Stephen Lendman

At the same time the Pentagon issued its new Nuclear Posture Review, Obama officially ordered the murder of a US citizen, Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki - accused of terrorism and an Al Qaeda connection without evidence.

Earlier on February 4, Washington Post writer Ellen Nakashima headlined, "Intelligence chief acknowledges US may target Americans involved in terrorism," saying:

"Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair acknowledged (February 3 in testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) that government agencies (specifically CIA operatives and Special Forces death squads) may kill US citizens abroad who are involved in terrorist activities if they are 'taking action that threatens Americans," or administration officials say so.

Obama's Nuclear Posture Review - New Policy or Same Old Same Old?

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Giordano Bruno

The word “terrorist” has assumed numerous presumptive connotations over the decades, and this trend of “redefining” the vicious label to suit certain governmental needs has only intensified in recent years, especially since 9/11. Its graduation as widely used political terminology gives it an almost archetypal quality, because it has the ability to trigger abundant and subconscious emotional reactions in the populace. However, these reactions are usually based on mass delusions: false ideas of what terrorism is, what it is not, and who is actually guilty of these loosely classified crimes. It is a weighted word, filled with projections, biases, and faulty perceptions.

Governments across the world, and organizations such as the UN, have considered “officially” categorizing what a terrorist actually is, but claim that they have been unable to reach an accord that satisfies everyone. I feel it is much more likely that ruling bodies, most especially the UN, would like nothing better than to keep the specifics of the term as hazy as possible for as long as possible. The more elusive it is, the more powerful it becomes to those elite minorities who wish to retain and centralize political control. While we tend to associate terrorism with Muslim extremism, because this is the image we have been force-fed for the past ten years, that association can just as easily be swayed or redirected to someone else depending on which person or people become most obstructive to the government’s immediate desires. At bottom, under the current cultural climate, anyone can be labeled a terrorist for any reason, even American Citizens liable for nothing more than exercising their Constitutional rights.

As our country spirals towards certain monetary derailment, scathing discontentment with the establishment is sure to arise. When trusted leadership betrays, when criminality becomes a political guideline, when the corrupt loot the world, burning the people alive in their ever expanding grip, invariably, defiance is born. The Globalists know this well. They have seen it time and again, and have learned from past mistakes. Instead of immediately attempting to crush this opposition of individualists, the Elites now preempt violence with “false cultural identification”; the public demonization of those who would inevitably rebel BEFORE they even do so, much like a murderer who admonishes his future victims for wanting to defend themselves. The wise man would find this tactic absurd, or insane, but wisdom is in short supply these days.

In this article, we will explore the steps that the Elites are taking to prime the masses for the label we will soon be hearing daily; “Homegrown Terrorist”. We will also take a look at the organizations and think tanks that manufacture this propaganda and mold it for public consumption…

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Jonathan Cook

"During her conscription, Kam copied possibly hundreds of army documents that revealed systematic law-breaking by the Israeli high command operating in the occupied Palestinian territories, including orders to ignore court rulings. She was working at the time in the office of Brig Gen Yair Naveh, who is in charge of operations in the West Bank."

”[Fugitive Israeli journalist Uri Blau’s] reports [based on Anat Kam's leaked information] included revelations that the senior command had approved targeting Palestinian bystanders during the military’s extra-judicial assassinations in the occupied territories; that, in violation of a commitment to the high court, the army had issued orders to execute wanted Palestinians even if they could be safely apprehended; and that the Defence Ministry had a compiled a secret report showing that the great majority of settlements in the West Bank were illegal even under Israeli law (all are illegal in international law).”

What is misleadingly being called in Israel the “Anat Kam espionage affair” is quickly revealing the dark underbelly of a nation that has worshipped for decades at the altar of a security state.

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Dahr Jamail

The dismantling of Iraqi intellectual life may have been a deliberate strategy, Roger Matthews learns (Dahr Jamail contributed a chapter to this book.)

Battle to destroy hearts and minds

I first went to Iraq in 1984 to work on archaeological excavations near Mosul. Our workers were Yezidis from the neighbouring villages and together we worked long hours in the hot sun. Over the following few years I lived in Iraq as resident director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and worked on projects all over the country. We suspected then that we might be living the last years of a golden age of Mesopotamian discovery, uncovering Iraq’s uniquely rich and important cultural heritage in collaboration with colleagues from Iraq and many other countries.

