1. “The media’s tall tales over Iraq
Clwyd wrote an article for the Times in which she claimed that Saddam had a people-shredding machine.
Apparently the Ba’athists would dump their opponents into a machine “designed for shredding plastic”, and later put their minced remains into “plastic bags” so they could eventually be used as “fish food”.
It gets worse: apparently these unfortunate men were put into the shredder feet first so that they could briefly behold their own mutilation before death.
Not surprisingly, Clwyd’s shocking claims spread around the world like a virus. The then prime minister of Australia, John Howard, talked of Saddam’s “human-shredding machine” in a speech justifying his decision to send troops to Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush administration’s hawkish deputy defence secretary, expressed his admiration for Clwyd’s article and a link to it was posted on the US state department’s website. Numerous pro-war journalists repeated Clwyd’s claims.
There was only one problem: there was no strong evidence, and there still isn’t, that Saddam had anything like a people-shredding machine.
When I investigated this story for the Spectator and the Guardian in early 2004, I found no convincing evidence that such a medieval-sounding contraption ever existed.
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The shredder story was used in a last-ditch effort to change people’s minds. As Trevor Kavanagh at the Sun rather wishfully argued: “British resistance to war changed when we learned how sadist Saddam … fed dissidents feet first into industrial shredders.” If Blair’s dodgy dossier was cynically used to drum up support in the run-up to the invasion, then Clwyd’s shredder story was cynically used to batter the last bit of war-scepticism out of the British public.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/04/ann-cwlyd-saddam-shredder-iraq-inquiry
2. “Fear of peace will be the death of Israel
The fear of peace has left Israel as a country which is prepared for nuclear warfare but not for non-violent protest on behalf of Palestinians. The fear of peace, and the blackmail of the right on behalf of settlement, has contorted Israel into a body which, unable to countenance the perils of treating the sickness of occupation, will eventually be killed by it.”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1147257.html
3. “It has been observed that no countries on the earth but the United States and Israel claim extraterritoriality, i.e. the right to seize or attack anyone anywhere and at any time based on evidence that is secret. The foul-up at Base Chapman is reflective of the transformation of CIA into a Washington-sanctioned retribution machine, something not unlike the terrorist groups that it claims to oppose rather than an intelligence agency. It is telling that after the slaughter at Base Chapman senior Agency officers immediately announced that they would get revenge and the pace of drone attacks has dramatically increased, killing few or no actual terrorists but many civilians and further destabilizing an already tottering Pakistan. The broader problems that the Agency is experiencing are revealed in CIA’s eight years of largely unrewarding effort against “international terrorism,” a symptom of a systemic failure to understand much less identify and penetrate groups that are, ironically, constantly looking for volunteers to fill their ranks. CIA’s traditional strength in recruiting agents and collecting intelligence has all but disappeared, subsumed into a paramilitary mission to launch hellfire missile firing drones, which is also almost certainly a reflection of the White House’s perception of what needs to be done. If that is so, the tactic is ultimately self defeating in that it produces more enemies that it is able to eliminate, making failure in Afghanistan an absolute certainty.”
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=565
4. “US Soldier Waterboards 4-Year-Old Daughter
Tabor admitted to police that he chose the CIA torture technique because his daughter was terrified of water.”
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2010/02/08/us-soldier-waterboards-4-year-old-daughter/
5. “Yemen and The Militarization of Strategic Waterways Securing US Control over Socotra Island and the Gulf of Aden”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17460
6. “U.S Vows To Bury Goldstone Report At UN”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17478
7. “War, Budgets and Blind Ambition The Limited Minds of the American Elite
The American elite’s unbounded, unquestioned, indeed unconscious sense of imperial entitlement and dominance — based ultimately on war, the threat of war and the profit from war — is one of the defining characteristics of our age. And if you would like to see a glaring example of this attitude in action, look no further than the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times, where one David Sanger gives us his penetrating “news analysis” of the Administration’s just-announced $3.8 trillion budget.
Sanger focuses on the huge, continuing deficits that the budget forecasts over the next decade. Completely ignoring the plain truth that his own expert source tell him later in the story — that “forecasts 10 years out have no credibility” — Sanger boldly plunges forward to tell us just what it all means. You will not be surprised to hear that the upshot of these big deficits is that neither Obama nor his successors will be able to spend any money on “new domestic initiatives” for years to come. But let’s let Sanger, savant and seer, tell it in his own words:
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What is most interesting here, of course, is not Sanger’s noodle-scratching over imaginary numbers projected into an unknowable future, but his total and apparently completely unconscious adoption of the mindset of militarist empire. For as he puzzles and puzzles till his puzzler is sore on how in God’s name the United States can possibly find any money at all to spend on bettering the lives of its citizens over the next 10 years, it becomes clear that Sanger — like the rest of our political and media elite — literally cannot conceive of an end to empire. Our elites and their courtiers literally cannot imagine life without a permanent war for global dominance, fueled by a gargantuan war machine spread across hundreds and hundreds of bases implanted in more than 100 countries.
