Editor’s Note: Without question, Barack Obama came out of the political gate faster than any man in history, sporting a flashy rainbow stripe and pumped up with that political steroid we now as “Hope and Change”. But even 21st century messiahs can run into the realities of political physics. A hard and fast fall back down to earth, for a marketing phenomenon who- we must not forget, ran (and won) on the most unashamed, in-your-face antiwar ticket in modern history. After Obama took office there was no change in imperial war policy, it was if Bush Jr had somehow fallen asleep, drunk under the White House’s Presidential Tanning Bed (sincere apologies for the crude turn of phrase here, but these are very cruel wars, no hope, no change). More wars, more and more bombings and countless body bags.
BARACK O'BOMER: When the Neo-Con War angle was spent, the elite tried their Socialist Bomber, who is already crashing and burning.
We all thought Bin Laden would save him. He thought he could bomb his way into re-election. So here we are 20,000 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles, and 15,000 sorties and smart bombs later, and Barack finds himself further in free-fall, down those all-important Presidential approval polls. Perhaps African-Americans are finally waking up after the come-down from the Barack-Buzz, the Studio 54 soiree is finally over. As their first ever African US Chief Exec continues to put more Africans (Libyans) into body bags, his faithful are rapidly fleeing for what’s left of the country’s moral high ground. He was meant to be Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger’s six million dollar Manchurian machine. Americans truly believed they had found their mythological Superman, only to be duped and sold another golf club-swinging teleprompter reading bullet pusher.
. More likely, a true hero for Americans will come in the form of some one with a genuine track record of community service, a woman named Cynthia McKinney. It’s possible that America has not seen such a politician with this much character who is willing to put it all on the line for the people she works for- the American people.
As we warned him earlier this year… Barack, the penny will eventually drop and your fans will demand substance, not more clever sales spin. We didn’t find it in you Barack, but thank God we found it in Cynthia McKinney.
. The irony… a man who accepted a Nobel Peace Prize before he started working. Anyone who would accept such a dodgy award could never really be worth his salt.
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An important 2008 campaign coalition for the president is not happy with his actions in Libya and it could very well cost him politically in 2012.
. Former Georgia Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney blasted President Barack Obama on Saturday at an ANSWER coalition meeting in Washington, D.C. for engaging the United States in a war against Libya. After returning from Libya with a group of U.S. journalists, Ms. McKinney launched a U.S. speaking tour to talk about her trip. “I took a rash step because I was so outraged that our president would launch yet another illegal, unconstitutional, immoral, war and so I also knew that my government was lying,” she said to a group of 60 -70 anti-war Left attendees sitting in a Columbia Heights meeting room. Ms. Mckinney told the gathering:
“Black America has been extremely supportive of our president, but not in this case. A line has been drawn in the sand with respect to our president bombing Africa and Libya in particular because of the history of support when the United States was supporting apartheid in the African continent, it was the people of Libya and the people of Muammar Qaddafi who were fighting to eradicate apartheid. And for those blacks and people of color inside this country who were fighting to eradicate American style apartheid, the people of Libya and Muammar Qaddafi were supportive as well.” “Now I don’t know that history, but brother Akbar knows that history very well and that is part of the reason why black America has drawn this line in the sand because this is something that is a historical relationship that has context that brother Obama …that President Obama…stepped across. He has crossed over the threshold.”
Listen here
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The war in Libya continues to lose support and despite liberals on a site like The Dally Koswho tout reasons to support the war, leftists in the anti-war ANSWER coalition are dead set against it. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Ohio Democrat, was part of a bi-partisan group of members on Capitol Hill who filed a lawsuit against the president two weeks ago for executing an illegal war. Before the House voted to deny authorization to the Libyan war but fund the operation, Rep.Kucinich told reporters last week, “It’s a tradition that the president’s party on the congressional level tries to offer him support, but I think that we need to give better advice to the president that this mission is not possible. That it’s misguided. That he had advice from the Pentagon and from his Attorney General that would suggest.
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” Mr. Kucinich added, “He should not pursue this without going to Congress and that we serve the president best when we tell him what we really think not just to endorse the policies that he has indicated that he wants.” Rep. Kucinich later told me that we was asked to participate in an anti-war event in October, when I asked him why the anti-war groups like ANSWER have not been as visible on the streets now as they were during the Bush administration. Ms. McKinney further attacked President Obama:
“I have been blessed to be able to travel all over the world. And as I have traveled, at one point I was extremely proud of the fact that black people in the United States and all over the world have a moral authority because everyone all over the world understands the plight that we have struggled against that we continue to have to struggle against, but unfortunately now, the policies of the Bush administration have been enunciated and implemented by black faces from Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice and now we have a continuation of those polices through the office of President Obama.”“So I’m directly impacted negatively by the actions of these black people who have decided that they would cast their lot with warmongers, war criminals, and people who peddle in death and destruction. So I decided as a responsible and conscious black person that I wanted my voice heard against what these other people were enunciating and at the same time I also am just sick and tired of war. I want better for my country.”
Randy Short of Black Agenda Report was also on Saturday’s ANSWER speakers’ panel and went after President Obama for “funding” what Mr. Short called “n****r hunting” in Africa.