Today, the discipline of Mesopotamian archaeology lies in tatters; Iraq’s universities and its antiquities service face an uncertain future in the midst of a harrowing present; standards of education, literacy and international engagement have plummeted to levels unknown in the history of Iraq; and the world continues largely to turn its back on calls for assistance from our Iraqi friends and colleagues. All this in a country renowned throughout the Arab world and beyond for its sophistication and open-mindedness, epitomised in the Arabic saying “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads”.

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Lance Freeman

"SS American Star": There isn't much left of her now - Seeing the remaining vestiges emotes
powerful feelings and stirs the imagination.

Americans, I have some bad news for you: You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home. I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.

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S. Fred Singer

Was it necessary? Colosseum in Rome with its lights off during
Earth Hour on March 27. The 'climate establishment', with a vested
interest in maintaining climate scares and fanning fears, is
desperately trying to save the IPCC and the myth of anthropogenic
(human-caused) global warming. But the public is wiser now.

'Climategate' suggests a conspiracy to commit fraud by a small gang of influential UN panel scientists

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has acknowledged they made a mistake in their projection of 2035 as the date when all the Himalayan glaciers would melt. But the Himalayan blunder is not a one-off mistake; it is only the latest of a long list of errors that have dogged the IPCC over the past 10 years. And by now, after the 'Climategate' flap of last November, 'Glaciergate' seems to have opened the floodgates with reports on 'Amazongate', 'Natural-disaster-gate', and many more.

In their 2001 report, the IPCC had claimed that the 20th century was 'unusual' and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases. Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period (around 1000AD, when Vikings were able to settle in southern Greenland and grow crops there) and the following Little Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800AD). Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the IPCC and the statistical errors in their analysis. Since then, the litany of IPCC errors continues to grow.

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Derry Brownfield

I consider Wayne Hage one of the most intelligent men I ever met. On our very first visit he was explaining the World Bank, the International Monetary fund and how the world bankers planned on collateralizing the world debt with land. Not just the U.S. national debt, but the “WORLD” debt. A listener sent me a copy of a report of the FOURTH WORLD WILDERNESS CONGRESS, which was held in Denver in 1987. Over 1500 people from sixty countries were told that wilderness lands were to protect the reindeer, the spotted owl and other endangered species. Ninety percent of the group consisted of conservationists, ecologists, government and United Nations bureaucrats. The other ten percent were world banking heavyweights, such as David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank, London banker Edmund de Rothschild and the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, James Baker, who gave the keynote address. George W. Hunt, an investment councilor, served as official host and sat in on all the meetings. It was George Hunt that wrote the report from which I have gleaned much of my information.

During the first three days, the group was told that the WILDERNESS CONGRESS was about beating the ozone deterioration and bringing the rain forests back. The following days were closed to the public. With only the bankers in attendance the topics discussed centered around the creation of a “WORLD CONSERVATION BANK” with collateral being derived from receipt of wilderness properties throughout the world. This bank would have central bank powers similar to the Federal Reserve. It would create currency and loans and engage in international discounting, counter-trade, barter and swap actions. Rothschild personally conducted the monetary matters and the creation of this WORLD CONSERVATION BANK. This bank would refinance by swapping debt for assets. A country with a huge national debt would receive money to pay off the debt by swapping the debt for wilderness lands. The plan was to swap one trillion dollars of Third World Debt into this new bank. In the long term, when the countries won’t be able to pay off the loans, governments from around the world will give title to their wilderness lands to the bankers.

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Stephen Lendman

The modern roots go back to Zionism's founding at the First Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland in 1897, its program being:

"Establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Eretz Yisrael."

Five decades later, it was accomplished by dispossessing indigenous Palestinians, denying them the right to their land, creating a new Jewish identity, legitimizing Jews as rightful owners, and using superior military force to assure it against defenseless civilians, no match against their powerful adversary.

Leading up to and after its War of Independence, Israel stayed politically and militarily hard line, negotiating from strength, choosing confrontation over diplomacy, naked aggression as a form of self-defense, and occupation to seize as much of historic Palestine as possible to secure an ethnically pure Jewish state - policies called "Israelification (and) De-Arabization" to preserve a "Jewish character."

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Tom Eley

"The public justification for killing Awlaki is based on bald assertions and hearsay from intelligence sources who refuse to even identify themselves. The executive branch arrogates to itself the powers of judge, jury, and executioner, and those targeted for liquidation have no right to question the supposed evidence against them."

