A billboard for Comcast pitches a lineup of “reality” shows, with this caption, “Recommended for you. Because real reality is boring.”
In contemporary America, real reality is also less real than Big Brother’s cartoony version. While we’re driving, walking, at work, lying in bed or even in the bathroom, Big Brother dictates what we know. Big Brother’s hypnotic screens have become our arbitrator of reality.
What capture us most are not the propaganda images, which can be ludicrously unconvincing, but the voice over. If Big Brother says it, it must be true.
Unlike in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does not speak to us in one stern voice. Deploying many puppets, Big Brother will humor, cajole and even uplift. Despite apparent divergences of opinions or even contradictions, Big Brother’s essential messages will always come through most clearly and persistently.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, for example, both speak for Big Brother. While Clinton compares Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler, Sanders states, “To temper Russian aggression, we must freeze Russian government assets all over the world, and encourage international corporations with huge investments in Russia to divest from that nation’s increasingly hostile political aims.”
Russia is a threat to world peace, they both agree. In boring reality, however, it is the United States that has surrounded Russia with missiles, staged provocative war games on Russia’s borders and pushed Georgia and Ukraine into wars with Russia.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, is used by Big Brother to fan hatred and paranoia of Muslims. From 9/11 to the Orlando Shooting, every “Muslim” terror attack on American soil has been framed and narrated, with no real evidence, by Big Brother. As with the Boston Bombing, Portland Christmas Tree Plot and the Shoe Bomber Plot, etc., Big Brother has either steered and coached the alleged terrorists, or had foreknowledge of them.
In boring reality, the US has also attacked Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Pakistan and Syria. Waging war on all these Muslim countries, the US has killed millions and generated millions more in refugees. According to Big Brother, however, the US is not a most brutal and systematic assailant of Muslims, but their hapless target.
Killing Muslims and stealing their land, Israel has also painted itself as a civilized, dignified and unbelievably restrained victim of barbaric Muslim terror.
Without Israel, the US would not be killing and demonizing Muslims endlessly, nor would it suffer these terror attacks pinned on Muslims. Without Israel, not just the US but the entire world would be much more peaceful.
No one remembers the Portland case. The FBI prevented Mohamed Osman Mohamud from working in Alaska so that he could be snared into a terror plot concocted by the FBI. A bomb-loaded van, provided by the FBI, was to be detonated to kill kids celebrating Christmas around a downtown tree.
Though the FBI had recorded and filmed Mohamud extensively, it could not produce the one tape where Mohamud supposedly incriminated himself. Big Brother tells us the recorder had a malfunction at that exact moment, and we don’t keel over laughing, such is our divorce from common sense.
After the Orlando Shooting, we have preposterous testimonies by purported survivors, witnesses and relatives of victims. Angel Colon was supposedly shot once in the hand, once in the hip and three times in one leg, all from an assault rifle at close range. On top of this, Colon was supposedly dragged over broken glass so that his back and buttocks were all cut up. Just three days later, however, Colon had recovered well enough to be presented to the press to recount his ordeal in amazing detail. Though lying face down and pretending to be dead, and in a darkened room, no less, Colon could see that the gunman was aiming for his head when Colon’s hand was hit. He also witnessed the woman lying next to him being killed. This sort of eidetic recall is typical of those whose only knowledge of shootings comes from movies. Colon has also been broadcast from his hospital bed, smiling and lifting, quite casually, his supposedly shattered leg.
Supposed witness Luis Burbano claims to have seen a bullet sticking about five inches from a victim’s leg. Even unfired, a R-15 bullet is just over two inches long, Luis.
Filmed repeatedly, from the very night of the shooting, Christine Leinonen is seen making all sorts of crying sounds and faces, but without actually shedding a tear. While her son was still unaccounted for, Leinonen blubbered, “This is a club that nobody wants to be in. Please, could we do something with the assault weapons so that we could stop this club from ever getting any new members? I beg all of you, please. I want you to know about my son. When he was in high school, he started the Gay-Straight Alliance, and he won the humanitarian award to bring gays and straights together. I’ve been so proud of him for that. Please, let’s all just get along. We’re on this earth for such a short time. Let’s try to get rid of the hatred and the violence, please!”
The Huffington Post deems Leinonen’s discharge “a powerful and devastating plea for more gun control.” Less prone to cow pie, Lucius Nonesuch, a commenter at Unz Review, observes, “It’s not the language of anyone’s everyday speech, nor is it anything like good literary language—it’s more like a bad MFA creative writing student’s verbiage. These ‘average’ people use impossibly bad metaphors and unbelievable figures of speech—the supposed mother above has now “joined a club,” the club of parents who have lost a child to gun violence—how does this dolt of a woman come up with this trite nonsense on her own? It is not her language, it is the language of a Bolshevik Communications Major. Undeniably bad language—and yet completely not right coming from her mouth.”
Thank you, Lucius Nonesuch. If more Americans were like you, we wouldn’t be hoodwinked endlessly by Big Brother. As is, we’re doomed.
The heirs of Meyer Lansky, the impresario of the North American Mafia gambling colony in Cuba (1933-1958) are betting on a big payback from the negotiations between the United States and Cuba to normalize relations between the two countries. Compensation claims by U.S. citizens or businesses for properties nationalized by the Cuban revolution are among the issues under discussion.
Lansky’s daughter Sandi, her son Gary Rapoport, and her brother Paul have filed a compensation claim against Cuba for the Riviera Hotel and Casino with the U.S. Foreign Claims Settlement Commission. The Cuban revolution confiscated the Riviera and other Mafia-owned properties after it toppled the gangster-linked regime of General Fulgencio Batista in 1959.
“It was through my grandfather’s hard work that the hotel was built,” Rapoport told the U. K. Daily Mail Online on December 23, 2015. “We are his natural relations . . . . By right, it should be our property.” He says the Riviera is valued at $70 million. The Tampa Bay Tribune, Reuters, and Haaretz have also covered the story.
The Riviera, which overlooks the Straits of Florida, was the crown jewel of Lansky’s casinos, hotels, and nightclubs in Havana. When the Riviera opened in December 1957, it was the largest Mafia-owned hotel-casino outside Las Vegas. The hotel’s 440 double rooms were booked solid for the winter season of 1957-1958.
However, the narrative that the success of the Riviera was the product of Meyer Lansky’s “hard work” is undercut by Lansky’s own assessment of his arrangement with Batista. Lansky talked candidly about his years in Cuba with Israeli national security writers Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau for their admiring biography Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob (Paddington Press, 1979). (Lansky lived in Israel in 1970-1971 to avoid tax evasion charges in the United States.)
Lansky pitched his plan to Batista to open Mafia owned casinos and nightclubs in Cuba in 1933. Lansky promised to make Batista, who had just come to power in a coup d’etat, a partner. Batista and his inner circle would get regular payments from the Mafia gamblers. In return, the gangsters would be allowed to operate without interference from Cuban authorities. With a handshake and an abrazo, Lansky and Batista laid the foundations of the Cuban gangster state.
“Working on the well-known principle that it’s better to use other people’s money than your own, Lansky persuaded Batista to have the Cuban government help finance the venture,” Eisenberg, Dan, and Landau wrote. “The [Cuban] government agreed to back every dollar invested on the island by foreigners with a dollar of its own and to give every hotel that cost more than one million dollars the precious prize of a gambling license . . . and the casino hotels would not have to pay Cuban taxes.”
The Riviera was one of four new hotels with casinos, which opened in Havana between 1955 and 1958. Cuban development banks subsidized 50 percent of Lansky’s $14 million Riviera project; Lansky-linked investors provided the rest. Senator Eduardo Suarez Rivas, brother of Batista’s Minister of Labor Jose Suarez Rivas, was secretary of the Compania de Hotels La Riviera de Cuba, which operated the Riviera.
The Mafia gambling colony was the cornerstone of the Cuban gangster state. The gangsters’ graft bound Batista, his inner circle, senior security officers, and the Mafia together in the defense of one of the most repressive regimes in Latin America. As a CIA report put it, “In return for the loyalty they gave him, Batista always backed his security services. In times of crisis, he often suspended civil guarantees . . . and gave the services a free hand.”
