizing the game that is being played for our minds allows us to filter out previously unknown message units as trash so that they never bring about an overload. It allows you to live a life of your own accord. And that is the key to transforming the prevailing system. In other words, we can’t defeat this powerful negative force by playing into their reality. We must, individually, live by our principles even when others frown upon it. Don’t worry, the others will break their trance eventually, as the manufactured anger to justify war, engineered hatred of their neighbors, and the constant bombardment of injustices upon them will eventually grow old. And you, as one living example of purity, will disprove a thousand lies.
Blowing It: Democrats, Unable to Be a Party of the People, are Sinking Themselves
Dave Lindorff – This Can’t Be Happening – 07/16/2011
The smoking ruin that is the the Obama White House, and the rotting corpse that is the Democratic Party, have, incredibly, together been boxed into a corner by, of all things, the certifiably insane Republican Party.
This amazing situation has resulted not through any brilliant strategy on the part of the Republicans, but by the self-inflicted wounds of the Democrats.
Faced with a collapsing economy that is at serious risk of performing a reprise of the Great Depression, Congressional Democrats and President Obama were in a perfect position to grab the flag and run home with it by declaring war on unemployment and on the party that has unequivocally declared itself openly to be the standard bearer of the wealthy and powerful.
All the president and Congressional Democrats had to do was announce that Social Security, Medicare, education and programs to protect the poor were all off limits in any discussion of the federal budget, and to declare an immediate 25% cut in military spending, as called for earlier by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee.
How hard would that have been to do? The polls show it’s what the public wants. Any elected official who did this, particularly someone elected and re-elected as a Democrat, would have been hailed by voters for such a bold action.
According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in late May and released June 11, 60% of Americans correctly attribute the nation’s enormous deficit primarily to military spending, which eats up 52% of every tax dollar (Social Security and Medicare are entirely funded by separate payroll taxes, and not only have not contributed a single dollar to the federal deficit, but have been routinely borrowed from by the government to finance the deficit in the government’s operating budget caused by military spending). Only 24% blame the deficit on domestic spending other than military (and probably every one of those is a Republican or right-wing independent who likely believes that the earth was created 6000 years ago, and is flat, and who will never vote Democratic no matter what).
Military vs. Education spending around the globe (US in company of Iran, China, Russia, UAE and India)
That same poll showed that the vast majority of Americans (73%) object to proposals to cut the budget by reducing federal funding for social programs, or federal funding to the states for education, or by reducing Social Security benefits (59%), for example by raising the retirement age.
What the Pew poll finds Americans do support is raising the cap on income subject to the Social Security Tax (FICA), from its current meager level of $106,000, to cover all income (66% in favor). They also favor raising taxes on those households that earn more than $250,000 a year (65% in favor), and they favor getting rid of tax deductions for corporations, which have allowed many wildly profitable companies like Exxon, GE and News Corp to pay no corporate taxes despite earning billions of dollars in profits (62% in favor). They also overwhelmingly favor reducing America’s military operations overseas, where the US currently maintains over 800 bases in countries all over the world, including wealthy allies such as Europe and Japan (62% in favor).
After being deluged with poorly written, simplistic and often ideologically-driven news stories all year hyping the supposed budget “crisis,” the percentage of Americans who say they are worried about the budget deficit has crept up from 24% to 28%, but far more Americans say they are worried about the jobs crisis (38%, up from 34% in March).
If you were a political advisor in the White House, or in the Democratic Congressional Committee or the Democratic National Committee, one would think that seeing those numbers, the strategy going forward would be obvious: declare the country to be facing New Depression, call the Republican Party out as a bunch of know-nothings, end the wars, bring the troops home, slash military spending, call for higher taxes on the rich, and, in Congress, introduce a public jobs program every day of every week, forcing the Republicans to vote them down, one after another through the next election day.
But the Democratic Party, as I said, is a rotting corpse, and it certainly is not an organization that sees itself as fighting for the common man and woman.
As for the White House political team, and the president himself, they seem to have long since lost their grip on reality.
The president has been hanging around with Wall Street bankers, taking their money and their self-serving ideas, for so long now he actually thinks like them. Congressional Democrats, like their Republican colleagues, are so covetous of corporate campaign cash and lobbyist perks that, with a few exceptions, they can’t imagine crossing any corporate interests.
This is not a case of Democrats being stupid. You’d have to be far worse than stupid not to see the correct political strategy to adopt at this point.