For the first time in history, an American president has officially ordered the assassination of a US citizen.

President Barack Obama has approved the “targeted killing” of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born Muslim cleric who is reported to be in hiding in Yemen. No substantial evidence has been brought to bear against Awlaki, 38, who is accused of terrorism, and he will be afforded no legal recourse against the death sentence.

Word of Obama’s decision has been intentionally leaked by multiple intelligence officials to various media sources. Reuters and the Wall Street Journal published news articles on the story on Tuesday, and these were confirmed by stories in the Washington Post and New York Times on Wednesday.

The killing of citizens declared by the executive branch to be “terrorists” was first announced as state policy by Obama’s director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, in February congressional hearings. “We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community,” Blair said. “If we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”

Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico, has been linked by e-mail communication to Nidal Malik Hasan, the army psychologist who gunned down 13 soldiers in a November rampage at Ford Hood, Texas. No evidence has been presented, however, to suggest that Awlaki in any way planned or ordered the attack.

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William Blum

Fatima Ahmed was born in Fallujah with deformities
that include two heads (The WE!)

When did it begin, all this "We take your [call/problem/question] very seriously"? With answering-machine hell? As you wait endlessly, the company or government agency assures you that they take seriously whatever reason you're calling. What a kind and thoughtful world we live in.

The BBC reported last month that doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the United States during its fierce onslaughts of 2004 and subsequently, which left much of the city in ruins. "It was like an earthquake," a local engineer who was running for a national assembly seat told the Washington Post in 2005. "After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was Fallujah." Now, the level of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than in Europe.

The BBC correspondent also saw children in the city who were suffering from paralysis or brain damage, and a photograph of one baby who was born with three heads. He added that he heard many times that officials in Fallujah had warned women that they should not have children. One doctor in the city had compared data about birth defects from before 2003 — when she saw about one case every two months — with the situation now, when she saw cases every day. "I've seen footage of babies born with an eye in the middle of the forehead, the nose on the forehead," she said.

A spokesman for the US military, Michael Kilpatrick, said it always took public health concerns "very seriously", but that "No studies to date have indicated environmental issues resulting in specific health issues." [1]

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Pam Martens

America is held out to the world as a meritocracy. You work hard, you play by the rules, you make sound judgment calls, you succeed. That’s the American dream. Right? That’s what the President of the United States should exemplify in his actions. Right?

Then how does one explain the individuals who represent the abject failures of financial and regulatory theory chosen by the President to dominate the dialogue on financial reform. How does one reconcile President Obama appointing Lawrence Summers as head of the National Economic Council after Mr. Summers played a central role in rolling back the safeguards that led to the current financial crisis.

This is what Mr. Summers had to say at the November 12, 1999 signing ceremony for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the draconian legislation that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and allowed commercial banks holding insured deposits to merge with investment banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies: the very same combinations that led to the 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression:

“Let me welcome you all here today for the signing of this historic legislation. With this bill, the American financial system takes a major step forward towards the 21st century, one that will benefit American consumers, business, and the national economy for many years to come…I believe we have all found the right framework for America's future financial system.”

Mr. Summers was wrong. This was not the “framework for America’s future” but the framework for epic financial collapse. Why isn’t Mr. Summers in an unemployment line along with the millions of Americans his bad judgment call put out of work?

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Chris Floyd

This Iraqi child was injured in the attack.

So, thanks to Wikileaks.org, Americans now know that their soldiers often gun down civilians in occupied countries during reckless missions based on little or no intelligence (in every sense of the word). This will no doubt come as a great shock -- yea, a veritable political earthquake -- in a land where the top commander in what is now its chief war just recently confessed that his troops were slaughtering an "amazing" number of civilians who posed no threat whatsoever.

We all recall the vast hue and cry that greeted this astounding admission by Afghan top gun General Stanley McChrystal, who was hand-picked by the Nobel Peace Laureate himself to lead America's noble crusade to stamp out Muslim extremism in Central Asia by killing innocent Muslims all over Central Asia. No less than the New York Times its own self reported prominently on McChrystal's chilling candor.

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Christopher Booker

Tumucumaque in northern Brazil has been
designated a 'carbon sink'

The carbon credits scheme would make WWF and its partners much richer, but with no lowering of overall CO2 emissions, writes Christopher Booker.

