She has the record and the vision
“For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.” —Robert Kagan
“I have a sense that she’s one of the more competent members of the current administration and it would be interesting to speculate about how she might perform were she to be president.” —Dick Cheney
“I’ve known her for many years now, and I respect her intellect. And she ran the State Department in the most effective way that I’ve ever seen.” —Henry Kissinger
Nobody Beats This Record
- She says President Obama was wrong not to launch missile strikes on Syria in 2013.
- She pushed hard for the overthrow of Qadaffi in 2011.
- She supported the coup government in Honduras in 2009.
- She has backed escalation and prolongation of war in Afghanistan.
- She voted for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
- She skillfully promoted the White House justification for the war on Iraq.
- She does not hesitate to back the use of drones for targeted killing.
- She has consistently backed the military initiatives of Israel.
- She was not ashamed to laugh at the killing of Qadaffi.
- She has not hesitated to warn that she could obliterate Iran.
- She is not afraid to antagonize Russia.
- She helped facilitate a military coup in Ukraine.
- She has the financial support of the arms makers and many of their foreign customers.
- She waived restrictions at the State Department on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar, all states wise enough to donate to the Clinton Foundation.
- She supported President Bill Clinton’s wars and the power of the president to make war without Congress.
- She has advocated for arming fighters in Syria.
- She supported a surge in Iraq even before President Bush did.
March 17, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Afghanistan, Honduras, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Syria, United States, Zionism |
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Tunisia strongly opposes any military intervention in Libya outside the framework of international law, Tunisian Foreign Minister Khemaies Jhinaoui told Sputnik.
In January, media reported that US President Barack Obama was making plans to open a third front against Daesh in Libya, following military operations in Syria and Iraq started by a US-led coalition in 2014.
“The impact of any foreign involvement or military strikes in Libya will be significant to our security. We are saying to our partners, who are willing to hit the strongholds of terrorists, that they have to inform us about their plans and, of course, we are against any strikes without legal ground. We think that any strike should be made [according to] the international legal framework and UN,” the minister said.
He added that the international community should shift its focus and help Libyans strengthen bonds and resolve their differences.
“We would like to see a new national accord government in Libya assume power and taking care of the terrorism issue. It is a task for the Libyans, not for foreigners to fight terrorism in Libya,” Jhinaoui pointed out.
Libya has been engulfed in conflict since the 2011 overthrow of long-term leader Muammar Gaddafi and the subsequent civil war. There are currently two governments in Libya: the internationally-recognized Council of Deputies based in Tobruk and the Tripoli-based General National Congress. The two sides came to an agreement on December 17, paving the way to the formation of the Government of National Accord.
On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that any military operations against terrorists in Libya should only be possible if the UN Security Council agrees to them.
March 15, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Militarism, War Crimes | Africa, Da’esh, Libya, Obama, Tunisia, United States |
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Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says any military operation in Libya requires the approval of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).
Lavrov said during a joint press conference in Moscow with visiting Tunisian Foreign Minister Khemaies Jhinaoui on Monday that Russia is aware of some plans for military involvement in Libya, but insisted that those plans could be implemented only with the permission of the 15-member council.
“We know about what’s being discussed openly and not so openly on plans of military intervention, including with the situation in Libya. Our common position is that this is possible only under the UN Security Council’s decision,” Lavrov said.
The top Russian diplomat also noted that a possible mandate for an operation against the terrorists in Libya must be defined unambiguously so as not to allow misinterpretations.
Russia says that the US-led military alliance NATO abused a United Nations resolution in 2011 to protect Libyan civilians from slain Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s forces in order to pursue regime change and political assassinations during a popular uprising across the North African country.
The remarks come as New York Times recently reported that the Pentagon and the highly secretive Joint Special Operations Command have provided the White House with “the most detailed set of military options yet” in Libya.
France’s Le Monde newspaper also reported last month that the country’s special forces and members of the country’s external security agency Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE) were in Libya for “clandestine operations” in cooperation with the US and Britain.
Meanwhile, a UN panel is also investigating claims that Turkey, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Sudan have violated an existing arms embargo by providing weapons to warring groups operating in Libya.
In mid-February, Libya’s internationally recognized Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni accused Ankara of interference in his country’s internal affairs.
Since 2014, when militants seized the capital Tripoli, Libya has had two parallel parliaments and governments.
Daesh took advantage of the chaos and captured Libya’s northern port city of Sirte in June 2015, almost four months after it announced its presence in the city, and made it the first city to be ruled by the militant group outside of Iraq and Syria.
March 14, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | Africa, France, Libya, Obama, Russia, Turkey, UK, United States |
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Pluto-Zionism is the three-way marriage of plutocracy, right-wing Zionism and US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a serial war criminal, racist and servant of Wall Street. How did this deadly ménage-a-trois come about? The answer is that a stratospherically wealthy donor group, dedicated to promoting Israel’s dominance in the Middle East and deepening US military intervention in the region, has secured Clinton’s unconditional support for Tel Aviv’s ambitions and, in exchange, Hilary receives scores of millions to finance her Democratic Party foot soldiers and voters for her campaign.
