Stephen Lendman

Western media, especially America's, mostly ignore multiple Obama wars (including against Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia), focusing mainly on promoting terror bombing Libya, slaughtering civilians to save them.

Ongoing since March 19, killing and destruction continue daily. NATO's second in command, US Admiral Samuel Locklear, told Congress that Washington wants Gaddafi assassinated. Earlier, one of his sons and three grandchildren were murdered, as well as around 40 Libyan imans, attending a peace conference to end the carnage. Ruthlessly, Obama, the peace candidate, wants it continued, claiming lawless executive privilege to do it.

On the Progressive Radio News Hour, live Tripoli reports discussed hospitals, schools, residential homes, and other non-military targets bombed, civilians killed, anti-NATO anger, and growing popular Gaddafi support, including a million Libyans rallying in Tripoli on his behalf.

On air, Cynthia McKinney said she saw it all, including fishermen killed at sea, food and medicine imports blocked, evidence that mercenary rebels murdered, tortured, harassed and raped dark-skinned residents like herself, and daily terror bombings - war crimes by any standard to conquer, colonize and plunder Libya for profit and greater regional control.

Like McKinney and other Progressive Radio guests, Tripoli-based Western journalists also witness NATO crimes. Nonetheless, their reports airbrush them, providing a sanitized version of war, detached from reality they conceal, no matter the daily horror enough to give anyone nightmares and second thoughts about who's right and wrong in this conflict.

Is there any doubt? Does it take keen perceptiveness to know? Can human misery be blocked in turning out daily copy?

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Bill Van Auken
WSWS

From a previous US attack on Afghan civilians (AFP/Getty)

At least eight women and two children were killed Wednesday when a NATO warplane dropped a bomb on a house in Afghanistan’s eastern Khost district.

The house was targeted after members of an armed resistance group sought shelter there while fleeing a combined force of US and Afghan National Army troops, the provincial police chief, Sardar Mohammed Zazai told the New York Times.

Earlier Wednesday, several hundred Afghans took to the streets in an angry protest over a US-NATO air raid that claimed the lives of two young shepherds in Ghazni province, southwest of Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul.

According to Reuters, over 250 villagers marched from villages in the Khogyani district to the provincial capital, Ghazni City, carrying the shrouded bodies of the boys and chanting “death to foreign troops.”

The air strikes were only the latest in a series of military actions that have claimed the lives of Afghan civilians. As in all such attacks, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claimed that the air strikes were carried out against legitimate military targets.

In regard to the bombing in Khost that killed 10 women and children, the Times reported:

“A NATO spokesman said he was familiar with the attack but did not have details yet and said that there may have been civilians present in the place where the Taliban took shelter.”

An ISAF spokesman claimed that only one person was killed in the Ghazni strike, after he had been seen digging, supposedly to plant an improvised explosive device.

The local residents who demonstrated, however, insisted that the two victims, both under the age of 15, were killed while herding cattle and were not “insurgents.”

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Gilad Atzmon

In an audio interview, Harvard University Yiddish Professor Ruth Wisse has condemned ongoing attempts by international activists to set sail for Gaza, on what she calls a “kill-the-Jews flotilla.”

“The purpose of the flotilla is to discredit the Israeli attempt to protect itself and to give Hamas a free hand amassing weapons to use against Israeli civilians.” [Wisse also forms a new type of ‘Jewish solipsism,’ saying] “It should be called for what it is: a 'kill-the-Jews flotilla. If it is called by its proper name, then it will be recognized for what it is.”

Here is the Yiddish logic: label first, then grasp accordingly. However, I would like to remind Wisse that as things stand in the Middle East, it is not the Flotilla peace activists or the democratically elected Hamas who kill. It is actually the Jewish State that is doing the killing, en masse, and in the name of the Jewish people.

The Saviour of the West

But Israel is not just about Jewish interests, according to the Yiddish Professor, it has a far greater role. Israel is the “fighting front line of what we used to call Western civilization, of the democratic free world.”

