1. ” Veteran of “Collateral Murder” Company Speaks Out
Josh Stieber, who is a former soldier of the “Collateral Murder” Company, says that the acts of brutality caught on film and recently released via Wikileaks are not isolated instances, but were commonplace during his tour of duty.
“A lot of my friends are in that video,” says Stieber. “After watching the video, I would definitely say that that is, nine times out of ten, the way things ended up. Killing was following military protocol. It was going along with the rules as they are.”
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/04/09
2. “New Research Sheds Light on Soviet Plans for World War III”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,687920,00.html
3. “The dismantling of Iraqi intellectual life may have been a deliberate strategy
The editors and authors of this book believe that the planners of the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq were not simply grossly negligent in allowing Iraq to descend into this hell. Their argument is that the planners consciously facilitated the dismantling of Iraq’s intellectual, academic and cultural apparatus in order to wipe the slate clean as a prelude to the rebirth of the country as a neo-capitalist secular democracy that would serve as a model for change across the Middle East. “To be remade, a state must be rendered malleable”, as the editors of this volume observe. Hulagu and his Mongol hordes doubtless understood this when they ransacked Baghdad in AD1258.”
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=411036&c=2
4. “Occupied Washington DC
Billboards for some of the most deadly – and expensive – weapons systems ever produced
As a visitor to our nation’s capital, I cannot tell you how disconcerting it is to step off the metro and find yourself face to face with a F-35 fighter jet. Where you would normally expect to find ads for cell phones or museum exhibitions, Washington’s subway, the second busiest in the country, instead displays full color backlit billboards for some of the most deadly – and expensive – weapons systems ever produced.
The ads for such companies as Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons producer, Goodrich, KBR, AGI, BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman can be found in many of the metro stations in the Washington metropolitan area. Not surprisingly, the heaviest concentration is at Pentagon City and near government offices at the Federal Center and Capitol South stations. Undoubtedly, the ads aim to influence key decision-makers, but they also serve the purpose of selling to the general public the concept that only our superior military prowess can protect us from a hostile world.
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An estimated 17,000 Capitol South metro passengers are confronted daily with Northrop Grumman Global Hawks and X-47 Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles, which boast a 4500-pound weapons bay, E-2D Advanced Hawkeyes, Viper Strike-armed Fire Scout unmanned helicopters and E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar Systems (STARS), all designed “for an unsafe world.” According to the centrist Brookings Institute, 90% of drone casualties in “targeted” strikes in Pakistan have been innocent civilians. Yet ads for these systems, which carry price tags ranging hundreds of millions of dollars when factoring in development costs, are on full display.
Perhaps most startling of all the Capitol South billboards is the ominous scene of a bombed out apartment building above the slogan “By the time you find the threat, we’ve already taken it out of the picture.” Northrop Grumman fails to fill us in on what happened to the people living in those apartments.
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At Union Station, Amtrak passengers should not be surprised if a soldier or two cut in line. Signs in the station invite uniformed military personnel to skip to the head of the ticket line. According to Amtrak, which is the only Department of Defense approved rail passenger carrier in the US, it is a way for the company to “extend their thanks.” That’s all and good but why wouldn’t Amtrak want to do the same for teachers, healthcare professionals, firefighters, librarians or non-profit volunteers?
Much of this is not necessarily new; the militarization of our society has been progressing for decades, permeating our schools, research and development programs, law enforcement and culture. And despite the heavy concentration in Washington DC, the phenomenon is certainly not limited to the nation’s capital. The signs of militarism in our country are ever-present to the point of becoming virtually invisible, while subconsciously persuading us to accept violence and war as not only a suitable solution to conflict, but the only one.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18590
5. “The Pay-Any-Price Principle
When choosing between frugality and security, history shows that America almost always selects the latter. To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy, we’ll pay any price and bear any burden to protect ourselves.
No doubt this was why the economic case against the Iraq invasion failed. To many, the war debate seemed to pose a binary question: debt or mushroom clouds? And when its a scuffle between money arguments and security arguments (even dishonest security arguments), security wins every time.
Call this the Pay-Any-Price Principle – an axiom that has impacted all of America’s wars, and now, most poignantly, its war on drugs. When faced with criticism of budget-busting prosecution and incarceration costs, law enforcement agencies and private prison interests have successfully depicted their cause as a willingness to pay any price to jail dealers of hard narcotics.
Of course, data undermine that story line. In 2008, the FBI reported that 82 percent of drug arrests were for possession – not sales or manufacturing – and almost half of those arrests were for marijuana, not hard drugs.
Fortunately, these numbers are seeping into the public consciousness. Gallup’s latest survey shows record support for marijuana legalization, as more Americans see the drug war for what it really is: an ideological and profit-making crusade by the Arrest-and-Incarceration Complex against a substance that is, according to most physicians, less toxic than alcohol.
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According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol use by college kids contributes to roughly 1,700 deaths, 600,000 injuries and 97,000 sexual assaults every year. By contrast, “The use of marijuana itself has not been found to contribute to any deaths, there has never been a single fatal marijuana overdose in history (and) all objective research on marijuana has also concluded that it does not contribute to injuries, assaults, sexual abuse, or violent or aggressive behavior,” as the group Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation notes.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25178.htm
