Felicity Arbuthnot

"The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists."
- J. Edgar Hoover, 1895-1972.

Since the fairy tale about weapons of mass destruction that can be launched against Western targets "within forty five minutes" is well past it's sell by date, the trans-Atlantic hasbara industry has dreamed up a new Grim Reaper for Syria, their latest quarry: chemical weapons.

Stephen Zunes succinct quote that: "U.S. policy regarding chemical weapons has been so inconsistent and politicized that the United States is in no position to take leadership in response to any use of such weaponry by Syria" [1] hits the chemical warhead on the nose cone.

Never mind Israel's lethal stockpiles, for ever, seemingly, blind eye territory, as apparently is the United States 5,449 metric tons chemical weapons arsenal, which cannot be disposed of until at least 2021 due to the hazards involved (Japan Times, 12th September 2013.).

However the storm troopers of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) joined the other insurgents in Syria and in under a month: " ... completed the functional destruction of critical equipment for all of its declared chemical weapons production facilities and mixing/filling plants, rendering them inoperable."[2]

President Assad, his country, this year alone, being five times an illegal target of Israel's fearsome destructive power from just across the Golan Heights[3] stated that his weapons were purely defensive - to use the cold war adage, a balance of terror.

All nations have the legal right to self-defence - unless they are majority Muslim, it would seem.

Felicity Arbuthnot

“There was no honour left; ruin and war and the blood was flowing...Sadness, hate and the reign of arbitrary destruction.” ~ Rachid Taha, Algerian Musician and lyricist

Shocking details have emerged from an impeccable source (not named for obvious reasons) of the execution on Thursday 7th June, in Baghdad, of Abed Hamid Hamoud, President Saddam Hussein’s former personal secretary and aide.

Mr Hamoud, fourth on America’s 2003 asinine, juvenile playing card list of Iraq’s sovereign government, has been held in jail since June 2003, after being arrested by US occupying forces.

He was sentenced to death in October 2010 with former Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Tareq Aziz and former intelligence chief Sadoun Shakir, heightening fears for their imminent execution.

“What you have not heard” states the commentator : “is that (Mr Hamoud) was led to his execution whilst under the impression that he was going for a medical check up.

“The Iraqi government didn’t even notify his family or relatives or make arrangements with them to deliver his body.”

A chilling observation on America and Britain’s “New Iraq” is that the Maliki government is: “ … so intent on revenge that they have waved the formalities of telling a person they were taking him to his execution.”

Felicity Arbuthnot
Global Research

US massacre Najaf, January 2007. Photo: Najaf Governor Office

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." ~ François-Marie Arouet ("Voltaire") (1694-1778.)

I have a deeply held belief that the duty of a commentator is, to the best of one's ability, to record, to shine light in often dark places, to act as a voice for those whose own voice, fears, plights might not be heard or known. To write about the emotions one sometimes feels when doing it, is an anathema and anyway a redundancy. The purpose is to attempt to draw attention to wrongs, not to whinge about the effects they can have - and any way, a private life should be just that. If politicians wish to strip themselves of their dignity and allude to everything from their sex life, to using private grief to gain sympathy votes, those with a shred of self-respect do not wish to emulate them. Here, I am breaking my taboo, for a reason.

Over the last several weeks I have again researched in depth, invasion's atrocities in Iraq, unearthing the unthinkable, switching off emotion and reading of terror, torture, monstrous wickednesses, word after sickening word. Then, Fallujah revisited (1) with document after document revealing the depth of the darkest depravities towards others, which can be plumbed, by "some mother's son" - or daughter. Indeed, some child's father or mother, able to shoot the children, toddlers, babies of others, in cold blood, drive over them in tanks, leaving the pathetic remains to be eaten by stray dogs.

Photographs viewed have included many which even hardened investigators have deemed: "too disturbing to view." This is not a view I hold. If family members who have survived, emergency workers (when not incinerated by U.S., troops themselves) medical staff, if not shot, imprisoned, tortured, or tied up with a bag over their head) can view, identify, bury with love and respect - or in the case of medical staff, carefully photograph, and note time, location of finding, then number, wrap and retain for a period, before burial, hoping a relative will claim the charred, mutilated, or worse, remains. It is a duty for those with any "voice", from countries responsible for this first documentable U.S., U.K., genocide of the 21st century, to draw attention to it, in the memory of and in tribute to, the voiceless, nameless, uncounted victims, in the hope that eventually, legal recourse might result.

The BRussells Tribunal

We, the undersigned, defending the right of Iraq to independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity, rejecting the attempts of Iraqi puppets promoted by the US occupation to trade the national rights of Iraqis and to institutionalise via census the criminal demo-graphic engineering they have pursued by force, declare that:

From the first day of the US-UK occupation of Iraq, the occupation began to undertake a series of measures, directly or through its local allies, to destroy Iraq as a state and a nation and to partition it along ethnic and sectarian lines.

Today, the puppet government of the occupation and its Kurdish partners are trying to hold a population census in Kirkuk province whose aim is to give a permanent legal character to the criminal social engineering, ethnic cleansing and demographic changes that have been implemented under occupation.[1] This could unleash a full blown civil war across Iraq, and potentially lead to its partition and a consequent regional war.

In addition to the death of more than one million Iraqis, the ethnic cleansing and other means pursued by the United States, United Kingdom and their allies in order to implement the process of partitioning Iraq, in its cities and regions, have caused the forced migration of 2.5 million Iraqis out of Iraq and the forced displacement of 2.5 million others from their homes inside Iraq.

Felicity Arbuthnot
Uruknet

A US Military graves detail with a bulldozer buries in a mass grave,
the bodies of dead Iraqi soldiers killed along the Mile of Death, on the
road between Kuwait City and Basra, north of Kuwait City. Many of
the Iraqi soldiers were killed along this stretch of highway on the 25th
and 26th of February 1991.

