0ne needs a wicked sense of humor these days to fully appreciate the present moment in American history, as a supposedly free country debates which police state practices to adopt, while ignoring any thought that maybe the United States should not be a police state at all.
The candidate I’m voting for acknowledges that forgiving and forgetting U.S. war crimes has not worked. They continue to haunt and hamper us. Former administration officials who lied us into war in Afghanistan and Iraq must be brought to justice. We need to know who falsified the intelligence and why. Remember their catchy slogan: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”?
Hundreds of thousands have died and many innocents continue to suffer for this cynical deception.
The CIA’s Phoenix program changed how America fights its wars and how the public views this new type of political and psychological warfare, in which civilian casualties are an explicit objective.
The CIA created Phoenix in Saigon in 1967 to identify the civilian leaders and supporters of the National Liberation Front; and to detain, torture, and kill them using every means possible, from B-52 raids and “Cordon and Search” operations, to computerized blacklists, secret torture centers, and death squads.
Graeme MacQueen’s 2014 book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, has been vindicated by the head of the FBI’s Anthrax Investigation.
There are two ways to look at the alleged terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
One is that in the English speaking world, or much of it, the satire would have been regarded as “hate speech,” and the satirists arrested. But in France Muslims are excluded from the privileged category, took offense at the satire, and retaliated.
The balance sheet for 2014 and the prospects for 2015 provide us with a complex panorama of negative and positive outcomes. In most cases the advances, are not earth-shattering but open possibilities for further progress. The negative developments, however, have greater and more threatening systemic outcomes.
Historic outcomes of pivotal events often dangled on threads of various possibilities. As they were outnumbered by more than two to one, an early morning fog enabled America’s future first President, George Washington with his command, to escape death or capture by British troops on Long Island, New York in 1776. As the last of 9000 men to board one of the transport boats, it’s unlikely Washington would have safely made the East River crossing without the fog’s appearance. Subsequent U.S.
America’s ruling elites are blatant in their intentions of maintaining “white privilege” at home and economic dominance by military means abroad.
Veterans Day is a holiday whose current meaning is somewhat different than its creators’ original intentions.
Obama took to the airwaves yesterday, oh so coincidentally, on the eve of September 11, to roll out his latest “smart war.” And it comes, oh so coincidentally, just before Congressional midterms when every member of Congress fears like the plague to be painted as a dove, just as happened in 2002 before Bush II took us to war.
Whatever role ISIS plays in this, Syria is certainly the target. It is telling that when it comes to money, Obama is asking Congress only for funding to train the Syrian “moderate rebels” in that bastion of Sunni moderation, Saudi Arabia.