The days of the North American gangsters in Cuba were numbered when Batista fled into exile on January 1, 1959. In 1958, Fidel Castro’s July 26th Movement had denounced the Mafia radio broadcasts from its guerrilla redoubt in the Sierra Maestra for turning Havana into a center of commercialized vice – gambling, prostitution, and drugs. When Castro arrived in Havana on January 8, he vowed to “clean out all the gamblers.” The Riviera and other gangster-owned properties were nationalized, and the Mafia gamblers returned to the United States.
To regain control of its casinos, hotels, and nightclubs in post-Castro Cuba, the Mafia waged a covert war on the Cuban revolution. The gangsters regrouped with their Cuban political allies, now in exile in the United States. The Mafia subsidized Cuban exile leaders and supplied arms to Cuban exile commando groups for attacks on Cuban targets from speedy boats and small aircraft. The gangsters also plotted with the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro.
In 1959, Lansky volunteered to arrange the assassination of Castro in a meeting with the CIA, according to Doc Stacher, a life-long Lansky associate. “He [Lansky] indicated to the CIA that some of his people who were still on the island, or those who were just going back, might assassinate Castro,” Stacher told his Israeli biographers. “Meyer Lansky thought that if Castro would be eliminated there was a good chance for Batista to make a comeback . . . He told them [CIA officers] he was quite prepared to finance the operation himself.” From 1960 to 1963, the CIA and the Mafia plotted covertly to assassinate Castro.
To portray Lansky as an aggrieved victim of Cuba is to stand history on its head. There should be no compensation for the heirs of the former Mafia gamblers in Cuba.
Jack Colhoun is an historian of the Cold War (University of Wisconsin, Madison, BA, 1968; York University, Toronto, PhD, 1976), an investigative reporter, and professional archival researcher. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Toronto Star, Salon, History News Network, The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times, the former (New York) Guardian newsweekly, and formerCovert Action Quarterly. He is the author of Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba, and the Mafia, 1933-1966 (New York: OR Books, 2013).
Peter Oborne is everything Chilcot will not be: concise, honed, forensic and devastatingly logical. Oborne’s Not the Chilcot Report is the most important book that will be published this year. I strongly urge you to read it. Anyone who doubts the continued relevance of what Tony Blair did then, to Britain today will be left in no doubt of the poison still pumping around not just the British political system but the entire Middle East.
Oborne’s book is a tremendous example of how much information can be made digestible in a short space by excellent writing. Oborne presents the clearest of accounts of the history of the Iraqi weapons programmes and the very clear knowledge that Britain and the international community had of them.
Where Oborne is at his best is skewering the guilty men by pinpointing the key lies and distortions. In so doing, he is able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the major figures acted dishonestly and with deliberation. Here for example is a phrase from a minute of 15 March 2002 by John Scarlett, then Head of the Joint Intelligence Committee and later Head of MI6, discussing what to release to the public:
“You will still wish to consider whether more impact could be achieved if the paper only covered Iraq. This would have the benefit of obscuring the fact that, in terms of WMD, Iraq is not exceptional.”
Oborne has seized on the phrase that proves that Scarlett was knowingly engaged in deliberately misleading the public, in order to promote an aggressive war. Do not expect anything so acute from Chilcot.
Oborne sets out the unanswerable case that UN Security Council Resolution 1441 could not “revive” the authorisation of military action against Iraq under UN Security Council Resolution 678, as it specifically stated that any further breach of Iraq’s disarmament obligations would “be reported to the Council for assessment”, not trigger military action. That assessment never happened. Oborne also points out the more overlooked argument that 678 itself only authorised military intervention for the purpose of securing Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait anyway, so it could not be “revived” unless Iraq again occupied Kuwait.
Oborne sets out in cogent and consecutive detail how Lord Goldsmith both held and set out this self evident fact, and that this was hidden from the Cabinet. Oborne highlights the evidence from Chilcot that every single one of the Foreign Office’s stellar department of Legal Advisers held this same view, that to invade Iraq would be illegal. And he skewers in every detail Goldsmith’s servile behaviour in flying to Washington to be given, and adopt, the Bush lawyers’ logically impossible position that it was open to any individual UN member to make the unilateral determination of whether Iraq was in material breach of the disarmament obligations.
Nothing here the cognoscenti did not know – but to read it set out so squarely still sends a chill down the spine.
Oborne is perhaps at his strongest on the disastrous consequences of the Iraq War. This is where neo-con revisionists in the mainstream media have worked hardest – the narrative window is that perhaps the war was based on an untruth, but the consequences were good.
Oborne shows that the security services predicted before the war that to invade Iraq would increase the terrorist threat in the UK. He shows conclusively from evidence to Chilcot including from former MI5 head Eliza Manningham Buller that the invasion of Iraq had indeed increased the terrorist threat to the UK and had directly caused the radicalisation of young British muslims with consequences including the 7/7 bombings.
Manningham Buller told Chilcot that it was beyond doubt, and measurable, that the Iraq invasion greatly increased the terrorist threat to the UK, and to counter the arguments of those who deny this – particularly Tony Blair – she pointed out that immediately following the invasion, Blair had agreed to an unprecedented doubling of the budget of MI5 – the domestic security agency.
The consequences of the invasion of Iraq in terms of Middle East instability and lives lost have been incalculable. In simple terms of deaths in Iraq alone, Oborne explains more clearly than I had ever seen that Iraq Body Count only includes fatalities confirmed in two separate English language sources, and therefore this is a major underestimate. 1 million dead is probably a more realistic estimate.
As battle rages around Fallujah for at least the fifth time since the invasion, as the population still starved of work, electricity, education, sanitation and health services rises up in Iraq and periodically attacks the luxury enclave of the Green zone, as the Daesh phenomenon looks to transmogrify into its latest manifestation, attempts to distance these consequences from Blair’s destruction of the Iraqi state are pathetic, yet widely disseminated in mainstream media. Oborne conclusively yet concisely explains why this propaganda is wrong.
The one area where I think he Oborne a little too kind is in his description of Chilcot and his team. Oborne rightly explains no great expectations of the Chilcot report should be held. He has told me privately that he expects that Chilcot will seek to “spread the blame widely and thinly”, rather than hone in on Blair and the really guilty parties. This is my information also; from the criticisms individuals have seen in the “Maxwellisation” process I learn a lot of the blame is to be shifted to the military.
But I don’t think Oborne really nails it on the extent to which Chilcot is a pre-arranged whitewash job. Chilcot was himself a member of the Butler Inquiry, an earlier whitewash covering much the same ground. Oborne points out the interesting fact that now Lord Butler is a free agent in the House of Lords, he has much more squarely accused Blair than anything he said in his report. But Oborne has only gently referred to the point that the Inquiry members were almost all very active cheerleaders for the Iraq War. Only one, Baroness Prashar, is arguably neutral. Not one of the numerous distinguished former Ambassadors, Generals or academics who opposed the war was selected.
The Chilcot Inquiry is a put-up whitewash with membership personally approved by Gordon Brown. It will not be worth reading. This short book by Oborne tells you everything you need to know. Read it instead.
Here is an excerpt from Oborne’s conclusion:
“In the decade after 9/11 the United States spent more than $3 trillion and squandered the lives of 7,000 American and allied soldiers. The consequence of these wars has been the destabilisation of Iraq, the emergence of Islamic States, and a failed state in Afghanistan. Meanwhile the reputation of America and its Western allies has been gravely damaged by the rendition, torture and detention without trial of terror suspects, and other cases of western brutality, such as Abu Ghraib.
…trust in the state was shattered by the Iraq War, and its gruesome aftermath. We have learnt that civil servants, spies, and politicians could not be trusted to act with integrity and decency and in the national interest. This discovery was shattering because it calls into question the moral basis on which Britain has been governed for the last hundred years or more.”
The truth is, these consequences were not unforeseeable. Indeed as Oborne notes on 14 February 2003 Dominique De Villepin, French Foreign Minister, had predicted to the Security Council exactly what the consequences would be:
“… the use of force is not justified at this time. There is an alternative to war; disarming Iraq through inspections.
Moreover, premature recourse to the military option would be fraught with risks… Such intervention could have incalculable consequences for a scarred and ravaged region. It would compound the sense of injustice, would aggravate tensions and would risk paving the way for other conflicts.”
It was an aggressive war on the basis of lies, for which people still die today, all over the world.