What has happened is that the Democratic Party is no more. It is, at this point, all about current incumbents gaining the favor of the corporate elite, lulling the public into a non-voting torpor or stupor, and of course, arguing that people worried about the nation’s future should vote for them yet again because “the Republicans are worse.”
In a press conference on Friday, President Obama made some incredible statements, all demonstrably untrue. He said “We are all part of the same country,” and yet he surely knows that when it comes to the leaders of America’s biggest corporations, including GE, whose chairman Jeffrey Immelt he appointed to head his Jobs Council, this is demonstrably false. While many of these leaders may be Americans by birth, the companies they run and represent earn the majority of their revenues and profits from operations abroad, and are thus, technically speaking, foreign enterprises, with foreign interests that trump any US interests. Obama said, “We are all in this together,” speaking of the supposed debt “crisis,” but of course, he has announced himself ready to cut Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid programs, upon which poor and working class families depend, while leaving the rich largely unscathed. He has said it is the “will of the people” to cut the budget, but to the extent that that is even true, which is highly debatable, the will of the people is actually to cut military spending, not to cut Social Security or Medicare or even budgets for education or Medicaid.
The good news is that an increasing number of Americans appear to be finally realizing that this president is a fraud–a shill for bankers, the corporate interests and the neo-con military establishment who has just been posing as a man of the people.
The bad news is that there is little likelihood of any Third Party arising before 2012 that could seriously contest the national election, meaning that we are probably headed for either more of the same or a for Republican-led government.
The hope has to be that the blatant sell-out of the public interest and the national interest by both parties and by the president is becoming so self-evident that the American public will actually wake up from its media-induced somnolence and will abandon them both.
The institutional obstacles to such an unprecedented rebellion are of course enormous, but then, these are unprecedented times.
France Says NATO Bombing Has Failed
Hillary says war must continue
By FRANKLIN LAMB | CounterPunch | July 11, 2011
On Sunday July 10, France seemingly allied itself with Russia and China in calling on NATO to immediately stop its counterproductive and counterintuitive bombing, as more countries witness public demonstrations against NATO’s actions in Libya. French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet said in Paris that military action in Libya must end and Colonel Gaddafi be welcomed around the negotiating table. Continual bombing of the country is not working, and diplomacy is the only solution – even if Gaddafi retains limited power, In an apparent U-turn in policy, Mr Longuet said Gaddafi could remain in Libya ‘in another room of the palace, with another title.’
Longuet said:
‘We must now sit around a table…
‘We will stop bombing as soon as the Libyans start talking to one another and the military on both sides go back to their bases.
‘They can talk to each other because we’ve shown there is no solution through force.’
NATO and the Obama administration can have no part of a dialogue because they will be the major losers if peace comes to Libya without Qadaffi leaving power.
No sooner had the French Defense Minister spoken than the US State Department issued a statement insisting that “the United States will continue efforts as part of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) coalition to enforce a U.N. Security Council-authorized no-fly zone in Libya designed to protect civilians under threat of attack, the State Department said. The spokesman did not mention that the no-fly zone was achieved back in March in 48 hours and that no Libya aircraft have flown since. Mission accomplished 100 days ago.
Hillary Clinton repeated her earlier words, “Our efforts in Libya will take time, but let there be no mistake that the political, military, and economic pressure on Qaddafi continues to grow. The allies will continue to increase pressure until the Libyan people are safe, their humanitarian needs met, and a transition of power is fully under way.”
And so it goes.
In most of the other Arab countries Fridays are days of rage against the government du jour but in Tripoli Friday prayers are followed by massive pro-Qadaffi rallies. One of the jokes heard at this week’s big pro-government Friday post prayer rally at Green Square is about how each morning Libya’s leader, following early morning Fajr prayers, dons his formal uniform, complete with those huge epaulets, and salutes the small NATO flag he tapes to his bathroom mirror as he moves from place to place dodging NATO drones and assassins. “Our leader does this”, one young lady informed me first with a wide smile and then growing serious, “because the NATO bombing of Libyan civilians, which the US/NATO axis claims Qaddafi is doing, has caused his popularity to skyrocket among our proud and nationalist tribal people. I am one example of this. Yes, of course we can use some new blood and long overdue reform in our government. Which country cannot? But first we must defeat the NATO invaders and then we can sort out our problems among our tribes including the so-called NATO Rebels.”
Since the beginning of the NATO operation, March 31, the alliance has conducted nearly 15,000 sorties, including close to 6000 bombing missions according to NATO’s media office in Naples. The most recent attacks reported on July 9 included 112 sorties and 48 bomb/missile attacks, and that is about average.