If the world’s largest, richest environmental campaigning group, the WWF – formerly the World Wildlife Fund – announced that it was playing a leading role in a scheme to preserve an area of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of Switzerland, many people might applaud, thinking this was just the kind of cause the WWF was set up to promote. Amazonia has long been near the top of the list of the world’s environmental cconcerns, not just because it includes easily the largest and most bio-diverse area of rainforest on the planet, but because its billions of trees contain the world’s largest land-based store of CO2 – so any serious threat to the forest can be portrayed as a major contributor to global warming.

If it then emerged, however, that a hidden agenda of the scheme to preserve this chunk of the forest was to allow the WWF and its partners to share the selling of carbon credits worth $60 billion, to enable firms in the industrial world to carry on emitting CO2 just as before, more than a few eyebrows might be raised. The idea is that credits representing the CO2 locked into this particular area of jungle – so remote that it is not under any threat – should be sold on the international market, allowing thousands of companies in the developed world to buy their way out of having to restrict their carbon emissions. The net effect would simply be to make the WWF and its partners much richer while making no contribution to lowering overall CO2 emissions.

WWF, which already earns £400 million yearly, much of it contributed by governments and taxpayers, has long been at the centre of efforts to talk up the threat to the Amazon rainforest – as shown recently by the furore over a much-publicised passage in the 2007 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s claim that 40 per cent of the forest is threatened by global warming, it turned out, was not based on any scientific evidence, but simply on WWF propaganda, which had wholly distorted the findings of an earlier study on the threat posed to the forest, not by climate change but by logging.

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David Lindorff

"[This] president, like his predecessor, has, almost since his first day in office, continued down a road of criminal and unconstitutional behavior that threatens the survival of Constitutional government in the United States."

Back in 2005-06, I wrote a book, The Case for Impeachment, in which I made the argument that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as other key figures in the Bush/Cheney administration--Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales--should be impeached for war crimes, as well as crimes against the Constitution of the United States.

These days, when I mention the book’s title, people sometimes ask, half in jest, whether I’m referring to the current president, Barack Obama.

Sadly, it is time to say, just 14 months into the current term of this new president, that yes, this president, and some of his subordinates, are also guilty of impeachable crimes--including many of the same ones committed by Bush and Cheney.

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Charles Glass

BBC correspondent John Simpson reported on March 4 that the number of defects in newborn babies in the Iraqi town of Fallujah had risen dramatically since the American assault there at the end of 2004. Some people in the town blame the abnormalities in their children on whatever chemicals the US Marines may have used in their conquest of the Sunni Muslim redoubt. Dr. Samira al-Ani, a paediatrician at Fallujah’s General Hospital, told Simpson that two or three children were born each day with serious cardiac problems. Before the first American attack on Fallujah in two years earlier, she noticed similar ailments in one baby every two months. “I have nothing documented,” she admitted, “but I can tell you that year by year the number [is] increasing.”

The Iraqi government, which supported the American attack with troops of its own, denies there has been any increase. “The US military authorities,” Simpson said, “are absolutely correct when they say they are not aware of any official reports indicating an increase in birth defects in Fallujah—no official reports exist.” Nor are any likely to. By any standard, though, this was a big story. John Simpson is a serious journalist and a friend, and I listened carefully to his report that morning on the BBC World Service. I waited in vain for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other serious American journals to take up the story. All I read was a brief item on the CBS News website quoting Simpson.

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Stephen Lendman

After General Stanley McChrystal took charge of US/NATO Afghan forces last June, systematic atrocities escalated sharply after promises of kinder, gentler killing (an oxymoron), winning hearts and minds, and fewer civilian casualties as a "paramount" objective - now much higher the result of more than a fourfold increase in night raids, targeting civilians, including children, while they sleep.

McChrystal's resume exposed his history - death squad terror, mostly against civilians, the same counterinsurgency he waged throughout Iraq as Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), especially in Al-Anbar Province that increased violence to curb it. It's no surprise for a man this writer earlier called "a hired gun, an assassin, a man known for committing war crime atrocities as (JSOC) head" - since 1980 comprised of Army Delta Force and Navy Seal units, killers to reign terror on vulnerable targets, mainly civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, and earlier in Vietnam as part of Operation Phoenix. More on that below.

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Tom Eley

Preparations advance for assault on Kandahar

A NATO military statement issued Sunday admitted that US Special Forces commandos carried out the execution-style killings of three women and two men in a February 12 night raid in southeastern Afghanistan. Among the dead women were two pregnant mothers, with 16 children between them. The third was a teenage girl. For weeks the US-led NATO officials had denied killing the women.

