And waving our red weapons o'er our heads
Let's all cry 'Peace, Freedom, Liberty!'
Shakespeare - Julius Caesar
Monday 28 June 2010
Freedom From 20,000 Feet
Saturday 26 June 2010
History Repeating As Tragic Farce
Friday 25 June 2010
'Kill TV' Starring Stanley McChrystal
Wednesday 23 June 2010
Gone, General, Gone
McChrystal and Obama in happier times above. The spin already has it that the strategy remains in place whatever it is. But this is not good for Nato or Isaf. An even bigger shambles prevails now. This month sees the worst casualties they have suffered and it will get worse still. McChrystal will have his own chatshow within a year. On Fox probably. Poetic justice of a kind.
Monday 21 June 2010
'Grim Milestone' Passed
Sunday 20 June 2010
Get Those Old 'Grim Milestone' Articles Dusted Off
Friday 18 June 2010
Thursday 17 June 2010
Wikileaks To Expose Another Massacre
The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks says it plans to reveal a new secret military video of one of the deadliest US air strikes in which scores of children are believed to have been killed. WikiLeaks announced the move in an email to supporters. It said it fears it is under attack after the US authorities said they were searching for the site's founder, Julian Assange, following the arrest of a US soldier accused of leaking the Afghanistan video and another of a US attack in Baghdad in which civilians were killed. It says it is still working to prepare the film of the bombing of the Afghan village of Garani in May 2009. The Afghan government said about 140 civilians were killed in Garani, including 92 children. The US military initially said that up to 95 people died, of which about 65 were insurgents. However, American officials have since wavered on that claim and a subsequent investigation admitted mistakes were made during the attack.
The video could prove to be even more embarrassing to the US military and risks weakening support for the disastrous campaign. The US said it was targeting Taliban positions when it used weapons that create casualties over a wide area, including one-tonne bombs and others that burst in the air. But two US military officials told a newspaper last year that no one checked to see whether there were women and children in the buildings. General David Petraeus said a year ago that the military's video of the attack would be made public as evidence that the US assault on Garani was justified. But it was not released.
Assange said WikiLeaks has the Garani video and "a lot of other material that exposes human rights abuses by the US government". Last week, it was revealed that US authorities are trying to make contact with Assange to press him not to publish information the Pentagon says could endanger national security. Assange cancelled an appearance in Las Vegas last Friday. In his email, Assange also calls on supporters to protect the website from "attack" by the authorities following the detention of a US soldier, Bradley Manning, who was arrested in Iraq after admitting to a former hacker that he leaked the Garani and Baghdad videos to WikiLeaks.
Friday 11 June 2010
Warmonger Assessments of Afghan War Officially Downgraded To 'Making Progress'
On Monday, June 7, the Afghanistan war completed its 104th month, becoming the longest-ever war the United States has fought. Costs continue to rise,outpacing that of the Iraq war for the first time last month -- a trend that appears likely to continue. McChrystal has curtailed his statements to indicate 'progress' rather than any semblance of a 'victory'.
Also on Monday -- probably not a coincidence - 12 NATO soldiers were killed, seven of them Americans. It was the deadliest day for coalition forces since last October. An additional five troops lost their lives on Sunday, and five more on Wednesday, making this one of the war's worst weeks for coalition casualties in its nearly nine years.
Another nugget of news from Afghanistan this week came in a New York Times report: an ongoing investigation sees compelling evidence that Afghan private security contractors have been bribing Taliban militants with US funds to escalate violence and thus boost the need for their services. "A series of events last month," they reported, "suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents." They spoke to a NATO official in Kabul who "believed millions of [American] dollars were making their way to the Taliban". The fallout? None, really. No declarations from party leaders. The only US politician who seemed to notice was Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). "Our troops are dying in Afghanistan, and now it turns out we may be funding their killers," he said.
Sunday 6 June 2010
CIA, Cynicism and Obscenity
From Jon Pilger in The Staggers:
The CIA set a precedent with the Tonkin “incident”, sparking off the Vietnam war. Today, we see the same arts of spin at work in Israel’s reasons for the bloody assault on the Muslim aid ships to Gaza.
How do wars begin? With a "master illusion", according to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA's pioneers in "black propaganda", known today as "news management". In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an "incident" that became the "conclusive proof of North Vietnam's aggression". This followed a claim, also fake, that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.
“The CIA," he said, "loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons - the agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of central Vietnam. They shot it up and made it look like a firefight, and they brought in the American press. Based on this evidence, two marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam." An invasion that took three million lives was under way.
