Tag Archives: Arabia

Super Harry kills the barbarians

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One of the frequent refrains in the US is that the powerful and well-to-do war promoters here always keep their own children out of the fighting, and that many of them are ‘chicken-hawks’, gung-ho avoiders of doing the actual fighting themselves. But in Britain, along comes Prince Super War Hawk, Killer of the Pagan, and he has duly registered and true authentic ‘royal blood’, too! He’s a True Warrior Prince from the Royalty… pure breed!

Well, the US has had several more plebeian Super Heroes for the pro-war press, one of which was an American pro- football player who once tried to outdo Warrior Prince Harry. That American Super Hero evidently was not very popular among his own troops, and was killed by ‘innocent’ fire. But Super Prince of Arabia, TE Lawrence, no I meant of Afghanistan, Prince Harry, is claiming to be the truest killer of the barbarians of them all. He’s making a few dinosaurs in Britain proud that such a fossil from the dead Empire of Great Britain apparently still is around, lost in some sort of time warp, one must guess?

In this picture Super Prince MANS a machine gun, as he strolls through the brutal barrios of The Natives. But alas, Super Prince is ready to PULL OUT, and return to being only poor Clark Kent once again.

Who needs Princess Di in these modern times, when the Murdoch press can PUSH Super Prince in its tabloids? But for now, Super Prince Harry must once again remove his Super Hero cape, and return to his people. One wonders what the British population thinks of this gala show?

CENTCOM is central command of what?

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Mecca in our talonsAs the invasion of Iraq progressed, I remember constant references to CENTCOM. Journalists would receive their briefings from CentCom, a tent in Kuwait by all appearances. I thought CentCom represented central military communications there, a safe spot behind our lines where generals could command artillery, logistics, etc.

Learning about the newly formed AFRICOM and the established EUROCOM, each beachhead assertions of US superpower control over world regions, I have to revisit US CENTRAL COMMAND for what it is, and its terribly telling dominion. Central? By the emblem I see you don’t mean the time zone. You are not talking about defense of the American Midwest. Do you really mean to refer to the Middle East, including its extended oil producing nations, as the center of your realms to command? I’d sooner concede to American ethnocentrism than to Judeo-Christian pre-occupation with Jerusalem, sooner than hold Mecca in the center cross-hairs of our bomb sights.

I’m happy to report there are currently no eager takers for Bush’s announced AFRICOM, command central for our extraction-industry ambitions on that continent.

After Bin Laden’s loudly felt complaint about the US unholy presence in Saudi Arabia, CENTCOM facilities had to be moved further from Mecca, to the crony dictator states of Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and the UAE. The US Central Command assets include many military bases and undisclosed “weapon pre-positioning sites,” six of which have been revealed to be located in Israel.

Stealing Muslim women from terrorists

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What is Greg Mortenson teaching the children of Pakistan?I’m afraid my Neo Liberal roots are showing. Greg Mortenson is delivering a lecture at CC on January 15th and I hardly know how to object. I too believe that the fate of mankind depends on education.

However, where have I the right to hold such a belief system, mine, above others? You can call Islam a religion for uneducated poor people, and be mostly right, as indeed the same applies to all fundamentalist absolutists. But that is only to regard education in the liberal sense, with its belief that a secular utopia awaits man’s bettering himself through progress. Technology, medical advances, and the celebration of the individual lead mankind where exactly? To a healthier, more antiseptic life certainly, civil discourse often, but to chaos and nihilism so far, quickly.

Fundamentalist Luddite religious systems may not take man to the moon, but they do ensure spiritually grounded lives, full families, and the same for all foreseeable descendants. Which model is likely the more sustainable? If we posit that the greater percentage of mankind need such intellectual tethers, to whom do you entrust their guidance? Allah or Coca Cola?

The West may think it offers salvation to the women of Islam, but is it true? Are the middle class advocates of women’s rights prepared to take in their rescuees? A Muslim wife’s life is at the mercy of Muslim males, and we’ve been treated to horrific accounts. How do they compare to what capitalism has to offer? Those liberated from the Koran can look forward to the certainty of exploitation by globalization bosses be they man or woman, regulated by amoral corporations and corrupt officials, now without the comfort of leading lives of spiritual purpose.

Isn’t the jury still out on the West’s liberated women? They’re having fewer children, that’s for certain.

White knights like Mr. Mortenson offer a gift horse that indeed cannot deliver. Meanwhile of course our soldiers and free trade carpetbaggers quietly pile on inside. Mortenson’s book Three Cups of Tea has been requisitioned by the Defense Department and issued to our counter-insurgency forces, probably to teach the Hearts and Minds lingo, hopefully not worse.

Mortenson’s visit to Colorado Springs is being sponsored by a new department of UCCS, the Center for Homeland Security, I kid you not! It’s a major now offered by UCCS, established with funding from the Pentagon, staffed with retired military instructors, and chaired by career CIA officer Steve Recca. Look him up, his name is tied completely to CIA activities. As they say in the intelligence biz, he’s totally “mobbed up.”

The tag line to Mortenson’s book tour is to use education outreach as an alternative means to combat terrorism. While it is a refreshing change-up to our direct war making against terrorism, I can’t imagine behaving cavalierly toward Islam is going to endear us greatly. Osama didn’t want US feet on the ground in Saudi Arabia. Do Muslims in general want westerners building schools for their girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Could stealing their young women be seen as anything but a provocation for a terrorist response?

Neo-liberal translations of Arabic

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Borat is a Jewish comedian in Muslim black faceDoes the Arabic at left mean anything to you? It could spell Tanzim Qaedat al-Jihad fi Balad al-Rafidin for all you know. Would that translate to “al-Qaeda in Iraq” if there was no such thing? AQI is a CIA coined term. Much as if the police searched your home, planted a stash, and labeled it “pot of your home.”