Pluto-Zionism and Clinton
Pluto-Zionists comprise the leading financial backers of Clinton. Her million-dollar backers, among the most powerful financiers and media moguls in America, include: George Soros ($6 million), Marc Benioff, Roger Altman, Steven Spielberg, Haim and Cheryl Saban ($3 million and counting), Jeffrey Katzenberg, Donald Sussman, Herb Sandler, Jay and Mark Pritzker, S. Daniel Abraham ($1 million), Bernard Schwartz, Marc Lasry, Paul Singer, David Geffen, Fred Eychaner, Norman Braman and Bernie Marcus. Waiting in the wings are the Republican billionaire ‘king-makers’, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, the Koch brothers as well as the ‘liberal’ multi-billionaire, Michael Bloomberg who had contributed $11 million in 2012 elections. These erstwhile Republican funders are increasing frightened by the anti-‘free trade and anti-intervention’ rhetoric of their party’s front-runner, Donald Trump, and are approaching the solidly pro-Israel, pro-war and pro-Wall Street candidate, Madame Clinton.
Israeli-First Ideologues and Clinton
In addition to the powerful Pluto-Zionists, a vast army of Israel-First ideologues is behind Clinton, including ‘veteran’ arm-chair war mongers like Victoria Nuland Kagan, Donald and Robert Kagan, Robert Zoellick, Michael Chertoff, Dov Zakheim among so many other promoters of Washington’s continuous wars on many fronts. Ms Nuland-Kagan, as US Undersecretary of State for East European Affairs, openly bragged about using hundreds of millions of dollars of US taxpayer money to finance the right-wing Ukrainian coup. Michael Chertoff, as head of Homeland Security after 9/11, jailed thousands of innocent Muslims while freeing five Israeli-Mossad agents arrested by the FBI for suspected involvement or pre-knowledge of the attacks in New York after they were seen filming the collapse of the towers and celebrating the event from a warehouse rooftop in New Jersey!).
Pluto-Zionists and the Israel-First ideologues support Ms Clinton as a reward for her extraordinary military and economic activities on behalf of Tel Aviv’s quest for regional dominance. Her accomplishments for the Jewish State include the promotion of full-scale wars, which have destroyed Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan; economic sanctions and blockade against Iran (she threatened to ‘obliterate Iran’ in 2007; and her own repeatedly stated unconditional support for Israel’s devastation against the people imprisoned in Gaza, which has cost thousands of civilian lives and rendered hundreds of thousands homeless. (In a letter to her ‘banker’, Haim Saban, Hillary stated: “Israel didn’t teach Hamas (the people of Gaza) a harsh enough lesson last year”).
Clinton versus Trump: ‘Moderation’ is in the Eyes of the Deceiver
The Pluto-Zionists, Israel-First ideologues, the US mass media and their acolytes on Wall Street and the Republican and Democratic Party elite are all on a rampage against the wildly popular Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, labeling him as ‘a danger to everything America stands for. (sic)’ Apart from savaging his persona, the anti-Trump chorus contrast his ‘extremism’ with warmonger Clinton’s ‘pragmatism’.
A careful examination of the facts reveals who is the ultra-extremist and who deals with reality:
Women
Madame Clinton’s much touted wars against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of women and children and uprooted millions of households. This bloody and undeniable record of mayhem was cited by Donald Trump when he argued that his policies would be much better for women than the Feminist Clinton’s had been.
So far, Trump’s worst offenses against women are his crude rhetorical misogynist quips, which pale before Hillary’s bloody record of devastation.
African-Americans
Clinton is backed by the leading black politicians who have long fed out of the Democratic Party patronage trough while selling the Clintons to the black electorate as ardent protectors of civil rights. In fact, as Steve Lendman has written, Hillary had referred to marginalized black youth as “super predators (with) no conscience, no empathy”. During her husband Bill’s presidency, she was on record supporting his draconian ‘three strikes’ crime laws, leading to the mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of young blacks; and she backed his ‘welfare reform’ program, which shredded the social safety net for the poor and forced millions of impoverished mothers to work for sub-poverty wages, further eroding the stability of black female-headed households. On the African front, ‘Sister’ Secretary of State Hillary’s war on Libya led to the displacement, rape and murder of tens of thousands of black women of sub-Saharan origin at the hands of her jihadi war-lord allies. Millions of black sub-Saharan migrants had lived and worked in Gadhafi’s Libya for years, tens of thousands becoming Libyan citizens. They endured the horror of rampant ethnic cleansing in Clinton’s ‘liberated’ Libya.
Trump, at worst, has done nothing of direct harm to African Americans and remains an enigma on black issues. He opposes Clinton’s war on Libya and has vividly blamed her policies as responsible for the chaos and human misery in post-NATO bombing Libya.
Latinos
Under the Obama-Clinton administration almost 2 million Latino immigrants have been seized from their homes and workplaces, separated from their families and summarily expelled. As Madame Secretary of State, Clinton backed the Honduran military coup that overthrew the elected government of President Zelaya and led directly to assassination of over three hundred activists, including feminist, indigenous, human rights and environmental leaders, like Berta Caceres. Clinton actively backed unsuccessful coups against the democratically elected Bolivian and Venezuelan governments.
Trump has verbally threatened to extend and deepen the Obama-Clinton expulsion of whatever remains of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrant Latino workers after Obama’s expulsion of the 2 million and the hundreds of thousands who have voluntarily gone home. His ‘extremist’ vision is completely in line with that of his allegedly ‘pragmatic’ opponent whose State Department promoted the destruction of so many Latino families in the US.