It is nice to find a Yiddish professor being so openly ‘nostalgic’ about Western civilisation, but I have to point out that Wisse is not familiar enough with the crucial philosophical distinction between Athens and Jerusalem: while Jerusalem stands for tribalism, chosen-ness and brutality, Athens represents the birth of the West, i.e. universalism, reason, Christianity , and ethical thinking (something that clearly is not reflected by the shameful behaviour of the Government in Athens this week).

Wisse is either lying, misinformed, or deluding herself -- Israel has nothing to do with Western thought or Western values; indeed, Israel and Jewish ideology are the total opposite of Western thought. At the most, Israel can, at times, be seen as an attempt to mimic aspects of Western thought and value systems.

Moreover, Israel is not a ‘civilisation’ and it is also far from being an exemplary civilised society. Israel defines itself as the Jewish State --and accordingly, Jews from Brooklyn enjoy rights that Palestinians from Jaffa, Lod, Acre, Ramle lack. For Israel to be a ‘civilisation’ then, it must first become a State Of Its Citizens. It must first accept the notion of civil law, and erase any traces of Jewish theocratic traits. Until that happens, Israel cannot be regarded as a civilisation, let alone 'Western Civilisation'.

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John Pilger
New Statesman

How does political censorship work in liberal societies? When my film Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia was banned in the United States in 1980, the broadcaster PBS cut all contact. Negotiations were ended abruptly; phone calls were not returned. Something had happened. But what? Year Zero had already alerted much of the world to Pol Pot's horrors, but it also investigated the critical role of the Nixon administration in the tyrant's rise to power and the devastation of Cambodia.

Six months later, a PBS official told me: "This wasn't censorship. We're into difficult political days in Washington. Your film would have given us problems with the Reagan administration. Sorry."

In Britain, the long war in Northern Ireland spawned a similar, deniable censorship. The journalist Liz Curtis compiled a list of more than 50 television films that were never shown or indefinitely delayed. The word "ban" was rarely used, and those responsible would invariably insist they believed in free speech.

The Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, believes in free speech. The foundation's website says it is "dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity". Authors, film-makers and poets make their way to a sanctum of liberalism bankrolled by the billionaire Patrick Lannan in the tradition of Rockefeller and Ford.

The foundation also awards "grants" to America's liberal media, such as Free Speech TV, the Foundation for National Progress (publisher of the magazine Mother Jones), the Nation Institute and the TV and radio programme Democracy Now!. In Britain, it has been a supporter of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, of which I am one of the judges. In 2008, Patrick Lannan backed Barack Obama's presidential campaign. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, he is "devoted" to Obama.

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Stephen Lendman

As part of a Libya international observer team, Middle East analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya headlined his July 5 Global Research.ca article, "NATO War Crimes: Depleted Uranium Found in Libya by Scientists," saying:

Sites targeted include "civilians and civilian infrastructure." Scientists from the Surveying and Collecting Specimens and Laboratory Measuring Group confirmed "radioactive isotopes (radioisotopes) at bombed sites" from field surveys conducted. Scientific analysis was conducted at the Nuclear Energy Institution of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

It showed that "several sites contain even higher than expected doses of uranium," including holes from NATO missiles and ordnance fragments. In interviews, Nazemroaya also said cluster bombs and other weapons are used freely in civilian neighborhoods targeting non-military sites.

Washington and NATO allies are using illegal "dirty bombs."

In late March, the Stop the War Coalition said dozens of US, UK, and French launched bombs and missiles against Libya in the first 24 hours all had DU warheads. They continue to be used daily despite Pentagon and other governments' denials.

On April 14, Foreign Policy in Focus columnist Conn Hallinan told Press TV that:

"The fact that the US is denying the use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions is just nonsense." When used against tanks, "enormous fireballs" are visible, a unique DU signature. As a result, "long-term consequences (for Libyans) are going to be severe."

More on that and DU munitions below.