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, currently back in Britain, cast a dark shadow over those campaigning to stay in the European Union in the June 23rd referendum. Inflicting himself on the Britain Stronger in Europe group, he spoke at every opportunity – reminding even the most passionate Europhile of the last time he assured “I know I’m right” – Iraq.
If the “Remainers” had an ounce of sense, Blair should have been ditched in a nano-second. He is not “Toxic Tony” for nothing.
However, since the long awaited Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq invasion is to be published just thirteen days after the referendum (July 6th) it is worth revisiting more of the mistruths of which he is capable.
On March 18th, 2003, Blair stood in Parliament and listed the times Saddam Hussein’s government had said they had no weapons of mass destruction dismissing them all, including the 11,800 pages or 12,200 pages of accounting of that which they did not possess and delivered by the Iraqi delegation at the UN to the UN UNSCOM offices on December 8th, 2002.
Lest it be forgotten, the reason for the uncertainty of the length of the volume is that the US delegation simply appropriated it and returned less than 4,000 pages so heavily redacted as to be indecipherable – and without the hefty index at the back listing the Western arms companies who had, prior to the first Gulf war, sold them weapons.
Blair told Parliament loftily:
… the 8th December declaration is false. That in itself is a material breach. Iraq has made some concessions to co-operation but no-one disputes it is not fully cooperating. Iraq continues to deny it has any WMD, though no serious intelligence service anywhere in the world believes them … We … will back it with action if Saddam fails to disarm voluntarily.
Iraq, of course, was telling the truth. Blair had appointed himself Judge, jury and executioner.
And here is a real whopper:
I have never put our justification for action as regime change.
And another:
Iraq is a wealthy country that in 1978, the year before Saddam seized power, was richer than Portugal or Malaysia.
Today it is impoverished, 60% of its population dependent on food aid.
Thousands of children die needlessly every year from lack of food and medicine.
What he omitted was stated in a piece I wrote back in 1998 addressing the ever repeated propaganda. The conditions were caused directly by the US-UK driven embargo, overseen by Blair’s envoy to the UN, Carne Ross, who headed the Sanctions Committee after the August 1991 imposed embargo:
In 1989 the World Health Organization recorded Iraq as having 92-per-cent access to clean water, 93-per-cent access to high quality health care and with high educational and nutritional standards.
By 1995 the World Food Program noted that: ‘time is running out for the children of Iraq’. Figures – verified by UNICEF – record that 1,211,285 children died of embargo-related causes between August 1990 and August 1997. A silent holocaust in the name of the UN. These numbers are similar to those lost in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia. It is three times the population of Kuwait in small lives. ‘After 24 years in the field, starting with Biafra, I didn’t think anything could shock me,’ wrote Dieter Hannusch of the World Food Program in l995. ‘But this was comparable to the worst scenarios I had ever seen.’
The day after Blair’s address to Parliament, Operation Iraqi Liberation began, to which he had committed the country in his visit to George W. Bush’s Texas ranch in April 2002, without telling Parliament.
Attorney General Lord Goldsmith wrote (a) letter to Mr. Blair in July 2002 – a full eight months before the war – telling him that deposing Saddam Hussein was a blatant breach of international law.
It was intended to make Mr. Blair call off the invasion, but he ignored it. Instead, a panicking Mr. Blair issued instructions to gag Lord Goldsmith, banned him from attending Cabinet meetings and ordered a cover-up to stop the public finding out.
He even concealed the bombshell information from his own Cabinet, fearing it would spark an anti-war revolt. The only people he told were a handful of cronies who were sworn to secrecy.
Lord Goldsmith was so furious at his treatment he threatened to resign – and lost three stone as Mr Blair and his cronies bullied him into backing down.
The then Prime Minister did not alone ignore the Attorney General’s legal advice. In November 2002 “six wise men” gave Blair “bloody warnings” as to the outcome of an attack on Iraq. They were:
… all academics, expert on Iraq, the Middle East and international affairs. They had been called to the Cabinet Room to outline the worst that could happen if Britain and the United States launched an invasion.
This was a meeting that could have changed the course of history and, with better planning for the aftermath, saved countless lives – if only the Prime Minister and his advisers had listened and acted on the bloody warnings on that day in November 2002.
Dr. Toby Dodge, then of London’s Queen Mary University, foresaw with extraordinary clarity the near certain outcome, warning:
… that Iraqis would fight for their country against the invaders rather than just celebrate the fall of their leader. A long and nasty civil war could follow. “My aim that day was to tell them as much as I could, so that there would be no excuses and nobody saying, ‘I didn’t know.’
Others who shared their extensive expertise were Professor George Joffe of Cambridge University, Sir Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King’s College, London and a Blair adviser, Professor Charles Tripp of the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, Steven Simon, Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Professor Michael Clarke, then of King’s College, London. Before the gathering they were warned: “Don’t tell him not to do it. He has already made up his mind”, Dr. Dodge told The Independent.
Blair and his Cabinet had: “… no plan for what would happen after the invasion. The approach was, ‘The Americans are heading this up. They will have a detailed plan. We need to follow them’ ”, said Professor Joffe. However in reality, a year’s planning by the State Department for the invasion’s aftermath: “was junked. They were making up policy on the hoof.”
Professor Joffe also explained the complexities of Iraq’s power structures with Tony Blair seemingly disinterested in the potential cultural, societal and political minefields, responding with kindergarten simplicity (re Saddam Hussein) “ But the man is evil, isn’t he?”
A chameleon-like absorption of George W. Bush, his political circle and his Generals’ simplistic “good guys”, “bad guys” rhetoric.
Steven Simon had little faith in bringing democracy to Iraq at the barrels of guns and deliveries of 30,000-pound bunker busters:
If everything had been done differently, there might have been some small shot at avoiding disaster. But only a small shot.
Incredibly, according to Professor Joffe: “The people who were put in charge in Iraq had very little knowledge or experience of the Middle East.”
Professor Clarke commented that Blair’s attempt to justify the invasion was mistaken: “We knew there was no nuclear stuff in Iraq.” Moreover, he believed: ‘Blair did not actually decide to go to war on the basis of intelligence, but made it look as if he had with his two “dodgy” dossiers. “He presented the case to the public as if they had incontrovertible evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. That was rubbish. They were ridiculous documents, both those documents.” ‘ (Emphasis added.)
Late last year, Blair made what was described as a “qualified apology” for “mistakes” made in Iraq – among them: “our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you removed the regime”. In the light of the above, blatantly untrue.
Blair’s dodging and weaving over the years since 2003 – in spite of his millions, numerous properties, jet (seemingly leased) and a yacht, accrued from advising some of the world’s most despotic leaders – seems to have worn him down a bit, though.
In an extraordinary television outburst attacking Labour Leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who said of Blair on BBC’s Newsnight last August: “If he has committed a war crime, yes (he should stand trial.) Everybody who has committed a war crime should.” Blair responded: “I’m accused of being a war criminal for removing Saddam Hussein … and yet Jeremy is seen as a progressive icon as we stand by and watch the people of Syria barrel-bombed, beaten and starved into submission and do nothing.”
No mention of the US’ illegal “coalition”, including the UK, which has made 4,024 strikes to 1st June this year, according to the US Department of Defence. Strikes remarkably inept at affecting the countless foreign terrorist groups, but which have caused devastation to the Syrian people whose plight was caused by US plotting.
46,615 bombs and missiles have been dropped Syria and Iraq in the seeming non-fight against ISIS and other criminal groups. (airwars.org)
Apart from his ongoing economy with the truth, Tony Blair also seems to be well past his sell by date. In Northern Ireland, probably the only place on earth which has a tenuous reason to give him some credit for the “peace process”, where he went to speak on the referendum at Ulster University, he was less than welcome.
Derry anti-war campaigner Frankie McMenamin said the former Labour leader was “not welcome” in Derry, telling the Derry Journal:
I was involved in protests about the Iraqi War which Tony Blair was responsible for, Tony Blair is hated throughout the world and he has blood on his hands over Iraq.
I will be voting for the U.K. to remain on June 23rd but I think someone like Mr. Blair (urging the stay in vote) will put a lot of other people off.
Tony Blair is not welcome in our city and the people who organized this visit obviously knew this.