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is actually the dumbed down shorthand of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia for Americans who wouldn’t know what Mesopotamia would have had to do with September 11. The lands of Mesopotamia would really suggest a Greater Iraq, inclusive of regions of Syria, Turkey and Iran. In which case, Jihadists advocating for the ancient territorial legacy of Iraq would not likely be fighting in Iraq at all. AND ACTUALLY, fi Balad al-Rafidin translates to “the country of the Two Rivers.”

Whether QJBR is a CIA invention, like the Jordanian who-never-was al-Zarqawi, will be for historians to decipher. Probably it’s a little of both. Regardless, AQI ends with “in Iraq” –only in America, land of few maps and sub-average education. We can’t even be told that Mexico is actually called Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, lest US Americans get confused.

What liberties can our think tanks and intelligence manipulators take with Kufic script! The phrase above could just as well mean “I will wipe World Jewry off the face of the Earth!” as “Springtime for Hitler and Germany.” Or it could have meant “erase the illegitimate borders imposed on trans-Arabia by the Western powers bent on imposing an Israeli colony, by ruse of religion, in mock restitution for the Holocaust, the pogroms and the Spanish Inquisition, to give them a beachhead for Middle East oil.”

If I were to have a guess at the Arabic characters above, it would be “Sin Salida.”

Algeria, Eritrea, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Chad, Yemen- all pulled into made by US war

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It is no longer even just Iran, Somalia, and Syria that are now being pulled into the vortex of the US government’s mad assault on the Muslim world. The above countries, too, are all being made part of the US grab for declining oil reserves. All are to have their security sacrificed, and all in the name of making the US supposedly more secure!.

This should give some people, who believe that it is total madness for the US to attack Iran therefore it can’t be in the planning, some food for thought? Regionalized warfare is in the planning and is being carried out though, whether we like it or not. It is no longer a matter of when it might occur, simply because it already is occurring.

Algeria is now sinking back into its decades long dirty war between its military and Islamic Rightist forces, as Turkey ‘s millitary is with its newest attacks on its oppressed Kurdish citizens. Hezbollah, in Lebanon, announces that Dick Cheney has begun a covert war against them inside that country, while Chad has now become drawn into conflict with Sudan. And in the Horn of Africa, the US is torturingand murering people alongside allies Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia, as Eritrea is being accused newly of supporting ‘terrorism’ because it opposes the US made invasion of Somalia with Ethiopian troops! Even in Thailand, the former government’s persecution of its Muslim community has now rebounded into that country presently being ruled most unstably by a group of coup leaders.

The real threat ahead as the US government moves its troops into line for an assault on Iran, is that the countries of Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Egypt will also have their stability crumble, not to mention other places like Saudi Arabia and Morocco, Nigeria, and the Congo, once again. Meanwhile, our politicians of both parties act as if all this is not all their doing! It is, and just like they don’t give a damn about the destruction they are causing abroad, they don’t give a damn about what they aere doing to the common American, neither.

House of Bush, House of Saud

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‘The Angry Arab’ and Craig Unger, author of the book ‘House of Bush, House of Saud’ team up for a great radio program about the Saud family and Saudi Arabia, the American government’s favorite Arab oil whore. Sell the oil cheap for foreign benefit, make a sweetheart deal for one’s own relatives, shaft the Arab people as a whole. So much for the US bringing democracy to the Arabs. What the US corporations and government want is for Arabs to bring cheap oil to America, peacefully or by force. The main Arab ally of the US is a brutal monarchy based on a fundamentalist Muslim theocracy. Check the program out- almost an hour long.

Is Iran Responsible, or the Bush family, for the destruction of Iraq?

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The American media and government have begun a campaign to blame Iran for the chaos and destruction that now exists in Iraq. The storyline goes that all would be OK, but only if the Shia were to behave.

The US public is pretty damn ignorant of anything that goes on in the Middle East, always has been, and there are no signs on the horizon to make anybody think that this will ever change. However this new line of total bullshit from our imperialist misleaders really is too much to take, even by the most demented American Right Winger.

Last I heard the US has suffered less than 5,000 casualties in 2 wars with Iraq. The Iranians though, suffered 1,000,000 casualties and $350,000,000,000 dollars in losses due to a war started by Sunni run Iraq and its Sunni Arab allies, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in 1980. The US government of Ronald Reagan with George Bush Senior acting as the Dick Cheney of that era, solidly was behind the effort to ‘punish’ Iran for having overthrown the US backed despot, the Shah of Iran. Donald Rumsfeld, the Reagan and Bush emissary, was busy pumping Saddam’s hand in support late 1983, flat in the middle of that aggression against Iran.

In short, the Sunnis have screwed up Iraq for over 1/4 century now and screwed over Iran, too. And they could not have done the damage they did without the consistent complicity of the Bush family in support of that destruction. For more info (since they didn’t teach this history at your school), check out ‘Iraq Iran War’ over at wikipedia.

Mexico’s oil is running out so up goes the Border Wall

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Americans are under the impression that Mexico is an extremely poor country. It is not. It is the world’s 5th largest oil producer, and the US economy’s 2nd largest foreign supplier of oil. Canada is #1, while Saudi Arabia comes in at #3. It’s per capita income is significantly higher than that of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, and Argentina. China is considered an economic super power, yet Mexico has 4 times the per capita income of that country. Mexico even has the world’s 2nd largest oil field. There is only one problem though. Mexico’s oil reserves are running out.

Yes, it is predicted that Mexico may only have about 10 more years before its 2 major oil fields go dry. What then? It is a country of over 100,000,000 people, and its government gets over half of what it spends from its oil revenues. As a result, the national oil company, PEMEX, is billions upon billions in dept, even as it funds the nation. Mexico wants to join up with US prosperity, even as the US itself is running into problems finding new sources of cheap oil to float its own economy. And Mexico is in much worse shape in that regard.