Foreign Policy
Clinton has launched or promoted more simultaneous wars than any Secretary of State in US history. She was the leading force behind the US bombing of Libya and the brutal ‘regime change’ that has fractured that nation. She promoted the military escalation in Iraq, backed the violent seizure of power in Ukraine, ‘engineered’ the military build-up (pivot to Asia) against China and negotiated the continued presence of thousands of US troops in Afghanistan.
Clinton has repeatedly pledged to her supporter Haim Saban and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Victoria Nuland Kagan, Donald and Robert Kagan, Robert Zoellick, Michael Chertoff, Dov Zakheim that she will give Israel with “all the necessary military, diplomatic, economic and moral support it needs to vanquish Hamas” regardless of the many thousands of Palestinian civilian casualties. The ‘pragmatic feminist’ Hillary is a fervent supporter of the Saudi despotism and its genocide war against the popular forces in Yemen. Hillary tried to pressure President Obama to send US ground troops into Syria. She promotes the continuation of harsh trade sanctions against Russia.
Trump opposes any further direct US intervention in the Middle East. During his debate in South Carolina, he repeatedly denounced President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq – as based on ‘deliberate lies to the American people’, to the shock and horror of the Republican Party elite. He has rejected Pluto-Zionist financing, arguing that only as an independent ‘honest broker’, who doesn’t take the side of Israel in its conflict with Palestinians, can he be effective in brokering a ‘deal’. He opposes sending ground troops overseas to Europe or Asia, which imposes a huge financial burden on the US taxpayers. He has gone on to suggest that European and Asian powers can and should pay for their own defense. Trump argues that the US could work with Putin against radical Islamist terrorism and he regards Russia as a potential trading partner. His anti-interventionism has been labeled as ‘isolationist’ by the Pluto-Zionist ideologues and militarist warlords holed up in their Washington think tanks, but Trump’s ‘America First’ resonates profoundly with the war-weary and economically devastated US electorate.
Israel
Clinton has totally and unconditionally pledged to widen and deepen US subordination to Israel’s war aims in the Middle East and to defend Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinian people in the occupied territories and within apartheid Israel. As a result, Clinton has built a coalition made-up of unsavory mafia-linked, gambling, media and speculator billionaires, whose first loyalty is not to America but Israel. She denounces all critics of Israel as ‘anti-Semites’.
Trump has never been a critic of Israel but he has called for greater ‘evenhandedness’, which is anathema within Zionist circles. For that reason he has not secured a single Pluto-Zionist supporter. So far, he has not been labelled an anti-Semite…. perhaps because his own daughter converted to Judaism following her marriage, but his lack of effusive philo-Zionism has him marked as ‘unreliable’ to the Jewish State. As a subterfuge for his lack of servility to Tel Aviv, Democratic Party Zionist hacks emphasize his ‘racism’ and ‘fascist’ tendencies…
The Democratic Elections: The Real Muck
Clinton currently leads Sanders for the Democratic nomination mostly on the basis of non-elected delegates, the so-called ‘super delegates’, who are party loyalists appointed by the bosses and elite politicians. Sanders’ call for a “political revolution in America” has no traction unless there is first a political revolution within the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party is like the Augean Stable – a clean up requiring a Herculean effort and a loud pugnacious leader with a big broom. Senator Sanders is no Hercules.
As a positive beginning, Sanders has mobilized grass roots support, raised progressive health, education and tax policies that adversely affect Clinton’s billionaire Wall Street backers (Big financier Jaime Diamond called Sanders ‘the most dangerous man in America’), and secured millions of contributions from small donors. But he has failed to target and demand the exit of the Pluto-Zionists, the Wall Street bankers and speculators and venal black politicians controlling the Democratic Party. They run the elections of US presidents and will make sure Hillary Clinton secures the nomination by hook or (more likely) crook.
Clinton is backed by this formidable authoritarian (profoundly anti-democratic) electoral machine. She is totally embedded in the process. Clinton has a track record of enthusiastic support for the barbarism of torture – laughing at and cheering on the torture-death of the wounded Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. In the pursuit of wars and war crimes, Hillary Clinton knows no limit and has borne no accountability. What makes Hillary so terrifyingly dangerous is that she could be ‘Commander in Chief’ of a great military power. While Clinton may be no Hitler, the US is vastly more engaged in world politics than Weimer Germany ever was. Her dictate would bring on global destruction.
If the Democratic primaries are as profoundly undemocratic as they have been in the past, the Republicans and their plutocrat partners are openly planning and plotting to ‘Dump the Donald’ and prevent Trump from obtaining an electoral victory. They have been discussing ways to use convention procedures to undermine a majority vote, and set up a ‘brokered convention’, where the ‘big-wigs’ jigger the delegates, rules and voting procedures behind closed doors robbing the populist front-runner of his party candidacy.
Conclusion
The US presidential primaries reveal in all their facets the decay and corruption of democracy in an era of imperial decline. The ascendancy of a financial oligarchy in the Democratic Party, backing a psychopathic militarist, like Hillary, cannot disguise her track record by labeling their candidate a ‘pragmatist’; the majority of Sanders supporters have no illusions about Madame Clinton. Panic and hysteria among an unsavory elite in the Republican Party and its efforts to block a sui-generis conservative Republican isolationist speaks to the fragility of imperial rule.
If the psychopathic war-monger Clinton is crowned the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, there is no way she can be considered the pragmatic ‘lesser evil’ to Donald Trump or any Republican – their bosses decide to spew out. At best, she might be the ‘equal evil’. In this case, more than 50% of the electorate will not vote. If, after being robbed of his growing movement for the Democratic Party candidacy, ‘Bernie’ Sanders does not break out with an independent bid for the White House, I will join the minuscule 1% who vote for Green Party candidate, Dr. Jill Stein.
