OCCUPIED COLORADO SPRINGS- While antiwar traditionalists remain stymied about Syria, let’s recognize that the US-EU intervention has already begun. Stop the escalating covert destruction of Syria. Bring our Special Forces boys home now.
CHICAGO- Leaving the Hoi polloi to wonder: “How will we stop NATO?”
OCCUPIED CHICAGO- President Obama got last weekend’s protest message loud and clear, he’s lost that voter to antiwar favorite Vermin Supreme. A week after the NATO Summit, his Democratic Party headquarters in the Prudential Building leaves the office lights on for the law enforcement vote. Or was it to compensate for Mayor Rahm Emanuel stiffing the CPD on their overtime pay for quelling popular dissent at the summit?
OCCUPIED CHICAGO- That sea of light blue helmets protecting the NATO summit in Chicago last weekend may be a novel visual to those accustomed to police state armor black, but that’s because most 60s era news images were black & white. Color photos from Life Magazine remind us that light blue was the team color of the Alabama state troopers who brutalized the Civil Rights marchers trying to march from Selma to Montgomery.
CHICAGO- The Chicago Police Department congratulates itself for using undercover officers to monitor activists, even though protester violence was negligible, but don’t admit the active role they played in dampening mood, fouling media images, and disrupting grassroots.
Headlines about Sunday’s midnight massacre in Kandahar transformed quickly from NATO FORCES RAID to become LONE GUNMAN KILLS 16, as the attributed sources shifted from Afghan locals on the scene to US military spokesmen. One might argue it’s in the interest of national security to attribute the murders in Balandi and Alkozai to a solitary stalker, to tamp the swelling anger of the Afghan populace, but what’s the truth? Making a rare concession, the NYT has revised its headline a 3rd time to read LONE SOLDIER SAID TO BE KILLER OF 16 AFGHANS, and the BBC puts “ACTED ALONE” in quotes. (UPDATE: AP adds “allegedly” and LA Times “apparently”)
Pundits stroke our soldiers’ egos by asking could one special forces soldier alone kill so many (?!), but more difficult to imagine is how a rogue fighter can equip himself and pass through multiple security defenses unobserved. Also doubtful is how and why a stealth assassin would burn the victims’ bodies as he moved about. Easier to believe is that damage control decided it best that one man take the fall for his comrades, God and country, probably the one too drunk to object.
MoveOn wants to mobilize the world’s largest nonviolence movement, calling on the 99% to teach-in itself in time for their American Spring. That’s certain to sound more palatable to America’s unbaptized middle-roaders, than the invitation above, invoking the reception likely awaiting protesters who plan to converge on Chicago in May. The G8 has been relocated to Camp David, but the larger NATO summit is still scheduled to warrant a two mile wide security perimeter around downtown Chicago. What does this poster communicate to you? I’m guessing the menacing image wasn’t chosen at random, it says to me the unadventurous need not apply.
SUNDAY- Drunken US soldiers kill 16 Afghanistan civilians, nine of them children. The US military is claiming the massacre was the work of one soldier who “wandered” inside homes in Kandahar’s Panjwayi district, but witnesses report it was a squad who laughed as they shot the families and tried to burn the bodies. US Army defenders might argue mouths agape that it doesn’t make sense, what would US NATO forces accomplish by doing that? State terrorism is no accident. Whether by directive, unleashing berserkers, or enlisting young men with mental deficiencies, TROOPS KILL KIDS.
For our remedial readers I’ll note that Tony and I are under fire for raising that point at an Occupy GA. What’s the vigilante posse got to say about the US soldiers in the village of Zangabad? Just part of the ugly job of war? Happens everyday? Yes it does.
Vancouver’s Adbusters Magazine sent the initial callouts to occupy Wall Street, to be the natural successor to unfinished revolutions in Tahrir Square and Madrid. Quickly enough it escaped their grasp. Adusters has issued two dozen “Tactical Briefings” since before September 17 to advise the growing rebellion, to be interpreted coming from a valued mentor, albeit an outsider, technically now, a non-occupier. The distinction was never more obvious than when one of their briefings advised striking the camps and waiting out the winter. But their briefing #25 offers more than retreat, it sets OWS sights on the joint NATO-G8 summit to be held in Chicago this May, against which very large demonstrations are already being planned. No specific advice on the other hand for local occupies, wisely perhaps, where tacticians can add no more to the strategy than hold your ground, by definition, occupy.