In this desperate world of energy depletion we are now entering into, it’s all for one’s self, so up goes The Wall. A decade ago, the promises were made that all would enter into a new world of prosperity through NAFTA. Free flow of everything! But how quickly dreams built on mirages can fall. We are now in a war to steal the energy resources away from the people of Iraq and Iran, and there is not about to be any US elite misgivings, if they have to screw over the Mexicans in a few short years ahead. A brave new world awaits us.

A small note… wikipedia states that with current rates of consumption, the world’s oil reserves will run out in 32 years. Be sure to check your tire pressures .

Also of interest… Mexicans stage tortilla protest

America’s rolling invasion of Somalia

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The US invasion and occupation of Somalia is like that of Haiti, nobody is paying much attention. And like the current occupation of Haiti, it ‘rolls’. What do I mean by describing this as a ‘rolling invasion’, for it is a term I think that describes the now prototypical US intervention into the affairs of other nations? Lebanon, too, is being violated by an American rolling invasion as yet another example. So let’s take a quick look at Somalia then, to get a glimpse of the US strategy everywhere for its misnamed ‘war on terrorism’.

In Somalia, the US first arranged an invasion of that country using Ethiopian troops. Then it followed by bombing the country from US ships. Just several weeks after the initial assault using another country’s military, that of Ethiopia, the US is switching them out, and moving a contingent of another country’s military in, 1,500 Kenyans troops. In turn, the US is pressuring Uganda, Rwanda, and South Africa amongst other countries, to follow. And without any interest at home what-so-ever, the US bombed Somalia once again just yesterday!

Imagine how the Somalians feel? As a Muslim country they finally get some semblance of government after 15 years of chaos, but then the US returns once again to topple the cart yet one more time. The US sponsored troops? Thousands of Christian Ethiopians! And to follow up this humiliation using a traditional enemy of one nation, the US brings in yet a second nation’s troops. See the roll? Like rolling waves of a heavy surf on the beach. This will then be followed by an eclectic assortment of other nations, none of which have anything in common with the natives, except for their racial coloring perhaps. And that of being sponsored by George W. Bush!

We could go to Iraq or Afghanistan to see the same nonsensical outsourcing of imperialism once again. But let’s look at Lebanon first. US invasion launched using Israeli troops first. Less than successful, so the Jewish forces pull partially back out. The US then has an unwanted UN move into the country as so-called ‘peacekeepers’. The US then threatens Hezbollah. The US then has France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, the European Union, and others to cajole the country with being given possible funds to rebuild itself some. The US threatens Syria and Iran. What will Bush roll in with next? US troops? Or maybe Polish troops? Don’t joke, they are already in Iraq and Afghanistan in large numbers. How about Japanese? Don’t joke, they are in Iraq! At the end of 2006, Yugoslavia had its area of Kosovo occupied by troops from 30 nations! Talk about a Tower of Babel!

OK, enough of Lebanon. More rolling imperialism, the grand daddy of idiotic imperialism, Haiti! US invades, deposes the legitimate president, and then partially removes itself, bringing in Canadians (some speak French) and Brazilians (many are Black)! Haitians in the streets improve their language skills in French and Portuguese. But wait! Troops arrive on behalf of Dubya from China, Chile, Argentina, France,Nepal, Jordan, Peru, Sri Lanka!, and Guatemala! (80 of them). I especially think the Haitians are impressed with Sri Lanka and Guatemala coming to visit. Those 2 militaries have such great reputations! And Haitians love a circus!

Isn’t all this rolling imperialism reminiscent of the Romans? They would send in all sorts of barbarians from one end of the Empire into the next. Can we even begin to imagine our own reaction if we were ever to be disrespected with such occupations and warmaking against us, as the US uses against so many others? Imagine if the former Soviet Union had won the Cold Ware, and followed it by occupying our country with troops speaking 20 different languages, 30 different cultures, etc.? That certainly would have gotten us into an enduring peace, for sure! lol.

Where will the US invasion of Somalia roll off to? What new group of heathens to trample on? Will any American ever really give a damn about these smaller societies that get run roughshod over by their government? Liberals are too busy trying ot get the US to send troops to Chad and Darfur to notice much where the troops are actually at. Some have yet to figure out that there is a war going on in Afghanistan, for example. Though it is encouraging to see that the latest poll finally finds over 1/2 of Americans are for withdrawal from that country at last. No thanks to the Democratic Party, I might add. Afghanistan is a dirty word for them to mention.

These rolling invasions create nothing but chaos and misery.

Lebanon in ruins

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Lebanon lies in ruins after the imperialist allies, the US and Israel, destroyed it once again. Israel’s invasion destroyed about $5 billion dollars worth of civilian infrastructure, and much of South Lebanon’s population has had to pass the Winter amongst the rubble of their former houses and cities.

No help has come, and the only possible assist for them in aid is coming through promises to help from those responsible for the destruction in the first place. At a conference in Paris, the US, France, European Union, and US Arab ally supreme, Saudi Arabia are promising 7.6 dollars of aid mirage to the Lebanese, but only if they do as the imperialists want them to do.

What we have is the mirror landscape that the US has forced upon Iraq and Afghanistan, and seems also determined to force on Iran and Syria in the days ahead. First the US and its allies reduce to rubble your country, and then if you obey us we offer to help repair some of the damage we have done! And everywhere the imperialist US Empire goes it foments warfare race against race, language group against language group, religious sect versus religious sect. Always divide and destroy in order to rule.

US ally, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, in control of the present Lebanese government in great part cooperated with Israel’s last entry into his own country. He thought to use the invasion against his internal opponents, the Shia. Instead, the resistance of the Shia headed Hezbollah to that invasion and destruction, strengthened them and weakened him. He is also held widely responsible for having allowed Lebanon’s foreign debt of $41 billion to have piled up. In short, he is the epitome of corruption, and this is the man the US is supporting against the majority of Lebanon’s population.