James Petras is author of The Politics of Empire: The US, Israel and the Middle East.
March 10, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Democratic Party, Donald Trump, George Soros, Haim Saban, Hillary Clinton, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Middle East, Palestine, Sanctions against Iran, Syria, United States, Zionism |
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Deadliest strike in America’s drone war calls into question how US defines “combatants”
US airstrikes targeting what the Pentagon is calling an al-Shabaab training facility in Somalia killed over 150 people on Saturday. In an announcement Monday, the Pentagon classified the dead as “militant fighters” who were allegedly preparing a large-scale attack against US and African diplomatic personnel.
International human rights groups quickly contested the Pentagon’s official narrative, however, asking how a strike killing in excess of 150 people could be anything but the product of widespread collateral damage.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism scoffed at US assertions calling the death toll from the strike “unprecedented.” The Saturday strike was the deadliest single US counterterrorism action since the group began monitoring drone strike reports in 2010.
The Pentagon countered that not only were the dead only al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists, but also that the “fighters” were scheduled to carry out an imminent attack against US interests.
Controversial drone program likely resulting in massive, unreported civilian deaths
The US drone program, a lynchpin in America’s global war on terrorism, has faced widening condemnation by the international community in recent years. Legal experts argue that the strikes cannot be legal without a proper congressional war authorization or the presence of ongoing hostilities, or a “hot war,” within the targeted territories.
More concerning to human rights advocates, however, are reports in recent years that many of those killed in drone strikes are civilians, who are then reported by White House officials as having been combatants. One report on Nevada-based drone operators observed that they “often do not know who they are killing, they are making a guess.”
Furthermore, investigations by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and other advocacy groups, who are backtracking news reports on drone strikes to the locations, indicated they have found startlingly different results than those suggested by the White House.
Repeatedly, when traced to the scene of strikes in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Libya, family members and witnesses on the ground decry the attacks as collateral damage, and claim that their slain family members were civilians.
Washington defines away collateral damage by use of “kill-boxes”
The death misreporting may be legal sleight-of-hand, as anyone who is present in a so-called “kill-box” is a legitimate target. Kill boxes are areas defined as small geographic spaces of hostility in which those present are automatically defined as a combatant.
This notion of a kill box made sense in conventional wars – civilians had notice and would stay away from battlefields. Today, however, a kill zone is defined as a perimeter around a high-level target or targets that actually moves with the target. In effect, US lawyers have simply defined away collateral damage.
Obama’s pledge of more transparency over legally dubious drone wars not likely to pan out
News of the attack comes as the White House announced Monday that it will disclose the death count of its controversial drone operations under President Barack Obama.
Obama’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, told reporters that the death count will be released “in the coming weeks” as part of the administration’s transparency commitment. In subsequent years, the US is scheduled to report death counts associated with drone warfare annually.
The report is limited to only Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa, but will not include death totals for strikes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria where hot wars continue.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest stated, “There will obviously be some limitations on where we can be transparent, given a variety of sensitivities – including diplomatic.”
Nonetheless, the increased reporting by the Obama Administration is welcomed by the human rights community and will include both official combatant and civilian death totals. It is all too likely, however, that official combatants are unofficial civilians, as America’s deadly game of international domination is sanitized with legal jargon.
March 9, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Afghanistan, Africa, Human rights, Libya, Obama, Pakistan, Somalia, United States, Yemen |
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Promoting the American Way of War in Campaign 2016
The crowd that gathered in an airplane hangar in the desert roared with excitement when the man on stage vowed to murder women and children.
It was just another Donald Trump campaign event, and the candidate had affirmed his previously made pledge not only to kill terrorists but to “take out” their family members, too. Outrageous as that might sound, it hardly distinguished Trump from most of his Republican rivals, fiercely competing over who will commit the worst war crimes if elected. All the chilling claims about who will preside over more killings of innocents in distant lands — and the thunderous applause that meets such boasts — could easily be taken as evidence that the megalomaniacal billionaire Republican front-runner, his various opponents, and their legions of supporters, are all crazytown.
Yet Trump’s pledge to murder the civilian relatives of terrorists could be considered quite modest — and, in its bluntness, refreshingly candid — when compared to President Obama’s ongoing policy of loosing drones and U.S. Special Operations forces in the Greater Middle East. Those policies, the assassinations that go with them, and the “collateral damage” they regularly cause are based on one premise when it comes to the American public: that we will permanently suspend our capacity for grief and empathy when it comes to the dead (and the living) in distant countries.
Classified documents recently leaked to the Intercept by a whistleblower describe the “killing campaign” carried out by the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command in Yemen and Somalia. (The U.S. also conducts drone strikes in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya; the leaked documents explain how President Obama has institutionalized the practice of striking outside regions of “active hostilities.”) Intelligence personnel build a case against a terror suspect and then develop what’s termed a “baseball card” — a condensed dossier with a portrait of the individual targeted and the nature of the alleged threat he poses to U.S. interests — that gets sent up the chain of command, eventually landing in the Oval Office. The president then meets with more than 100 representatives of his national security team, generally on a weekly basis, to determine just which of those cards will be selected picked for death. (The New York Times has vividly described this intimate process of choosing assassination targets.)