The two most active Embassies in Libya these days are the Russian and the Chinese. On February 2, according to the Bulgarian Embassy staff, which was falsely rumored to be currently handing US consular services, the US Embassy essentially ordered all EU and NATO Embassies to pack up and join their chartered plane and boats. Libyan officials tell visitors that they were shocked by the fast exodus. “They did not even say goodbye. Suddenly they were on their way to the airport,” one Foreign Ministry advised during a meeting last week.
The Russian and Chinese leadership has grown increasingly critical of NATO’s actions in Libya and are demanding a immediate and permanent ceasefire. Some cynics here are pointing out that these countries, unlike NATO, knows exactly what they are doing and it includes the realization that they have an excellent chance to obtaining many billions of dollars in lucrative contracts. It is partly this realization that it’s “all of nothing” that keeps the US and its potent military asset, NATO, focused on assassinating Colonel Qaddafi and breaking his civilian support base. If Qaddafi lives, NATO loses and so do the current major oil industry contractors who are reportedly becoming depressed seeing reports of all the Russian and Chinese businessmen arriving in Libya.
As one student at Tripoli’s Al Fatah University commented, “What your American government has done in the region to destroy yourselves since 9/11 is amazing to Libyans. Now you are going to fight us? Why? You already had all our oil you wanted at a bargain prices; we stupidly put our sovereign funds in US banks and we did not even bother Israel much. Every day that NATO bombs it kills more Libyan civilians. We sacrificed nearly 1/3 of our population, or more than one million of our brothers and sisters, expelling the Italians 70 years ago. Doesn’t anyone in your government study history? We are not Bahrainis or Syrians. We are armed and will use our weapons.
Among the errors our leadership has made, one of the worst is that it believed the US agreements we made in 2004. The Iranians and North Koreans laugh at us for trusting you and giving up nuclear and biological weapons programs. Believe me, if Qadaffi leaves power you will miss him because the Libyan people will be tougher against your projects than he has been.”
On July 9, 2011, NATO claimed its aircraft carried out another “precision strike” on a pro-Qaddafi missile firing position near Tawurgha, south of Misrata. According to its media office, “NATO intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance were conducted over a period of time to ascertain the military use of the site. It was confirmed as being used to launch indiscriminate attacks on Libyan civilians in the area and a staging area by pro-Qaddafi villagers, including planning attacks on rebel’s forces near the port and city of Misrata.” The next morning, 7/10/11, local inhabitants denied that the farm had any military activity on the property and an examination of the farm buildings failed to discovery any.
NATO is getting hammered by critics, including during its press conferences, especially by reporters from such groups as Jane’s Defense Weekly who know a thing or two about weapons and war. Last week Jane’s ridiculed the NATO commander who claimed that seeing satellite dishes on roofs were evidence of a particular site being a “Command and Control Center.” Jane’s found that assertion silly.
As international pressure builds on the White House to call off the NATO bombing campaign, several proposals are being discussed within the African Union, the Russian and Chinese Embassy’s, and even between the “NATO rebels” and representatives of the Libya government in Tripoli.
One possible scenario might be for Libya to offer Obama and NATO a fig leaf which would include Colonel Qadaffi “retiring to his tent to write and reflect” while dialogue takes places among the Libyan people, including the tribes and 600 plus Peoples Congresses which of course should have been allowed to take place as Congressman Dennis Kucinich and others insisted back in February, 2011 before NATO invaded.
Franklin Lamb is reachable at fplamb@gmail.com
The True Cost of America’s Wars
By Jack A. Smith | Activist Newsletter | July 7, 2011
During his speech on Afghanistan June 22, President Obama revealed that “Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war.” He knew this was a deceptive understatement, as did everyone who keeps close watch on the Bush-Obama wars all these years.
Few Americans , however, have closely followed Washington’s 21st century wars of choice, so a trillion probably sounds right to them, but that amount in 10 years — when the annual cost of air conditioning alone for the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq amounts to $20.2 billion a year — is way off base.
(It’s difficult to conceive of one trillion, so we’ll repeat a method we’ve used before: Sixty seconds comprise a minute. One million seconds comes out to be about 11½ days. A billion seconds is 32 years. And a trillion seconds is 32,000 years.)
The latest objective estimate for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, made public June 29, is between $3.7 trillion and $4.4 trillion (140,800 years), according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.