We in the US have watched stupid and ignorant from the sidelines, as our government has spread anarchy and chaos from Afghanistan to Iraq to Lebanon to Somalia to where next?….probably Iran, Syria, Jordan, Pakistan, and on beyond. In the last 2 weeks, the Democratic Party voters, that sat passively behind the passivity of their consenting-to-Bush DP leaders, have finally chosen to go out and protest some. The Democrats finally have stirred some. There is a current of optimism and hope in the air for them because of it.

But what of their newly found ability to oppose a little? Is it real, or just a pretense to get the Democratic Party back into office? Are they really opposed to their government’s imperialism? I have my own thoughts to what the true answer actually is. I am less than hopeful that their opposition is anything more than the most shallow and skin deep. I wish that I am proven wrong, but I think that I know my fellow Americans well, and that is what fuels my pessimism. Meanwhile, my heart goes out to the people of Lebanon, who are once again being forced into living in total Hell, all but ignored by those who put them there.

The US & Britain are profoundly undemocratic forces in the world today

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If it is not enough to give Israel the free reign and financial aid to terrorize Palestianians and steal their lands at will, the US and Britain also try to disrupt and tear up the governance the Palestinians try to arrange for themselves.

For years they made demons out of Arafat and Fatah, but today the US & its allies are politically supporting Fatah by trying to force new Palestinian elections early and pumping money into Fatah and its leader Abbas, so that this group will be able to buy the new elections at will and destroy their opposition, Hamas. The US and Britain are profoundly undemocratic forces in the world today, though this in effect is nothing new, and this is just the most recent example of this. Our corporate government leaders no more support democracy in placxes like Palestine and Iraq, than they do in our own workplaces if we try to organize unions.

We can go back to the US’s coup against Allende where Washington DC installed Pinochet into power. We can go also to examine Algeria, where in 1991 the US and Europe supported a military coup after the elections were won by an Islamic coalition. Subsequently, several hundred thousand were slaughtered down, and repression there continues to this day. Hardly an incentive for Muslim groups looking for national independence and liberation to take a peaceful course of action, as opposed to crashing planes into the Pentagon and elsewhere.

We can also see today, the US and its allies pushing to keep an undemocratic and unpopular Lebanese government in power. One that opened the gates to a foreign power (Israel) to wage war once again inside Lebanon against the majority sector of that country’s population. We can see it in the US and European’s support for the fraudulent and unpopular president just installed in Mexico, that provoked the largest demonstrations in the history of that country. And we can see it in the longterm US and Brit support for the Saudi Arabian monarchy, the Musharraf dictatorship in Pakistan, and the repressive Egyptian government, that has merely the sheerest of mirages of having any democratic trappings to it.

Everywhere we look, the US and its allies are supporting tyrants and thugs, but can anybody really claim that this is something new? But this latest example of the US and Britain trying to force new elections on the Palestinians, is a new low of sorts, I think. It is forcing upon the Palestinians the type of factional violence that the US and Britain have already forced upon Afghanistan and Iraq. Could the Nazis themselves have taken this strategy of fomenting inter factional fighting to a form more detrimental to its victims?

What Bush and Osama together have taught the world

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September 11 was important in world history, because Osama bin Laden taught the world that resistance to US domination was most effectively fought on US soil, and not the soil of the world’s oppressed nations.

Seems simple enough, but most victims of US foreign policy up to then had fought back directly against their own US propped-up puppet governments. Osama bin Laden globalized the resistance to US imperial policies by taking the fight to US soil. His message? Not to let D.C. fight the war solely on your home territories.

The 9/11 attacks might have not alone taught the world much of anything, if there had not been the Bush Adminstration team in office. That was the genius of Osama. He knew how elite American arrogance would most likely respond, being of elite lineage himself. He knew that the US ruling class would tend to try to destroy this new resistance against their world domination by using pure and total violence, much as the ruling class in Osama’s native Saudi Arabia does when threatened. But pure violence is dangerous since it tends to overheat like a nuclear meltdown occurring within the core of a reactor.

At present glance, it appears that nothing much has changed. The response of the Bush Administration to 9/11 was to up the level of violence against the peoples of the Third World states of Afghanistan, then Iraq, and next Lebanon No new attacks have occurred on American soil meanwhile. And as usual, there have been yet new hundreds of thousands of victims of the US military and its ME Frankenstein, the state of Israel’s IDF. The European governments have done their part, as junior cheerleaders of the US mandated blood bath outside their own continent.

But what will be the ultimate cost that the American people will eventually pay for sitting by and silently allowing its corporate-run government to go bezerk after 9/11? I talk not of the trillions of dollars in national debt that is being run off, but rather of the fact that the Bush Adminstration has practically guaranteed that Osama’s message did take root in the populations of the world.

Osama said let’s start a dirty war of attrition against the US rulers on their home soil. Osama had the ability to give the lesson that this was the Achille’s heel of US imperialism, but he didn’t have the organization to do much more than just explode one big bonfire or two for the passive and impoverished crowd he was trying to wake up to see. Bush has now given this previously dormant crowd the knowledge of the technique to create one, two, a thousand mini or maximum 9/11s in the years ahead.

It does not involve airports nor planes, And the world is more awake now. It is probably only a matter of weeks, or months at best, before the war stirs once again on the US mainland soil, but this time with newer techniques learned on Afghan and Iraqi soil. The ultimate price to be paid by Americans for their acceptance of this carnage, is that the carnage will most likely hit our soil once again, just like it hit New York previously.