“There was the other thing I was to look at and that was how these terrorist people who are killing, support the troops over in Iraq from Derna, from Benghazi…these same al Qaeda people that we’re being taxed to fight are the ones we’re funding who are raping with Viagara black and brown women–cutting their breasts off and letting them bleed to death–taking their body parts and spelling the word ‘whore.’ That’s a humanitarian intervention people? They are going on African hunts or we would say, ‘n****r hunting.’ Our president is funding this. I have friends who are Somali who fled Libya and are now in Italy give me stories about how they have been robbed, how the have been beaten, and how people are being killed.”
It is unlikely ANSWER will get the huge numbers of anti-war participants it saw during the Bush years. Without a Republican in office, the left has little in common to unite and hate over. However, an anti-war march is planned in Washington on July 9, nonetheless. It seems that the left-wing is currently divided among three factions. One side is protecting the president from negative fallout during a campaign year from his own foreign policy actions. Another more pure pacifist crowd wants to retreat immediately from all foreign intervention regardless of consequences.
. The third albeit smaller camp senses impending election doom and is looking for a face-saving way out of the intra-party dispute in the hopes of salvaging some endangered seats in Congress. Is it no wonder President Obama called to draw down troops from Afghanistan so he could focus on domestic policy? - This story is from 21st Century Wire.
As oil is positioned to surge again this summer, intelligent and informed members of society will want to reconsider our crack-like addiction to this black gold which seems to drive the price of everything, along with all major wars, famines and other world events.
We can take a look back to yesterday, 1996 to be exact, and revisit the killing of the electric car by the now defunct General Motors (GM). This was an important link in a chain of events that has placed us where we are today, and in the same boat we were back in 1978.
As a social-consumer group, Americans will believe almost anything they hear from “official sources”. No matter how outrageous or unfounded a mainstream mantra may be, like sheep, they will almost always follow the larger flock, regardless of which way it may be headed. In terms of consumer adoption in the 20th century, the litany of disinformation is endless and includes popular myths like:
GMO’s are safe to grow and eat.
Nuclear power is green and safe.
Fluoride is good for you and helps fight tooth decay.
Mercury in vaccines is not harmful.
Battery technology hasn’t advanced enough to support an electric car industry.
Let’s look at that last one. Batteries just weren’t good enough to power cars and free households from dependence on oil companies, right? Wrong. The battery problem had been largely solved and not just in theory, but even in 1990′s production. Then GM bought its way in as a condition for using US inventor Stan Ovshinsky’s battery in its cars. Through a legally dubious move, it sold its share in the company to Chevron/Texaco. And now the battery is gone.
This move was made possible by a team comprised of GM, Chevron/Texaco, and your elected and appointed career members of the US Federal Government, a move that undoubted pushed back the adoption of a mass electric car by a further 20 years or more.
But Washington’s impressive legacy of collusion and corruption doesn’t end there.
As far back as 1974, Vanguard-Sebring’s CitiCar mad its debut at the Electric Vehicle Symposium in Washington, D.C. It had a top speed of over 30 mph and a reliable warm-weather range of 40 miles. By 1975 the company was the sixth largest automaker in the U.S. but is dissolved only a few years later. Two years later in 1976, the US Congress had passes the Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Research, Development, and Demonstration Act. The law was passed in order to help spur the development of new technologies like batteries, motors, and other hybrid-electric components. It also passed because the public will was there and innovators were ready to run with it. Sadly, Federal career-oriented politicians were not up to the task, running the risk of ruining their chances to serve on the boards of these same major industry players.
An Auto-Oil-Fed pincer move was then applied in order to bury all renewable technology trends in 1980 when Washington, under Reagan’s watch, sunk a growing popular national movement towards renewable energy research, development and commercialisation, pushing the electric car back another 20 years.
Prior to WWII, clear back to the 1920′s, the electric car was neck and neck with the gasoline-gusselling combustion engine cars. But the gas monsters eventually won way back then. Not much has changed up until today.
Again, we hear that Sad Ballad of the corporate monopolists’ victim, Stan Ovshinsky and his car battery in 1996, we can only look back and wonder, “what if”…
GM and Chevron colluded to kill progress, namely Ovshinsky’s advances in electric car battery technology.
EV1 vs the Hummer: thanks to Federal government interference in the market, he Hummer won.
How the Federal Government bends to the will of certain corporations.
Mary Burgess wrote on the dawn of GM’s bankruptcy debacle:
“In the documentary Wally E. Rippel, a research engineer, points out that there is still about a trillion barrels of oil in the earth. “At $100 a barrel, that’s $100 trillion of business left in the ground”. The fat cat oil companies have so much to gain from prohibiting new technologies from taking over our current consumption of oil and gas, and they have the power to make it happen. Their pressure on the government, and the car companies, including GM, ensured that the EV1 would not survive. Under these pressures GM chose the gas gusseling Hummer over the EV1. Ironically now, GM owes over $1 million for every Hummer on the road.”