ADBUSTERS TACTICAL BRIEFING #25
Hey you redeemers, rebels and radicals out there,
Against the backdrop of a global uprising that is simmering in dozens of countries and thousands of cities and towns, the G8 and NATO will hold a rare simultaneous summit in Chicago this May. The world’s military and political elites, heads of state, 7,500 officials from 80 nations, and more than 2,500 journalists will be there.
And so will we.
On May 1, 50,000 people from all over the world will flock to Chicago, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month. With a bit of luck, we’ll pull off the biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen.
And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights. We’ll go there with our heads held high and assemble for a month-long people’s summit … we’ll march and chant and sing and shout and exercise our right to tell our elected representatives what we want … the constitution will be our guide.
And when the G8 and NATO meet behind closed doors on May 19, we’ll be ready with our demands: a Robin Hood Tax … a ban on high frequency ‘flash’ trading … a binding climate change accord … a three strikes and you’re out law for corporate criminals … an all out initiative for a nuclear-free Middle East … whatever we decide in our general assemblies and in our global internet brainstorm – we the people will set the agenda for the next few years and demand our leaders carry it out.
And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear.
Jammers, pack your tents, muster up your courage and prepare for a big bang in Chicago this Spring. If we don’t stand up now and fight now for a different kind of future we may not have much of a future … so let’s live without dead time for a month in May and see what happens …
for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ
I know very little about the dark side of Colonel Gaddafi. I’ve never seen him outside the filter of Western media. For all I know he emptied baby incubators, hid WMDs and ran rape camps. He wasn’t responsible for Lockerbie, the CIA knows that much. The deposed leader’s execution yesterday was nothing to celebrate. It was sad, brutal and shrouded in mystery. Hugo Chavez hailed Gaddafi as a fallen hero, and I’ve never had occasion to disagree with Chavez. Nor have I ever taken issue with George Galloway and he hated Gaddafi. Probably the aging revolutionary was both heroic and corrupt, eccentric and lunatic. Gaddafi was the most powerful protector of Africa, and the only leader to have apologized for Arab role in African slave trade. Naturally he had to be booted from the club.
Is the US only ever up against evil strongmen? Isn’t it obvious that any leader who opposes US hegemony has to be a strongman? Putin is as formidable as any former Soviet foe, and by comparison, Gaddafi was fey. He let down his guard, thought he could sell out to the New World Order and keep his nationalized oil. But the Capitalist jackals do not respect ideologues and will exploit it as weakness.
Captured alive, Gaddafi was brutally mobbed, although the predominant Arabic voices urged keeping him alive. Multiple video angles contradict the official statement that Gaddafi succumbed to crossfire. Video images seem to show special uniformed soldiers heading against the flow of Libyan fighters converging on Gaddafi after the fatal shots.
Was this a Mussolini moment? Hardly. To the last moment Gaddafi seemed incredulous that his people would betray him. I’m not really sure they did. He railed against the CIA and al-Qaeda backed “rebels” who were tearing Libya asunder. NATO’s strength undoubtedly tipped the balance, and Gaddafi’s demilitarization of Libya left him with insufficient defenses.
Looking at a video still of the final moments of Libya’s deposed leader, I’m reminded of the picture we once posted of Silvio Berlusconi’s bloodied face. We took it down I believe because it celebrated violence I suppose. I regret caving to whatever bastards took offense. Their timid sensibilities keep fascists like Berlusconi in power. Since that one glorious grasp at justice populi the Italian despot has stayed out of the public grasp, the Prince of Wales nearly didn’t it.
The Western press is pitching Gaddafi’s undignified death as a warning to all leaders who challenge white rule. I think it’s significance reaches much further. Summary execution at the hands of a mob. Could happen to the highest of the well heeled.