On April 19, investigative journalist/author Dave Lindorff also told Press TV that strong evidence points to DU use, saying:

"The way some of these (armored) vehicles and tanks have been hit look like it's pretty strong evidence that it is depleted uranium. It's the kind of explosive burn that you get from that particular ammunition. And certainly the US has been flying A-10s, which generally use (DU) shells in their armaments."

On June 6, historian/researcher Dr. Randy Short repeated the same charge, telling Press TV viewers that NATO targeted Tripoli residential areas with DU weapons, cluster bombs, and other illegal substances. Back from Tripoli, he said:

"I've been to one particular area....in which Seif al-Islam Gaddafi's house is located, and in that community which was residential, I saw the damage to civilian homes."

He added that high numbers of civilian deaths and injuries emboldened Libyans to resist Western imperialism.

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Jeff Gates
Gilad Atzmon's Blog

Christine Lagarde (center) is a French lawyer and has been the
managing director of the International Monetary Fund since
July 5, 2011. (From "Inside Job," Sony Pictures Classics, 2010)

This is the final part of a four-part series published by arabnews.com. Here are the links to parts one, two and three.

A popular documentary, Inside Job, captured kudos at the 2010 Academy Awards. Its hard-hitting analysis marked a milestone among filmmakers for shining light in the dark corners of Wall Street. Writer, producer and director Charles Ferguson provided a public service by exposing key perpetrators.

Laudable yet incomplete, Ferguson’s popular film left unaddressed the all-important “how.” The storyline left moviegoers with the impression that the film’s featured insiders operated virtually alone in perpetrating history’s greatest heist. In truth, the real “inside job” is far more sinister and remains ongoing.

The latest Wall Street mega-fraud required that “the mark” (the public) first be induced to embrace a mindset that grants financial signals not just deference but outright dominance. The pre-staging of that perspective required education to internalize a shared consensus that then worked its way into policymaking and law.

To suggest that those portrayed could commit a crime of such enormity without broad-based acquiescence leaves a defrauded public looking for culprits in the wrong places. While those Ferguson featured should be indicted and prosecuted, their conviction alone would leave untouched the internalization of a consensus mindset fully capable of enabling the next fraud.

To preclude the next swindle requires that a long-deceived public grasp the common source of this deceit. While it’s true that those featured are masterful manipulators of Wall Street conditions, those conditions are “downstream” of a widely shared viewpoint.

This fraud-enabling perspective first gained traction in the US as the “Chicago model” with careful nurturing by proponents at the University of Chicago and other top universities. This money myopic world view soon matured into the “law and economics” movement that gradually embedded this shared belief in the US law and then re-branded this mindset worldwide as the US-discrediting “Washington consensus.”

Those portrayed in Inside Job are problematic. But they alone are not the perpetrators. Incarcerate or execute those portrayed and the problem remains.

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Bob Chapman
International Forecaster

What the world is experiencing today did not happen by chance, it was planned that way.

What Congressman Louis McFadden said of the “Great Depression” is as true today as it was in the 1930s. As Chairman of the House Banking Committee he said, “It was no accident; it was a carefully contrived occurrence. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so they might emerge as rulers of us all.”

What you are experiencing economically and financially today is nothing new. Just study history all the precedence is there. The bankers and their willing helpers do the same thing over and over again. As we have said often what these banks represent is corporatist fascism and monopoly. Through their great wealth they control most governments and their court systems. That is why your elected representatives do not listen to you. They have already been purchased by Wall Street and banking. These are the same people who have financed most wars on both sides for centuries. Through their banks, and the Bank for International Settlements, and the BIS, they control money laundering and the worldwide drug trade, which is the most lucrative of all enterprises. The centerpiece of all the financial powers of the Illuminists come from the control of the drug trade for centuries.