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And on a more prosaic level, the end of empire would mean an end to the horrendous economic distortion wrought by our war-profiteering industries. Other businesses would inevitably come to the fore, economic activity would be spread more evenly across more sectors. And so, yes, those who have feasted so gluttonously for so long on blood money would not be quite as rich as they are now.
A better world — not perfect, by no means perfect, but much better — is entirely possible. We could easily dismantle the empire — carefully, safely, with deliberation — over the next ten years. It is a reasonable, moderate, serious option. It would not require violent revolution, or vast social upheaval. But our elites do not want this. They can no longer fathom life without the exercise — and worship — of power that empire entails. They will not accept — or even contemplate — any alternative to it.
And thus every option and policy we are offered — whether from right-wing Republicans or “progressive” Democrats, or from “serious” news analysts on “serious” papers — must fall within these pathetically cramped, constricted mental horizons. Empire — the imposition of dominion by violence and threat of violence, and the financial and moral corruption this breeds, the example it sets at every level of society — is the canker in the body politic. Until it is dealt with, there will be no healing, no hope, no change — just more degradation and disaster all down the line.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17472
8. “The US Military: A Mindset of Barbarism
This mindset is rooted in American history and might be peculiar to it. By way of metaphor, it might be characterized by a line from a You Tube video, “Startrekking Across the Universe,” wherein the fictional Captain Kirk says: “We come in peace, shoot to kill.” In the classic work, “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville captured this seeming contradiction in American “habits of the heart” with regard to Native Americans, slaves and all those deemed as “other.” Tocqueville points out that unlike the Spaniards, English or French conquerors, the Americans went out of their way to pass laws and enact treaties to justify their mistreatment of others. So, for example, slavery was considered immoral, but was legal. Similarly, extermination of the Indians was immoral, but the government signed treaties before it broke them. So-called “witches” were executed only after they were given trials and assigned lawyers. And so on. It seems that Tocqueville captured an important aspect of American culture that continues to this day.
Fast-forwarding to World War II, the US engaged in numerous acts that some historians and lawyers believe could have been called war crimes had the US lost that war. Examples include the firebombing of German and Japanese cities, and of course, dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fast-forwarding further to the Vietnam War, the US established policies of “search and destroy” missions in “free-fire” zones. The important point is that these acts were justified by all sorts of legal jargon about “status-based” targets (which apparently means that the target is considered “hostile” simply by existing, and therefore constitutes a potential threat).
This sort of legalizing of acts that otherwise might be considered atrocities has continued in the current, long war on terror. For example, it is no secret that John Yoo and other White House lawyers went out of their way to make torture seem lawful. In this and other acts, the government continues to behave in the manner described by Tocqueville.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17476
9. “Wall Street owners angry with their purchase
The article describes how Wall Street — which poured massive amounts of money into the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party over the last several years, ensuring unparalleled access and influence — is now threatening to support the Republicans if Obama keeps saying mean things about them. Wall Street executives are angry that, after duly purchasing the Democrats (they have receipts and everything), the Obama White House is now rousing the dirty rabble with their anti-banker rhetoric
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There are numerous points to note about all of this. First, there simply is no more odious faction inside the U.S. than Wall Street bankers — and that’s saying quite a bit. Just over a year ago, they almost caused a complete global economic collapse — and did cause extreme economic suffering around the world which continues to this day — with their sleazy, piggish and lawless behavior. Yet barely a year later, they now turn around and threaten their purchased politicians with punishment if their behavior is meaningfully restricted or even if they’re publicly criticized. In light of what they did — and are still doing — they should consider themselves lucky that the public hasn’t stormed their homes and offices in mass rage. Far less pernicious behavior has triggered such uprisings in the past, and if the American public hadn’t been as ingrained with the passivity and learned helplessness they’ve been trained to accept, one would certainly have seen some of that.
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So the GOP is out there successfully pretending in front of the angry tea partiers that they, too, are furious about Wall Street’s gorging and domination of Washington, all while simultaneously crawling to Wall Street and pledging to be good little boys and girls — and to keep the agitated masses at bay — if Wall Street once again purchases them rather than the Democrats. The only thing more absurd than the Democrats’ pretending to be the Populist Party of the People is the Republican Party’s doing so.