So let’s look some at the new techniques to wage war on American soil. Let’s look at the Improvised Explosive Device (IED), which is close cousin to the cluster bomb. The IED has accounted for about 1/3 of the US casualties in Iraq. The components of an IED are cheap and its materials easily found. And let us not think that only Muslims can use these devices within the US. Anybody can.

Ex- US soldiers can come back and construct them. Hispanics tired of the US messing with their countries can put them together. Gang members trafficking in illegal substances and human flesh can do the same. That’s what a dirty war is all about. The weak use weaker weapons against the more powerful, but weapons they do begin to use. Iraq plus 9/11 = the ability and desire by yet more people, to use cheap weapons against the US government on US soil. Bush has given that little shove that was needed to make Osama’s lesson to the world more effective.

These IEDs are what has been giving the Iraqi resistance its sharpening edge. But where might this dirty war of attrition begin to play out in yet another battlefield? See William S. Lind’s commentary, The Boomerang Effect that shows how one scenario most likely might occur.

Osama taught us that what goes around comes around. Americans have just yet to learn that lesson, though the Bush Klan is determined that we certainly will. Dubya, Dick, and Donald helped the world find the most hard to stop weapon that could be used against the American people. The IED. The lesson was learned in Iraq, but the whole world has been watching.

How well is the war in Iraq going?

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Finally there is unity! The war in Iraq is not going well for the United States so say the press, the politicians, Rumsfield, even. Oh the suffering amongst the British and Americans. They did not forsee the unfolding problems. If only the Iraqis would act normal!

It’s so bad they say, you think that the American government would be suing for peace? Cut in run, don’t cut and run? How do we get out of this unfolding disaster for our beloved country? So now we are awash in crocodile tears we are. Boohoohoo. Our poor suffering America. Yes, and the entire elite spectacle is so sickening it makes one want to vomit.

And, yes, this spectacle even includes our churchly ‘peace movement’. One group of kind people, the nuns. were rushing around Colorado last week to send canned goods to the soldiers and their families. And now, the CS pacifists are beginning a countdown. Tick-tock-tick-tock. Look what’s been done to our soldiers! We are nearing the magical 3,000 mark! Time to light some candles and pray.

Oh, and let’s not forget the Iraqis, too! Mention them at the press release for when the clock strikes 3. Don’t let it strike 4! We beg of you. One would open one’s mouth to say something to them about this sad approach, but for the fact that lighting a candle or two is a major ‘peace action’ for them. They’re in motion now! So better to remain mum so that at least the ten or fifteen of them get their pictures in The Gazette and Indy as concerned folk.

All this wailing and despair. Both Democrats and Republicans are creasing their brows with worry and cold sweat. We’ve lost Iraq they moan. It’s all going so wrong! It’s become like one big sorry soap opera. Oh the agony, and Oh the guilt. We tried to do good, but we failed. Why, oh why, oh why? Maybe it was them? Yes that’s it. The Arabs cannot be trained!

All this would be way comical if it weren’t so absolutely pathetic. First all, the start of wartime didn’t begin yesterday with Bush’s invasion of Iraq. It didn’t begin with 9/11. It didn’t even begin with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. So where do all these stupid calculations begin? The liberal churchgoing peacenics would have it all start with the number ZERO, and would have our time of great despair calculated now at 3,000. It’s very Biblical to do it that way, but it is utter nonsense. US foreign policy effecting Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq have killed millions. ‘We’ lost less than 3,000 US soldiers in this time, and all America begins to cry like babies! Jesus H. Christ! Talk about being absolutely self-centered? YES, our society definitely takes the cake!

All this hysteria proceeds from the previous nonsense we have been spoon fed. Stuff about WOMD, protecting the sovereign country of Kuwait, helping establish democracy in the Middle East, and so on for ad nauseum. Can our elderly still remember all the nonsense about what a supposedly remarkable man was the Shah of iran? I date myself here, because I certainly can. Time Magazine, and all the usual rest of the pornographic US press, loved the guy! The Shah was the world master of running a state torture regime, like the one that America’s top criminals now copy so fanatically. Back then, it was claimed in the US that he was a man ahead of his time. Oh such a teacher that Donald and his ilk had! The Shah. Oh shit! Ask the British and they will show you how it started all way before even then.

And then, the unfortunate takedown. This modern day American hero, the Shah, fell. Tears. Where did ‘we’ go wrong? Where did this modern leader go wrong? We need to arm Osama and gang to the tune of multi-billions, and make the Soviets have their own Vietnam. Osama the freedom fighter! We need to cook up a war with Iran to show them we wouldn’t let them get away with thumping our patron saint, The Shah. So America and its buddies, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia armed Saddam Hussein. Killed a million plus.

Fast forward to now. Where did Bush go wrong, The chimp? Boohoohoo. It’s a bloodbath. And we get the ‘debate’ of the press corp buffoons. Stay the course, or cut and run? Yeah, but how ’bout we all just throw up? This is not a real debate our elites are engaging in, just a charade. A country that allowed its elites to destroy the lives of millions in this stretch of ME alone, deserves to go bankrupt. And we are! Boohoohoo. How we suffer they say! We approach 3,000 of our own dead, in the midst of this shower of blood we have constructed for others, and all the press propaganda brigade can talk about is American trauma! Nauseating. The real trauma for America will come when the bill arrives in the mail, Chumps.

Let’s face it. The war is going rather well. There have been 2 main goals for Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, Lockheed, and President Cheney. Max out the profits that can be financed from the public treasury. And control the oil. These pied pipers of the Democratic and Republican politician rats are not going to ‘cut and run’. From what? They’re looking to extend the war, are they not? And for good reason. The war in Iraq is going well for them. Why not take it further? Why not make it permanent war? After all these decades of killing, the local peacenics can’t even get it together enough to get 100 people out to pray and light candles. The Iraq War is going well for the war machine. Three thousand? Oh get real, please.