The Israelis have played this murderous game since 1948. The massacre of peace activists in international waters on 31 May was "spun" to the Israeli public for the better part of the week, preparing them for yet more murder by their government, with the unarmed flotilla of humanitarians described as terrorists or dupes of terrorists. The BBC was so intimidated that it reported the atrocity primarily as a "potential public relations disaster for Israel", the perspective of the killers, and a disgrace for journalism.
Guilt trip
A similar master illusion now consumes Asian governments. On 20 May, South Korea announced it had "overwhelming evidence" that a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine sank one of its warships, the Cheonan, in March with the loss of 46 sailors. The US keeps 28,000 troops in South Korea, where the public has long supported détente with Pyongyang.
On 26 May, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, flew to Seoul and demanded that the "international community must respond" to "North Korea's outrage". She flew on to Japan, where the new North Korean "threat" eclipsed the briefly independent foreign policy of the Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, elected last year with popular opposition to America's permanent military occupation of Japan. (On 2 June Hatoyama resigned, having failed to move a US military base in Okinawa.) The "overwhelming evidence" is a propeller that "had been corroding at least for several months", reported theKorea Times. In April, the director of South Korea's national intelligence, Won Se-hoon, told a parliamentary committee that there was no evidence linking the sinking of the Cheonan to North Korea. The defence minister agreed. And the head of South Korea's military marine operations said, "No North Korean warships have been detected [in] the waters where the accident took place." The reference to an "accident" suggests the warship struck a reef and broke in two.
To the American media, North Korea's guilt is beyond doubt, just as North Vietnam's guilt was beyond doubt, just as Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, just as Israel can terrorise with impunity. But, unlike Vietnam and Iraq, North Korea has nuclear weapons, which helps to explain why it has not been attacked, not yet: a salutary lesson to other countries, such as Iran, currently in the cross hairs.
In Britain, we have our own master illusions. Imagine someone on state benefits caught claiming £40,000 of taxpayers' money in a second-home scam. A prison sentence would almost certainly follow. But David Laws, chief secretary to the Treasury, does the same and is described as follows: "I have always admired his intelligence, his sense of public duty and his personal integrity" (Nick Clegg). "You are a good and honourable man" (David Cameron). Laws is "a man of quite exceptional nobility" (Julian Glover, the Guardian), and "a brilliant mind" (BBC).
The Oxbridge club and its associate members in politics and the media have tried to link Laws's "error of judgement" and "naivety" to his "right to privacy" as a gay man, an irrelevance. The "brilliant mind" is a wealthy, Cambridge-groomed investment banker devoted to the noble task of cutting the public services of mostly poor and honest people.
Crushing blow
Now imagine another public official, the force behind one of the great war criminals and liars. This official "spun" the illegal invasion of a defenceless country that resulted in the deaths of at least a million people and the dispossession of many more: in effect, the crushing of a human society. If this was the Balkans or Africa, he would very likely have been indicted by the International Criminal Court.
But crime pays for the clubbable. In quick step with the Laws affair, this truth was demonstrated by the continuing celebration of Alastair Campbell, whose frequent media appearances provide a vicarious thrill for the liberal intelligentsia. To the Guardian, Campbell is "bullish, sometimes misdirected, but unafraid to press on where others might have faltered". The Guardian's immediate interest is its "exclusive" publication of Campbell's "politically explosive" and "uncut" diaries. Here is a flavour: "Saturday 14 May. I called Peter [Mandelson] and asked why he didn't return my calls yesterday. 'You know why.' 'No, I don't.' He said he was incandescent at my Newsnight interview . . .'"
In a promotional interview with the Guardian, Campbell dispensed more of this dated incest, referring just once to the bloodbath for which he was a principal apologist. "Did Iraq lose us support in 2005?" he asked rhetorically. "Without a doubt . . ." Thus, a criminal tragedy equal in scale to the Rwandan genocide was dismissed as a "loss" for New Labour: a master illusion of notable profanity.
Friday 4 June 2010
Israeli Lies Unravel
'During the bloodiest part of the assault, Israeli commandos shot one person every minute. One man was fatally shot in the back of the head just two feet in front him and another was shot once between the eyes. He added that as well as the fatally wounded, 48 others were suffering from gunshot wounds and six activists remained missing, suggesting the death toll may increase.
The new information about the manner and intensity of the killings undermines Israel's insistence that its soldiers opened fire only in self defence and in response to attacks by the activists.'Link