"Wrong from the start." ~ Ezra Pound, 1885-1972.

When the horrors of the sadistic, near necrophile behaviour of U.S., personnel at Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, first showed the tip-of-the-iceberg-lie of "liberation": cruelty, depravity and bestiality on a scale which apparently dwarfed all that Saddam Hussein's regime had been accused of, President George W. Bush said: " This does not represent the America I know."

He should have. It was under the watch of his father, George Bush, Snr., that in 1991, thousands of Iraqi conscripts were buried alive in southern Iraq, by US army tanks and bulldozers. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches, with peoples arms and things sticking out of them", said Colonel Anthony Moreno who participated.(1)

Sixteen years earlier, in 1975, Bush Snr., with Henry Kissinger and Vernon Walters, set up "Plan Condor", under which CIA-enlisted exiles, orchestrated : ".. the torture and assassination of leftist leaders (under which) Latin American military rulers, also 'disappeared' thousands of their opponents." (2)

This followed in the bloody footsteps of the CIA 1966 Phoenix Project, designed to "cleanse" South Viet Nam of Communists (Viet Cong.) "Specially designed torture chambers were constructed in all forty four provinces. Rape of women suspects, electric shock, water torture, and hanging from ceilings were standard methods during interrogations." (3) Further: "The U.S.'s Phoenix Program killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese.

Vietnamese prisoners were thrown into 'tiger cages' - built by Texas military conractor RMK-BRJ, the forerunner of Halliburton subsidiary KBR .. and routinely tortured." (See 2.) Halliburton has, of course, hit financial bonanzas in Iraq and Afghanistan, along the occasional slightly bumpy legal path.

Steven Harkins
Pulse Media

Conspiracy theories exist in ‘the realm of myth’, where ‘imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored’ [i]. This is according to a website created by the US State Department to debunk a range of outlandish conspiracy theories.

Among the theories criticized on the website are conspiracies regarding the assassination of JFK, the moon landings, and the September 11th attacks [ii]. Alongside these well-known sources of wild speculation is the subject of depleted uranium (DU). The website states:

Uranium evokes very powerful fears. It is associated with atomic weapons, mass annihilation, radiation sickness, cancer and birth defects. Depleted uranium evokes these same fears, despite the fact that it has been depleted of much of its radioactivity. Fear-based associations can be more powerful than logic and facts. Compare how you feel about tungsten to how you feel about depleted uranium. Both are heavy metals, but “depleted uranium” might sound scarier to you [iii].

So the US State Department argue that when it comes to conspiracy theories ‘evidence is ignored’ and that it is ‘fear-based associations’ and not ‘logic and facts’ that have caused people to make a connection between birth defects, cancer and depleted uranium.

Felicity Arbuthnot
Uruknet

"Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war." (Tony Blair, speech as newly elected Prime Minister, 1997.)

August is seemingly Spotlight on Illegal Invasion month. President Obama has made his Mission-Lost-Cause speech about US., Iraq fantasy "withdrawal" - leaving behind 50,000 troops, perhaps 50,000 mercenaries, and some have suggested 100,000 "advisors."

In context:

"Last month, the Congressional Research Service reported that the Department of Defense workforce has 19 percent more contractors (207,600) than uniformed personnel ... in Iraq and Afghanistan, making these wars ... the most outsourced and privatized in US history. Worse, the oversight of contractors will rest with other contractors. As has been the case in Afghanistan, contractors will be sought to provide "operations-center monitoring of private security contractors (PSCs) as well as PSC inspection and accountability services."(1)

Tony "I would do it again" Blair, announced, on 16th August, he is to give his entire £4.6 million advance on his book: "My Journey", to the Royal British Legion, for support of British soldiers in need. As the ungracious calls for his "journey" to be to the Hague get louder - with some suggesting a far less civilized ordeal - it seems timely to assess British "achievements" in Iraq.

Felicity Arbuthnot

Flood victims, seen from an Army helicopter, take refuge under a date tree
in Pakistan's Rajanpur district in Punjab province August 15, 2010. Reuters/
Adrees Latif

" .. to wade through slaughter ... and shut the gates of mercy on mankind." Thomas Gray (1716-1771.)

The scale of the disaster caused by the floods in Pakistan, is barely comprehensible. As Juan Cole has written, expressing near disbelief : "The submerged area of the country is as big as the United Kingdom, fourteen million Pakistanis are affected, two million are homeless." Six million need immediate relief, according to the UN., and thirty six thousand are suffering from acute diarrhoeal symptoms, with cholera already diagnosed. 1,600 are reported dead, with the number certain to multiply. Famine is a real possibility.

The great Indus river, the world's longest, which flows also through China, India and Kashmir, rising in Tibet and flowing in to the Arabian Sea, has flooded Sindh and Balochistan provinces, forcing the evacuation of over ninety percent of the villages. With no place to hide, people watched their homes washed away, in a monsoon season that continues through September. Hundreds of villages are inundated or completely under water, with roads, rail links, thus transportation cut, as frantic people try to flee to safer ground. It is the worst flooding in the country's history, with some experts saying the region worst affected for nearly one hundred years. A far wider area is now threatened.

When the waters subside, the million-plus people who are directly or indirectly dependent on the mangroves, will have had their livelihood affected or erased, as will the fishermen along this great expanse. Looking at US., news sites, the enormity of this tragedy has evoked not pity, but almost universal vindictiveness. "Serves you right", "You had it coming", "Where is Allah now?" "So now you want help from the Great Satan's troops and helicopters", are a few of the milder ones, addressed to a River Valley civilization which dates to about 3,300 BC., with tools found, used fifteen thousand years ago.