These bankers and denizens of Wall Street and the City of London control our societies and in particular, business, finance and economics - almost every event within society is controlled by these elitists; as we saw in the stock market dotcom bubble of the late 1990s and the real estate bubble that began in 2003 and ended in 2006. We exited the stock market in the second week of April of 2000 and then again at 14,000, calling for a Dow 6,600 bottom. We believe we have been in a secular bear market in stocks since 2000 and we haven’t as yet seen the bottom by any means. Markets are not longer free and are under constant manipulation by elitists behind government.

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Thierry Meyssan
Voltairenet.org

Mohamed Siala receiving the Voltaire Network team of investigators.
© Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya / Réseau Voltaire

One of the motives for the war against Libya is to stop the development of the black continent, to enable the setting up of an AfriCom military base in Cyrenaica and to begin the colonial exploitation of Africa for the benefit of the United States. In order to understand this hidden agenda, Voltaire Network interviewed Mohamed Siala, Co-operation Minister and Manager of Libya’s sovereign wealth fund.

Voltaire Network: Your country is gas and oil rich. The Libyan Investment Authority manages an accumulated capital estimated at 70 billion dollars. What use are you making of this bonanza?

Mohamed Siala: We possess a significant amount of resources, but they are non renewable. We have therefore set up the Libyan Investment Authority to protect the wealth of future generations, following Norway’s example. A portion of these funds are dedicated to the development of Africa. This means that 6 billion dollars have been invested in African development shares, i.e. agriculture, tourism, commerce, mines, etc…

The remaining funds have been invested in various sectors, countries, currencies all over the world, including the USA and Germany. This, unfortunately, is what enabled them to freeze our assets.

Voltaire Network: Technically, how was the freeze carried out?

Mohamed Siala: The assets freeze is governed by the banking regulations of the country where they are invested. The rule is that they block our bank accounts, but we sometimes can get them unblocked if we take the litigation to the UN Claims Committee and provided we can prove they were destined for specific uses. For example, I have just pleaded for the unfreezing of funds earmarked to pay scholarships to 1200 students that we sent to Malysia. We are trying to do the same for everything that relates to social allowances or the hospitalization expenses of our citizens abroad.

We are sometimes allowed to use funds to buy food or medicine. This is, in principle, our right but many are refusing to unfreeze the necessary funds or are dragging their feet. For example, the Italian State rejects any use of our assets. In Germany, while the State authorizes their use for humanitarian purposes, it is sometimes the banks that refuse to unfreeze the necessary funds. The interpretations of the resolution are entirely different depending on each State. What we demand is a clear rule: what is permitted is authorised and what is not is forbidden. Right now, the interpretation is political and might prevails over right.

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Stephen Lendman

Americans are the last to catch on. Too often, in fact, they never do or realize one sitting government is as lawless as others. It's true despite a failed state's rotting stench permeating everywhere across the world, planning perhaps to blow it up to save it.

On July 3, Peter Dale Scott told Progressive Radio News Hour listeners what he fears most. He repeated it in a July 4 email, citing a Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com article, accessed through this link.

Using information from DEBKAfile, a Jerusalem-based intelligence site with close Mossad ties (providing commentary and analysis on regional terrorism, intelligence, security, military and political affairs), he discussed a frightening prospect. More on it below.

Founded in June 2000, DEBKA calls itself independent, "pioneer(ing) intensive news coverage and analysis of global (Islamic, not Israeli, US, or other Western) terror before it hits" front pages.

Calling its reports "not infallible," Scott said its information deserves attention because some past predictions proved true. Specifically, he cited their June 25, 2003 story that

"The Americans are secretly building two giant intelligence facilities in Iraq at a cost of some half a billion dollars."

Doing so and more makes it

"seem that America is now indeed acting as recklessly and idiotically as Britain and France did in the (1956) Suez crisis...."

On air and in his email, Scott wondered whether

"Washington failed to take into account the reaction of Russia and China (the way Britain in 1956 insanely" didn't bank on America's response at the time). "Or is (America) counting on its (nuclear superiority) to deal with any problems in that area."

Disturbingly, top US officials include extremists who think brute force solutions work best, even high risk ones like nuclear war or simultaneously waging too many conventional ones.