Organizers meeting today to plan against next year’s G8 summit in Chicago hit the ground running –backward. On Friday a spokesperson for one of the coalition partners offered this assurance to the Chicago Tribune: “Our goal is a legal, permitted, family friendly march where people can come and have their voices heard in a safe environment.” Interesting. The objective of successful past anti-globalization protests has been no less than to shut the undemocratic summits down.
Nine months out, it appears activism’s old guard is determined to blunt all real resistance welling in American youth. The Tribune found another normalizing voice from UNAC which disavowed any recourse but nonviolence. WTF? It’s one thing not to encourage violence, another to promise to “back off from any violence.”
Hello? Activists with broken spirits need to STFD and STFU. Let younger, hotter heads give you a lesson in courage and purpose. If you are over thirty, hold yourselves among the fucks responsible for this mess. Who are you to deny the young their righteous rage?
As elder activists, precisely what wisdom is it you think you can impart? Have you stopped one war? Slowed imperialism? Ended nukes? Saved the whales? Halted global warming? Attended to anything but the erosion of democracy, the social safety net and the environment? Your exalted nonviolence neither delivered India from class exploitation nor ended racism in America. Stick with fundraising, educating, inspiring others, drawing your peers into social networking; lead, but not by edict, and not by a consensus dominated by your peers. Put your dogma aside for the young leaders, let them make their own mistakes. I hope you will at least admit they can’t fail more miserably than you.
At Sunday’s meeting, the United National Antiwar Committee spokesman acquitted himself when confronted by a young gentleman representing an anarchist entity. Committee member Ashley Smith’s full quote had been: “We will not be the ones to initiate or perpetrate any violence.” And: “We will back off from any violence.” But when pressed at the meeting, he explained that organizers hoped the event would be safe for families, but that younger militants could exercise their freedoms like anybody else. I paraphrase.
I’ll qualify my criticism by pointing out that a number of the organizers were personal victims of recent FBI home invasions, so they are fully justified in having to distance themselves from being interpreted as advocating violence. An additional challenge is presented by an adversarial corporate press determined to squeeze whatever soundbite it wants to discredit or hobble protest.
Of course I’d prefer activists recused themselves from addressing the subject of violence/nonviolence, instead of alienating potential allies by being deliberately exclusionary. And by potential allies, I mean the only allies that will get the movement anywhere, the NEXT GENERATION, because who else are you expecting?
The US Department of Defense finally released the list of US soldiers killed on the NATO MH-47 Chinook helicopter downed in Afghanistan.
Median age was in high 30s, which is unsurprising for highly trained Special Ops, but isn’t it interesting that the usual disproportionate percentage of Americans of Color as cannon fodder (see casualty figures) doesn’t extend to the higher-paid military career jobs?
Huge props of course to African Americans who decide against being career hitmen. And let’s not neglect the exclusively white composition of the Abu Ghraib snap shot perps, and the docket, however sparse, of other US soldiers accused of war crimes.
In a Dec 2, 2008 diplomatic cable released by Aftenposten, the US ambassador to Switzerland reports that US-Swiss relations “lack the natural intimacy and trust” because, he laments:
“U.S. and Swiss soldiers never fought side-by-side in a war, no Swiss town felt an emotional bond to the U.S. for a past liberation or economic assistance program,” which creates the vexing obstacle that the Swiss Army won’t lend their knives to NATO or other USG non-multilateral projects:
“The Swiss military is limited by law to participating only in peace support operations (PSOs) — as opposed to peacekeeping or peace enforcement –“ I’ll interrupt here to highlight the distinction which the historically-neutral, tri-lingual, direct-democracy Swiss nation makes, perhaps like the Inuit and their fabled hundred words for snow. Americans are sold only one kind of peace, which has to be kept and enforced. We have only one word for peace and it’s not peace.
NATO spokesmen are preempting accusations of insensitivity concerning two US rockets which killed twelve Afghan civilians in Marjah, the latest operation against the Taliban. Six of the unintended victims were children. Military brass are expressing worry that such collateral damage will prove a setback to winning the hearts and minds over the latest US antipersonnel maneuvers.
US Marines are complaining that new rules of engagements are making the fighting more arduous and protracted. The stricter rules dictate that US soldiers cannot fire at people unless they commit a hostile act or show intent. This new policy abides by Geneva Conventions, meaning the earlier rules did not.