The war in Iraq is going well; there is no anger in the air. Only religious pacifist good will. Feliz Navidad. When people get angry, they will not light candles and meditate. And without real anger, the bloodbath will go on.

Brokeback Desert

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I found this article by Brian Whitaker very interesting. Also, his commentary, Brokeback Desert, is followed by an even more interesting discussion of ME sexuality in its current state. I think it would be interesting to see a remake of this movie slightly changing script into a story about two gay bedouin and their love for each other. Why not tie T.E. Lawrence in there somehow, too? And some scenes of trains with Turkish female passengers on board being blown up by a character that could be given the name ‘Osama’, this time around.

Remember when terrorism against the Turkish civilians was in Big with Hollywood? Fact is, the movie ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ had no women with speaking roles in it at all! So it was kind of a Brokeback British Army flick, of sorts, produced by Sam Spiegel, a very zealous Zionist. And Anglo Americans in the audiences were cheering on terrorist Arabs and terrorist Brits working together to blow up all things Turkish!

Of course, those evil Turks needed to get a little blown up by our Anglo Saxon heros. the Brits. Turks were the Hollywood Muslim savages back then, and not so much the Brit allied Arabs. So it was Arabs working with Anglos that was then in vogue, instead of Black Americans working with Redneck White guys against the baddies. Go figure? but it was a different era then. Peter O’Toole with his bright blue eyes sparkled as the rather effiminate Brit who loved Arabs… uh… men.

Actually, this was my favorite movie when I was a young adolescent. That, and A Thousand Clowns and Marat Sade. Must have watched Lawrence of Arabia more times than my kid has watched Lion King, even. Would watch it again in remake, too, if they would just fuse that Brokeback angle into the new script. We got to keep up with the times now. Brokeback Desert meets Lawrence of Arabia! A remake I’d love to see.

Milton Friedman, Champion of Liberty?

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Today’s Gazette has their lead editorial starting out chirping away with “Milton Friedman- Champion of freedom passes away”. Oh come now, you guys! This economist was known more for being the economic theorist that inspired Chile’s Dictator Pinochet, and you lame brains heil him as being a champion of liberty? Oh well, this is typical of the nutty Right Wing Libertarian nitwits running that paper.

What Milton Friedman was noted for, was his desire to remove all government regulating of the multinational corporations that run the world, “arguing for freer markets” in the words of the Gazette editorial. Ironically, the Gazette has another story today that gruesomely shows the Milton Gazette mentality in its most extreme form. Page A3- China admits to using executed prisoners’ organs for transplants. In this story, we discover that American citizens have been travelling to China to buy and get these parts of butchered Chinese prisoners sewed inside of them. China certainly is a part of the rather unregulated world ‘free market’ in body parts that has become truly Friedmanesque in scope. And can we forget the Friedmanesque ‘free market’ of Argentina, where babies stolen from the wombs of political prisoners went to the high rollers of that country.

Milton Friedman, a real champion of freedom? Sure he is, Gazette. You guys are economic visionaries for sure. Is it any wonder that countries like Guatemala and Saudi Arabia have had major internal scandals around the issue of stolen body parts, where many in the population believe that Americans are stealing body parts from Guatemalan children, or stealing them from dead Iraqis murdered by the US army? That’s as wild a believing that Mickey Mantle is still alive, isn’t it? Remember his go to the head of the line liver transplant? But when a country’s leaders champion the likes of economic butcher Milton Friedman, then we can expect the rest of the world to be just a little leary of it. That’s Friedman’s real legacy. Neoliberlal ghoul.

Showing fealty

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Demonstrating fealty to the SaudisJon Stewart parodied the Bush-Ahmadinejad face off at the U.N. on Thursday, characterizing George Bush’s address as a Mafia don trying to intimidate his subjects.
 
In this light, the significance of Bush holding hands with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah earlier this year finally hit me. Bush is probably taking out on us what he’s getting from his masters. The public hand-holding was none other than a show of fealty.

At first I thought Bush could have been helping the not-so-elder along a Texas trail. Or maybe hand-holding might be a Saudi custom between friends. I laughed a bit at the gay innuendo, thinking about Jeffrey Gannon/Guckert, the gay prostitute who frequents the White House but nobody knows for whom, keeping in mind Stephen Colbert’s chiding White House Spokesman Scott McClellan for retiring to “spend more time with Andrew Card’s children.”
 
What does it mean to kiss the Don’s ring? Or the Pope’s? Or to touch another’s feet? It isn’t affection, it isn’t submission. It’s the literal origin of what it is to kiss ass. An act which both parties agree to be distasteful and beneath one’s dignity, but necessary to demean oneself to show deference.

It means subjugation, to humiliate yourself, in the original sense of humility, to abase yourself before your superior, before everyone’s eyes, to demonstrate your allegiance.

Holding Prince Abdullah’s hand was not about kissing up to the Saudis to cement an oil deal. It was an offer George W. could not refuse. Who owns a major share of the US treasury bonds? Who could break the US economy at will? To whom does Bush owe his fortune and ascendency? “Hold my hand.”

What could it mean for the President of the United States to be demonstrating his fealty to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia?

The Path to 9 11

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In defense of ABC’s docudrama The Path to 9/11. Near the beginning, when the terrorists were taking responsibility for the 1993 WTC bombing, “Ramzi Youssef – Palestinian Terrorist” explained why they had done it: because of America’s military and economic support of Israel.

The subject of Israel and Palestine never came up again, and never came up at all on Ted Koppel’s counter-ABC-straw-man The Price of Security.

We’ve got our boot on Palestine’s windpipe, they’re flailing their arms hoping to dislodge us, and we declare a war on arm flailing. Our media runs through what options America has to be safe from arm-flailing without looking at our boots to let American citizens consider how we might tread the earth with more humanity.

