That “Freedom” the US/NATO Brings Afghanistan

 

Tales in a Kabul Restaurant

by KATHY KELLY

 

 

 

Aggressive War By Any Other Name

Would Still Smell As Disgusting

NY Times:

Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A.

AP:

US Doubles Aid To Syrian Rebels, Who Want More

“Instead, the Obama administration’s pledged to provide an additional $123 million in aid, which may include for the first time armored vehicles, body armor, night vision goggles and other defensive military supplies.”

Another $123M tax money, while schools fold.  Seniors are being denied food and medicine.  Obama is the representative of the Military-Industrial-Crony-Capital-Corporate sector.  He does not give a damn about Americans, nor Syrians.

Syria’s so-called “rebels” are majority Al-Qaeda connected “Al Nusra Brigade.”  Their atrocities have killed tens of thousands of civilians.  We are living Orwell’s worst nightmare.  Don’t beleve me?  How about a Catholic Church official from Syria?

“It’s not a question of promoting democracy or pluralism as the West wants us to understand of its policies. This is a lie, this is hypocrisy,” Syriac Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III Younan told Catholic News Service.

Western nations did not heed warnings and so “bear responsibility for what is happening in Syria.”

“We were warning all those involved, the countries in the region and in the West — that means the United States and some of the European Union countries, like the United Kingdom and France — that this kind of violence would lead to chaos and the chaos to a civil war,” Patriarch Younan said. “And at that time, two years ago, they chose not to believe that.”

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1302115.htm

Yes America.  Your willful, criminal ignorance kills thousands around the world.  You’re supposed to keep checks on your government.  That’s called “democracy.”

Pakistani court declares US drone strikes illegal

 

Judge ORDERS government to halt cooperation with US drone attacks in Pakistan tribal belt, and to go to UN Security Council.

UK Independent: A Pakistani court has declared that US drone strikes in the country’s tribal belt are illegal and has directed the government to move a resolution against the attacks in the United Nations.

Obama’s official state murder policies may be meeting some meaningful resistance.

 

Israel’s Latest War Crimes

“Israeli strike kills 42 Syrian soldiers”

-Stars and Stripes

The psychotic double-standard in international relations could easily compare to WW2 Nazi rationalizations.  If any other country does the same thing — invade a country’s air space, drop bombs on its facilities, murder its soldiers, it suddenly becomes quite clear what’s happening.  If Canada flies down into New York and bombs a military base, the United States would have a problem with that.  If Russia flies into Alaskan air space and sinks a US patrol boat, this is clearly to be interpreted as an act of war, a war crime and an atrocity.

But imperialists and “exceptionalists” don’t adhere to reality, morality, common sense or anything approaching ethical behavior.

The big story that US media doesn’t want to talk about:

UN: Rebels, not Assad, appear to have used chemical weapons

United Nations human rights investigators said Sunday they have gathered testimony from outside Syria suggesting rebels, not Bashar Assad’s regime, may have used chemical weapons.“Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated,” Carla Del Ponte, a member of the independent commission of inquiry on Syria, told Swiss-Italian television. “This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.”

-The Hill

If the ignorant sheeple don’t hear about it, then it never happened, clearly.

The Kill Team (2013)

From the Tribeca Film Festival, a documentary about some of America’s armed murderous thugs in its foreign legions.  See the review.

Massive Bombing Kills at Least a Dozen

 

Let’s talk about the kind of “terrorism” that’s  a hell of a lot more likely to affect you and your family: corporate responsibility without accountability.  The “deregulation” offensive led by people like governor of Texas G.W. Bush and the right wing corporatists, including Obama, is responsible for killing large numbers of  workers, a disturbingly increasing number.  Miners, plant workers, the regulations to ensure worker safety are little more than a joke after decades of erosion and deal making in the slimy halls of power.

“We know that the EPA, back in 2006, cited West Fertilizer for not having an emergency risk management plan. That is, a dangerous and explosion-prone plant that was using a hazardous chemical in large quantities, and that was storing highly explosive material also in large quantities, had made little or no effort to assess the risks of what it was doing. Indeed, it has been reported that the company had assured the EPA, in response to the complaint, that there was “no risk” of an explosion at the plant! An AP article reports that the company, five years after being cited for lacking a risk plan, did file one with the EPA, but that the report claimed the company “…was not handling flammable materials and did not have sprinklers, water-deluge systems, blast walls, fire walls or other safety mechanisms in place at the plant.”

Two Acts of Terror, Only One Investigation
by DAVE LINDORFF

 

“After all, it was Obama’s Justice Department that in December 2011 settled the case of the April 2010 Massey Energy Upper Big Branch explosion, which killed 29 miners, with a “non prosecution agreement.”

Outrageously, the Justice Department said it would not criminally prosecute Massey even though the Labor Department concluded that Massey’s “unlawful policies and practices” were the “root cause of this tragedy.”

Corporate Terrorism in West Texas
by RUSSELL MOKHIBER

 

 

Triggering Wounds (trailer)

This may be controversial.  Made by teens in Harlem…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1_Wn_JCyGw&feature=player_embedded

 

 

US soldier/Iraq: “We are the terrorists.”

“If you go to mental health, you’re gonna get charged with malingering.” -Iraq veteran Ethan McCord

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE7xGrsWZi0

 

“One veteran suicide every 65 minutes now.”-Abby Martin

 

 

 

The Obama Satan Dust Up

I found this quite funny originally, not because of any particular religious kookery on my part, but because on some levels it is quite appropriate to call out Obama’s evil. Even if the intent is completely different, the incident is an opportunity to talk about the realities.

Linn Washington Jr. wrote an article pretty close to what I would have written, had I been bothered:

The Real Obama?

“The evil inherent in Obama’s cavalier brush off of the “collateral damage” on innocents caused by drone assaults — including the killing of children — is what lawyers’ could term as prima facie evidence of evil whether or not one embraces those right-wing extremist labeling Obama the Anti-Christ.”

It’s also an opportunity to call out the History Channel, which has a stained record generally of bias and militarism. Their hit piece on the 9/11 cover-up was telling enough. Dishonest, skewed “history” is the norm there, and nobody should expect anything else. Perhaps this Obama/Satan flap will alert people as to whom is responsible for content there.

 

Bradley Manning Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize

Sign the Petition for Manning to Win the Next Nobel Peace Prize

Pressure the Nobel Committee, who have in years past awarded their prize to war criminal monsters like Henry Kissinger, and uh, who’s that other one?  Oh, Barack Obama, who is currently responsible for the torture and persecution of whistleblower Bradley Manning.

 

“Bradley Manning’s Nobel Peace Prize

Whistleblower Bradley Manning has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and he should receive it.

No individual has done more to push back against what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism” than Bradley Manning. And right now, remaining in prison and facing relentless prosecution by the U.S. government, no one is more in need of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Alfred Nobel’s will left funding for a prize to be awarded to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

The intent of the prize was to fund this work. As a result of enormous legal expenses, Bradley Manning is in need of that funding.

Please sign this petition to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

I urge you to award the peace prize to Bradley Manning.

 

Glorious Operation Iraqi Freedom

Posted at Truthdig:

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney

From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

 

Blackwater Works for CIA (RT)

Black Water: Extension of CIA

 
Unaccountable mercenary war criminals Blackwater work for unaccountable war criminals Central Intelligence Agency, court records show. Murder & mayhem perfectly okay, and accountability will not be seen in your lifetime. Move along, chattel.