The university assembled a team of economists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal experts, and a physician to do this analysis, which included future costs for veterans care and interest on war debts to be paid over the next few decades.
The medical costs are huge. “While we know how many U.S. soldiers have died in the wars (just over 6,000),” the report pointed out, “what is startling is what we don’t know about the levels of injury and illness in those who have returned from the wars. New disability claims continue to pour into the VA, with 550,000 just through last fall.” This doesn’t even include the thousands of deaths and injuries among quasi-military contractors. There are about as many contractors as troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s impossible to precisely predict the interest costs on these wars. In 2010, $400 billion of our tax money went toward paying off past war debts as far back as the Korean War of the early 1950s. We’ll pay war debts indefinitely because Washington is always borrowing to plan for or start new wars. So far, the U.S.-led NATO war for regime change in Libya is costing American taxpayers about a billion. The Pentagon has blueprints ready for many different kinds of future wars, from small counter-terrorism escapades, to cyberspace and outer space conflicts, to nuclear war, all the way up to World War III.
The Brown University figures may turn out to be underestimates. A few independent studies over the years have been somewhat higher but were brushed aside by the White House and the mass media. This may happen to the Brown calculations as well.
The respected Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Professor Linda Bilmes wrote a book three years ago estimating the cost of the Iraq war only, based on data collected in 2006. It was titled “The Three Trillion Dollar War.” They based their calculations on the “hidden” costs of the war that include enormous medical care expenses over the next 50 years for tens of thousands of badly wounded soldiers, other benefits, equipment replacement, and interest on war debts.
Stiglitz and Bilmes calculated in 2008 that the combined cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would be between $5 and $7 trillion. They called these adventures the “credit card wars.” Using a somewhat different methodology a few years ago, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, estimated the Iraq war ultimately will cost $3.5 trillion. They didn’t include the Afghan war.
Assuming Obama is reelected, the Bush-Obama wars — including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen (and Somalia, where the U.S. is now engaged in drone strikes), plus the wars in Obama’s final years — will certainly top $5 trillion in real costs.
In this connection, we cannot forget that current Pentagon spending of around $700 billion a year represents a huge increase since 2001, when it totaled about $380 billion. (By comparison, during this same time period, military spending by Iran — portrayed by Washington, Tel-Aviv and Saudi Arabia as the greatest danger to peace in the Middle East — dropped from $9 billion in 2001 to $7 billion in 2010.)
But Defense Department expenses are only half the story. Double the Pentagon’s $700 billion for a true estimate of the amount of money the U.S. spent on war-related issues last year. That’s $1.4 trillion a year for the United States. How is this possible?
Instead of just discussing the Pentagon budget, it is essential to also consider Washington’s various other “national security” budgets. That of course includes the costs of Washington’s 16 different intelligence services, the percentage of the annual national debt to pay for past war expenses, Homeland Security, nuclear weapons, additional annual spending requests for Iraq and Afghan wars, military retiree pay and healthcare for vets, NASA, FBI (for its war-related military work), etc. When it’s all included it comes to $1,398 trillion for fiscal 2010, according to the War Resisters League and other sources.
It’s not enough just to take note of the money Washington spent on stalemated wars of imperial choice. It’s fruitful to contemplate where our $5 trillion Bush-Obama war funding might have been invested instead. It could have paid for a fairly swift transition from fossil fuels to a solar-wind energy system for the entire U.S. — a prospect that will now take many decades longer, if at all, as the world gets warmer from greenhouse gases. And there probably would have been enough left to overhaul America’s decaying and outdated civil infrastructure, among other projects.
But while the big corporations, Wall Street and the wealthy are thriving, global warming and infrastructure repair have been brushed aside. States are cutting back on schools and healthcare. Counties and towns are closing summer swimming pools and public facilities. Jobs and growth are stagnant. The federal government is sharply cutting the social service budget, and Medicare et al. are nearing the chopping block.
During his Afghan speech, President Obama also declared that “we take comfort in knowing that the tide of war is receding.” Finally, some “real change we can believe in” — right? Meanwhile, as The White House and Congress slash the deficit, be assured despite a bit of fixing here and there, the military and national security budgets will remain essentially unchanged.
— For the Brown Univ. study, http://costsofwar.org/
— For Stiglitz and Bilmes, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/02/27/28891/nobel-laureate-estimates-wars.html
— For cost of air conditioning, Afghan-Iraq — See Domestic News Briefs below.