Before its resurged insurgence, Fallujah was not considered a setback. In other headlines, Secretary of State Clinton declared that Iran is heading toward being a military-led regime, the potential of nuclear weapons posing a terrifying threat. I don’t know about Iran, can we say that about the USA?
This time let’s learn something from the travesty of Vietnam. The interests which drove US soldiers into the hamlets of Southeast Asia are directing the massacres today. We call them the hawks, as if war was mere blood sport. Though South Vietnamese collaborators were forced to flee for their lives from Saigon, their US cohorts were never held to account. This time as America extricates itself from terrorizing Afghanistan, let’s note those among us with blood on our hands and prosecute. Not the soldiers, but the warmongers in the charge: those commanders who every month reported the war “is still winnable” those propagandists who blamed the failure of occupation on waning public resolve, those politicians who rationalized inhumanity, and the war industrialists, all of them.
Dutch NATO forces rescued 20 hostages off the coast of Africa last week without loss of life. They thwarted a pirate attack, confiscated the booty, but must release the captured pirates owing to International Maritime Law. Contrast this with American cowboy rules of engagement.
Several US Navy warships faced a solitary lifeboat on which three teenage Somali pirated held hostage Maersk Alabama captain Richard Phillips. The covered lifeboat remained tethered to the stern of one of the Navy ships while negotiations, we’re told, progressed.
Going into day three, before the American TV audience could lose interest, US Navy Seals rescued the captive Phillips at a cost of a 100% casualty rate to the pirates. Although the DoD did not initially want to reveal its anti-pirate tactics, spokesmen have admitted that the “daring rescue” was in effect three precisely-simultaneous sniper shots to the heads of the three captors. The fourth pirate already having been entrusted to the US ship’s custody for medical care. The captain freed, the wounded pirate’s collateral was thus gone, and his grant of safe-passage was rescinded.
The official story is that US infrared imagery revealed that the American captive’s life was in danger. One of the pirates was holding a gun to his head, and this act prompted the snipers to intervene. Negotiations, apparently, were not proving fruitful. I’m guessing that this account reflects the exact opposite of what happened. The navy snipers had been holding their fire until the moment Captain Phillip was NOT in a pirate’s crosshairs.
Although the Somali pirates were just teens, I bet they knew from brutal experience, what most of us know from violent television, that holding your gun to a hostage’s head is the only way to prevent your rivals from gunning you down. Trapped in a lifeboat, the pirates knew that high powered US weaponry would be trained upon each of their heat silhouettes. The moment their captive was not in the predicted trajectory of the crossfire, nor threatened by a collateral death-spasm squeeze of a trigger, the pirates would be toast.
The rescue operation began with a greater-than-three number of US snipers aiming weapons at the little boat. The more the better, to assure that at every instant, complicated by the rocking and turning of the lifeboat in the waves, at least one sniper could claim one pirate, without the hostage laying vulnerable to leeward bullets. The images in the sniper scopes were wired to a director’s console, where the determination could be made when all three targets were spoken for, and the order could be given to fire. The last hurdle remained for the pirate who held his gun on the hostage to drop his guard for just an instant, lest he squeeze off a round into the hostage. Wanna bet that’s what happened?
Great marksmanship, no question. Plenty of training no doubt. We can take nothing away from the heroism shown in braving responsibility for jeopardizing Captain Phillip’s life. It is probably also a common law enforcement strategy. Although that doesn’t make it legal.
Unless the US Navy releases the targeting footage, we are unlikely to confirm the true sequence of events. But where the pirate’s gun was pointing makes a difference. The Navy is explaining that it acted because Phillips’ life was at stake. Otherwise, shooting people who are not shooting at you is considered underhanded.
The Dutch navy forces bay have bellyached that they had to turn loose their captured pirates, instead of leaving them imprisoned somewhere, but the Dutch had seized them in Somali waters, where the pirates operate as their nation’s only Coast Guard. The Dutch NATO commandos prevented an attack, and liberated the detainees being held by the de-facto Somali border agents, and their directive ended there.