The meeting had not been publicly advertised and the address was to a specially selected audience. The co-speaker was Blair’s former Chancellor, Gordon Brown, near equally unpopular, who wrote the cheques for years of UK bombings before the invasion and then for the invasion’s destruction. Had the meeting been publicly advertised, assured Mr McMenamin, protesters would have been out in force.
On 17th June, Blair was a signatory to an open letter, signed by two former deputy Prime Ministers and a number of MPs and public figures urging voters to stay in the European Union. It included the words:
… public life, whether in politics or elsewhere, should be about something else – something better.
It should be driven by a desire to bring people together when it would be easier to tear them apart. A wish to build bridges rather than erect walls”, to promote that which is “peaceful, tolerant, compassionate”.
As he added his signature, did he reflect on Iraq’s destroyed bridges – literally and metaphorically, on a nation of walls erected by US and UK troops over one of the most open landscapes anywhere to be found and on the accompanying destruction of peace, tolerance and compassion at the hands of US and UK policies aided by his ignorant determination and “ridiculous documents.”
Philippe Sands QC, Professor of international law and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London, has said he believes, unequivocally, that the 2003 invasion was illegal under international law.
In the UK, beyond those associated with the government’s effort, I cannot think of a single international lawyer who thinks the war was lawful. Not a single name comes to mind. That’s got to be telling.
It can only be hoped the Chilcot Inquiry’s findings deliver Charles Anthony Lynton Blair and his cohorts a sharp, chilly return to reality for their part in a tragedy which will be his and George W. Bush’s place of infamy in history.
As this is finished, against the odds, the referendum is announced lost, the UK is out of the EU, the financial markets and the pound have plummeted and Prime Minister Cameron has announced his resignation. It will probably never be known to what – if any – extent Blair’s reviled presence changed “stay” voters to “leave.”
Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist with special knowledge of Iraq. Author, with Nikki van der Gaag, of Baghdad in the Great City series for World Almanac books, she has also been Senior Researcher for two Award winning documentaries on Iraq, John Pilger’s Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq and Denis Halliday Returns for RTE (Ireland.)
The ten worst acts of the Nuclear Age described below have set the tone for our time. They have caused immense death and suffering; been tremendously expensive; have encouraged nuclear proliferation; have opened the door to nuclear terrorism, nuclear accidents and nuclear war; and are leading the world back into a second Cold War. These “ten worst acts” are important information for anyone attempting to understand the time in which we live, and how the nuclear dangers that confront us have been intensified by the leadership and policy choices made by the United States and the other eight nuclear-armed countries.
1. Bombing Hiroshima (August 6, 1945). The first atomic bomb was dropped by the United States on the largely civilian population of Hiroshima, killing some 70,000 people instantly and 140,000 people by the end of 1945. The bombing demonstrated the willingness of the US to use its new weapon of mass destruction on cities.
2. Bombing Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). The second atomic bomb was dropped on the largely civilian population of Nagasaki before Japanese leaders had time to assess the death and injury caused by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima three days earlier. The atomic bombing of Nagasaki took another 70,000 lives by the end of 1945.
3. Pursuing a unilateral nuclear arms race (1945 – 1949). The first nuclear weapon test was conducted by the US on July 16, 1945, just three weeks before the first use of an atomic weapon on Hiroshima. As the only nuclear-armed country in the world in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the US continued to expand its nuclear arsenal and began testing nuclear weapons in 1946 in the Marshall Islands, a trust territory the US was asked to administer on behalf of the United Nations. Altogether the US tested 67 nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, with the equivalent explosive power of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs daily for that 12 year period.
4. Initiating Atoms for Peace (1953). President Dwight Eisenhower put forward an Atoms for Peace proposal in a speech delivered on December 8, 1953. This proposal opened the door to the spread of nuclear reactors and nuclear materials for purposes of research and power generation. This resulted in the later proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional countries, including Israel, South Africa, India, Pakistan and North Korea.
5. Engaging in a Cold War bilateral nuclear arms race (1949 – 1991). The nuclear arms race became bilateral when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic weapon on August 29, 1949. This bilateral nuclear arms race between the US and USSR reached its apogee in 1986 with some 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, enough to destroy civilization many times over and possibly result in the extinction of the human species.
6. Atmospheric Nuclear Testing (1945 – 1980). Altogether there have been 528 atmospheric nuclear tests. The US, UK and USSR ceased atmospheric nuclear testing in 1963, when they signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty. France continued atmospheric nuclear testing until 1974 and China continued until 1980. Atmospheric nuclear testing has placed large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere, causing cancers and leukemia in human populations.
7. Breaching the disarmament provisions of the NPT (1968 – present). Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) states, “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament….” The five nuclear weapons-states parties to the NPT (US, Russia, UK, France and China) remain in breach of these obligations. The other four nuclear-armed states (Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea) are in breach of these same obligations under customary international law.
8. Treating nuclear power as an “inalienable right” in the NPT (1968 – present). This language of “inalienable right” contained in Article IV of the NPT encourages the development and spread of nuclear power plants and thereby makes the proliferation of nuclear weapons more likely. Nuclear power plants are also attractive targets for terrorists. As yet, there are no good plans for long-term storage of radioactive wastes created by these plants. Government subsidies for nuclear power plants also take needed funding away from the development of renewable energy sources.
9. Failing to cut a deal with North Korea (1992 to present). During the Clinton administration, the US was close to a deal with North Korea to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. This deal was never fully implemented and negotiations for it were abandoned under the George W. Bush administration. Consequently, North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 2003 and conducted its first nuclear weapon test in 2006.
10. Abrogating the ABM Treaty (2002). Under the George W. Bush administration, the US unilaterally abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. This allowed the US, in combination with expanding NATO to the east, to place missile defense installations near the Russian border. It has also led to emplacement of US missile defenses in East Asia. Missile defenses in Europe and East Asia have spurred new nuclear arms races in these regions.
David Krieger is a founder and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
It is a scandal in contemporary international law, don’t forget, that while “wanton destruction of towns, cities and villages” is a war crime of long standing, the bombing of cities from airplanes goes not only unpunished but virtually unaccused. Air bombardment is state terrorism, the terrorism of the rich. It has burned up and blasted apart more innocents in the past six decades than have all the antistate terrorists who ever lived. Something has benumbed our consciousness against this reality. In the United States we would not consider for the presidency a man who had once thrown a bomb into a crowded restaurant, but we are happy to elect a man who once dropped bombs from airplanes that destroyed not only restaurants but the buildings that contained them and the neighborhoods that surrounded them. I went to Iraq after the Gulf war and saw for myself what the bombs did; “wanton destruction” is just the term for it. – C. Douglas Lummis, political scientist
The above was written in 1994, before the wanton destruction generated by the bombing of Yugoslavia, another in a long list of countries the United States has bombarded since the end of World War II, which is presented below.
There appears to be something about launching bombs or missiles from afar onto cities and people that appeals to American military and political leaders. In part it has to do with a conscious desire to not risk American lives in ground combat. And in part, perhaps not entirely conscious, it has to do with not wishing to look upon the gory remains of the victims, allowing American GIs and TV viewers at home to cling to their warm fuzzy feelings about themselves, their government, and their marvelous “family values”. Washington officials are careful to distinguish between the explosives the US drops from the sky and “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), which only the officially-designated enemies (ODE) are depraved enough to use. The US government speaks sternly of WMD, defining them as nuclear, chemical and biological in nature, and “indiscriminate” (meaning their use can’t be limited to military objectives), as opposed to the likes of American “precision” cruise missiles. This is indeed a shaky semantic leg to stand on, given the well-known extremely extensive damage to non-military targets, including numerous residences, schools and hospitals, even from American “smart” bombs, in almost all of the bombings listed below.
Moreover, Washington does not apply the term “weapons of mass destruction” to other weapons the US has regularly used, such as depleted uranium and cluster bombs, which can be, and often are, highly indiscriminate.
WMD are sometimes further defined as those whose effects linger in the environment, causing subsequent harm to people. This would certainly apply to cluster bombs, and depleted uranium weapons, the latter remaining dangerously radioactive after exploding. It would apply less to “conventional” bombs, but even with those there are unexploded bombs lying around, and the danger of damaged buildings later collapsing. But more importantly, it seems highly self-serving and specious, not to mention exceptionally difficult, to try to paint a human face on a Tomahawk Cruise missile whose payload of a thousand pounds of TNT crashes into the center of a densely-populated city, often with depleted uranium in its warhead.