Humiliation for Petraeus
Despite Troop Surge, Taliban Attacks and US Casualties Soared
By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | July 4, 2011
Data on attacks by armed opposition forces and U.S. combat casualties since the U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan was completed last summer provide clear evidence that the surge and the increase in targeted killings by Special Operations Forces have failed to break the momentum of the Taliban.
The Taliban and allied insurgent organizations launched 54 per cent more attacks and killed or wounded 56 per cent more U.S. troops over the nine months from last October through May than in the comparable period a year earlier, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Defense and by the highly-respected Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO).
The nearly 1,571 attacks in May recorded by ANSO, which exceeded the previous monthly peak total of 1,541 attacks in September 2010, was achieved four months earlier in the fighting season than the previous peak.
The number of attacks in June was two per cent less than in May, according to the latest ANSO report published on the organisation’s website Sunday.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said last June that U.S.-NATO forces would have to demonstrate “progress” by the end of calendar year 2010 or face a collapse in public support.
But the Taliban responded to the surge with a carefully planned strategy to maintain much higher levels of offensive operations through the period from October through December, which normally drop off from the high point of the offensive. The war plan for 2011 was aimed at pushing the level of attacks to new highs earlier in the year than ever before.
Even as the monthly level of Taliban attacks was going down in the last quarter of 2010, the number of Taliban IEDs planted and direct or indirect fire attacks during the quarter was 130 per cent higher than in the same period of 2009, as shown in a graph in the April 2011 DOD report on Afghanistan.
That increase in attacks recorded by the Pentagon relative to the previous year matches almost exactly the increase of 132 per cent in U.S. casualties in Afghanistan in the fourth quarter relative to the same period in 2009, according to casualty data provided to IPS by the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO).
The JIEDDO data show the number of U.S. troops killed in action increased by 56 per cent from 80 in the last quarter of 2009 to 125 in the same period of 2010.
But the little-noticed number of U.S. troops wounded in action was 1,446 in the final quarter – a 140 per cent increase over the 601 wounded in the comparable period of 2009.
Virtually all of the 33,000 additional U.S. troops announced by President Barack Obama in December 2009 had arrived by the beginning of September 2010, so that the major increases in Taliban attacks and U.S. casualties relative to the previous year came after the U.S. and NATO were deploying their peak level of combat capacity.
Both DOD and ANSO data show that major increases in Taliban attacks and U.S. casualties continued into the second quarter of 2011.
ANSO data show 2,740 attacks in the first quarter of 2011, 53 per cent higher than the 1,791 attacks in the first quarter of 2010. DOD’s April report shows roughly 5,060 attacks for the most recent first quarter, compared with 3,618 for the comparable period last year – a 40 per cent increase.
ANSO data show just under 1,200 attacks in April and nearly 1,571 attacks in May – 43 percent more than the 1948 attacks in April and May of 2010.
The ANSO attack data include only those which are regarded as having a significant impact on security, thus excluding hundreds of unexploded IEDs and other incidents counted by DOD.
ANSO’s reporting is supported by the European Commission, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
U.S. casualties during April and May totaled 958, compared with 750 a year ago, according to JIEDDO’s data.
The total of 3,416 U.S. troops killed or wounded for the eight-month period since September 2010, according to JIEDDO data, represents a 54 per cent increase over the casualties in the comparable period a year earlier.
No other NATO country releases monthly totals for wounded in action in Afghanistan, although the UK updates the cumulative total monthly. The Canadian military asserts that it does not want to give Taliban insurgents information on the effectiveness of its attacks.
The Pentagon asserted in its April 2011 report that in the previous six months, operations by U.S. and NATO troops as well as Afghan security forces had “broadly arrested the momentum of the insurgency in much of the country”. But it cited only one concrete indicator of such a shift – a reduction in insurgent indirect fire attacks in the Regional Command East.
But indirect fire has never been more than a tiny fraction of insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, and a province-by-province breakdown of attack numbers in the ANSO report on the first quarter of 2011 shows that the Taliban had increased the total number of attacks in Khost, the pivotal province in the Eastern region during the quarter to 326, compared with just 147 during the comparable period of 2010.
Another key province in the Eastern region, Paktya, saw insurgent attacks of up to 124 in the quarter compared with only 14 the year before, and total attacks in both Paktika and Kunar were up 12 per cent and eight per cent respectively over the previous year.
General David Petraeus, who had remained silent on the data on the increase in Taliban attacks and U.S.-NATO casualties since last September, suggested to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius last week that the surge was now beginning to pay off, because the level of violence in “recent weeks” was down five per cent from a year ago.
