George Bush oversees torture and commits the “supreme war crime” of aggression, causing suffering and death for millions. Gets to go back to his ranch.
One of the victims of these crimes throws a shoe at the perpetrator. Gets 3 years in jail.
The Guardian did get one thing wrong in their report. Muntazar al-Zaidi is not just a hero in the Arab world.
Republican Congressman from Texas, Ron Paul, describe’s America’s problem in a nutshell:
Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of “keeping us safe” or “promoting democracy” or “protecting their strategic interests.”
Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up check points on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence.
Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed, or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers’ attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but instead, for every American killed, ten more would take up arms against them, resulting in perpetual bloodshed.
According to our own CIA, our meddling in the Middle East was the prime motivation for the horrific attacks on 9/11. But instead of re-evaluating our foreign policy, we have simply escalated it. We had a right to go after those responsible for 9/11, to be sure, but why do so many Americans feel as if we have a right to a military presence in some 160 countries when we wouldn’t stand for even one foreign base on our soil, for any reason?
Due to being in Iraq at the time I missed this interview with Saddam Hussein. Fascinating.
Think again (think Tony Blair):
I shut my eyes when I listen to [Obama] and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.
Here we have a handsome, dashing and intelligent man, a man with generous instincts and a silver tongue; but a man with no distinctive plan for government that he has seen fit to share with us; a daring opportunist; somebody we may one day judge as a sort of Tony Blair with brains. And here we go again, all over again, hook, line and sinker.
Even after so many months of speech-making it’s still not clear what are the concrete changes that may now ensue and in particular, there are some big foreign policy areas where Obama is not promising a hugely different tack from Bush …
As for what the policies are going to be, the situation is pretty depressing. I mean, Obama, during his campaign, didn’t promise very much, basically talked in cliches and synthetic slogans like “change we can believe in.” No one knows what that change is. In foreign policy terms, during the debates, his — what he said was basically a continuation of the Bush-Cheney policies. And in relation to Afghanistan, what he said was worse than McCain …
He doesn’t like to take on power … I think his record in the state senate in Illinois and in the US Senate is that he doesn’t like to take on power. And if you don’t take on power, you know, the corporate power that dominates every department in our government, you’re going nowhere, because they control the budget, they control the priorities, they have heavy control on the media.
… his position contains massive inconsistencies … he has not repudiated the war on terror. Rather, he insists that by focusing excessively on Iraq, the Bush administration “took its eye off the ball”. The real target must be Afghanistan and if Osama bin Laden is spotted in Pakistan, bombing must be used there too.
John Pilger (who was right about Blair back in 1997):
Like all serious presidential candidates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expansionist. He comes from an unbroken Democratic tradition, as the war-making of presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton demonstrates. Obama’s difference may be that he feels an even greater need to show how tough he is.
My guess is, sadly, that within one week, literally one week, Obama’s staff and cabinet choices will make decisively evident that without mass activism forcing new outcomes, change will stop at the surface. I fervently hope I am wrong.
Vice President-elect, Joe Biden, is a pro-war Zionist. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, helped push through NAFTA and favoured the war on Iraq.
Alexander Cockburn on Rahm Emanuel:
He’s a former Israeli citizen, who volunteered to serve in Israel in 1991 and who made brisk millions in Wall Street. He is a super-Likudnik hawk, whose father was in the fascist Irgun in the late Forties, responsible for cold-blooded massacres of Palestinians.
Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys… Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?
Obama: bought and paid for.
(thanks to Media Lens for this post)
Sherwood Ross, for Yubanet: Steering Committee to pursue the prosecution for war crimes of President Bush and culpable high-ranking aides after they leave office Jan. 20th.
Shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 I wrote this opinion piece, which was published in my hometown newspaper, Hawke’s Bay Today, in New Zealand. It prompted this response, by way of letter to the editor, from Hardie Martin:
After reading his Opinion in Hawke’s Bay Today on April 12, it occurs to me that anyone seeking a Minister of (dis)Information of the same calibre as Iraq’s Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, need look no further than Christiaan Briggs.
I wonder what Hardie Martin would make of today’s occupation of Iraq:
US using debts to blackmail Iraq:
“Baghdad is under pressure by Washington to accept the security deal in exchange for clearing all of Iraq’s debts,” Iraqi lawmaker Mohammed Kamid al-Humedawi told Press TV on Wednesday. The US will be allowed to set up permanent military bases, if Iraq signs the agreement. Under the deal the US forces will also be granted immunity from legal prosecution inside their bases in Iraq.
Iraqi government fuels ‘war for oil’ theories by putting reserves up for biggest ever sale:
The biggest ever sale of oil assets will take place today, when the Iraqi government puts 40bn barrels of recoverable reserves up for offer in London. BP, Shell and ExxonMobil are all expected to attend a meeting at the Park Lane Hotel in Mayfair with the Iraqi oil minister, Hussein al-Shahristani. Access is being given to eight fields, representing about 40% of the Middle Eastern nation’s reserves, at a time when the country remains under occupation by US and British forces. Two smaller agreements have already been signed with Shell and the China National Petroleum Corporation, but today’s sale will ignite arguments over whether the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a “war for oil” that is now to be consummated by western multinationals seizing control of strategic Iraqi reserves.
The prospect of an attack on Iran has been on my mind since the attack on Iraq, not in the least because it would probably precipitate a great depression and turn much of the world into a fireball.
Tom Engelhardt has a thoughtful piece on why he thinks the U.S./Israel won’t attack Iran, despite some of the nutters running around the halls of power in those countries.
Let’s hope he’s right.
The media in the West has a lot of blood on its hands already. Is it going to have more blood on its hands in Iran? Iran is not the belligerent party:
When it comes to demonising Iran, the US, Israel and Britain have a unified message and a compliant media, which has learned nothing from its mistakes during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and seems happy to continue to act as a government propaganda arm in some cases.
Thanks to the dutiful corporate mouthpieces, most Americans and Britons have no idea that Tehran is acting within its rights under the NPT.
They don’t know that in December, a US intelligence estimate stated categorically that Iran is not currently developing nukes or that the nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors Iranian facilities, has no proof it seeks to do so.
The West’s propaganda campaign is so effective that the majority of Westerners believe that Iran is the belligerent even though the facts support the contrary argument.
New blog from my very good friend Ken O’Keefe. First post is about a Nuclear Free resolution he managed to get passed in the Reinstated Hawaiian Government legislature.