The timing of Obama’s Federalist hacking of GM was uncanny to say the least. The irony here for the clueless American voter is that many Democrats saw their Messiah as a “Green” President, and a champion for Mother Earth. The reality of course, is nothing like that. He is just another CEO on the payroll of his corporate board. Burgess continued:
“General Motors dropped from DOW today as it filled for bankruptcy this morning. The Obama administration is to purchase the remains of the suffering company for $30 billion, with the Canadian government chipping in an additional 9.5 billion for the Canadian branch of the company. Together the two governments and the remaining GM staffers will have an arduous task of restructuring the giant company in to a leaner organization in the hopes that it can again rise to be a profitable employer to thousands.
Almost prophetically the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? was broadcast on TV the night before GM officially filled for bankruptcy. The documentary details the story of the EV1, GM’s electric car that was released in 1996… They didn’t let people buy the EV1, leasing was the only option to procure the vehicle. They even put A-list celebrities such as Mel Gibson through lengthy questionnaires prior to letting them lease an EV1. in 1999 when GM stopped production of the EV1, they pulled all of the EV1s on the road and destroyed them, an action that was made possible by their lease only policy…
GM put an inferior battery in the first edition of the EV1, even though they owned a controlling interest in a company that had a patent for a far superior battery invented by Stan Oshinsky . Sadly GM only released 200 second generation EV1′s that included the superior battery, and later GM sold it’s shares to Chevron/Texaco who were free to suppress the innovative technology.”
So this a clear, defined history of collusion between the three main players in the energy game: manufacturers, oil companies and, of course (the one we always forget to mention), your altruistic Federal Government. In this world, trends are not allowed to develop and history is diverted to an alternative reality, one which we find ourselves still on today.
THE TESLA CAR: A hint at what electric cars could be offering today had the technology been allowed to develop freely.
Still, naive voters, activists, and green crusaders harp on about energy policy and tax hikes on fuel, as if it were the only way to reach a cleaner, more efficient future. They speak of man-made global warming and climate change as if its something real, and not a psuedo-science invented and promoted by politicians and career charlatans like Al Gore, Maurice Strong and John P. Holdren. The reality is that its nothing more than another trillion dollar rent-seeking, corporate pyramid scam designed to enrich its elite circle of crafty progenitors.
The problem my dear Watson, is right there in front of your nose. It’s an age-old problem. The elephant in the front room that Americans, particularly for those self-professed “Liberals” in this society. The weak-minded and castrated members of your Federal government have time and time again interfered with the true free market and the natural progression of innovation in technology, in order to fix the game for their biggest corporate donors and their bookies on Wall Street, who in turn will secure the financial future of their federal government legislative fixers.
As the solar industry struggles to be born again, with the help of Ovshinsky’s latest battery technology, the Sad Ballad of Stan Ovshinsky plays on in the background.
It’s not just a song now, it symbolises a bona fide crime against humanity that deserves the most swift and harsh execution of justice.
Green industries? What a laugh. Not until we grow a pair. Until then, the only green industry is in the bill-clip.
This week several members of Congress challenged Obama on the legality of the Libya war, given that actions have exceeded the 90 day period during which The White House doesn’t need Congressional authority for military action under the War Powers Act.
The White House response: We don’t need Congressional approval because this is not technically a hostile action (because we don’t have ground troops in Libya).
Tonight the NYT has a major bombshell: Two top lawyers — Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — told The White House otherwise.
ORDERS FROM ABOVE: Obama is faithfully executing a globalist agenda in Libya
Even Attorney General Eric Holder sided with Krass.
But Rather than heed their advice, he instead went with two lawyers with views more favorable to him: Bob Bauer (who is internal at The White House), and State Department advisor Harold Koh.
This is striking:
Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.
No doubt this will only embolden the bi-partisan group of Congressmen who think the war at this point is illegal.
And of course one can only imagine how news like this would have gone down under the Bush administration.
All that being said, Obama does have the support of serious lawyers, and he himself was a constitutional lawyer, so the idea that just because Johnson and Krass opposed this decision doesn’t in itself end it.
But this is still tough.
For some context, see this American Conservative story (from last June) on the war philosophy of Harold Koh, a renowned liberal legal scholar who also has a history of justifying hostile activity.
At the end of March, Harold Koh, top lawyer at the State Department, used his keynote address at the annual confab of the American Society for International Law to make an announcement: the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to kill suspected terrorists is legal. The drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan are lawful because, Koh delineated, they are done only in national self-defense, their proportionality is always precisely calibrated, and they carefully discriminate civilians from combatants.
There’s both more and less to it than that, but the legal argument itself is of minor importance. What matters is that Koh said it. Harold Hongju Koh: renowned human rights advocate; leading theorist of international law (which, the ASIL conventioneers would happily have told you, is much more civilized than mere national law); until last year dean of Yale Law School and therefore unofficial pope of the American legal system, and former director of the school’s Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights; Obama appointee accused by Glenn Beck and likeminded screamers of wanting to smuggle Sharia law into U.S. courts. All of which is to say, if a liberal lion like Harold Koh says drone strikes are lawful, what more do you need to know?
US Special Forces units based at Fort Hood, Texas, have been told to prepare for deployment to Libya no later than July, according to a US military source. The Special Forces would then be followed in September or October by heavy armored units of the First Cavalry Division, currently located in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with other components of the US III Corps. This report was broadcast today on the Alex Jones radio program, and comes against the backdrop of escalating US destabilization operations against Syria and sharpening US condemnation of Damascus and its ally, Tehran.