That comment revealed that Petraeus has been desperately looking for even the slightest evidence that the pattern of annual increases in Taliban attacks was being broken.
But the short-term dip in the level of attacks he cited is scant reason for believing that the pattern has been broken. In previous years, two months in the late spring or earlier summer with little change in the level of attacks have been followed by one or more months with large increases over the previous month.
In fact, the post-surge Taliban operations have continued a pattern that has been consistent over the past five years: a gradual increase in the number of attacks from the low point at the end of the previous year’s campaign in January or February to a high point in August or September, followed by a gradual decline in attacks from October to February.
The new low point is always significantly higher, however, than the year before.
This year, the level of attacks at the low point in February was 45 per cent higher than the low point of 2010, which was in turn 38 per cent higher than the one in 2009.
The Taliban leadership appears to have been making a point to Petraeus and the Pentagon: “The level of our offensive operations cannot be slowed by your military operations against us.” And as the U.S. and NATO troop level begins to ebb, the ability of the Taliban to mount even higher numbers of attacks can only continue to grow.
~
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in 2006.
McCain & Lieberman Keep Up Interventionist Rhetoric
By Vincent D’Agostino | The American Conservative | July 1st, 2011
John McCain has found a new talking point: the growing division within the Republican Party over the nation’s military forays abroad. He referred again to the split up in a panel on Afghanistan yesterday in Washington at the Institute for the Study of War, just a week after telling ABC’s Christiane Amanpour that “there’s always been an isolationist strain in the Republican Party, that Pat Buchanan wing.”
But yesterday he introduced a few new terms. Now the tension within the party is between “the Eisenhower Republicans and the Taft Republicans, the internationalists and the isolationists.” Forget that Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address is a document quoted frequently by some in the so-called isolationist wing of the party.
McCain further expressed worry about the nation’s declining appetite for the internationalists’ grand crusades for democracy. “I am very concerned about our long-term ability, and willingness, to fund” war efforts abroad, he said.
McCain was joined on the panel by Senator Joseph Lieberman and retired Army General Jack Keane. Lieberman is known for defending his interventionist positions in a nasty Democratic primary battle in 2006, while Keane was a chief architect of the surge strategy in Iraq.
The trio were put in a tough position when a retired soldier in the audience—a former Green Beret who fought in Afghanistan—asked “What is good enough?” to call the mission in Afghanistan a success. McCain defined winning in broad terms, saying that America can finally leave when national security threats are gone, and when there is some kind of stability in the region.
General Keane seemed to acknowledge the hazy nature of Senator McCain’s response, saying, “These are ambiguous types of wars that we’re fighting” and “protracted, unconventional wars test the mettle of democracies.”
Yet the General, to his credit, tried to be more concrete: “What’s good enough is an Afghanistan security force that can cope with the violence there.”
But Lieberman’s response was the most radical of the three. “We hesitate to use words like victory and defeat anymore,” he said. He also claimed that Americans were focusing too much on Al-Qaeda. “We’re fighting an ideology,” he insisted.
Meanwhile, McCain gave a new partisan name to the current approach in Afghanistan, calling it the “Obama-Biden strategy.” He claimed the Administration’s plan will make it “extremely difficult to carry out a successful counter-insurgency strategy” in Afghanistan.
But the Senator forgets that most Americans don’t want a counter-insurgency strategy at all. They just want out.
Lavrov: Arming Libyan rebels a major violation of UN resolution 1970
RT | June 30, 2011
France has become the first country openly to admit it has supplied the Libyan rebels with weapons – a measure banned by the UN Security Council. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has labeled the move as a major violation of the UN resolution.
“We have asked our French colleagues if the statement about weapon supply from France to the Libyan rebels is true,” Lavrov said. “We are waiting for the answer. If that is proved to be true, that would be a major violation of the UN resolution 1970.”
The move was also condemned by the African Union, while China indirectly objected to it.
A French military spokesman, Colonel Thierry Burkhard, said the arms, including machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, as well as munitions, were parachuted in to besieged rebels.
According to the official, the deliveries took place in early June in the western Nafusa Mountains, when Gaddafi’s forces encircled the civilians and refused to allow a humanitarian aid corridor there, AP reported on Wednesday.
Chairman of the African Union Jean Ping has condemned the move in an interview with BBC, saying it threatens to put the entire region at risk.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei indirectly opposed France’s actions on Thursday, saying that countries should avoid actions that go beyond UN Security Council directives.