The US and Israel, it’s hard to say who is the master of whom, are actively killing Palestinians in a genocidal program every bit as calculated as the Holocaust or the extermination of the Native Americans. The US supported the recent slaughter of Lebanese peoples, also considered by the international community as genocide.

The US accuses Syria or Iran of backing Hizb’Allah. Those links are sketchy compared to our sending weapons and aid to Israel and other false authorities in the Middle East. When Israel was stepping up its bombing Lebanon in advance of the nearing ceasefire, we had to speed our resupply of Cluster Bombs lest Israel run out of time to use them. The US arms and defends the self-proclaimed kings and sultans who amass great wealth from the sale of their countries’ oil while at the same time subjecting their peoples to abject poverty. Bin Laden opposed our propping up of the Saudis. Youssef decried our support of Israel in Palestine. Arabs have cause to reject US strong arm policies in Egypt, Qatar, Kuwait, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and of course Iraq. Muslims have very good reasons to reject US policy in Afghanistan, Indoneasia and the Philippines.

The least ABC could do in its mockudrama was to set the scene with the Muslim extremists’ motives, and that was it. Even though the rest of the program was re-edited because of the criticism, there followed closely law enforcement characters endlessly lamenting they needed authority for warrantless searches, domestic eavesdropping and inter-departmental information sharing. Filipino police were depicted heroically for not waiting for warrants, female border agents were lauded for using their intuitive -read racial- profiling, suggestions were made of an FBI coverup, even that Clinton’s people were helping Osama.

The irrationality-mongering was so egregious it would take forever to enumerate. The good news is that the Stephen Bochco style shaky camera, the endlessly tight closeups, the jump cuts unto incongruous details lacking context, and the frenetic action going every direction, serve really like an alarm bell going off next to your ear. It’s not conducive to critical thinking, but it’s also painfully and obviously contrived.

I draw one fundamental conclusion. The 9/11 truth seekers have been right all along. We must diffuse the 9/11 lie because the establishment yahoos, both Republican and Democrats, plan to ride this vile deception as long as they can.

By comparison, Ted Koppel’s sombre contemplative piece was full of verbal obfuscation. Koppel began his report with “by now every adult in America knows what happened on 9/11.” What an innocuous way to brush aside the fact that what happened is known, yes, and disputed! His language got no clearer as the program progressed. Lots of “clearly” this, when of course it very clearly could be unclear.

Koppel asked critical questions of such criminals as the author of the latest definition of torture and the commander of Gitmo who declined to admit that detainees had ever been tortured, but Koppel let Bush cabinet officials off with softballs and setups. Koppel let Tom Ridge appear thoughtful as to hold a mirror to himself asking what America is about, he let effete Senator Hays tell everyone that nuclear bombs can be made from items purchased at Home Depot, and Koppel let an NSA software developer appear pro-civil liberties by rejecting racial-profiling. His solution? Eavesdrop on everybody.

By assuming the role of white knight, Ted Koppel is really an effective mouthpiece for the Time-Warner machine, a major player in upholding corporate dominance. What do you think of his “point well taken” technique? As if his smilingly elusive subjects have just trumped him with something other than a quacking canard!

The good news about Koppel on Discovery is that we got a close look at the Bush operatives. They are in charge, yes, and they benefit from being presented by a charming, deep voiced newsman, but didn’t you recognize Larry, Moe and Curly right down to the haircuts? These guys are dopes! In morals, self-reflection and speech. It makes me giddy to contemplate because it’s not going to take much thinking power to take them down. Call me gullible, call me idealistic. It’ll take effort, determination and sacrifice, but it won’t take nucular-chemical-rocket science.

Israelites go home

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Baja JudeaAdmittedly this is a picture of Tel Aviv residents protesting their nation’s militant actions against Lebanon and gathering to offer a prayer for peace.
 
On another level, is it also a picture of fair-skinned westerners on a Middle Eastern beach who’ve overstayed their welcome?
 
Maybe it’s time to close Club Med Judea.

Americans descend upon Baja Mexico all the time, we don’t try to annex it. Or Costa Rica, or Belize. There’s nothing wrong with vacationing in the tropics, but is it fair to emigrate there, declare it your own, and ask the world to protect you from the anger of the people who you sent packing?

Let American and European Jews have their promised land, as promised vacation land. Visit and sunbathe all you want, then go home. This idea that white man should colonize Arabia is so 19th century. Colonization doesn’t work, and we have no right.

Nowhere was this more obvious than South Africa, where white colonizers held themselves as superior to the natives, imposing apartheid to force the indigenous populations to keep to their own neighborhoods.

Can there ever be peace in the Holy Land? Of course there can. Return Israel to its rightful owners. Let Jew, Muslim and Christian live together in a secular state. Will there always be sectarian violence? Perhaps, we’re seeing it elsewhere between Muslims. Sectarian problems will have to be worked out between neighbors. It’s clear the answer was not to give the whole ball of wax to one religion. Especially not the white one.

Maybe there is no al-Qaeda?

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Try this on for size: the war on terror is being used to justify all forms of restrictive government controls, from surveillance to union-busting to torture. Lacking any terrorist acts of late, how do we know there are even terrorists? Except that our government keeps scooping them up, putting them in Guantanamo, but it won’t let us see them.

Is Guantanamo really about keeping certain Islamic “illegal combatants” from doing harm? As the overwelming number of detainees are released without charges, it’s hard to believe the authorities cared who they had detained. Perhaps Guantanamo has been serving to perpetuate the myth that such terrorists exist at all.

Arbitrary interments function to terrorize a populace (a reason why they’re violations of international law), but perhaps the US has an additional purpose. What if there is no major league AL Qaeda except for the fictional assemblage at Guantanamo? Perhaps we’ve not been allowed a close look at the captives at Guantanamo lest we detect that there is no rhyme or reason to those detained.