Orders then make their way down to drone operators somewhere in the United States, thousands of miles from the individuals slated to be killed, who remotely pilot the aircraft to the location and then pull the trigger. But when those drone operators launch missiles on the other side of the world, the terrifying truth is that the U.S. “is often unsure who will die,” as a New York Times headline put it.
That’s because intel on a target’s precise whereabouts at any given moment can be faulty. And so, as the Times reported, “most individuals killed are not on a kill list, and the government does not know their names.” In 2014, for instance, the human-rights group Reprieve, analyzing what limited data on U.S. drone strikes was available, discovered that in attempts to kill 41 terror figures (not all of whom died), 1,147 people were killed. The study found that the vast majority of strikes failed to take down the intended victim, and thus numerous strikes were often attempted on a single target. The Guardian reported that in attempts to take down 24 men in Pakistan — only six of whom were eventually eliminated in successful drone strikes — the U.S. killed an estimated 142 children.
Trump’s plan merely to murder the relatives of terrorists seems practically tame, by comparison.
Their Grief and Mine
Apparently you and I are meant to consider all those accidental killings as mere “collateral damage,” or else we’re not meant to consider them at all. We’re supposed to toggle to the “off” position any sentiment of remorse or compassion that we might feel for all the civilians who die thanks to our country’s homicidal approach to keeping us safe.
I admit to a failing here: when I notice such stories, sometimes buried deep in news reports — including the 30 people killed, three of them children, when U.S. airpower “accidentally” hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last October; or the two women and three children blasted to smithereens by U.S. airpower last spring at an Islamic State checkpoint in northern Iraq because the pilots of two A-10 Warthogs attacking the site didn’t realize that civilians were in the vehicles stopped there; or the innumerable similar incidents that have happened with remarkable regularity and which barely make it into American news reports — I find I can’t quite achieve the cold distance necessary to accept our government’s tactics. And for this I blame (or thank) my father.
To understand why it’s so difficult for me to gloss over the dead, you have to know that on December 1, 2003, a date I will never forget nor fully recover from, I called home from a phone booth on a cobblestone street in Switzerland — where I was backpacking at the time — and learned that my Dad was dead. A heart attack that struck as suddenly as a Hellfire missile.
Standing in that sun-warmed phone booth clutching the receiver with a slick hand, vomit gurgling up at the back of my throat, I pressed my eyes closed and saw my Dad. First, I saw his back as he sat at the broad desk in his home office, his spot of thinning hair revealed. Then, I saw him in his nylon pants and baseball cap, paused at the kitchen door on his way to play paddle tennis. And finally, I saw him as I had the last time we parted, at Boston’s Logan Airport, on a patch of dingy grey carpet, as I kissed his whiskered cheek.
A few days later, after mute weeping won me a seat on a fully booked trans-Atlantic flight, I stood in the wan light of early December and watched the employees of the funeral home as they unloosed the pulleys to lower Dad’s wooden box into the ground. I peered down into that earthen hole, crying and sweating and shivering in the stinging cold, and tried to make sense of the senseless: Why was he dead while the rest of us lived?
And that’s why, when I read about all the innocent civilians we’ve been killing over the years with the airpower that presidential candidate Ted Cruz calls “a blessing,” I tend to think about the people left behind. Those who loved the people we’ve killed. I wonder how they received the news. (“We’ve had a tragedy here,” my Mom told me.) I wonder about the shattering anguish they surely feel at the loss of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children, friends. I wonder what memories come to them when they squeeze their eyes closed in grief. And I wonder if they’ll ever be able to pick up the pieces of their lives and return to some semblance of normalcy in societies that are often shattering around them. (What I don’t wonder about, though, is whether or not they’re more likely to become radicalized — to hate not just our drones but our country and us — because the answer to that is obvious.)
Playing God in the Oval Office
“It’s the worst thing to ever happen to anyone,” actor Liam Neeson recently wrote on Facebook. He wasn’t talking about drone strikes, but about the fundamental experience of loss — of losing a loved one by any means. He was marking five years since his wife’s sudden death. “They say the hardest thing in the world is losing someone you love,” he added. I won’t disagree. After losing her husband, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg posted about “the brutal moments when I am overtaken by the void, when the months and years stretch out in front of me, endless and empty.” After her husband’s sudden death, author Joan Didion described grief as a “relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”
That squares with the description offered by a man in Yemen who had much of his extended family blown away by an American drone at his wedding. “I felt myself going deeper and deeper into darkness,” the man later told a reporter. The drone arrived just after the wedding party had climbed into vehicles strewn with ribbons to escort the bride to her groom’s hometown. Everyone’s belly was full of lamb and it was dusk. It was quiet. Then the sky opened, and four missiles rained down on the procession, killing 12.
U.S. airpower has hit a bunch of other weddings, too. And funerals. And clinics. And an unknown and unknowable number of family homes. The CIA’s drone assassination campaign in the tribal regions of Pakistan even led a group of American and Pakistani artists to install an enormous portrait of a child on the ground in a frequently targeted region of that country. The artists wanted drone operators to see the face of one of the young people they might be targeting, instead of the tiny infrared figures on their computer consoles that they colloquially refer to as “bugsplats.” It’s an exhortation to them not to kill someone else’s beloved.