A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn’t have an air force.
The bombing list
Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War)
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-1961
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets)
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Iran 1987
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991 (Persian Gulf War)
Kuwait 1991
Somalia 1993
Bosnia 1994, 1995
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
Yemen 2002
Iraq 1991-2003 (US/UK on regular basis)
Iraq 2003-2015
Afghanistan 2001-2015
Pakistan 2007-2015
Somalia 2007-8, 2011
Yemen 2009, 2011
Libya 2011, 2015
Syria 2014-2015
Plus
Iran, April 2003 – hit by US missiles during bombing of Iraq, killing at least one person
Pakistan, 2002-03 – bombed by US planes several times as part of combat against the Taliban and other opponents of the US occupation of Afghanistan
China, 1999 – its heavily bombed embassy in Belgrade is legally Chinese territory, and it appears rather certain that the bombing was no accident (see chapter 25 of Rogue State)
France, 1986 – After the French government refused the use of its air space to US warplanes headed for a bombing raid on Libya, the planes were forced to take another, longer route; when they reached Libya they bombed so close to the French embassy that the building was damaged and all communication links knocked out.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 13, 1985 – A bomb dropped by a police helicopter burned down an entire block, some 60 homes destroyed, 11 dead, including several small children. The police, the mayor’s office, and the FBI were all involved in this effort to evict a black organization called MOVE from the house they lived in.
Them other guys are really shocking
“We should expect conflicts in which adversaries, because of cultural affinities different from our own, will resort to forms and levels of violence shocking to our sensibilities.” – Department of Defense, 1999
The Targets
It’s become a commonplace to accuse the United States of choosing as its bombing targets only people of color, those of the Third World, or Muslims. But it must be remembered that one of the most sustained and ferocious American bombing campaigns was carried out against the people of the former Yugoslavia – white, European, Christians. The United States is an equal-opportunity bomber. The only qualifications for a country to become a target are:
It poses a sufficient obstacle to the desires of the American Empire;
It is virtually defenseless against aerial attack.
The survivors
A study by the American Medical Association: “Psychiatric disorders among survivors of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing”:
Nearly half the bombing survivors studied had an active postdisaster psychiatric disorder, and full criteria for PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder] were met by one third of the survivors. PTSD symptoms were nearly universal, especially symptoms of intrusive reexperience and hyperarousal.
Martin Kelly, publisher of a nonviolence website:
We never see the smoke and the fire, we never smell the blood, we never see the terror in the eyes of the children, whose nightmares will now feature screaming missiles from unseen terrorists, known only as Americans.
The prospect of Hillary Clinton being President of the United States of America is one to fill our minds with dread concerning the likely posture of Washington in foreign affairs should she ever attain the Oval Office. There is no doubt she would continue or even increase the intensity of Washington’s military confrontations with China and Russia — and enjoy smacking the wrists of smaller countries whose actions might displease her. Indeed her castigation might go further, even to the extent of rejoicing in the murder of national leaders such as President Gaddafi of Libya, about whom she laughed “We came. We saw. He died.”
Who might be next, with Hillary at the helm?
Under her reign the US military presence around the world would be maintained or expanded — but no matter who is in the White House, the hundreds of military bases surrounding China and Russia will continue operations and the US nuclear-armed fleets that roam the seas and oceans will maintain their aggressive posture.
Drone assassinations will also continue and more innocent people like that poor taxi driver in Pakistan will be killed by US Hellfire missiles guided by gleeful techno-cretins who move control sticks and prod buttons while playing barbaric video games from their comfortable killing couches in drone-control bases.
That taxi driver?
To remind you: on May 21 a taxi driver called Mohammad Azam was earning his tiny daily wage by picking up passengers who crossed the Iranian border into Pakistan. Sometimes he would take them only to nearby villages, but that day he picked up a client who wanted to go to the city of Quetta, eight hours drive away. He drove off in his Toyota Corolla, and a few hours later, when he stopped for a rest, Obama’s Hellfires struck and blasted the car to twisted shards of metal — and reduced Azam and his customer to smoking corpses.
Azam’s passenger was the evil Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, travelling under a false name. His sought-for anonymity didn’t do him much good, because he had been traced and tracked, and while he was in Iran or when he was going through border crossing examination on the Pakistan side it’s likely that a US-paid agent planted a chip on him or in his baggage that signaled his whereabouts to the drone-controlling video-gamers.
Azam the taxi-driver didn’t know Mullah Mansour and was not associated with the Taliban or any such organization. He was an entirely innocent man trying to earn enough money to feed his family — his wife, four small children and a crippled brother who stayed with them.
But Azam was killed by the same US Hellfire missiles that killed Mullah Mansoor.
The Pentagon stated that “Mansur has been an obstacle to peace and reconciliation between the Government of Afghanistan and the Taliban, prohibiting Taliban leaders from participating in peace talks with the Afghan government that could lead to an end to the conflict.” So they killed him. And without the slightest hesitation they also killed the taxi driver Mohammad Azam.
If a person in a foreign country that can’t retaliate to drone strikes is considered an enemy of the United States there is no question of arrest, charge and trial. When it can be done they are killed by drone missile strikes, personally authorized by President Obama who stressed that there must be “near certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed,” and that “the United States respects national sovereignty and international law.”
But the US president ordered the assassination of two people in a country whose prime minister said that the US drone attack was a gross violation of national sovereignty. And although the White House and the Pentagon might — just might — be able to convince a War Crimes Tribunal that their killing of Mullah Mansur was in some fashion reasonable, how could they possibly claim that their murder of the taxi driver Azam was justified? When did it become “respectful of international law” to deliberately slaughter a taxi driver?
The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, declared that Mansoor’s obliteration “sends a clear message to the world that we will continue to stand with our Afghan partners as they work to build a more stable, united, secure and prosperous Afghanistan.” Which was no doubt solace to Azam’s widow and her two little boys and two little girls when his hideously charred fragmented corpse arrived next day.
People like Obama and Kerry and Clinton and countless millions of others simply don’t care about the smashing, flashing, hideously agonizing death of the innocent taxi driver Azam.
The US President’s professional video-gamers had killed yet another totally innocent non-combatant, but no doubt they all slept soundly on the night that Azam’s children began to realize their terrible loss.
Three weeks after the drone murder of taxi driver Azam there was a massacre of 49 people in the US city of Orlando. It was horrible. Much of the world was aghast, and there was emotion displayed in Europe and North America, with candle-lit vigils, solemn silences of respect in parliaments and other demonstrations of sympathy and solidarity. And when a British female Member of Parliament was killed by a lunatic on June 16 there was an amazing outpouring of grief in the country. Her husband said after her murder that “the two things that I’ve been very focused on is how do we support and protect the children.”
Quite right. And understandable and most admirable.
But who is going to support and protect the children of the US drone-killed taxi driver Azam?
The slaughter of innocent human beings is an everyday occurrence in Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan, where countless thousands have died — without a single western candle being lit in sorrowful commemoration of any Iraqis, Libyans or Afghans who have died in the savage chaos caused by the catastrophic military fandangos in their countries by US-led western powers.
Western countries are highly selective in displaying disapproval and grief following killings, be they mass or individual, and it could hardly be expected that the US assassination of a Pakistani taxi driver would attract the slightest sympathy or censure.
The murder-by drone of taxi driver Azam by the Pentagon’s video-gamers could be summed up by Hillary Clinton’s happy rejoicing about the murder of President Gaddafi during the US-NATO blitz on Libya, when she laughingly declared that “We came. We saw. He died.”
And thinking about the future . . . Would you be surprised if in twenty years or so one of the children of taxi driver Azam were to take up a gun and kill Americans?
The University of Alaska is sponsoring a study that will examine whether of not WTC Building 7 was brought down by a controlled demolition on September 11, 2001.
For those who may not be aware, standing some 47 stories high, Building 7 was the third skyscraper that collapsed later in the afternoon on 9/11, dropping at free-fall speed – in less than 7 seconds – and yet, it was not struck by any plane and was located over 100 metres away from WTC 1 and 2.