Spokesman for the rebels Mahmoud Jibrilm who is now in Austria, said more weapons are needed to fight against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. He also said the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council needs large amounts of money from foreign sponsors to fund its programs for civilians.
Meanwhile the UK on Thursday said that it is supplying body armor to the rebels. Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague said the UK was offering 5,000 sets of body armor, 6,650 police uniforms, 5,000 high-visibility vests and communication tools to Benghazi. The equipment is meant for the rebel police.
“Armed rebels are not civilians, which the UN wants to protect”
France has been among the main powers behind the NATO-led air campaign, officially aimed at protecting civilians from assaults by Gaddafi’s forces. However, many view a change of regime in Libya as the main reason of the alliance’s involvement in the country.
The Libyan National Transitional Council last week also received its first tranche of financial help from the international community to the amount $100 million, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague announced on Wednesday. The rebels are receiving funds from several nations including the US, the UK, Italy and France.
The UN Security Council resolution 1970, which was adopted on February 26, imposed an arms embargo on the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, preventing weapons from being supplied to anyone in Libya. The UN Security Council resolution 1973, which established a no-fly zone over Libya, allowed NATO countries “to take all necessary measures… to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.”
As the unrest has been continuing in Libya since mid-February, the fighting between the forces of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and the rebels, backed by the NATO forces, seems to have reached a stalemate.
France’s admission to arming rebels undermines the whole reasoning behind the bombing campaign, says John Laughland, the director for the Institute of Democracy and Co-operation in Paris.
“The argument, as we know, war predicated on the accusation that Libyan government was attacking civilians. The admission that France war arming the rebels is very obviously an admission that what’s going on in Libya is a fight between the government and armed rebels, and armed rebels are not civilians. So any attack on the armed rebels in Libya is therefore not necessarily a war crime. In other words this news is not only incompatible with the case that’s being made for the war in Libya, it completely contradicts it,” he told RT.
George Kenney, a former US diplomat, said that France had also apparently shipped a couple of light tanks to the rebels, and that this would only lead to more problems later.
“That was very foolish on the part of France. We do not know who these rebels are. We do not know what they are going to do with these weapons. And I would suspect that some significant percentage of the weapons will find their way into the hands of terrorists and will just become another problem for us to have to deal with later on.”
Mugged then Shot
By Linh Dinh | June 28, 2011
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, why shouldn’t the United States be the most corrupt (and corrupting) country on earth? We’re number one! In America, each politician can be bought and absurd sums of money are routinely misallocated or missing altogether, with nary a peep from the complicit media. On the foreign front, America’s modus operandi is to bribe every dictator, and the ones she can’t bribe, she’ll undermine, overthrow or bomb back to Jesus. In exchange for this bribe, which can be disguised as loans or “foreign assistance,” said dictator will allow America to loot his country in perpetuity. If you don’t believe me, just strip any tinpot dictator and you’ll surely find “CIA” tattooed on one ass cheek, with a (pretty good) portrait of a recent U.S. president embossed on the other. Lovers always leave a mark, they often say. Sometimes it’s not a dictator, per se, but a dominant party that’s America’s hushed puppy. In any case, rapacious trade deals and unpayable loans are the bane of countless client states orbiting Washington.
Domestically, American corruption has been institutionalized as campaign contributions and lobbying, but that’s only the open, legal part. Perhaps these practices are allowed to trick us into thinking that American corruption only goes so far, but who really knows what goes on in the labyrinthine backrooms, basements and dungeons of Washington? In any case, us lumpen Americans are “represented” by millionaire politicians who are lint deep in the pockets of the fattest banks and corporations. The American politician is thoroughly corrupt, often from grassroots level, but the degree of venality and sanctimonious hypocrisy increase as he approaches Washington DC, that beautiful cesspool of martial madness.
No candidate who’s not heavily pro big business, overtly or covertly, can have any chance of being elected to national office. He won’t be funded, nor will he be seen on television. It’s not a democracy when all candidates are vetted beforehand, and only millionaires can be chosen by other millionaires and billionaires. In this setup, the average citizen doesn’t matter, as his vote or canvassing for a favorite are only charades designed to make him feel good and involved, as if his opinions and advocacy matter, but whatever he does, it won’t prevent the election of yet another tool who’s corrupt, pro war and pro big business, at the expense of all else. But don’t despair, all you earnest partisans, for even when your candidate does lose, you’ll still get the same deal, more or less. Those who voted for McCain, for example, got pretty much all of his policies through Obama, so it’s a win, win, lose, lose situation, see? Emblematic of this farce is the fact that American tax payers are even asked to contribute three bucks a year to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. Though stuffed with cash from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Raytheon, etc., our candidates still panhandle from poor schmucks whom they will soon rip off anyway.