Once in a while a drone operator comes forward to reveal the emotional and psychic burden of passing 12-hour shifts in a windowless bunker on an Air Force base, killing by keystroke for a living. One serviceman’s six years on the job began when he was 21 years old and included a moment when he glimpsed a tiny figure dart around the side of a house in Afghanistan that was the target of a missile already on its way. In terror, he demanded of his co-pilot, “Did that look like a child to you?” Feverishly, he began tapping messages to ask the mission’s remote observer — an intelligence staffer at another location — if there was a child present. He’ll never know the answer. Moments later, the missile struck the house, leveling it. That particular drone operator has since left the military. After his resignation, he spent a bitterly cold winter in his home state of Montana getting blackout drunk and sleeping in a public playground in his government-issued sleeping bag.
Someone else has, of course, taken his seat at that console and continues to receive kill orders from above.
Meanwhile Donald Trump and most of the other Republican candidates have been competing over who can most successfully obliterate combatants as well as civilians. (Ted Cruz’s comment about carpet-bombing ISIS until we find out “if sand can glow in the dark” has practically become a catchphrase.) But it’s not just the Republicans. Every single major candidate from both parties has plans to maintain some version of Washington’s increasingly far-flung drone campaigns. In other words, a program that originated under President George W. Bush as a crucial part of his “global war on terror,” and that was further institutionalized and ramped up under President Obama, will soon be bequeathed to a new president-elect.
When you think about it that way, election 2016 isn’t so much a vote to select the leader of the planet’s last superpower as it is a tournament to decide who will next step into the Oval Office and have the chance to play god.
Who will get your support as the best candidate to continue killing the loved ones of others?
Go to the polls, America.
Mattea Kramer is a TomDispatch regular who writes on a wide range of topics, from military policy to love and loss. She blogs at This Life After Loss. Follow her on Twitter.
Copyright 2016 Mattea Kramer
March 3, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Afghanistan, Africa, Bernie Sanders, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Donald Trump, Human rights, Iraq, Libya, Middle East, Obama, Pakistan, United States, Yemen |
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A new in-depth report from The New York Times paints a damning portrait of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the US government’s involvement in the war in Libya. While there had been previous reports citing Clinton as leading the charge for the US to enter the war and overthrow former Libyan Leader Moamar Gaddafi, the Times published a play-by-play story with on-the-record comments numerous current and former Obama Administration officials.
The most prominent of those on-the-record comments came from former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who claimed that the decision to go to war in Libya was heavily influence by Clinton. In fact, Gates says she made the difference in a “51-49” decision that ultimately destroyed the country of Libya and allowed ISIS to grab new territory in the Middle East.
The breakdown of the events thoroughly supports the view that Hillary Clinton learned nothing from the Iraq War debacle. And, according to the Times, “The lessons of the Libya experience have not tempered her more aggressive approach to international crises.”
Make no mistake, Hillary Clinton is the war candidate in 2016.
The report claims that after a meeting with Westernized Libyan exiles in what appears to be an eerie parallel to the Ahmed Chalabi con, Clinton became convinced that Libya could become a thriving democracy if Gaddafi was overthrown. She then worked tirelessly to ensure the US jumped into the war, pushing back against then-Defense Secretary Gates, National Security Advisor Tom Dolan, and Vice President Joe Biden, who wanted to stay out of the conflict.
Gates even recalled telling President Barack Obama and others in on the Libya meetings that he and the Pentagon had more than enough responsibilities with the Iraq and Afghanistan missions, saying, “I think at one point I said, ‘Can I finish the two wars I’m already in before you guys go looking for a third one?’”
The answer was no. Though there was no solid intelligence on what exactly Gaddafi would or would not do regarding the opposition, then-Secretary Clinton began aggressively lobbying other countries to support the war effort and help the rebels in Libya. With France and the UK already on board, Clinton turned to Russia which shared President Obama’s concerns about unintended consequences.
The Times story notes Russia initially opposed a no-fly zone, even after Clinton told them the US did not want another war. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reportedly responded to Clinton by saying, “I take your point about not seeking another war. But that doesn’t mean that you won’t get one.”
In the end, Russia and other countries acquiesced to Western powers and the bombing began. Initially, the bombing led to a stalemate, which Clinton reportedly found unacceptable, leading her to push for higher-level US weapons to be sent to rebel forces. Those weapons would ultimately end up in the hands of Islamic terrorists in Syria and elsewhere, something Clinton had been warned about by intelligence and military leaders, who said there were “flickers” of Al Qaeda among the Libyan rebels.
As Clinton friend and initial supporter of intervention Anne Marie Slaughter had noted during the war, “We did not try to protect civilians on Qaddafi’s side.” Nor was there any real effort to do so after the US-backed rebels took control.
With the aid of the US, the Gaddafi government collapsed and the now-unrestrained rebels went wild, including a campaign of ethnic cleansing that Clinton herself had been made aware of through private emails from unofficial advisor Sidney Blumenthal. Victorious Arab rebels began killing black Africans en mass due to the rebel’s perception that all black Africans in Libya had been loyal to Gaddafi.
Outside of the new information is something the Times brought out of the memory hole vis-a-vis Clinton and Libya. In the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Gaddafi, then-Secretary of State Clinton did a victory lap, which included a press tour of post-Gaddafi Libya and a memo celebrating her own role in the war [PDF], which likely was designed to serve a later political purpose should she decide to run for president in 2016.
Now, with Libya as a coherent political entity arguably no longer in existence, former Secretary Clinton says it is too early to tell if the war in Libya was a success or failure, and told Congress last October that, “At the end of the day, this was the president’s decision.” So much for leadership.