The official version of events is that fire spread to Building 7, from the main towers, devastating the structure, and causing it also to fall in on itself, but many have questioned how exactly every single support column in the building could have failed simultaneously without the use of pre-planned explosives.
Dr J Leroy Hulsey, chair of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, has partnered with Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth to begin a rigorous academic study into what really caused it to collapse.
Dr Hulsey said:
“Over the next year, with a team of PhD students, I will be rebuilding World Trade Center building 7, using the same drawings that were used to build it originally we will reconstruct it digitally.”
“NIST says the building fell down due to office fires. Our investigation will evaluate the probability that this was the cause of the collapse.”
Ted Walter, Director of Strategy and Development for A&E 9/11 Truth added:
“We hope to gain significant traction in the engineering community by providing an authoritative refutation of NIST’s report, by showing that there is no way that fires could have brought down building 7.”
On the day of 9/11 the BBC reported that Building 7 had collapsed 20 minutes before it actually had, which only raises suspicions that somebody knew it was about to come down. See that monumental screw up, which happened live on TV, here:
.
Watch the collapse of Building 7 here:
. Do you believe explosives brought down Building 7?
Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi is one of the most famous women in the world. She is a holder of the Nobel Peace Prize and hailed as “the Mandela of Asia” because of her human rights record. However, when we look at her continual lack of concern about the plight of the Rohingya people in the former Burma, you have to question the level of her compassion and integrity.
You may gasp at this and I must admit that I never thought that I would ever write that about such an iconic figure. I, like tens of thousands of others around the world, campaigned long and hard to have the pro-democracy leader freed from the shackles of the Burmese junta which kept her under house arrest for years.
When she was finally released to lead her country to a better future there were tears in my eyes, but now I am completely bewildered by her deathly silence about the pitiful state of the Rohingyas living in squalor and inhumane conditions in Myanmar.
The military junta in Burma-Myanmar refused to acknowledge the existence of the Rohingyas and would only ever refer to them as “Bangladeshis”. Now, under the political leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi, the government has gone one step further by banning the use of the word Rohingya, as if 1.1 million people have just disappeared. One has to ask if she and the generals still lurking in the background are following the Israeli manual on how to deal with unwanted citizens and ethnic minorities.
Let’s not forget that Israel’s founding Prime Minster David Ben-Gurion maintained close ties with Burma. In December 1961 he was given the full red carpet treatment during a state visit. Shortly before boarding his flight he gave a press conference: “I am leaving today for a new country but not a strange one; in all of Asia, there is no more friendly nation to Israel than Burma. Israel and Burma are two old countries with old histories which renewed their independence in 1948.”
According to Ben-Gurion, “Both [Israel and Burma] are democratic and both follow the same principle in foreign relations – promoting friendly relations and mutual aid with all peace-loving countries irrespective of their internal regimes and without injuring the interests of any other country; loyal to international cooperation based on United Nations principles.”
Of course the state visits by Israeli leaders didn’t stop at Ben-Gurion; Shimon Peres, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and Golda Meir all went to Burma along with a string of other politicians. Others, including current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have extended hospitality to Burmese-Myanmar leaders in Tel Aviv.
By flattening more than 530 Arab towns and villages since 1948, controlling the movement of the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and airbrushing Palestinian culture, cuisine and lifestyle from everyday life, some say that the Israelis have been engaged in a slow genocide against the Palestinian people. Now I’m wondering if they’ve handed over the genocide manual to Aung San Suu Kyi and Myanmar.
The official narrative pushed out to the media is that there is religious tension between Rohingya Muslims and Myanmar’s Buddhists and that that is the problem. This is untrue. The state-sponsored persecution and oppression of the Rohingya people has gone on for decades. They are denied citizenship and ready access to health care and hospitals, and they have limits placed on their right to free movement and many other basic human rights. Religious persecution has been the order of the day along with land confiscations, forced labour, arbitrary taxation, house demolitions and restrictions on marriage, work and education. These are all forms of state oppression and tyranny the same as or similar to those encountered by Palestinians at the hands of Israel; now they’re being endured by the Rohingyas.
Last year, Asia witnessed a huge refugee crisis when hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas were exploited by people smugglers and took the seas in unseaworthy vessels. Abandoned by the smugglers their boats sailed aimlessly for weeks on end; without the food thrown to them by local fishermen the death toll as they starved would have been much higher.
It was only after an international outcry that neighbouring countries finally offered refuge to the Rohingya boat people, but then they forced them to live in squalid refugee camps in Thailand, Malaysia, India and Bangladesh. Around 150,000 live in conditions that are little better than concentration camps, and reports of mass graves surfaced last year.
Meanwhile, the ever-fragrant female “Mandela of Asia” smiles sweetly during less than robust press interviews and obfuscates at the very mention of the Rohingya people. What’s worse is that she gets away with it because most of the media still eulogises the icon who world leaders and statesmen simpered over when she was released.
The so-called head of state in Myanmar’s first “democratically elected government since 1962” maintains silence over the plight of the Rohingyas. Recently, she appeared a little tetchy when asked about them by US Secretary of State John Kerry, who was told to be more cautious over the “sensitive issue”. Even the Dalai Lama has been blanked by the diminutive leader after he called publicly and privately on several occasions for her to show compassion and act to stop the persecution.
If she has taken genocide lessons from the Israelis, then the State Counsellor and Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi has learned well. She has now declared that her government will not use the term “Rohingya” when referring to the “Muslim community” in Rakhine State. It is an echo of the occasion when former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir declared infamously that there was “no such thing as Palestinians.”
“Suu Kyi does not use the terms ‘Rohingya’ or ‘Bengali’,” announced Aye Aye Soe, the deputy director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during a visit by the UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar, Yanghee Lee. “The words of war do not support the current situation. Now, citizenship is under close scrutiny, and the use of the terms does not support the scrutiny process for citizenship. Suu Kyi requested that UN officials and other guests not use these controversial terms in case they should lead to conflict.”
As far as chutzpah goes, some might say that Aung San Suu Kyi has outdone the Israelis in her determination to shut down discussion or questions about the Rohingyas. In her world, it seems, they simply do not exist.
Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, the current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, issued an 18-page report on 20 June calling for a halt to discrimination against Rohingyas and human rights violations when Aung San Suu Kyi and Yanghee Lee met. There were warnings that crimes against humanity were suspected of being committed. The UN official criticised the Myanmar government for not releasing the plans for the “peace and stability and development implementation work committee” for Rakhine State, led by Aung San Suu Kyi.
Mary Scully is a veteran of political activism, including in the anti-war, women’s rights, civil rights and Palestinian solidarity movements; she was blunt about Aung San Suu Kyi: “She won that election through a loathsome compromise with the military junta and by supporting their neoliberal policies bringing in foreign investment and mining projects at the expense of farmers and rural workers.”
Some of those farmers and villagers were way ahead of the rest of the world in understanding her betrayals, she explained. “They booed her out of town for saying the expropriations of their lands and destruction of the environment were ‘for the greater good’. Now the New York Times reports that in a recent meeting, Suu Kyi advised the US ambassador against using the term ‘Rohingya’ to describe the Muslim people of Myanmar because her government does not recognise them as citizens.”
Scully, who is also running as an independent socialist candidate for US president later this year, added: “Using the same kind of marble-mouthed deceits she used to blither to reporters, her representative told the ambassador, ‘We won’t use the term Rohingya because Rohingya are not recognised as among the 135 official ethnic groups. Our position is that using the controversial term does not support the national reconciliation process and solving problems’.”
If Aung San Suu Kyi has indeed studied Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians then the student is on her way to becoming the master. Or, as Scully sees it: “Solidarity with Rohingya Muslims against genocide and for justice means educating about their struggle against genocide and part of that education requires exposing the murderous duplicity and collusion of Suu Kyi.”
Strong words, but given the evidence that is coming out about Aung San Suu Kyi, it is hard to see how the veteran campaigner could have said anything less.
Donald Trump NYC speech on stakes of the election:
“When I see the crumbling roads and bridges, or the dilapidated airports, or the factories moving overseas to Mexico, or to other countries, I know these problems can all be fixed, but not by Hillary Clinton – only by me.”
“Everywhere I look, I see the possibilities of what our country could be. But we can’t solve any of these problems by relying on the politicians who created them.We will never be able to fix a rigged system by counting on the same people who rigged it in the first place.The insiders wrote the rules of the game to keep themselves in power and in the money.