Observers point out that US Special Forces have been in Libya since February. They also note that, while the Libyan destination is highly plausible, some of these units may also find themselves on the way to Yemen, Syria, or beyond.
Another anonymous military source speaking on the Alex Jones broadcast reported that US stocks of depleted uranium (DU) munitions are currently very low. This may be the reality behind outgoing Defense Secretary Gates’ complaint last week that NATO is “running out of bombs” in Libya, and similar remarks by French NATO General Stephane Abrial in Belgrade.
BOMBS AWAY: US and NATO forces are sizing up Syria as their next carpet bombing 'regime change' project.
A source at US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed that US forces are being lined up for new foreign missions, and added that his unit had recently processed two deceased US Army soldiers and three deceased US civilians, possibly mercenaries. The source attributed these cases to Libya, although US operations in Libya are widely thought to be controlled by the new US African Command (AFRICOM).
These reports should be taken together with the energetic protests from the Russian Foreign Ministry over the presence of the US Aegis cruiser Monterrey (a vessel with anti-ballistic missile capabilities) in the Black Sea, along with the arrival of the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan off the coast of Syria.
According to the Israeli site DebkaFile, which often reflects the views of the Mossad, “Western sources additonally report a build-up of ship-borne anti-missile missile strength in the Mediterranean basin. This huge concentration of naval missile interceptor units looks like preparations by Washington for the contingency of Iran, Syria and Hizballah letting loose with surface missiles against US and Israeli targets in the event of US military intervention to stop the anti-opposition slaughter underway in Syria. Moscow, Tehran and Damascus, in particular, are taking this exceptional spate of American military movements in and around the Mediterranean as realistically portending American intervention in Syria.” Debka also says that Hezbollah is in the process of moving some of its formidable missile assets from northern Lebanon to the central regions of that country, closer to Israel.”
The Obama administration is thus on a collision course with the Congress over the War Powers Act, which requires legislative approval of the Libyan war by June 20. If Obama continues to bomb Libya beyond next Monday, or compounds his air assault with a ground invasion, he will be impeachment bait.
21st Century Wire Editor Patrick Henningsen talks with Russia Today about the UN and NATO’s illegal war in Libya
NATO is continuing its barrage of the Libyan capital, with no sign there will be any let-up until Colonel Muammar Gaddafi goes. Western and Arab countries are showing their support for the Libyan opposition by pledging more money.
The rebels say they need $3 billion over the next several months to pay salaries and buy supplies.
Although the rebels have managed to get financing from their first oil exports to the US, writer and filmmaker Patrick Henningsen believes the oil business coming out of Libya is not the main driver of this NATO operation.
“We are talking about a total restructuring of the state,” he said. “The rebels drew up plans way back in March to have their own oil company to replace the Libyan national oil company, and their own national bank.”
UN AND NATO: Taking sides in Libya's civil war to bring Libya under the globalist system.
The unfreezing of Libyan assets to be given to the opposition is taking longer than expected, but Henningsen says there are bigger issues.
“I think a bigger question is that the Libyan national bank has one of the highest per capita gold reserves of any state bank in the world. I think the only country that has a higher per capita gold reserve is Lebanon,” he said. “What Gaddafi might have stuffed away in Swiss bank account or a collection of Swiss bank accounts is miniscule compared to the state assets in terms of gold and oil that Libya possesses. And this has really been the game all along.”
Henningsen claims this operation is about making Libya fold into the globalist umbrella, converting the nation to a more privatized one…
Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu surprised few recently by furiously rejecting US President Barack Obama’s proposal to use the 1967 borders as the basis for a two-state solution, in the wondrously long-running, vicious, costly and ultimately useless Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to Netanyahu, the main hurdle to any agreement here is simply that the 1967 frontiers are “utterly indefensible”.
This of course is forgetting that nuclear facilities like Dimona have madeIsrael fundamentally harder to defend, left instead with more of a 19th century colonial-style border. For Netanyahu, of course, this argument is waved aside with contempt, as he and his antiquated political friends shrink back, laager style into their 1914-1918 military philosophy.
In addition to their Big Bertha first world war-type weapons – tanks and artillery – Israel also has modern hi-tech weapons at its disposal, thanks to American taxpayers and generations of American and European politicians giving knee-jerk support to a derisory remake of the Crusades. Indeed, Israel exists only at the behest of the Anglo-American and European elite who drew its borders and supplied it with political and military aid. Why these Holy Wars were abandoned, long ago, is as simple as why Israel will abandon its colonial conquests: they generated no serious war booty or peace dividend to enthral and enrich the European masses. Their “net present worth” was zero.
THE STATE TOO LATE
Israel, as a state, was a completely classic 19th century European-style nation-building concept. Other examples include almost all existing European and African countries of today, with a few exceptions like Spain, Portugal, France and England, and the USA which can claim a much older, or slightly more mature pedigree. These states, at their time of founding had totally different social, cultural, ideological, economic and demographic conditions, relative to the real world of today.
Many nation states of today are simply dysfunctional within a globalized economy. Israel is no different, it only came later to the party.