March 2, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Hillary Clinton, Libya, United States |
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A “small number” of UK military advisers are secretly operating in Libya along with US special troops, sources told the Telegraph. The aim of the operation is to battle Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIL/ISIS) militants in the conflict-ravaged country.
“Special forces commandos” are reportedly working with their “US counterparts” in the city of Misrata, northwestern Libya, the paper said Saturday.
The Telegraph cited Western officials and sources on the ground who claimed that a “small number” of British troops are currently on a “low key mission” in the city.
Also, the US military in Libya have started “giving tactical training” to several local militias, the sources said.
The paper obtained confirmation that “training” of local rebels had been taking place in recent weeks from separate officials close to Western governments. It is not yet clear which EU countries took part in this “training.”
The British government has so far refused to comment on the Telegraph report.
In January, Jonathan Powell, the UK Special Envoy to Libya, was speaking about battling Islamic State terrorists.
“There are a number of armed groups there sitting next to Isil who have the capacity to deal with it. But they need to be united and have a common cause if they are to do something,” he said.
The UK is not the only country said to be operating in the war-stricken state. On Wednesday, it was revealed that France is also using their special forces and commandos to battle Islamic State there.
“The last thing to do would be to intervene in Libya. We must avoid any overt military engagement, but act discreetly,” a senior military source told Le Monde.
In the meantime, Federica Mogherini, EU top diplomat, said that the EU will only intervene against the terrorist group Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in Libya if it receives an official invitation from the legitimate government of the country.
Libya has been in turmoil following the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011. Since the spring of 2014, two governing groups are in a war for power over the country. Islamic State took advantage of the situation and seized some territories in the center of the country – including the port of Sirte.
Five years on from the start of the uprising, Libya is in a markedly worse position. Its oil revenues have halved, while it is also facing a growing threat from Islamic State, which is looking to capitalize on the lack of political stability and political infighting.
READ MORE: France waging secret war in Libya – report
February 28, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Illegal Occupation, Militarism | France, ISIL, ISIS, Libya, UK, United States |
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In an interview with Sputnik, military expert Antonio Mazzeo described Rome’s decision to allow armed US drones to fly from the Sigonella military base in Sicily to Libya as a gross violation of the Italian Constitution.
According to him, the move will further add to the militarization of the Sigonella base.
He said that even the deployment of unarmed Global Hawk drones to Sicily nine years ago, was not quite in line with the nation’s constitutional provisions limiting the use of Italian military facilities to self-defense, given that their task is to detect targets for bombers.
“Even if they do not carry missiles, they can be called a weapon of attack, destruction, and the first strike,” Mazzeo said. Article 11 of the 1948 Italian Constitution states that “Italy repudiates war as an instrument offending the liberty of the peoples and as a means for settling international disputes.”
His remarks came after Italian Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti confirmed earlier this week that the United States had been given permission to use the Sigonella base to carry out drone strikes on Daesh targets in Libya.
February 27, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Militarism | Italy, Libya, United States |
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A former director of America’s Central Intelligence Agency has said that the international agreements made after World War Two are starting to fall apart, and may change the borders of some countries in the Middle East.
“What we see here is a fundamental melting down of the international order,” Michael Hayden told CNN. “We are seeing a melting down of the post-WWII Bretton Woods American liberal order. We are certainly seeing a melting down of the borders drawn at the time of Versailles and Sykes-Picot. I am very fond of saying Iraq no longer exists, Syria no longer exists; they aren’t coming back. Lebanon is teetering and Libya is long gone.”
Hayden described the current situation as a “tectonic” moment. “Within that we then have the war against terrorism; it is an incredibly complex time.”
He explained that there are two fronts in the war. “The way I think about it, we Americans with our military backgrounds, call one element the close battle and the other the deep battle. The close battle is the one you and I are able to see everyday, that’s the heat-blasting fragmentation against those people who are already convinced they want to come kill us, and frankly, we are pretty good at that one.”
However, he said that the US is “not good” at the deep battle. “That’s the production rate of people who want to come kill us in 3, 5 or 10 years. Fundamentally the problem there is that that is not our fight.”
February 26, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Michael Hayden, Middle East, Syria, United States, Zionism |
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If Western capitals and their international agencies have long decried sectarianism, and all other form of overt xenophobia, may it revolve around ethnicity, social class, gender, politics or faith, those powers have nevertheless leaned on elitism and selectivity to carry both their war propaganda and narrative in the Middle East.
I would personally argue that much of the hatred we have seen rise in the MENA – Middle East and Northern Africa, over the past decades, stem from Western powers’ desire to fragment, divide and segregate to better manipulate nations, and play communities against each other. This grand Balkanization of the Middle East the Yinon Plann laid out in the 1980s was not just another political exercise … it appears evident today that at its heart, such strategy spoke socio-political and sectarian engineering, before any real geographical re-arrangement. Beyond a simple game of border drawing, the Yinon Plan aimed to rise an Empire on the ashes of both a civilization, and a history – to hell with the consequences.
It was Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya in 2011 who best summarized the Yinon Plan, when he wrote: “[The Yinon plan] is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli regional superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the surrounding Arab states into smaller and weaker states.”
The strategy, which was later on championed under another name by US Vice President Joe Biden to accelerate the break-up of Iraq into three separate entities: Shia, Kurds and Sunnis, provisions for a division of the Greater Middle East along both ethnic and sectarian lines, to better play into those ideological divisions which regional powers have wielded to assert their power. Amid a fragmented MENA, Israel would rise a Titan, not just militarily, but politically, as it would benefit from the absolute back-up of all Western capitals – if need be through coercion.