The US on the other hand, executed three “Somali Pirates,” regardless the varying degree of culpability the individuals might have had.
Without a day in court, that’s extra-judicial murder. If you consider these were three African youths, it looks like a lynching.
Let’s take note, by whose account to we know what happened out on the high seas? Do we know even that these were pirates? Says who? I am simply playing devil’s advocate. Do we know these four youth weren’t stowaways? Perhaps they had been Shanghaied and attempted an escape via the Maersk Alabama’s lifeboat. Do we know what happened really? That’s what courts are there to decide.
Everything the American TV audience knows is from the mouths of the US military. What do we know? These youths might have been human-trafficking cargo, en route to or from war zones. They might have broken free, running straight into the Maersk’s convenient cover story that all inconvenient incidences can be labeled pirate attacks. Have we anybody’s word who has not been lying to us about war crimes everywhere, about the use of torture, about the true magnitude of renditions and secret prisons?
These black youths might just as well have been the captive sex slaves of the porky white contractor mercenaries who were planning to kill them while in the act of buggering them, but the damn Negroes slipped free. So the Navy Seals had to come play cleaner to the embarrassing mess. I exaggerate to emphasize: what the fuck do YOU know?!
“This is how the USA handles pirates” was basically our statement. Americans stateside cheered and grabbed their dicks. But overseas, and on the seas, the sentiment is much more wary. The US Navy has escalated the war on piracy. Now the rules of engagement for both sides is going to be shoot first, ask questions later.
Are the Somalis quaking in their pirate boots? When the news hit about what the Navy Seals did, the self-styled privateers of the Somali Coast redoubled their attacks on foreign ship traffic.
The current leadership of the Czech Republic has been defeated by opposition parties, but corporate US and UK news outlets aren’t reporting the whole of why it happened. Global Network activist and hunger striker, Jan Tamas writes from Prague:
Dear friends,
I am very happy to announce that the Czech government has fallen. The Parliament voted the no-confidence. For us it is a great victory: we knew that the only way to stop the installation of the US radar base was the fall of the government and we worked for more than 2 years in this direction with permanence and coherence.A government that represented the interests of the US military industry has fallen.
Our work has been fundamental in encouraging the members of the Parliament who already were against the radar and to spread doubts in the ones who were in favor. And it was just the change of mind of some deputies that made the fall of the government possible.
On the other hand, pressed by the hunger strike, the Social-Democratic Party had to take a clear position supporting us and this will make it more difficult for them in the future to change their opinion about the radar. The collaboration with the Communist Party, that has always supported our initiatives, has been decisive as well.
Thanks to all of you for the support you gave us in many activities, support that was critical.
Thanks to all the pacifist organizations, thanks to the members of the European Parliament who believed in our fight, thanks to the mayors of different countries, thanks to the Humanist Movement, that allowed this protest to expand to many European countries and to reach other continents.
A great space should be given to this news. Now the US must rearrange their plans because of the protest of a people who don’t want foreign troops on this territory.
And the invading armies should withdraw from all the occupied territories of the world.
Now it is necessary to develop a strong opposition to the “Star Wars” and in favor of the nuclear disarmament also in other countries.
Now in the Czech Republic a new chapter of our struggle begins.
A strong hug
Jan Tamas
Prague, Czech Republic
A No to NATO Protest 2009 is being organized in Strasbourg, France, but where is the US Antiwar Movement? A similar protest against NATO should and could be built on the same date in Washington DC at the Pentagon, so why does the American Antiwar Community always give NATO a free ride?
Look below at the organizing committee for the Strasbourg event and notice how the US antiwar Community is simply MIA. That’s very sad…
No to NATO Protest Saturday 4th April 2009 – Sunday 5th April 2009 Details to be confirmed…………………………………………..
A protest is being organised outside the NATO conference in Strasbourg, France marking the 60th anniversary of NATO.
Sixty years of NATO are enough. NATO is the main driving force behind global war. NATO stands for the missile defense system, military bases around the world, nuclear weapons and military interventions and expenditure. NATO is a rival to the UN and the system of international law, and it is intertwined with the European security and defense system. But NATO is not all-powerful, indeed it is under extreme pressure right now in Afghanistan.