From Dan to Beersheba and a lot further, is how we might put the way Israeli maximalists of the 19th and 20th centuries interpreted where their ‘national heartland’ extends. Their present Land of David, thanks to the Goliath of US taxpayers funds, is of course impressive space-wise, but it unhappily possesses rather small amounts of real resources, relative to the dreamtime land grab of those fundamentalist Israeli maximalists. Among these, with no possible error, we can identify Benyamin Netanyahu.
NETANYAHU: Old thinking is holding up any real progress and increasing frustration for Israel.
The son of a renowned historian, the personal secretary of Zeev Jabotinski considered by some to be founder of the Zionist right, Netanyahu absorbed from childhood his father’s interpretation of Jewish history as a series of tragedies. The lesson was simple: gentiles cannot be trusted. In this narrative, Jewish history is one of constant betrayal by white anti-semites, where the only remedy is for all Jews to return to the Biblical Land of Israel. Its Arab neighbors can also never be trusted, as Jabotinski preached, so the new Israeli nation must erect a Maginot Line of Jewish military power to deter its enemies forever. This is exactly what we have today in 2011.
The Biblical Land of Israel was imaginatively interpreted – exactly the same way that 19th century European nation builders did when planning their own respective land grabs. The “historical” but entirely imaginary territory called Eretz Yisrael extended from the Nile in Egypt, and ranged across large chunks of the Arabian Peninsula, extending as far north into today’s Turkey, Armenia and the lower Russian Caucasian republics, and east to Iraq. The sweep and reach was breathtaking, very much like the oil-spawned invention by Europeans and Americans, of 1932, called Saudi Arabia.
The real Israel was not founded until 1948: by then the window of opportunity for creating European-style nation states almost anyplace outside Europe – in Africa, Latin America and Asia – was closing. The colonial model no longer applied. Populations had grown too much and too fast, weapons technology was spreading at the same time as democratic notions. The world’s economy – even in 1948 – was beginning to globalize, and nuclear power was soon going to be developed. It was the start of the downhill run for 19th century-style nations.
In terms of mainstream consensus reality, this phenomenon is in no way recognized – officially – today. Sadly, the myth of supreme military power and its 19th century land-grabbing racist modus operandi, called Eminent Domain, are still riding high in the small mental space of today’s great leaders, huddled together in G8 and G20 meetings. Therefore, it is unsurprising, to say the least, that most European and American leaders approve and support Israel. Unaware that because of nuclear power and similar high-tech Doomsday Machines like pesticide factories and other Seveso-type industrial centres on their home territory, Israel have no real defence from attack by a rising number of potential enemies – or victims of their constant and micro-colonial aggression- they blithely soldier on.
NUKES ARE A LIABILITY
Israel itself seems to wax lyrical endlessly about its exposure to the terrorist threat. More important perhaps should be Israel’s exposure to a conventional military attack. In an era of ballistic missiles, Israel’s so called ‘defence’ is grossly compromised.
Missiles owned by Iran and many other nations can easily reach Israel’s supposedly secret, supposedly forgotten, supposedly impregnable atom bomb factories in the rural, tourism-oriented areas near Dimona, west of the Dead Sea and near the Jordanian border. Its plutonium brewing reactors, reprocessing centres, fuel rod ponds and bomb fabrication workshops, stored weapons, nuclear wastes and fissile materials- once the ultimate proof of Israeli military superiority- are all open to attack.
LIABILITY: The nuclear production site at Dimona remains a strategic nightmare for Israel.
If such an event were to occur, Israel would receive a Fukushima-times-six kick into the bin of history, at the flick of a missile launch switch. To be sure, not only Israel would be wiped out, but a large chunk of eastern Egypt, all of Palestine, the west of Jordan, most of Lebanon and much of southern Syria – depending on wind and weather. Under a worst-credible ballistic missile attack on Israel’s Dimona nuclear production sites, at least 500 times the radiation of the Hiroshima atom bomb of 1945 would be released, and thrown to the rains and winds.
BIG BERTHA PHILOSOPHY
Israel’s military elite are almost indistinguishable from its political elite because Israel is permanently war ready. Israeli propaganda tells Israelisto be immensely proud of their kill-and-forget hi-tech inventions like drones, with air-to-ground missile launch capability, Depleted Uranium(DU) munitions, anti-personnel, aka anti-civilian weapons, and a host of other joyous morale-boosting state-of-the-art death tech. But whenever Israel is moved by its fundamental Eminent Domain urgings, and when it simply has to invade Lebanon or Palestine to punish, waste and destroy, it wheels out its 20th century-style tanks and artillery. Israeli paranoia, a natural mass reaction to the warfare state, alsoresults in constant incoherence and weakness in Israel’s negotiating stance in the endless farce of creating a Palestinian state.
This planned Palestinian state would almost certainly be, by Israeli standards, by definition demilitarized. It is equally sure that Israel must see its army “sit along the Jordan River” and occupy hundreds of isolated settlements spread amidst a hostile Palestinian population- supposedly for strategic reasons. The costs can only be high, the economic benefit low, which will again require generous military aid via the US.
Netanyahu should in fact study the lessons of the 1973 Yom Kippur war on the Golan Heights before denouncing Obama’s idea. At the time, long-term trends making Israel the “State Too Late” were already at work. When the war started, the first action of the Israeli army command was the forced evacuation of the area’s settlements, which Israel’s generals knew would quickly become a burden, and an obstacle to maneuver, for their troops and tanks. The net result was simple: it left Israel with even less defensible and more erratic borders than the supposedly “indefensible” 1967 lines.
