1. “A war of colonial conquest in Afghanistan
The ostensible legal basis on which American troops are in Afghanistan is the “Authorization for Use of Military Force”, the joint resolution passed by the US Congress on September 18, 2001—one week after 9/11. The resolution authorised military force for the purpose of capturing or destroying the Al Qaeda leadership, beginning with bin Laden, so as to prevent further terrorist attacks.
Nearly eight years later, there is barely the pretence that American troops are in Afghanistan to hunt down Al Qaeda. Instead, the war is declared to be against the “Taliban”—a label indiscriminately applied to any Afghan who resists the US-led occupation. At no time, however, was there an accusation that the Taliban had a role in 9/11. The Bush administration’s justification for targeting the Islamist government in Kabul was that it rejected an ultimatum to turn over the Al Qaeda leadership to the United States.
The dropping of the original pretext for the invasion poses the question: with what purported legal justification has the US government and its allies continued and escalated the war? The truth is they have none. Nothing remains but the reality of an imperialist war of plunder and domination.
The US-led occupation of Afghanistan and the terrible violence engulfing Pakistan is the culmination of 30 years of American imperialist intrigue in Central Asia to establish strategic and economic dominance over the resource-rich region.”
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/pers-j10.shtml
2. “The FBI informant and the Bronx bomb plot
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly held press conferences at the synagogues to reassure New Yorkers about their safety. During Kelly’s remarks, it was startling to hear the commissioner refer to al-Qaeda by name, if only to say that the four purported home-grown terrorists had no ties to Osama Bin Laden’s organization.
As more details emerged, however, the less the four defendants sounded like men with the skills to plan a sophisticated terror plot. They were small-time crooks, felons with long criminal records whose previous activities revolved around smoking marijuana and playing video games. One defendant, Laguerre Payen, was arrested in a crack house surrounded by bottles of his own urine; his lawyer describes him as “mildly retarded.”
It seemed fairly astounding that, for a full calendar year, such a group could remain interested in and plan anything more complex than a backyard barbecue, let alone a multipronged paramilitary assault, as the indictment against them alleged.
But what the indictment didn’t say, and what the initial news reports didn’t fill in, was the extent to which the fifth man in the plot, an unnamed FBI informant, had provided the glue to hold the Newburgh 4 together.
…
There have been no real domestic “terrorism” cases that have not been instigated by an FBI informant. What amazes me is that the writers of the Voice article don’t draw the logical conclusion that all of the so-called terrorism cases over the past 20 years have been sting type affairs, in which the FBI was heavily involved. The real question, of course, is why Moslems have been targeted..”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/20600
3. “McNamaranism Alive and Well
Why Robert McNamara lived to age 93 is not for us to know. He did have second thoughts, but his decades-late utterances about the Pentagon and Washington’s lies and immorality only enraged those who hated the war, as well as those who believed in the empire.
But to mourn his passing is unnecessary. We haven’t learned a thing from his life and crimes. We continue to trust our overseas wars and our patriotic souls to soft-handed, finely dressed, wire-rimmed statist intellectuals and pansy-hearted politicians, beholden to the lobbies of democracy, of national industry, of foreign interests, of empire.
We trust them and we send our own unemployable and ill-educated children into the maw, for their own good. To make them strong and pure. To instill in them blind obedience to intellectuals in suits. To train them in the ways of professional and political bean counters who cannot count.
Until we the people completely turn our backs on the state, and its beloved empire, we are all McNamarans.”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski233.html
4. “Reporting on Iran by the numbers
Imagine the mayor of your city or town calls a live press conference to announce a costly program to exterminate all the sewer crocodiles that live in the cities sewer system as per that old urban legend. With budgets running very tight in this tough economy, with vital services being drastically cut back all throughout city government, the Mayor announces that he is setting aside several million dollars to exterminate crocodiles in the city sewer system that don’t exist and never have.
Now imagine, that instead of running a headline the next day like “Unbalanced Mayor calls for war on crocs that don’t exist” the most trusted city newspaper of record runs one that reads “Mayor calls for war on sewer crocs” and not once in the whole story is it even hinted that this Mayor’s claims are baseless, absurd, and not to mention insane.
That, almost without exaggeration, describes nearly all reporting on Iran and the “nuclear” issue in the United States. Our Federal government makes not only wholly unsubstantiated claims about Iran’s nuclear program but ones that are contradicted by ample available evidence (even some of it coming from the federal government itself!) and our press repeats these claims with nary a challenge as to their veracity.
Just about every single newspaper wire story on Iran and the nuclear issue is a veritable garden of lies of omission, purposeful misrepresentations, and unsubstantiated allegations ripe to be impeached but left unchallenged in any meaningful way. These stories are so far removed from any sort of minimal journalistic ethics or standards that they may as well be written by the Pentagon.”
5. “Barack McNamara Obama
Why Can’t Obama See His Wars Are Unwinnable?