“The first step towards establishing this was a war between Iraq and Iran,” wrote Darius Nazemroaya, before he added: “The Atlantic, in 2008, and the US military’s Armed Forces Journal, in 2006, both published widely circulated maps that closely followed the outline of the Yinon Plan. Aside from a divided Iraq, which the Biden Plan also calls for, the Yinon Plan calls for a divided Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. The partitioning of Iran, Turkey, Somalia, and Pakistan also all fall into line with these views. The Yinon Plan also calls for dissolution in North Africa and forecasts it as starting from Egypt and then spilling over into Sudan, Libya, and the rest of the region.”
Interesting how our modern wars have followed the very pattern enounced once upon a 1982 by Zionist Israel …
But how is the Yinon Plan fitting into Syria’s humanitarian crisis, and Western powers’ propensity to selectively wave outrage before ever so pliable corporate media? Well … for one Syria’s humanitarian crisis’ make-up follows the very same pattern of division and ethno-sectarianism.
Entire regions of Syria have been ignored, neglected, and de facto sold out to the barbarism of Terror’s armies on account its communities follow Shia Islam, or Yezidism. Besieged by Wahhabi radicals, victimized and persecuted, those poor souls were never offered the courtesy of a whisper in the press … why such blindness if not an admission of guilt?
I recall rather clearly how loudly corporate media stumped their feet over Madaya – the lambasting and the delirious outrage against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over allegations he was purposely starving a city to command their submission. How silent media have been since it was proven that Madaya’s tragedy was in fact not President al-Assad’s making; but those militias’ the West has learnt to call “friendly” in its pursuit of regime change.
In a report for The Independent, Robert Fisk paints a reality too many journalists have sought to avoid – whether for financial comfort or ethical apathy.
Mr Fisk writes:
“This is the untold story of the three-and-a-half-year siege of two small Shia Muslim villages [Nubl and Zahra] in northern Syria. Although their recapture by the Syrian army – and by Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Iraqi Shia militias – caught headlines for a few hours three weeks ago, the world paid no heed to the suffering of these people, their 1,000 “martyrs”, at least half of them civilians, and the 100 children who died of shellfire and starvation.”
There are many other villages like Nubl and Zahra today which suffer the same pain, and the same radical evil … yet their stories have never been told – worse still, their courage, and their resistance in the face of absolute infamy have never been celebrated.
Blinded by media lies, the public has forgotten that Syria’s war is in fact NOT a civil war, but a war against Terror – which Terror Western powers, and their regional allies: Saudi Arabia and Turkey in the lead, have been only too zealous to enable.
2011 Revolution was but a cover for a very violent takeover aimed at fragmenting Syria. To manifest such explosion of Syria’s sovereignty, war would need first to exacerbate sectarian and ethnic tensions, to then justify Balkanization.
First came Iraq, then Syria, and Libya … which nation will fall next to the madness of the Yinon Plan? From the looks of it, Egypt stands on shaky ground … the last potent military power in a long list of disappeared apparatus.
While war might not be in Egypt’s cards, its make-up does not allow for much sectarianism or ethno-centrism after all, there are many ways to break a country: economically, socially, politically etc …
How is Egypt’s economy faring these days?
As we look at Syria, as we observe the stand of a nation against covert imperialism we would do well to remember those strings being pulled in the darkness.
It is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran who often warned against “the real enemies”, those powers which from afar wield Takfirism to manifest the rising of a new socio-political order.
Will we dare see?
February 25, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Egypt, Israel, Libya, Middle East, Sudan, Syria, Yinon Plan, Zionism |
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French special forces and intelligence commandos are engaged in covert operations against Islamic State group militants in Libya in conjunction with the United States and Britain, the French newspaper Le Monde reported Wednesday.
It said President Francois Hollande had authorized “unofficial military action” by both an elite armed forces unit and the covert action service of the DGSE intelligence agency in the conflict-ridden North African state, which has two rival governments and largely ungoverned desert spaces.
What Le Monde called “France’s secret war in Libya” involved occasional targeted strikes against leaders of the ultra-radical Islamist group, prepared by discreet action on the ground, to try to slow its growth in Libya.
The defense ministry declined comment on the substance of Le Monde’s story, but a source close to Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said he had ordered an investigation into “breaches of national defense secrecy” to identify the sources of the report.
Hollande said that France was at war with the Islamic State group after it claimed responsibility for a wave of attacks on bars, restaurants, a concert hall and the national soccer stadium in Paris on Nov. 13 last year, killing 130 people.
The ministry has previously confirmed that French aircraft recently conducted reconnaissance flights over Libya, where France took a leading role in a 2011 NATO air campaign that helped rebels overthrow Moammar Gadhafi’s autocratic rule.
It has also confirmed that France has set up an advance military base in northern Niger on the border with Libya.
Le Monde said French intelligence had initiated a previous strike last November that killed an Iraqi known by the nom de guerre Abu Nabil who was the senior Islamic State group leader in Libya at the time.
Le Monde said specialist bloggers had reported sightings of French special forces in eastern Libya since mid-February.
It quoted a senior French defense official as saying: “The last thing to do would be to intervene in Libya. We must avoid any overt military engagement, but act discreetly.”
February 24, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Illegal Occupation, Militarism | Africa, France, Libya, UK, United States |
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