American politicians may differ on personal and ethical matters such as school prayer, gay marriage and abortion, but on all the major, lucrative issues affecting the military industrial complex or big business, they are remarkably uniform. Our senators and congressmen also behave like trained seals when it comes to Israel. Witness the 29 standing ovations a packed House gave Netanyahu recently. Whether Democrat or Republican, each was terrified to be caught sitting as his colleagues jumped up and barked.
Your rep sure knows who his daddy is, and it ain’t you, sucker! The primary job of the American politician, from Obama on down, is to spin and disguise an endless series of corporate and military crimes he’s enabling. Which brings us to the Pentagon. No other governmental organ is more gluttonously corrupt. The Pentagon’s main function is not defending America but to bleed this country dry to enrich Halliburton, Lockheed/Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and the rest. Over and over again, the Pentagon has put hundreds of thousands of Americans in harm’s way, just so its masters can make a handsome profit. To feed these insatiable ogres, the Pentagon is willing to destroy American itself, and it is doing so, right now.
Beside bloody business as usual, billions of dollars often go missing from the Pentagon cash register without any explanation whatsoever, and in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld even admitted that $2.3 trillion had disappeared, which he blamed on sloppy accounting. So it’s not thievery or corruption, but merely inept arithmetic. Tamping down this scandal, the mainstream media seemed to agree.
But perhaps we do have a math problem. We are a people who clip 25 cent coupons, drive (an SUV) a mile to save a buck, register with subtle satisfaction the missing penny from a $19.99 price tag, yet these stolen trillions leave us unfazed. One reason for this, I think, is that American corruption is not experienced directly, face to face, as it is in many other countries. Most Americans have never been browbeaten and shaken down by a corrupt cop, clerk or judge, so we can pretend that corruption doesn’t hurt us. Washington has also been waging wars without raising taxes, so it’s no skin off my back, many Americans are thinking, but our bellicose policy overseas is certainly bankrupting the homeland, even as it increases our insecurity in future blowbacks. The constant hike in our money supply, devaluing our dollars, is also a form of hidden taxation.
Another reason for our passivity in the face of widespread corruption is the state of our media, which routinely hype trivial stories while suppressing much greater outrages. Thus, the money John Edwards spent on his mistress, a million dollars provided by two private donors, was discussed for a week by television and newspaper “pundits,” but no one is concerned about the $1.5 million of tax money wasted each time Washington fires a Tomahawk missile at Libya. How many thousands have been launched so far in this three-month war? No one knows, and no one seems to care about the real flesh and bones on the receiving end of those weapons. “Bad guys” deserve to die, and so do “collateral damages.” Even as they mug us, our masters speak to us as if we’re morons. As they gobble up the entire world and everyone’s future, we get to nibble on catch phrases and slogans
Like Pavlov’s dogs, Americans have been conditioned to salivate at the sound of a home run, a Lady Gaga’s burp and the promise of hope and change comes election time, but when that fat, familiar hand reaches into our wallet, yet again, we feel nothing. We’re cool and blasé until it’s our turn to receive the pink slip, be evicted, then having to curl up in our car or on cardboard.
Interviewed by Stud Terkels, retired congressman C. Wright Patman said in 1970, “A dictatorship could spring up here over night, if this country got so bad. If another Depression came, we’d have a revolution. People wouldn’t take it any more. They have more knowledge. The big ones, they’d be looking for somebody that’d have the power to just kill people, if they didn’t agree. When John Doe begins to get up, they’d just go down and shoot him.”
I’m not sure that we have more knowledge, but with a presidency that can wage wars without congress or popular approval, and that can imprison or kill any American citizen without due process, a dictatorship is certainly here. Ditto, that Depression.
In a productive economy, corruption is less glaring because there are so many legitimate ways to enrich oneself, but in an increasingly non-productive one, such as what we have now, corruption becomes the primary means to riches. As we starve and kill each other, the mega corporations and their servants, our politicians, will continue to fatten themselves through their access to power.
In a ghetto with no stores, only drug corners, any bling-bling dude steering a loud Hummer is viewed suspiciously (or with admiration), so in this nation of fewer and fewer factories, save those that make bombs, tanks and high-grade weapons, who are our biggest death pushers and pimps, and what should we do about them?
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New Book
The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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