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In essence, Wall Street executives said to David Kirkpatrick, the NYT reporter who wrote this story: ”I want to threaten and criticize the President, but I’m too much of a coward to do so with my name attached, so will you let me do it in your paper anonymously”? And Kirkpatrick replied: ”Oh, absolutely; that’s what anonymity is for: to let the country’s most powerful people spew venom and issue threats while being shielded and protected by journalists from accountability.” Perhaps one of those nameless executives might have inquired of Kirkpatrick: ”but didn’t your newspaper publish very stringent guidelines limiting the use of anonymity in the wake of the Iraq debacle?”, to which Kirkpatrick could easily and truthfully have replied: ”oh, those? Please. Nobody worries about that, least of all us. That’s just there to placate the same angry rabble whom you’re now ordering your political property to more efficiently pacify.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
10. “ The Terror-Industrial Complex
I spent more than a year covering al-Qaida for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East. The threat posed by Islamic extremists, while real, is also wildly overblown, used to foster a climate of fear and political passivity, as well as pump billions of dollars into the hands of the military, private contractors, intelligence agencies and repressive client governments including that of Pakistan. The leader of one FBI counterterrorism squad told The New York Times that of the 5,500 terrorism-related leads its 21 agents had pursued over the past five years, just 5 percent were credible and not one had foiled an actual terrorist plot. These statistics strike me as emblematic of the entire war on terror.
Terrorism, however, is a very good business. The number of extremists who are planning to carry out terrorist attacks is minuscule, but there are vast departments and legions of ambitious intelligence and military officers who desperately need to strike a tangible blow against terrorism, real or imagined, to promote their careers as well as justify obscene expenditures and a flagrant abuse of power. All this will not make us safer. It will not protect us from terrorist strikes. The more we dispatch brutal forms of power to the Islamic world the more enraged Muslims and terrorists we propel into the ranks of those who oppose us. The same perverted logic saw the Argentine military, when I lived in Buenos Aires, “disappear” 30,000 of the nation’s citizens, the vast majority of whom were innocent. Such logic also fed the drive to root out terrorists in El Salvador, where, when I arrived in 1983, the death squads were killing between 800 and 1,000 people a month. Once you build secret archipelagos of prisons, once you commit huge sums of money and invest your political capital in a ruthless war against subversion, once you empower a network of clandestine killers, operatives and torturers, you fuel the very insecurity and violence you seek to contain.
I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty. But I do know that permitting jailers, spies, kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule of law contaminates us with our own bile. Siddiqui is one victim. There are thousands more we do not see. These abuses, justified by the war on terror, have created a system of internal and external state terrorism that is far more dangerous to our security and democracy than the threat posed by Islamic radicals. “
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24611.htm
11. “ Britain, You Better Wake Up
The more I read about the Chilcot inquiry the more disturbed I am. The fallacy imbued in the heart of British ‘democracy’ is staggering. While some commentators are concerned with questions to do with the legality of the war, the most crucial issue here is actually the disappearance of ethical judgment from our public and political life. Rather than being concerned with morality and ethics British politicians are concerned with legalism. In other words, if someone would manage to prove that the war was ‘legal’ then the murdering of a million and a half Iraqis would be well justified. Let’s all face it, our politicians are corrupted to the bone.
In fact the Chilcot inquiry is in itself a pretty disturbing concept. As George Monbiot pointed out a few days ago in the Guardian CIF, in the world of British ‘official inquiries’, it is the government that appoints its members and sets its terms of reference. “It’s the equivalent of a criminal suspect being allowed to choose what the charges should be, who should judge his case and who should sit on the jury”. As if this is not enough, none of the Inquiry members is an attorney. None of its member are qualified in the art of questioning. Consequently, the inquiry doesn’t have any legal ability, capacity or teeth. It is a farce. It is there to release some public steam. It is there to convey a false image of openness. I believe that the most pathetic statement was pronounced last week by Tony Blair, “People didn’t think that al-Qaeda and Iran would play the role that they did”, announced the unchallenged genocidal man in front of inquiry. Basically we are now blaming the so-called ‘enemy’ for not performing according to ‘our plans’. I guess that even an illiterate burglar would refrain from using such an argument in the court. Blair obviously got away with it.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24619.htm
12. ” The “Shock Doctrine” for Haiti
The U.S. is reviving what Haitians call “the plan of death.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24613.htm