Members of the open preparation committee for the protest at the 60th anniversary of NATO include:
Arielle Denis (Le Mouvement de la Paix, France)
Reiner Braun (IALANA, speaker of Cooperation for Peace, Germany)
Chris Nineham (Stop the War Coalition, UK)
Tobias Pflüger (MEP, IMI, Germany)
Thomas Magnusson (International Peace Bureau, Sweden)
Sotiris Kontogiannis (Stop the War Coalition, Greece)
Elaheh Rostami Povey (Stop the War Coalition, UK/Iran)
Peter Strutynski (Federal Committee Peace Council, Germany)
International Peace Bureau (IPB)
International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (INES)
International Association of Lawyers against Nuclear Arms (IALANA Europe)
War Resisters’ International
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), Germany
Le Mouvement de la Paix, France
Stop the War Coalition, Great Britain
Stop the War Coalition, Greece
Cooperation for Peace, Germany
Federal Committee Peace Council, Germany
Further details of the NO TO NATO demonstration will be available shortly. To read a briefing on NATO’s expansion by Kate Hudson, the chair of CND, click here.
It is a clear indication of how iron clad government controlled is the US corporate press that news reporting about Somalia in the last couple of weeks has been centered on the stoning to death of a young girl and ‘pirates’. Never mind those millions of starving refugees in the country that the Pentagon has created, it’s ‘Indiana Jones’ time here for the American media! And pirates are always fun to play with! But who are the real pirates off the coast of Somali in the Indian Ocean? Asia Times Online gives us some insight into just that question… NATO reaches into the Indian Ocean
India was once a neutral player in the old Cold War, but not anymore these days and times. The US has captured another satellite government to use in its geopolitical warfare against China and Russia… and that country is India. That old ally of the US, Pakistan?… well let’s just say that their new role is to be turned into a battlefield zone in Southern Asia for the Pentagon. The US based military industrial complex needs to get the Pentagon firmly into that region for more sales for them to be funded from US taxpayers. How better to keep the welfare system for them going? They need Federal ‘bailout’!
As to the Somali ‘pirates’ seizing ships inside their coastal waters? Look at it from their viewpoint? Nobody complained much about the US/ Ethiopian piracy in their homeland, now did they? How about those $300,000,000 of fish annually pirated from their coastal waters by international fisheries based in other countries? Who cares about fish piracy stealing from the starving Somalians? Did you even hear about it? Then why not Somali ‘pirates’ getting into the big game?
The US government is into a big geopolitical play to corner the world’s last remaining natural resources away from China and Russia. Southern Asia is the new zone of combat and the Indian Ocean sits strategically placed between Asia and Africa and most of all, the Middle East. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is now into piracy in the Indian Ocean in a big way, all under the direction of the USA, and that wonderful little building in Northern Virginia, the Pentagon! Peace Now, Y’all. I’m sure that Obama plans to deliver ‘PEACE’… lol. He’s going to fight the Big Bad ‘pirates’ in Africa!
| First there’s Georgia, where Russia pushes back US efforts to muscle further NATO expansion. Then in our own hemisphere, Bolivia and Venezuela expel their US ambassadors, as Russian long range bombers land in South America in advance of joint naval maneuvers in the Caribbean. It’s not a resumption of the Cold War with the USSR, Russia is advancing no Communist Iron Curtain. But could a rival super power, in league with the unaligned nations, be a challenge to US hegemony? We could hope so. |
The US and Britain are pulling NATO in one direction and France and Germany seem increasingly rather reluctant to follow along. The US wants a NATO ready to start nuclear war with Russia and ready to dismember Pakistan’s national integrity, but the French and German governments don’t seem fully on board this imperialistic US game plan. They sit by silently in apparent disbelief, as the US also foments civil war in Ukraine.
As a result of this French and German discord with the US war drive, NATO has issued a comment or two that it will not participate in US destruction inside Pakistan. NATO says won’t take part in Pakistan raids And France and Germany have tried to bargain with Russia separate from the US about the Georgia/ US-Russian conflict, but without any real success.