Scott told Progressive Radio News Hour listeners that he's warned for months about Libya being a flashpoint for escalated general war, similar to how WW I began.

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Khalid Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem

Sheikh Raed Salah leads Israel's Islamic Movement, the political
importance of which has risen in recent years. (S. Scheiner/AP)

The arrest by the British authorities last week of Sheikh Rae'd Salah, one of the prominent leaders of Israel's 1.7 million-strong Palestinian community, is a real affront to the most elementary considerations of justice. It is also an indelible shame that should continue to haunt the British justice system for a long time to come.

Far from being motivated by any real violations of the law, the arrest seemed to have been prompted by a vindictive complaint by pro-Israeli Zionist circles in the British capital. Ultimately, the real motive behind the arrest is to silence one of the most outspoken defendants of Palestinian rights, the very man the Israeli intelligence has been persecuting, vilifying and even trying to assassinate.

I am not talking about someone I don't know. Since the late 1980s, I have met Ra'ed Salah many times. I visited him at his home in Um al-Fahm and I attended his lectures. And from my acquaintance with the man, I can solemnly attest to his honesty, religiosity, rectitude and clean credentials. He is a man who would rather be morally straight than politically correct, he wouldn't flinch from telling the truth (as he sees it) for fear of undesirable public reaction.

Sheikh Ra'ed Salah is therefore a man of sublime principles. He feels he is morally obliged to speak up against oppression, especially Israel's pornographic oppression that is meted out to his own people on both sides of the Green Line, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as Israel.

He does belong to that special category of people, which encompasses great men and women, who stand up in the face of power, throwing their moral weight on the side of the weak, the persecuted and the helpless.

Hence, ascribing racism to this man is an insult to truth, which can only be made by irredeemable ignoramuses or malicious liars.

Needless to say, the Israeli intelligence made every conceivable effort to vilify and incriminate, even criminalize, Sheikh Salah.

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Adnan Al-Daini

Communication has become the art of the sound bite; infuriating, though that is, it is the reality of the world we inhabit. S/he who is good at simplifying a complicated issue, but keeps the essence of it is the one who will reach the widest audience. 

The left and progressives are too clever by half [*]. They get the complexities, but are loath to simplify for fear of losing some strands of the argument.  Liberal progressive writers use their experience and knowledge combined with findings from other sources in an enterprise of intellectual rigour to back up their theses and conclusions. However, it is important that these conclusions and ideas are then distilled into easily digestible chunks, and presented in a way that resonate with the experiences and struggles of the ordinary voter, to whom politics is not such a passion.  Alas, this does not happen.  Progressives seem to me to be writing for each other with little regard to keeping an eye on a wider audience.

The right have always been able to appeal to the basest instincts of human nature in a way that chimes with the aspirations of the many. Take, for example, the issue of the savage cuts in government spending that are being advocated by the right on both sides of the Atlantic; it is presented in the guise of a “family finances” argument.  As a family, “wouldn’t you want to pay your debts and live within your means”? - is a very appealing argument.

Note that when the right and like-minded groups talk about cutting government spending even further, they are not talking about cuts in spending on wars and its destructive machinery. Oh no, they are talking about cutting it from the meagre amounts given to the disabled, the poor, the unemployed, those most vulnerable in our society. They never talk about priorities in spending; they never talk about the obscene income gap between the ultra rich and the poor.

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Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

No dogma, no doctrine, no parties, no political poltroonery; just one plank in this platform: I'm for the poor.

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Gilad Atzmon

Medical x-ray of live ammunition lodged in the skull of a man,
Ussayed Qadous, shot at point blank range by Israeli troops
near Itamar in 2010

RE: photo: Yitzhar is home to Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, author of the notorious “Torat Hamelech,” which uses rabbinical sources to justify the killing of non-Jewish civilians, including children, in combat situations. - A year ago in nearby Palestinian farming villages Awarta and Iraq Burin, Israeli soldiers were accused of executing local youths during riots against settlement expansion. As Jesse Rosenfeld reported, despite the clear evidence of execution style killings, none of the soldiers who held the Palestinians in custody at the time they were shot were convicted of any crimes. - Max Blumenthal

Israeli Police is now arresting leading Rabbis for endorsing and supporting 'Torat Hamelech' (The King's Torah), the Jewish religious book that justifies the killing of Gentiles.

Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, son of Shas spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef, was questioned Sunday morning on suspicion of incitement to racism and violence following his endorsement of the religious tract which preaches Goy hatred.

Kiryat Harav's Chief Rabbi Dov Lior was also detained a few days ago for his endorsement of the same racist text.

The arrest of the Rabbis sparked violent protest across Israel. It also raised harsh criticism against the police and state prosecution by right-wing elements.

I guess that one may be puzzled by the whole saga and wonder how come the Jewish State, a state that legally discriminates people on racial grounds, a state that institutionally abuses its non-Jewish population, an entity that terrorises and starves the indigenous people of the land and often enough kills them en masse, is so concerned with a few Rabbis who endorse the Halacha interpretations that actually justify such lethal barbarian policies and practices. The answer is pretty interesting.

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Stephen Lendman

The rights of millions of displaced Palestinians are inalienable
and do not lapse because of their long suppression, this is what
the Flotilla II encounter is really about and this is also why Israel
finds it so dangeous. (Reuters)

Daily, Israel keeps proving its lawless rogue credentials, notably by blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza. As a result, it finds new ways to show contempt for human rights, rule of law standards, civility, fundamental Judaic tenets, and its very legitimacy as a nation state, established by mass slaughter and displacement of indigenous Palestinians from their homeland.

Today, its war against humanity dirty tricks/state terrorism arsenal includes propaganda, intimidating lawsuits, pressure on other governments, sabotage, subversion, cold-blodded murder, and whatever else it takes to ruthlessly commit slow-motion genocide against nearly 1.7 million Gazans, besides daily crimes against others in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

No wonder growing numbers of fed up Jews are leaving, voting with their feet, including studies showing half or more there actively consider it, and why not.

Israel is an armed camp, a warrior state, a modern-day Sparta, institutionalizing militarism as a way of life. Young children are taught this ideology in school, including to hate, not respect non-Jews, especially Muslims as violent enemies and human rights activists supporting them.

Freedom Flotilla II participants are among them - vilified, sabotaged, delayed, and now blocked from departing by Greece's complicit rogue government, after agreeing to surrender its sovereignty to Western bankers despite mass street protests against it.

In fact, Greece's Washington embassy published an "Announcement on the Flotilla," accessed through this link.

In part it says:

"Prohibition of the departure of ships with Greek and foreign flags from Greek ports to the maritime area of Gaza today."

In other words, Gaza-bound ships in Greek ports are prohibited from sailing because Israel and Washington demand it - a clear international law violation.

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Khalid Amayreh

Ketziot prison camp, where innocent Palestinians are being held.

Zionism is a virulent philosophy and venomous ideology that has transformed Jews into tormentors, persecutors and oppressors as well as occupiers, liars and land thieves.

For many years now, Israel has been dumping Palestinians behind bars, or sending them to agonize in open-ended detainment in desert detention camps, purely for political reasons.

In hundreds of cases, there are absolutely no legal grounds, nor even according to the Israeli military laws, for the incarceration of indisputably innocent Palestinians.

Israel often doesn't even try to justify this flagrant, vindictive and oppressive policy. It just contents itself with invoking the security mantra, utterly ignoring the most elementary considerations of equity and justice.

In countries around the world, let alone countries that consider themselves civilized and democratic, a person is arrested, charged and prosecuted. If found innocent, he is released, if not he is sentenced to jail terms or receives other forms of punishment.

In the Occupied Palestinian territories, however, detaining Palestinians at will is the backbone of the occupier's policy toward the occupied, the Palestinians. Palestinians are arrested and kept away from their families for years without justifiable reasons.

