1. “Peter Dale Scott’s Observations on the Drug Relationship
In 2003′s “Drugs, Oil and War” Scott writes;
“In the half century since the Korean War the United States has been involved in four major wars in the Third World: in Vietnam (1961-1975), in the Persian Gulf (1990-1991), in Colombia (1991-present), and in Afghanistan (2001-2002). All four wars were fought in or near significant oil-producing areas. All four involved reliance on proxies who were also major international drug traffickers. The American habit of training, arming, and financing its drug-trafficking allies in order to help secure oil resources abroad has been a major factor in the huge increase in global illicit drug trafficking since World War II.
This pattern is further reinforced when we consider two of America’s major indirect interventions of the same period: support for the Nicaraguan Contras (1981-1988) and the Afghan mujahedin (1979-1991). The CIA contracted for Contra support in Central America with an airline owned by a ringleader of the largest cocaine network in the region. By providing funds for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a drug trafficker selected for support by Pakistani intelligence (the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI), the CIA helped propel Hekmatyar into becoming, for a while, the lagest heroin trafficker in Afghanistan and perhaps the world.
All empires since the Renaissance have been driven by the search for foreign resources, and nearly all – including the British, the French, and the Dutch – used drugs as a cheap way to pay for overseas expansion. When the United States decided to preserve Western influence in Southeast Asia, it inherited a social structure of former colonial regimes that had coexisted in one way or another with powerful Chinese Triads engaged in the drug traffic…
…American dependence on drug proxies can be traced to the CIA decision, in 1949-1950, to provide arms and logistic support to the residual forces of the Chinese Kuomintang in Burma. This evolved into the much larger program of support for the opium-growing Hmong tribesmen in northeastern Laos. In the wake of the domestically unpopular Vietnam War, the United States, in asserting an increasingly explicit geostrategic interest in oil reserves throughout the world, has continued to seek out local drug proxies as a supplement or an alternative to the use of U.S. armed forces.” (p.27-28, Rowman & Littlefield softcover“
http://www.911blogger.com/node/19511
2. “The authors of all but one of these documents were John Yoo and Jay Bybee (both then of the Justice Department but now, respectively, a member of the University of California at Berkeley Law School faculty and a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals). They were also the authors early in the Bush administration of two special memorandums defining torture much more narrowly than in the United States code of military justice or U.S. civil law.
They redefined torture to permit what ordinarily is illegal in U.S. military and civil law under the so-called Federal Maiming Statute. This law makes it a crime to disfigure faces and body parts with knives or razors, or to cause blindness, or cut out tongues, or perform other grotesque and gruesome tortures that this column will leave to the consciences of professor Yoo, Judge Bybee and the senior members of the Bush administration who wished to be advised on their exemption from such legal limits.“
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090305_bush_justice_dept_documents_confirm_worst_fears/
3. ““Attacking Freeman is intended to deter other people in the foreign policy community from speaking out on these matters. Freeman might be too smart, too senior and too well-qualified to stop, but there are plenty of younger people eager to rise in the foreign policy establishment and they need to be reminded that their careers could be jeopardized …
if they said what they thought.”
But the Obama administration appears to have no problem with people who say what they think about U.S.-Israel ties. Take Samantha Power, the former Harvard professor whose outspoken views echo those of Walt and Mearsheimer. Obama gave her an important job on the National Security Council.“
http://wire.antiwar.com/2009/03/05/refile-column-setback-for-pro-israel-hawks-in-usbernd-debusmann/
4. “Freeman is a man of enormous diplomatic experience, both a China expert and a Middle East hand, and is the former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He is also a clear-sighted analyst who is not afraid to say that the US mission in Afghanistan has become quixotic, and that Israel’s expansionist policies are bad for all concerned, including the US. As soon as his appointment was bruited, the well-connected coterie of right-Zionist pundits went after him, and it is pretty obvious that he was being smeared and punished for having dared publicly criticize Israel, which the Revisionists have tried for years to make a hanging offense.
Walt pointed out that these pundits were just deploying ad hominems and that for them it is all about Israel, and then they accused him of being hysterical, paranoid, etc.
What Walt is too polite to say is that these guys are just ultra-nationalist bullyboys. A bully is a bully, it doesn’t matter whether a Zimbabwe nationalist or a Zionist, and it doesn’t matter whether it is John Hagee or Jonathan Chait.
…
The ultra-nationalist bullyboys set up Campus Watch to intimidate university administrations and to cow vulnerable assistant professors, which they have been doing with the utmost viciousness. They also bully congress, threatening to fund their rivals if they step out of line and decline to give Israel more cluster bombs to drop on innocent civilians. Most American Jews are social liberals and voted for Obama. They were the group, along with African-Americans, most likely to oppose the Iraq War in 2003. But the far-right Zionists among them have the big megaphones. Most major metropolitan newspapers have an ultra-nationalist Zionist columnist. Why? They are like 10 percent of the American Jewish community, which is 2 percent of the American population. But they aren’t correct in their analyses. They aren’t good writers. They don’t represent any significant population. They are just ultra-nationalists. And their main activity is to try to smear and intimidate people.