One might come to realise here that if there was genuine will on the part of Israel and the US to create a Palestinian state, it would have already happened by now. The reality is that it hasn’t happened, and will never happen so long as Israel’s 24-7 warfare state is allowed to dominate its political scene.
MOVING FORWARD IN 2011
Today, Israel can only be frightened by the collapse of friendly dictators in the region, starting with Egypt’s Mubarak, and threats to known and controllable dictators such as Syria’s Bashr al Assad and the Yemenite “good dictator” Saleh. For Israel’s borders to be defensible, they first need to be legitimate and internationally recognized. Unfortunately, Israeli paranoia seeps out of Netanyahu, who does not trust the gentiles to supply ironclad international recognition of Israel’s borders, and fears that the America under Hopey Changey Obama is increasingly unreliable as its international sponsor.
Probably impossible- or extremely unlikely, the real solution for Israel would be to firstly accept that it is a State Too Late. Negotiation with its Arab neighbours, all of which face their own and real problems of legitimacy and popular support, could fast forward to a vastly more secure and productive set of community based solutions. In its favour, Israel has a democracy framework, it has an economy that even without massive infusions from the USA and Europe can survive, especially if its population falls as the stable state shrinks to a more-realistic size, composition and structure.
For such pipe dreams to have any potential of becoming real, however, Israel’s current political and corporate warfare state leaderships must entirely disappear – along with its neighbouring countries, Europe, the USA, and elsewhere.
- When Britain lost control of Egypt in 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden said he wanted the nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser “destroyed … murdered … I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt”. Those insolent Arabs, Winston Churchill had urged in 1951, should be driven “into the gutter from which they should never have emerged”.
The language of colonialism may have been modified; the spirit and the hypocrisy are unchanged. A new imperial phase is unfolding in direct response to the Arab uprising that began in January and has shocked Washington and Europe, causing an Eden-style panic. The loss of the Egyptian tyrant Mubarak was grievous, though not irretrievable; an American-backed counter-revolution is under way as the military regime in Cairo is seduced with new bribes and power shifting from the street to political groups that did not initiate the revolution. The western aim, as ever, is to stop authentic democracy and reclaim control.
AN ELITE AGENDA: Obama is doing the job he was hired to do by his elite masters.
Libya is the immediate opportunity. The Nato attack on Libya, with the UN Security Council assigned to mandate a bogus “no fly zone” to “protect civilians”, is strikingly similar to the final destruction of Yugoslavia in 1999. There was no UN cover for the bombing of Serbia and the “rescue” of Kosovo, yet the propaganda echoes today. Like Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Gaddafi is a “new Hitler”, plotting “genocide” against his people. There is no evidence of this, as there was no genocide in Kosovo. In Libya there is a tribal civil war; and the armed uprising against Gaddafi has long been appropriated by the Americans, French and British, their planes attacking residential Tripoli with uranium-tipped missiles and the submarine HMS Triumph firing Tomahawk missiles, a repeat of the “shock and awe” in Iraq that left thousands of civilians dead and maimed. As in Iraq, the victims, which include countless incinerated Libyan army conscripts, are media unpeople.
In the “rebel” east, the terrorising and killing of black African immigrants is not news. On 22 May, a rare piece in the Washington Post described the repression, lawlessness and death squads in the “liberated zones” just as visiting EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, declared she had found only “great aspirations” and “leadership qualities”. In demonstrating these qualities, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the “rebel leader” and Gaddafi’s justice minister until February, pledged, “Our friends … will have the best opportunity in future contracts with Libya.” The east holds most of Libya’s oil, the greatest reserves in Africa. In March the rebels, with expert foreign guidance, “transferred” to Benghazi the Libyan Central Bank, a wholly owned state institution. This is unprecedented. Meanwhile, the US and the EU “froze” almost US$100 billion in Libyan funds, “the largest sum ever blocked”, according to official statements. It is the biggest bank robbery in history.
The French elite are enthusiastic robbers and bombers. Nicholas Sarkozy’s imperial design is for a French-dominated Mediterranean Union (UM), which would allow France to “return” to its former colonies in North Africa and profit from privileged investment and cheap labour. Gaddafi described the Sarkozy plan as “an insult” that was “taking us for fools”. The Merkel government in Berlin agreed, fearing its old foe would diminish Germany in the EU, and abstained in the Security Council vote on Libya.
Like the attack on Yugoslavia and the charade of Milosevic’s trial, the International Criminal Court is being used by the US, France and Britain to prosecute Gaddafi while his repeated offers of a ceasefire are ignored. Gaddafi is a Bad Arab. David Cameron’s government and its verbose top general want to eliminate this Bad Arab, like the Obama administration killed a famously Bad Arab in Pakistan recently. The crown prince of Bahrain, on the other hand, is a Good Arab. On 19 May, he was warmly welcomed to Britain by Cameron with a photo-call on the steps of 10 Downing Street. In March, the same crown prince slaughtered unarmed protestors and allowed Saudi forces to crush his country’s democracy movement. The Obama administration has rewarded Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive regimes on earth, with a $US60 billion arms deal, the biggest in US history. The Saudis have the most oil. They are the Best Arabs.