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Ray McGovern
Consortium News

Yes, that was I standing before the U.S. Embassy in Athens on the eve of the July Fourth weekend holding the American flag in the distress mode — upside down.

Indignities experienced by me and my co-guests on The Audacity of Hope, the American boat to Gaza, over the past 10 days in Athens leave no doubt in my mind that Barack Obama’s administration has forfeited the right to claim any lineage to the brave Americans who declared independence from the king of England 235 years ago.

In the Declaration of Independence, they pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to a new enterprise of freedom, democracy, and the human spirit. The outcome was far from assured; likely as not, the hangman’s noose awaited them. They knew that all too well.

But they had a genuine audacity to hope that the majority of their countrymen and women, persuaded by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the elegant words of Thomas Jefferson, would conclude that the goal of liberty and freedom was worth the risk, that it was worth whatever the cost.

These days we have been seduced into thinking that such principles have become “quaint” or “obsolete” — words used by President George W. Bush’s White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to make light of important international agreements like the Geneva Conventions.

As every American should know, and remember, the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence were based on the firm belief that ALL men are created equal, that they have UNALIENABLE rights — among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Not just “all Americans,” mind you, but all people. The Declaration of Independence was meant to be a statement expressing the “self-evident” rights of all mankind. Those principles had a universality that was a beacon to the world.

True, American democracy and, indeed, the Founders themselves were far from perfect. In the early decades of the Republic, basic rights were denied to women, to black slaves, to Native Americans, and to many of the poor. But Americans worked on building that “more perfect union” and are still working on it.

Justice was always at the heart of the American ideal. That we still have a long way to go in securing that justice must not be allowed to obscure the fact that ours is a noble and courageous experiment. Or at least it was.

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Stephen Lendman

Facsimile: Primary Documents in American History. Text HERE. The U.S. Government now is just as guilty of crimes & transgressions against a number of countries around the world as King George III of Britain was (against the Crown colonies) back then. The Government in Washington now also is committing similar misdeeds and is demonstrating similar lawlessness against its own citizens. - The people of America now should consider rising up and declaring its independence from Washington. - Ed.

All US federal holidays wreak of hypocrisy, representing notions and events other than what they commemorate. Besides Christmas, none perhaps is more celebrated than when America became independent from Britain on July 4, 1776.

Coming in the summer, parades, outings, barbecues, other celebratory events, and baseball highlight the day for many - relaxing, not reflecting on the same independence we deny nations globally, waging imperial wars and other ways to prevent it.

July 4 also commemorates America's history, liberation and traditions most people don't know, never learned, or forgot. Instead - in school to the highest levels and through media managed news - they've been force fed distortions, half truths and illusions to believe what, in fact, isn't true now and never was, a sanitized rewritten history, what historian Howard Zinn corrected in his "People's History of the United States."

First published in 1980, it became an extraordinary non-fiction best seller with over two million copies sold and counting, followed (in 2004) by "Voices of a People's History of the United States," presenting words and thoughts of labor and anti-war activists, anti-racists, feminists, socialists, and others rarely heard.

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Stephen Lendman

The humanitarian excuse for the attack on Libya is nothing
but a preparation for an invasion.

After three and a half terror bombing months and counting, destroying Libya for wealth and power continues, each imperial nation playing its part in this sinister dirty game, masquerading as liberation.

France finally admitted what's already known, that it's been supplying mercenary cutthroats with automatic weapons, rocket launchers, assault rifles, anti-tank missiles, and who knows what else. So have Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, perhaps other US imperial allies, and the Pentagon itself. In mid-April, The New York Times said Benghazi-based rebels got weapons from abroad without naming names.

For months, US and UK special forces provided training, The Times saying "professional training centers" were used to do it. In fact, recruiting, funding, and arming rebels began well before bombing began. America's war was planned many months, perhaps years earlier. Obama picked his moment to launch it.