That’s why we’re asking Bernie Sanders’ voters to join our movement: so together we can fix the system for ALL Americans. Importantly, this includes fixing all of our many disastrous trade deals.
Because it’s not just the political system that’s rigged. It’s the whole economy.
It’s rigged by big donors who want to keep down wages.
It’s rigged by big businesses who want to leave our country, fire our workers, and sell their products back into the U.S. with absolutely no consequences for them.
It’s rigged by bureaucrats who are trapping kids in failing schools.
It’s rigged against you, the American people.
Hillary Clinton who, as most people know, is a world class liar –
just look at her pathetic email and server statements, or her phony landing in Bosnia where she said she was under attack but the attack turned out to be young girls handing her flowers, a total self-serving lie.”
“If I am elected President, I will end the special interest monopoly in Washington, D.C.The other candidate in this race has spent her entire life making money for special interests – and taking money from special interests.Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit and theft.
She ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund – doing favors for oppressive regimes, and many others, in exchange for cash.
Then, when she left, she made $21.6 million giving speeches to Wall Street banks and other special interests – in less than 2 years – secret speeches that she does not want to reveal to the public.
Together, she and Bill made $153 million giving speeches to lobbyists, CEOs, and foreign governments in the years since 2001.
They totally own her, and that will never change.
The choice in this election is a choice between taking our government back from the special interests, or surrendering our last scrap of independence to their total and complete control.”
“Our country lost its way when we stopped putting the American people first.We got here because we switched from a policy of Americanism – focusing on what’s good for America’s middle class – to a policy of globalism, focusing on how to make money for large corporations who can move their wealth and workers to foreign countries all to the detriment of the American worker and the American economy.We reward companies for offshoring, and we punish companies for doing business in America and keeping our workers employed.
This is not a rising tide that lifts all boats.
This is a wave of globalization that wipes out our middle class and our jobs.
We need to reform our economic system so that, once again, we can all succeed together, and America can become rich again.”
“I have visited the cities and towns across America and seen the devastation caused by the trade policies of Bill and Hillary Clinton.Hillary Clinton supported Bill Clinton’s disastrous NAFTA, just like she supported China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization.We’ve lost nearly one-third of our manufacturing jobs since these two Hillary-backed agreements were signed.
Our trade deficit with China soared 40% during Hillary Clinton’s time as Secretary of State — a disgraceful performance for which she should not be congratulated, but rather scorned.
Then she let China steal hundreds of billions of dollars in our intellectual property – a crime which is continuing to this day.
Hillary Clinton gave China millions of our best jobs, and effectively let China completely rebuild itself.
In return, Hillary Clinton got rich!
The book Clinton Cash, by Peter Schweitzer, documents how Bill and Hillary used the State Department to enrich their family at America’s expense.
She gets rich making you poor.
Here is a quote from the book: “At the center of US policy toward China was Hillary Clinton…at this critical time for US-china relations, Bill Clinton gave a number of speeches that were underwritten by the Chinese government and its supporters.”
These funds were paid to the Clinton bank account while Hillary was negotiating with China on behalf of the United States.
She sold out our workers, and our country, for Beijing.
Hillary Clinton has also been the biggest promoter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which will ship millions more of our jobs overseas – and give up Congressional power to an international foreign commission.
Now, because I have pointed out why it would be such a disastrous deal, she is pretending that she is against it. She has even deleted this record of total support from her book – deletion is something she is very good at — (at least 30,000 emails are missing.)
But this latest Clinton cover-up doesn’t change anything: if she is elected president, she will adopt the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and we will lose millions of jobs and our economic independence for good. She will do this, just as she has betrayed the American worker on trade at every single stage of her career – and it will be even worse than the Clintons’ NAFTA deal.”
“Hillary Clinton may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency.Here is some more of what we learned from the book,Clinton Cash:
A foreign telecom giant faced possible State Department sanctions for providing technology to Iran, and other oppressive regimes. So what did this company do? For the first time ever, they decided to pay Bill Clinton $750,000 for a single speech. The Clintons got their cash, the telecom company escaped sanctions.
Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved the transfer of 20% of America’s uranium holdings to Russia, while 9 investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Hillary Clinton appointed a top donor to a national security board with top secret access – even though he had no national security credentials.
Hillary Clinton accepted $58,000 in jewelry from the government of Brunei when she was Secretary of State – plus millions more for her foundation. The Sultan of Brunei has pushed oppressive Sharia law, including the punishment of death by stoning for being gay. The government of Brunei also stands to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of Hillary’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she would absolutely approve if given the chance.
Hillary Clinton took up to $25 million from Saudi Arabia, where being gay is also punishable by death.
Hillary took millions from Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and many other countries that horribly abuse women and LGBT citizens.
To cover-up her corrupt dealings, Hillary Clinton illegally stashed her State Department emails on a private server.
Her server was easily hacked by foreign governments – perhaps even by her financial backers in Communist China – putting all of America in danger.
Then there are the 33,000 emails she deleted.
While we may not know what is in those deleted emails, our enemies probably do.
So they probably now have a blackmail file over someone who wants to be President of the United States.
This fact alone disqualifies her from the Presidency.
We can’t hand over our government to someone whose deepest, darkest secrets may be in the hands of our enemies.”
The decision by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to ban the Russian track and field team from competing in the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro is as much about politics as it is about doping and fair play. Indeed, while the International Olympic Committee (IOC) upheld the ruling with caveats that might allow some of the athletes to compete, the public relations damage has already been done. Russia has been cast as a serial violator of doping rules, and must be a country that is dishonest and cheats routinely; those sneaky Russians just can’t be trusted. Or so the propaganda subtext implies.
But a closer look at the manner in which the Olympics has been politicized reveals that it is, in fact, the US and its allies, not Russia, who have done the most to use this quadrennial competition of the world’s best athletes for political gain. And in so doing, it is Washington that bears responsibility for tainting the Olympics.
While the allegations of Russian doping may or may not be true, and the country’s attempts at addressing the issue may or may not be ineffectual, the fact remains that it is politics and geopolitics, not banned substances, that now befouls the games. A quick survey of recent history shows just how serious this politicization has become.
The Olympics as a Weapon
This is not the first time (nor is it likely the last time) that the Olympics have been politicized. And, considering the recent deep freeze in US-Russia relations thanks to Ukraine, Syria, Edward Snowden, and other key issues, one cannot help but reach the conclusion that the US has used its considerable influence behind the scenes to jab a thumb in the eye of Mr. Putin and the Russian Government. Moreover, even if this were entirely the actions of the relevant international athletic bodies with no interference from Washington, could anyone seriously blame Moscow for concluding that the ban is politically motivated?
Consider for a moment the recent history of the Olympics, Russia, and the US. In 2014, the western media was replete with columns and television news stories calling for a boycott of the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Literally dozens of op-eds were written with titles like Send Athletes to the Sochi Olympics, but Boycott the Games, ostensibly in an attempt to put pressure on the Kremlin in the wake of the passage of controversial legislation regarding LGBT rights in Russia. In fact, the generally aggressive position of the West came through clearly in decisions by leaders such as Barack Obama and David Cameron not to attend the games, despite the invitations.
It should be remembered that the Sochi Olympics, which took place in February 2014, proceeded against the backdrop of intense upheaval in Ukraine, right on Russia’s border, not far from Sochi. In fact, the coup that forced former President Yanukovich, widely seen as a key ally of the Kremlin, took place roughly 48 hours prior to the closing ceremonies in Sochi. The general feeling in Moscow, and among many political observers internationally, was that the US-backed coup in Kiev was timed to coincide with the Olympics in the hopes that the Russian Government would fear responding too harshly given the precarious question of public opinion globally.
At the time, many had likened the series of events around Sochi 2014 to the start of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 which coincided with the launching of attacks by Georgia’s government under then President Mikhail Saakashvili against the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Indeed, almost at the very moment that the Russian President Putin was sitting in a stadium in Beijing along with other world leaders, a key US-NATO ally and partner initiated a war of aggression. However, as one might recall, the western corporate media, with its dutiful adherence to the war party line, endlessly droned about Russian aggression against Georgia.