The assault on Libya, a crime under the Nuremberg standard, is Britain’s 46th military “intervention” in the Middle East since 1945. Like its imperial partners, Britain’s goal is to control Africa’s oil. Cameron is not Anthony Eden, but almost. Same school. Same values. In the media-pack, the words colonialism and imperialism are no longer used, so that the cynical and the credulous can celebrate state violence in its more palatable form.
Author John Pilger’s film “The War You Don’t See”.
And as “Mr. Hopey Changey” (the name that Ted Rall, the great American cartoonist, gives Barack Obama), is fawned upon by the British elite and launches another insufferable presidential campaign, the Anglo-American reign of terror proceeds in Afghanistan and elsewhere, with the murder of people by unmanned drones – a US/Israel innovation, embraced by Obama. For the record, on a scorecard of imposed misery, from secret trials and prisons and the hounding of whistleblowers and the criminalising of dissent to the incarceration and impoverishment of his own people, mostly black people, Obama is as bad as George W. Bush.
The Palestinians understand all this. As their young people courageously face the violence of Israel’s blood-racism, carrying the keys of their grandparents’ stolen homes, they are not even included in Mr. Hopey Changey’s list of peoples in the Middle East whose liberation is long overdue. What the oppressed need, he said on 19 May, is a dose of “America’s interests [that] are essential to them”. He insults us all.
A helicopter mysteriously landed at the scene of Dr David Kelly’s death shortly after the body was found.
The aircraft only remained on the ground for five minutes before leaving, suggesting it either deposited or collected somebody or something.
Details from its flight log, released under the Freedom of Information Act, show that the helicopter – hired by Thames Valley police – landed at Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire at 10.55am on July 18, 2003, 90 minutes after the body was discovered by volunteer search teams.
BIZARRE: A helicopter briefly landed at the scene of Dr Kelly's death - after the body was found - at Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire. Details of the aircraft, hired by police, have been withheld (file picture)
Significantly, the flight log has been heavily redacted, making it impossible to know who was on board or what its exact purpose was.
The flight was not mentioned in oral evidence at the Hutton Inquiry, set up by Tony Blair to investigate Dr Kelly’s death.
Dr Andrew Watt, who has previously raised questions about the suicide finding reached by Lord Hutton, has written to Attorney General Dominic Grieve drawing his attention to the flight.
Dr Watt, a clinical pharmacologist, said: ‘If the purpose of the helicopter flight was innocent, one has to ask why it was kept secret.’
The riddle joins the growing list of unanswered questions about the circumstances of the government weapons inspector’s final moments.
It emerges in the same week that Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell were accused of lying to the Chilcot Inquiry into the lead-up to the Iraq war.
The Mail reported yesterday how declassified documents from the inquiry revealed a spy chief disputed Campbell’s claim that the dossier was ‘not the case for war’.
A senior diplomat also accused the former prime minister of distorting expert reports about the post-war chaos.
Dr Kelly is said to have killed himself in woods near his home after being named as the prime source of a BBC report accusing the Labour government of lying to take Britain into war in Iraq…
Uniquely for a suspicious death, no coroner’s inquest has been held. Instead, the Hutton Inquiry found he committed suicide by swallowing painkillers and cutting his wrist with a blunt knife.
Dr Kelly left no suicide note and had arranged to meet his daughter on July 17, 2003, the day he was last seen alive.
He had also made plans to see friends the following week and, on the morning of his death, booked a return ticket to Iraq in connection with his work.
The latest disclosure comes as Attorney General Mr Grieve prepares to announce whether there will be an inquest into Dr Kelly’s death. He has waited almost a year to reach a decision.
In opposition, Mr Grieve told at least two fellow MPs privately that he had misgivings about the Kelly affair.
Last June, after the Coalition was formed, he asked anyone with new information about Dr Kelly’s death to send it to him and over the last nine months has been informed of several pieces of material evidence which were never raised at the Hutton Inquiry.
Crucially, a non-statutory public inquiry such as Hutton has none of the powers of a coroner’s inquest.
Witnesses, including Mr Blair and Mr Campbell, did not swear an oath before giving evidence.
A group of doctors has begun a legal action to try to secure an inquest.
Papers submitted through their lawyers Leigh Day & Co say the suicide finding is medically implausible and should be investigated fully by an experienced coroner, not a judge.
The doctors have set up a fund to raise £25,000 for a judicial review in case Mr Grieve decides there is no case for an inquest.
Dr Michael Powers QC, representing the doctors, said: ‘Dominic Grieve has been sitting on a substantial amount of new evidence for a very long time.
‘In law, the case for a coroner’s inquest is unanswerable.’
Well, in the case of Muammar Qaddafi it’s not only twice: once for his daughter, murdered by the United States bombing on his home in 1986, and again on 30 April 2011 when his youngest son, Saif al Arab, but yet again for three young children, grandbabies of Muammar Qaddafi killed along with Saif at the family home.
Now, I watched Cindy Sheehan as she bared her soul before us in her grief; I cried when Cindy cried. Now, how must Qaddafi and his wife feel? And the people of Libya, parents of all the nation’s children gone too soon. I don’t even want to imagine.