Even the International Criminal Court (ICC) is complicit, functioning as an imperial tool, not a legitimate tribunal. Its chief prosecutor Jose Luis Moren-Ocampo, in fact, targets victims, not criminal Washington, London and Paris conspirators, attacking a nonbelligerent country. It's been standard US practice since WW II.

In May, Ocampo sought arrest warrants for Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam, and brother-in-law intelligence chief, Abdullah Al-Sanousi, on "charges of orchestrating systematic attacks against civilians (amounting) to crimes against humanity," with no evidence whatever to prove it.

Then end of June he issued arrest warrants against all three on alleged crimes against humanity, saying reasonable grounds exist to believe they're "criminally responsible as indirect perpetrators of civilian killings and repression" - again with no corroborating evidence or authority. Libya, in fact, isn't an ICC member, nor are America, China, Russia and India, some nations, openly critical of how it operates with good reason.

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Adnan Al-Daini

I lived in communist Russia for a year (1970-1971). Talking politics to Russian colleagues after mutual trust was established, they told me that they knew that as far as they were concerned what they read in their approved newspapers, for example Pravda (truth), or what they listened to on their television and radio, was propaganda and not a word was believed.  The tragedy in the West is that people believe they have free corporate media, and tend to believe far more than they should, especially when the news concerns wars in faraway places with people of different cultures and religion, the "other".

Replacing  state control by powerful ultra rich media moguls and powerful corporations does not make the media free.   Journalists will follow their masters' voices to simply select events, news and stories to reinforce the prejudices of those powerful owners, enhance their profits and advance the interests of their corporations.  The propaganda of western media is more subtle, which makes it more effective, but it is propaganda nevertheless.

John Pilger, in the New Statesman, urges people to develop a healthy cynicism towards the media thus:

This acute scepticism, this skill of reading between the lines, is urgently needed in supposedly free societies today. Take the reporting of state-sponsored war. The oldest cliché is that truth is the first casualty of war. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty. Not only that: it has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship that goes unrecognised in the United States, Britain and other democracies; censorship by omission, whose power is such that, in war, it can mean the difference between life and death for people in faraway countries, such as Iraq.

In his excellent film "The War You Don't See", he powerfully demonstrates the complicity of the media in the deception of the public to justify endless wars.

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John Lanchester
London Review of Books

The economic crisis in Greece is the most consequential thing to have happened in Europe since the Balkan wars. That isn’t because Greece is economically central to the European order: at barely 3 per cent of Eurozone GDP, the Greek economy could vanish without trace and scarcely be missed by anyone else. The dangers posed by the imminent Greek default are all to do with how it happens.

I speak of the Greek default as a sure thing because it is: the markets are pricing Greek government debt as if it has already defaulted. This in itself is a huge deal, because the euro was built on the assumption that no country in it would ever default, and as a result there is no precedent and, more important still, no mechanism for what is about to happen. The prospective default could come in any one of several different flavours. From everybody’s perspective, the best of them would be what is known as a ‘voluntary rollover’. In that scenario, the institutions that are owed money by the Greek government will swallow heavily and, when their loan is due to be repaid, will permit their borrowings to be rolled over into another long loan. There is a gun-to-the-side-of-the-head aspect to this ‘voluntary’ deal, since the relevant institutions are under enormous governmental pressure to comply and are also faced with the fact that if they say no, they will have triggered a proper default, which means their loans will plummet in value and they’ll end up worse off. The deal on offer is: lend us more money, or lose most of the money you’ve already lent.

This is, at the moment, the best-case scenario and the current plan A. It reflects the failure of the original plan A, which involved lending the government of George Papandreou €110 billion in May last year in return for a promise to cut government spending and increase tax revenue, both by unprecedented amounts. The joint European Central Bank-EU-IMF loan was necessary because, in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, Greece was exposed as having an economy based on phoney data and cheap credit. The cheap credit had now dried up, and Greece was faced by the simplest and worst economic predicament of any government: it couldn’t pay its debts.

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