There has been most certainly a group of Islamic Fundamentalists who orchestrated the 1990 attack the WTC, the bombing of the USS Cole, the bombing of the US embassy buildings in Nairobi, and other bombing in Southeast Asia. And on 9/11/2001 a group of Saudi Arabians flew two airplanes into the WTC, although likely with assistance.

But that’s probably about it. With a dozen or so hijackers dying on 9/11, another dozen usual suspects rounded up in Pakistan and Indoneasia, and poster boy Osama traipsing about Afghanistan, there might not have been any more.

A “war on terror” requires enemy terrorists. If there are no further acts of terrorism, how are you going to assert that there are still terrorists out there? Why not incarcerate a bunch of guys who dress like terrorists and take credit for intervening with their dastardly plans? Plus you’ll be asserting that if you have some, there must be more.

But the stories coming out of those released from Guantanamo indicate that US security agencies are simply playing a cruel games with individual world citizens. Why have such detainees been denied access to the world? Isn’t it more appropriate to say that the world is being denied access to the detainees? Maybe it’s the outside world that the US is trying to keep out of Guantanamo. Otherwise people of reason could unravel the fiction of Al Qaeda.

Lost in translation

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Stoning the Devil between noon and sunset
Today 345 pilgrims in Saudi Arabia were stampeded to death. Hundreds more were injured. It happened in the frantic scramble of millions of pilgrims trying to edge close enough to three ancient pillars to cast 29 pebbles at them. Or something like that. Before the sun set.

I wish I wasn’t feeling so disheartened by this news. It’s not about the loss of life exactly. Antiwar activists are trying their best to give meaning to the Iraqi deaths we’ve caused in this war while Muslims in Mecca are dying because they’ve trampled each other.

When you take this religious war at face value you can see why many Americans dismiss Islam as a religion for simple people. On one hand you become convinced to take up the responsibility of the white man’s burden, and on the other hand you want to subdue any militancy such a people might entertain toward threatening you.

On a day like today it’s hard not to want to hedge your bets with the Neocon zionists.

A stampede like this has the propensity to happen every year at the ritual of the Ramajat. Sometimes the casualties have been many times more. Each year the government tries to improve the lay of the land to accommodate the increasing millions of pebble-throwing pilgrims. Imagine if everyone descending to the subway was determined to use just the leftmost turnstyle, and they weren’t about to slow down to do it.

Except that these death at Mecca were of their own choosing, and except that to die on the Hajj is an honorable death, this predictable tragedy appears synonymous with the useless muslim deaths by our hand.

I cannot help but feel there’s racism in my sentiments. These pilgrims weren’t killed because they were stupid or simple or primitive. This is tradition meets technology, maximum capacity meets three million persons, this is crowd dynamics.

I do not begrudge the Muslims their holy pursuits, especially as a response to the tragedies we’ve visited upon them. But couldn’t the pilgrims or the Saudi government for that matter take a special war-time care not to appear careless about their own lives?

It’s a hard enough sell over here. Here American newspeople are still asking questions like “civilian casualties -are the lives of our soldiers being jeopardized by too great of a concern for the safety of Iraqi civilians?”

It would be no great leap for a young American soldier to rationalize his callous barbarity. He can believe he’s machine-gunning the “stupid Hadjis” to their eternal paradise.

Vets Day part 2: the 3rd Armored Cav

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Black gloved marchers
Before the Guernica that became Fallujah,
 
before our use of chemical weapons in Fallujah,

before there were civilians immolated in their beds by white phosphor in Fallujah,

before Napalm under the disguise of Mark-77 was used in Fallujah,

before our tanks were running over the injured Iraqis in the streets of Fallujah,

before our helicopters were killing every last family trying to wade across the Euphrates River to escape the blood bath that was Fallujah,

before we were turning back all able-bodied men from the age of 11 to 65 from the lines of refugees trying to leave Fallujah because we didn’t want insurgents to escape our pincer movement, forcing them back into the city to make a stand,

before we declared that anyone not evacuated from Fallujah would be treated as a combatant,

before we declared our determination to make an example of Fallujah.

2.
Before we tried to make an example of Fallujah the first time because the world saw what they did to the four contractor mercenaries,

but had to pull out because we hadn’t yet thought to cut off access to the hospitals from which were escaping horror stories of the atrocities we were committing against the civilians of Fallujah.

Before we had thought to ban Al-Jazeera from Iraq for reporting on Fallujah despite our restrictions,

before we killed the Al-Arabia reporter who dared to venture into Fallujah.

3.
Before the famous desecration of the bodies of the contractor-mercenaries by enraged Fallujah youth who’d often seen contractor-cowboys ride through their streets shooting indiscriminately out the window;

before our military tried to cordon off Fallujah with encampments.

4.
Before the killing of three unarmed Iraqi marchers, and the wounding of dozens more, who’d assembled to protest a massacre the day before, both times by nervous 82nd Airborne soldiers who thought they had been fired upon first.

3.
Before the massacre of schoolboys protesting the occupation of their school by American soldiers. The soldiers claimed to have been fired upon and yet the only bullet holes to be found after the killing of 17 unarmed Iraqi men and boys were from the American guns.

5.
Before that time Fallujah had not been occupied. Fallujah remained restful throughout America’s invasion of Iraq. It was not until the actions of the 82nd Airborne and the Marine Expeditionary Force that Fallujah erupted into a hotbed for the insurgency and, as a result of American anger, into American war crimes recalling Lidice and Guernica.

Throughout this period, and in between the disastrous actions by the 82nd and the Marines, Fallujah and the Anbar Provence were the responsibility of the 3rd Armored Cavalry of Fort Carson, Colorado Springs. To their credit, they were not party to the unfortunate American actions.