But within a few months, independent investigations showed that in fact Moscow’s assertion that Saakashvili launched an unprovoked attack on Russian peacekeepers and unarmed civilians had been accurate. Could it be mere coincidence that at the very moment that the Russian leader was in Beijing a war on Russia’s border and against Russians was launched? Whether coincidence or not, it was not interpreted that way by Putin and his advisers. And, of course, they had good reason to be suspect of the timing and motives behind the attack.
Undoubtedly, Russian leaders had in their minds the not too distant memory of the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Ostensibly a move designed to punish the Soviet Union for its intervention in Afghanistan, the US Government under then President Carter made the decision to boycott the Moscow Olympics, and attempted to get other countries to do the same. In hindsight however, the move is remembered as a disastrous blunder by an administration seen as inept in terms of foreign policy while being dominated by Cold War ideologues such as Zbigniew Brzezinski.
In an article aptly titled Jimmy Carter’s Disastrous Olympic Boycott, which purposefully was published on February 9, 2014 (two days after the start of the Sochi Olympics), Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, associate professor in the strategy and policy department at the U.S. Naval War College, wrote that:
[Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski also saw an opportunity for Carter to assert himself on matters of foreign policy. But what could the United States hope to do?… the West German ambassador to NATO suggested an Olympic boycott. The White House was intrigued. In a meeting of the National Security Council, Lloyd Cutler, the White House counsel, argued that the United States should boycott the Olympics only if it were combined with other strong action. Vice President Walter Mondale was enthusiastic… As for the president, according to White House notes of the meeting, Carter said the idea sent “cold chills” down his spine… Almost instantly, the press supported a boycott.
Two points brought out by the above excerpt bear closer scrutiny. First is the fact that Brzezinski – a calculating strategic planner at the uppermost echelons of the political establishment, whose hatred of all things Russia is internationally renowned – saw the Olympics as a means of further undermining Russian/Soviet standing internationally at precisely the moment that the US proxy mujahideen were battling Soviet military in Afghanistan. In effect, Brzezinski saw an Olympic boycott as war by other means. The fact that the national security team, led by Brzezinski, was the driving force behind the decision to boycott the Moscow Olympics reinforces the perception that the boycott was less about defending Afghanistan than it was about scoring political points against the Soviet Union.
Secondly, one should pay close attention to the final sentence of the excerpt which really bears repeating: “Almost instantly, the press supported a boycott.” In other words, the corporate media – significantly freer and more diverse in opinion in 1980 than it is in 2016 – was critical in selling the American public on the idea of a boycott. Perhaps another way of saying it would be that the media acted as the public relations mouthpiece of the US Government, in much the same way it does now. And without that compliant media making the case for such action, it is unlikely that Americans would feel anything other than anger at being cheated out of an opportunity to watch their country’s best athletes compete against the top competition in the world.
But the politicization of sports vis-à-vis US-Russia relations is not restricted solely to the Olympics. In fact, as recently as last year the US, UK, and other allies led an effort to discredit Russia’s hosting of the World Cup, the most watched sporting event in the world, with claims of corruption and bribery. Never mind the fact that it was MI6 operatives engaged in spying against Russia who created the dossier used to implicate Putin & Co. in the illegal “buying” of the World Cup. Indeed, this scandal was the death knell for former FIFA boss Sepp Blatter who, because of seemingly friendly ties with Russia, was quickly shown the door after 17 years.
But what’s the point of all this? Who cares if some Russian athletes can’t compete in Rio? A valid question, to be sure. To think of these moves by the US and its allies as purely designed to embarrass Russia is to completely misread the intent behind them. Certainly, bad publicity for Putin is part of the rationale, but it is not the real goal. Instead, the targets are the citizens of western countries whose ideas, opinions, and attitudes towards Russia will be shaped as much by sports and popular culture as by anything else.
And so, the real objective is to portray Russians as crooked cheaters whose dishonesty and insidious intentions are overshadowed only by their mindless loyalty to their country. It is to make Americans and Brits and Europeans – already Russophobic in their outlook thanks to decades of Cold War propaganda and the current onslaught of “Putin did it!” politics – view Russian athletes as little more than a bunch of steroid-injecting Ivan Dragos whose deceit is merely a reflection of the treacherous double-dealing of their political leadership.
In short, the move to ban the Russian track and field team is part of a broader project to discredit Russia in the eyes of the public at large. The issue is not so much about whether there is doping in Russia’s track and field program – doping is widespread in many countries, including the US – but rather about how to undermine and weaken Russia in the court of public opinion on the eve of the Olympics. Furthermore, the negative attitudes promoted by the media will justify further aggressive policies in Ukraine, Syria, and beyond. And that is precisely the point.
Walter Lipmann, the renowned writer, commentator, and theoretician of public opinion and propaganda defined the term “stereotype” in the modern psychological sense as a “distorted picture or image in a person’s mind, not based on personal experience, but derived culturally.” And it is just such a distorted picture which the US and its partners are cultivating against Russia, using the Olympics as the pretext.
Moreover, that the distortion is “derived culturally” rather than from personal experience demonstrates that it is the propagandists of the corporate media whose job it is to manufacture and perpetuate such distortions for political reasons who are the arbiters of truth. George Orwell would be proud.
The US Congress has proposed a bill seeking to re-establish a Cold War-era body to counter Russian espionage. Patrick Armstrong, former political counselor at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow, and long-time analyst of the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, detailed the reasons why the US seeks to restart the Cold War.
New York-based internet media website BuzzFeed recently reported, citing an unnamed source in the US intelligence service, that the legislation in question calls to revive a presidentially-appointed group to counter “Russian spies and Russian-sponsored assassinations,” in the United States. The group would also investigate the funding of Russian “covert broadcasting” and “media manipulation.”
“One should never forget that all these kinds of bills actually put money into some people’s pocket,” Armstrong told Radio Sputnik.
The analyst asserts that there is money behind the invention and constant promotion of a “Russian threat.” The US military is currently committed to “fabulously” expensive projects that “never really come to an end but everybody makes a pile of money out of.” Playing the “bad Russians” card is a good way to stimulate business, he suggests.
“My favorite one was the Panama papers. ‘Ha! Finally we have proof that Putin is stealing money and hiding it abroad’, [although] Putin’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in the papers [but] today we have the theory that obviously it’s Putin behind the leak of the Panama papers,” Armstrong observed. “There is no limit to this ridiculousness.”
“What are the current stories now?” he asked. “Oh yes, Russia hacks into the DNC (Democratic National Committee) computer. No, it’s some guy in a basement in Romania, just like the last guy who hacked into Hillary Clinton’s stuff.”
“Nobody’s going to come out and say ‘Oh Gee, I guess we’re just plain lying about Russians in Syria, invasion in Ukraine and the coming collapse of Russia… What they’re going to say is that…’Putin has somehow cleverly got into people’s minds, we need more money.'”
Another motive, Armstrong suggests, is US determination to expand NATO, in an attempt to get “better control of things.”
“Somewhere,” he asserted, “along the line, [the US] realized that expanding NATO — when all NATO membership meant was that you blew up Libya, or you joined in to celebrate the third decade of a losing war in Afghanistan — wasn’t going to pull in new members. So it’s trying to revive the old Russian threat.”
A so-called 2017 Intelligence Authorization Bill was passed by the US Senate Intelligence Committee in May, and awaits Senate approval. Armstrong predicts that the bill will most likely be approved, but noted that the idea of a “big enemy” is not really selling. He cited a recent Pew poll showing that no more than 1/3 of EU nationals consider Russia to be a threat to anything.
As for the Moscow’s reaction to such moves, Armstrong said that Russia doesn’t want war and, along with China, is playing an “intelligent” hand.
“[Russia] is playing a much more intelligent game than anybody in the West,” he said. “The problem is managing the downfall of the American empire. 20 to 30 years from now, when China, Russia, Iran, India are much more important than they are today, and the US is definitely declining, the trick is, how do you get to there, from here, without blowing everything up? The last days of a declining empire are always very dangerous.”
The analyst shared his thoughts on America’s next president.
“We’ve got to get through the next 25-30 years without the US blowing the […] out of all of us, so what I would like to have for the next four years is a president good at negotiating. What we’ve had until now is, ‘do what we want or we bomb you.'”
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment. … Full review
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Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
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