Inside the US, we have seen no split in the unity of the ruling 2 parties in their apparently united desire to push conflict with Russia to the wire. We have seen not the faintest sign that there is any disagreement at all between the DP and RP over dragging Pakistan further into civil war pushed by outside forces, i.e. the US government. There has been no apparent Democratic Party response to Palin’s comments that she was ready to war with Russia. And the DP-voting bloggers have even gone along totally, too.
There is a clear US government drive to increase world conflict in order to establish yet more US hegemony across the planet. Americans as a whole seem utterly content with this at the moment, since they still see no price to pay that will involve themselves. Such a level of ignorance and stupidity is truly disheartening, and Americans will ultimately discover what a catastrophe they went along with as their leaders plotted and planned.
Oops. US military spokesmen have had to do an about-face on their account of the NATO air raid on Nawabad which may have killed in excess of 60 Afghan children. It turns out a western doctor on the scene the next day made a video record on his cell phone which depicted more bodies than the US Special Forces had admitted, by a factor of too many.
UN and Afghan representatives are calling for an investigation into the over 90 casualties. Their counts are corroborated by the villagers and eyewitnesses. The official US and NATO casualty figure is still eight. This is the number recorded by the ISAF soldiers and corroborated by an embed reporter, working for none other than Fox News, and being none other than Oliver North!
LYING WITH STATISTICS. It’s a worn truism, but what do you do when the public’s mathematical literacy ebbs ever lower? Lie without statistics. Give new meaning to mean, median and average. Use false statistics to reinforce the new lie. Here are a couple ugly examples.
ISAF Air Raid on Nawabad
Afghans are up in arms about a recent US air raid in Herat Province which they say claimed more than 90 lives, the majority of which were children. US spokesmen claim the death toll was not ninety, but five, er, eight. A disparity which they explain could be complicated by the rubble from the bombs.
US puppet Hamid Karzai is standing by the Nawabad villagers, likewise is the UN. So it’s NATO and the US versus Afghanistan and the UN, as to whether the NATO International Security Assistance Force air raid should be investigated so that Karzai might be able to assure his people that US warplanes will be more careful next time.
The US press have been phrasing their interviews like mediators hoping to find a middle ground figure to reconcile the vastly disparate casualty record. But is that how casualties of war are accounted for? Can you imagine OJ refuting his ex-wife’s demise? Would a criminal court consider that an agreeable fraction of Nicole Simpson was murdered that night?
LA law enforcement found two bodies on the front steps of Nicole’s Brentwood residence. Just as tangibly, survivors on the ground in Afghanistan were able to count their missing. Journalists, UN workers, and Afghan authorities on our payroll have had access to the bodies, graves and witnesses.
American military personnel admit they may not know the full extent of the casualties, conceding that some might have been buried in the stony debris. Consider how horribly disingenuous is this admission.
We’ve all seen the leaked aerial gun-sight video footage on which we know the airmen can see every heat-emiting body. The bombers and their command-center triggermen on land can see little white bodies running around before they are hit, and then the faint gray pieces of human beings as the warmth leaves their ex-lives. Thus, American soldiers are lying, to whatever degree it makes a difference. Regardless, is the murder of civilians any place to equivocate with median approximations?
Bisphenol A
Here’s another example in pharmaceutical news. Studies have been released to show that the chemical Bisphenol A is a danger to humans. Well, news presenters well tied to the chem-agra-pharma industry are careful to note that some of the scientific results are inconclusive. So we have, on one side, harmful, and on the other, uncertain, championed by the FDA. The corporate media advises us that the conclusion probably lies somewhere in the middle. Oh? It’s a toss up, is it?
Heads and tails is a toss up. Heads –and can’t read the face of the coin exactly– is heads. Bisphenol A harms human brain activity, or at best, half-harms it. We’re muddied or partially muddied. It takes evidence to the contrary to muddle a middle.
The corporate media mantra of offering us two-sided analysis is serving well to temper findings which point at wrongdoers. Global warming becomes global luke-warming, becomes: leave the knob set on a harmless simmer.
I swing the other way. The media are all liars. Every last motherfucking one. From right to left, the mean average is a liar. If that stat is irrefutable, tell me, am I lying?