MURDERED BY NATO: Saif-al-Arab killed in cold blood by the US, UK and France.
All my mother could say in astonishment was, “They killed the babies, they killed his grandbabies.”
The news reports, however, didn’t last more than one half of a news cycle because on 1 May, at a hastily assembled press conference, President Obama announced the murder of Osama bin Laden.
Well, I haven’t forgotten my empathy for Cindy Sheehan; I haven’t forgotten my concern for the children of Iraq that Madeleine Albright said were OK to kill by U.S. sanctions if U.S. geopolitical goals were achieved. I care about the children of Palestine who throw stones at Israeli soldiers and get laser-guided bullets to their brains in return. I care about the people of North Africa and West Asia who are ready to risk their lives for freedom. In fact, I care about all of the children — from Appalachia to the Cancer Alley, from New York City to San Diego, and everywhere in-between.
On 22 May 2011, I had the opportunity to visit the residence of the Qaddafi family, bombed to smithereens by NATO. For a leader, the house seemed small in comparison, say, to the former Clinton family home in Chappaqua or the Obama family home. It was a small whitewashed suburban type house in a typical residential area in metropolitan Tripoli. It was surrounded by dozens of other family homes.
I spoke with a neighbor who described how three separate smart bombs hit the home and exploded, another one not exploding. According to the BBC, the NATO military operations chief stated that a “command and control center” had been hit. That is a lie. As anyone who visits the home can see, this home had nothing to do with NATO’s war. The strike against this home had everything to do with NATO adopting a policy of targeted assassination and extra-judicial killing — clearly illegal.
The neighbor said he found Saif Al-Arab in his bedroom underneath rubble; the three young grandchildren were in a different room and they were shredded to pieces. He told of how he picked up as many pieces as he possibly could. He told us that there are still pieces there that he could not get. He asked us to note the smell — not the putrid smell of rotting flesh, but a sweet smell. I did smell it and thought there was an air freshener nearby. It smelled to me of roses. He asked me why this was done and who was going to hold NATO accountable.
Muammar Qaddafi was at the house. But he was outside near where the animals are kept. It is a miracle that he survived. From the looks of that house and the small guest house beside it, the strike was a complete success if the goal was to totally and thoroughly demolish the structure and everything inside it.
NATO wants us to believe that toys, items and clothing, an opened Holy Koran, and a soccer board game are the appointments found in military command and control offices. I wonder if we could find such articles in NATO’s office in Brussels.
The opened Holy Koran seemed to be frozen in time. In fact, there was a clock dangling from its cord — dangling in space. And indeed, for the four young people in that house at the time of NATO’s attack, time had stopped.
The concussion from the bombs were so great that eerie tile on the walls and floors of the home had been knocked from the walls. Black burn marks scorched the walls. The force broke a marble or granite countertop. The bathtub was literally split into two parts. Shards of the bomb were everywhere. I wondered if the place was now contaminated with depleted uranium.
The Qaddafi home is a crime scene — a murder scene. The United States prisons are full of men and women who are innocent — even on death row. I wonder where the guilty who are never prosecuted go.
Now, if the International Court of Justice were really a repository of justice, it would be investigating this crime. Instead, it is looking for yet another African to prosecute. We in the United States are familiar with this: on our local news every night, we are saturated with photos of Black and Brown criminals with the implication being that White people don’t commit crime. The moment the face of someone arrested is not shown, then we know that the culprit is White. It’s the unwritten code that we people of color all live by wherever in the world we might happen to be. Global apartheid is alive and well and exists on many levels.
I left the house sick in my heart. As I was about to depart, the neighbor begged me, asked me over and over again, why had this happened? What had they done to deserve this? He seemed to not want me to leave. Honestly, I think I was his little piece of America, his little piece of President Obama and I could help him to understand why this course of action was necessary from my President’s point of view. He said NATO should just leave them alone and let them sort out their problems on their own.
I did leave his presence, but that man’s face will never leave me.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”
In response to my previous article, I received the following quite about Buddha from Shiva Shankar who excerpted Walpola Rahula’s What The Buddha Taught:
… The Buddha not only taught non-violence and peace, but he even went to the field of battle itself and intervened personally, and prevented war, as in the case of the dispute between the Sakyas and the Koliyas, who were prepared to fight over the question of the waters of the Rohini. And his words once prevented King Ajatasattu from attacking the kingdom of the Vajjis. …
… Here is a lesson for the world today. The ruler of an empire publicly turning his back on war and violence and embraced the message of peace and non-violence. There is no historical evidence to show that any neighboring king took advantage of Asoka’s piety to attack him militarily, or that there was any revolt or rebellion within his empire during his lifetime. On the contrary there was peace throughout the land, and even countries outside his empire seem to have accepted his benign leadership. …
Please don’t allow special interest press and war mongering gatekeepers of the left to blot out the tragedy unfolding in Libya. Please don’t allow them to take away our chance to live in peace throughout our land and with countries inside and outside our hemisphere. Congress should vote to end NATO’s action in Libya and barring that should assert its Constitutional prerogatives and require the President to come to it for authorization of this war. And then, Congress should heed the wisdom of the people of our country who are against this war and vote for peace.
21st Century Wire