After the killings US Special Forces dug their bullets out of the dead women’s bodies and treated the holes with alcohol to erase forensic evidence, an Afghanistan government investigation has reportedly determined. A United Nations official confirmed that the Afghan investigation found evidence US soldiers had tampered with the crime scene. These reports are substantiated by family members and local authorities, who say US soldiers blocked access for seven hours to the home in Gardez, the regional capital of eastern Paktia province, while they attempted to cover up the crime.

The US-led coalition, while admitting for the first time that its forces killed the women, now contends that it did not attempt a cover-up. “All regrettable,” said Rear Adm. Greg Smith, the top military spokesman in Kabul, of the deaths. “That said, there is absolutely no evidence that the forces covered anything up.” This is a bald lie. In fact, all the available evidence shows there was a cover-up, and a crude one at that.

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Chris Floyd

Charles Davis (via Jon Schwarz) has an incisive take on the high fluttery flail induced in our imperial courtiers by the latest Tea Party tantrums. Davis demolishes a piece in The Nation by progressive paladin Maria Harris-Lacewell, in which she waxes lyrical -- not to nonsensical -- about the great threat to "the legitimacy of the state" posed by Tea Partiers disrespecting our elected officials. These acts -- spitting, swearing, insulting, shouting, etc. -- which might have been considered legitimate expressions of citizen anger (or at least good clean fun) if directed at, say, George Dubya or Dick Nixon, are now to be regarded as -- I kid you not -- "an act of sedition" when aimed at the ruling party.

It's this kind of thing that gives insipid sycophancy a bad name. But Davis is on the case:

Now, considering that U.S. government imprisons more of its own citizens than any other in the history, with 25 percent of the world's prisoners; that it has more military bases in more countries than any previous empire in history, and has killed millions of people from Iraq to Vietnam; and that its current head, Barack Obama, is openly targeting for extrajudicial killing Americans and foreigners alike, one might ask: why is a liberal magazine so concerned about this state's legitimacy?

Or as Thoreau put it (in a quote that is pretty much the slogan for this blog): "How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."

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Jeremy Scahill

Three US special forces soldiers were killed in northwest Pakistan this week, confirming that the US military is more deeply engaged on the ground in Pakistan than previously acknowledged by the White House and Pentagon (see "The Secret US War in Pakistan," November 23, 2009). The soldiers died Wednesday in Lower Dir when their convoy was hit by a car bomber in what appeared to be a targeted strike against the Americans. According to CENTCOM, the US soldiers were in the country on a mission to train the Pakistani Frontier Corps, a federal paramilitary force run by Pakistan's Interior Ministry that patrols the country's volatile border with Afghanistan. A Pakistani journalist who witnessed the attack said that some of the US soldiers were dressed in civilian clothes and had been identified by their Pakistani handlers as journalists. The New York Times estimates that there are sixty to a hundred such US special forces "trainers" in Pakistan. Capt. Jack Hanzlik, a spokesman for the United States Central Command said there are about 200 US military personnel in Pakistan.

While the deaths of the soldiers has sparked impassioned discussion in Pakistan about the extent of the US military presence, the Pentagon has emphasized that the US soldiers were in Pakistan on a training mission at the invitation of the Pakistani government, saying they were not engaged in direct combat.

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Stephen Lendman

Lest anyone think members of organized religions are above reproach, take note.

In his new book "God and His Demons," Michael Parenti confronts both Old and New Testaments saying:

"The god of the Holy Bible - so much adored in the United States and elsewhere - is ferociously vindictive, neurotically jealous, intolerant, vainglorious, punitive, wrathful, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sadistic and homicidal. As they say, it's all in the Bible. Beware of those who act in the name of such a god. Were we to encounter these vicious traits in an ordinary man, we would judge him to be in need of lifelong incarceration at a maximum-security facility. At the very least, we would not prattle on about how he works his wonders in mysterious ways."

In fact, 'biblical Jesus qualifies quite well as founder and forerunner of an intolerant Christianity."

Leaving child molestation implied but unaddressed, the Bible deals with sexuality in broader terms, including incest, adultery, homosexuality, and rape - children vulnerable to all except adultery.

Jesus also preached love your enemies and return good for evil, a message saying child molesters deserve forgiveness, not punishment, that's an open invitation for pedophiles, an epidemic now raging in the Catholic church but one with longstanding roots.

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