A military strategist once said that in order to dominate a population, you must put out its eyes. That is, you have to shut up the people who can see what is really going on. The ultra-nationalist bullyboys are trying to shut up Freeman and Walt, with character assassination and ad hominems and, in Freeman’s case, blackballing. They have gotten away with this shameful behavior for so long, despite the enormous harm it has wrought to the United States, that one hesitates to short them. They may well succeed in derailing Freeman’s appointment. But remember, these same pundits kept quoting to us the completely flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was just wrong. Freeman would be in charge of the writing of NIEs, and the ultra-nationalist pundits are afraid that he will get in the way of their plans for mayhem. If people don’t stand up for Freeman, it is hard to see how they can escape some of the blame when things go pear-shaped because of future bad National Intelligence Estimates.”
http://www.juancole.com/
5. ““Outlaw the Shadow Banking System!
When I read the remarks of President Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown after their meeting at the Oval Office on March 3, 2009 and the speech of the latter to the Joint Session of Congress on March 4, 2009, I realized that a growing antagonism has emerged between certain factions of the ruling elites in the City of London and in Washington DC.
The first warning of the acute differences was sounded by President Obama himself and it was most surprising that the mass media paid hardly attention to it. In his weekly address on February 28, 2009, President Obama said:
“I realize that passing this budget won’t be easy. Because it represents real and dramatic change, it also represents a threat to the status quo in Washington. I know that the insurance industry won’t like the idea that they’ll have to bid competitively to continue offering Medicare coverage, but that’s how we’ll help preserve and protect Medicare and lower health care costs for American families. I know that banks and big student lenders won’t like the idea that we’re ending their huge taxpayer subsidies, but that’s how we’ll save taxpayers nearly $50 billion and make college more affordable. I know that oil and gas companies won’t like us ending nearly $30 billion in tax breaks, but that’s how we’ll help fund a renewable energy economy that will create new jobs and new industries. In other words, I know these steps won’t sit well with the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business, and I know they’re gearing up for a fight as we speak. My message to them is this:
“So am I.”
Read the underlined words again.
It is clear something is definitely amiss within the ruling elites and President Obama has thrown the gauntlet to his adversaries. The skeptics may say that we should not read too much into this above quoted paragraph, as it could be mere spin to rally the troops in times of crisis. Time will tell.
I take the view that it is inevitable that the members of the ruling elites would go for each other’s throats because those who were given the charge to ensure that the money-machine keeps running have screwed up big time. Someone must answer for the fiasco.
…
Is it any wonder that Gordon Brown and President Obama, the political representatives of the Power Elites have decided that it is about time that these financial harlots are to be brought under control before they wreck the entire global power structure?
Let us have no illusions about Obama and Gordon Brown. They are going after these financial harlots not because they want to protect us from these criminals, but because for too long the political faction had to play second fiddle to the financial faction in the overall scheme of global one world government.
Until lately, money power triumphed over political power. However, when the entire financial system broke into pieces, it was time to settle scores!
…
Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Speech to Congress, March 4, 2009
“And we need to understand what went wrong in this crisis, that the very financial instruments that were designed to diversify risk across the banking system instead spread contagion across the globe. And today’s financial institutions are so interwoven that a bad bank anywhere is a threat to good banks everywhere.”
“And you are also restructuring your banks. So are we. But how much safer would everybody’s savings be if the whole world finally came together to outlaw shadow banking systems and offshore tax havens?”
Blink and read again the underlined words. You have just read that Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made the call to “outlaw the shadow banking system and offshore tax havens!”
Wow!
Even if you are a skeptic and holds the view that the quotes are mere spin to delude the people, you cannot deny that Prime Minister Brown has let the genie out of the bottle!“
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12584
6. “There is much more than immediately meets the eye in the George Bush’s decision to accept an invitation to address an audience of business executives assembled by Calgary’s Chamber of Commerce. According to David Taras, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary, there is considerable behind-the-scenes strategy in the decision to have the former US president begin the process of attempting to rehabilitate his public image in this “very conservative and pro-American” urban centre. Some have dubbed Calgary Houston North, a nickname that does suggest much about the town’s real character. Calgary is indeed a virtual colony of Houston and Dallas economically, and, to some extent, politically and culturally as well. A high pro portion of its inhabitants have either immigrated from Texas or they have relatives who made the northward trek from Governor Bush’s old stomping grounds. Calgary forms the political base and home constituency of Canada’s current minority government leader, Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In 2001 Harper and some of his closest advisors put their provincialist biases on full display when they advocated the raising of a “firewall” around Alberta to isolate Oil Patch and its agencies from the constitutional authority of the Canada’s national government.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12586
