Ft Carson is Burnt Acres not Green Acres

Ft Carson fire of 2008For several years now Colorado Springs has watched in incredulous dismay as the Pentagon has tried to represent its local terrorism training center, Fort Carson, as being some sort of Green Acres to Coloradans. Incredibly, the local group of Democrats at the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission have done their part in playing part of the game with the military in this regard, as they held joint meetings with the military and even printed up some of their propaganda about being ‘Green’ in their quarterly newsletter.

But what’s the real story about this supposedly lean, green, terrorist cell near by? Are they out to save Mother Earth through the military-industrial complex as they claim? If you are a True Believer in this Pentagon propaganda offensive, then take a look at this news item then… Fort Carson fire consumes 6,500 acres

It turns out, not surprisingly, that the military dropping bombs during heir ‘exercises’ is what started this fire out. These boy toys are noted for being just like that, but burning money off through weaponry is the American economy and so this Blood Red group must expand! Nothing green about it except for the American dollars being consumed so stupidly. It’s simply time to stop this bombs away, burn Mother Earth away machine. If you care about ecology, get out and show your concern by protesting the continuous and constant US military presence here in Colorado Springs.

It takes a lot of nerve to try to pass the pentagon off as Green, humane, and Earth loving, doesn’t it? But these Pentagon lairs get a humongous propaganda budget from American taxpayers to do just that. If your military backed job depends on it,t hen you might be the type of dunce to buy into this hogwash? If not, it’s just another reason to be sick of what the total militarization of America is doing to us.

*** Note that the fire pictured was a wildfire from last year at Fort Carson and not this year’s fire.

US media campaign to help Pentagon defend its use of torture on POWs

George Bush on water boardingThere is a growing effort to defend the use of torture on POWs by the US military, and it centers around the Pentagon’s and the corporate media’s effort to convince the American people that some Guantanamo inmates have become terrorists post discharge. These POWs were discharged because they were found to be innocent of ‘terrorism’, but now the Pentagon and US media want to paint a picture of US military incompetence, all to bolster a campaign to defend those that tortured these POWs when they were at the US run torture concentration camp called Guantanamo (Gitmo).

The corporate media campaign is based on utterly superficial and flimsy ‘evidence’, which is because basically it is Pentagon propaganda and lies. The following gives a link to this so-called ‘evidence’ printed out today in The Christian Science Monitor and scattered throughout today’s US propaganda industry’s coverage of the issue of ‘closing down’ Guantanamo. Ex-Guantánamo inmates return to militancy in Yemen

What is seen quickly, is that all the ‘evidence’ comes from the Saudi government, a dictatorship heavily invested into torturing prisoners. The fact that the US corporate media and the Pentagon turn these American held POWs to these world class criminals and then has the utter gall to report their stewardship over these prisoners as virtual reality and TRUTH really takes the cake! In fact, it is an endorsement of the Saudi torture regime itself, and a use of this foreign torture regime to help justify US military torture in place under Bush, and now Barack Obama.

Per the ‘evidence’ of the Christian Science Monitor stuff, all of the evidence of a supposed return of POWs found innocent and released to supposed criminal activity comes from the word of Saudi government spokesmen! Sick!

Much of American society wants to find a way to justify using torture on other people. They revel in it, and have spent years pretending that torture is not happening, torture is not torture, and in a myriad of ways supporting the use of torture while pretending not to be. This is the latest effort on their behalf by the Pentagon and corporate media, and is utterly a ghost fantasy script written for them, with the aid and assistance of one of the most reactionary regimes in the world, the Saudi Arabian government. This fact alone shows how unembarrassed much of America is about its own criminal use of torture, and this campaign may be used by Barack Obama to step back from actually even making he effort to clean up the US government’s world image by transferring Guantanamo POWs elsewhere?

The use of torture runs deep inside the entire American business of jailing and abusing its own population, too. Guantanamo hardly even begins to be the tip of the iceberg at this point, in uncovering and terminating abuse of prisoners of any kind. We are a very sick country, and many resist the CHANGE needed to turn things around. It is certain that we have a very long way to go to even begin to address these issues, let alone change things for the better. Do not let the corporate media’s lies on behalf of Pentagon use of torture convince you to change your views. America, you simply are not under any sort of threat from ex-jailed Guantanamo POWs.

Barack says his effort at image repair for US government to begin immediately

Western Hemisphere Institute for Security CooperationHow do you begin to repair US image abroad without really doing so much of anything? You don’t say a word really against the torture regime that your political party participated in running along with its supposed political opposition, the Republicans, but you begin to close the US Government’s most blatant image problem down…. name wise. That would be Gitmo… Guantanamo. See: Obama prepares to issue order to close Gitmo.

That’s kind of like in 2000 how Slick Willie Bill Clinton changed the US military’s torture school from the name of School of Americas (the SOA) to the totally obscured name of Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). Nothing else changed except the name. Not too surprising since Obama has stacked his new Administrative Cabinet with all those old Slick Willie retreads.

Bet you had never even heard of the name WHINSEC, now had you? And I bet you that Obama has no plans to really end US government use of torture but rather to hide it more away. Bets on that Obama will actually close down ‘WHINSEC’? Didn’t think so… The US Government has always used torture on POWs. The Vietnamese could tell the typical American something about that, as so could many a Latino. How many Democratic Party presidents and top politicians have helped administer US military torture through the years? How many countries has the US government helped their government use torture on other peoples? Your guess is as good as mine?

Smile, your mom chose life!

masturbation is murderOn Fillmore Street there is one of those giant, obnoxious billboards with a giant smiling baby on it, and the words, ‘Smile, your mom chose life’. Probably put up there with the help of one pedophile plagued church, too. You know the name of that church, I think?

All over the world this church that aided the Nazis and aided in the genocides against indigenous people in the Americas and aided in the pogroms against Jewish people even before the Nazis, is on one giant campaign to make people think that they respect life because they want to impose their will on young women. Smile, but did your mom always not have an abortion when she got pregnant? One rather thinks that it is not quite that simple at all, in fact.

You see, these crazy church people are often liars and hypocrites. They do one thing for themselves and urge something else entirely on others. Does Ted Haggard come to mind? Maybe many of those religious moms did have an abortion even if they did later on life give birth to you and your brothers and sisters? Maybe they had several abortions before they started to raise kids? Maybe they had an abortion or two after you were born? It’s not quite as simple as that billboard portrays it as being, now is it?

These crazy religious nuts don’t even choose much life at all, but choose death most often instead. Imagine advocating that women give birth wholesale in countries like Nicaragua, where this obnoxious church, the Catholic, has gotten the government to ban all abortions for all reasons. The Nicaraguan people do not even make $1,000 per year per capita to raise their families on. Does this church do anything to ‘choose life’ when these children are born? I rather think that they do not. How about you?

You know what this church does with its money? It invests it in real estate. It invests it in sanctimonious propaganda billboards that tell others what they should do. But they don’t help raise those poor families in countries like Nicaragua where they force women to give birth to often unwanted and uncared for children. They spend it on lawyers to get out of paying money to people molested by their priests when these people were still children. This is the Catholic Church for you. This is the American Catholic Church.

‘Smile, your mom chose life’ my ass. The Catholic Church has a totally checkered attitude towards choosing life, and that’s their little secret they don’t want you thinking much about. Life with the Catholic Church! What a trip! And NO, life does not begin at conception. And NO, there was no ‘immaculate conception’ either.

So keep your nutty religion away from the rest of us, OK? And reform yourself before you go getting ‘papal’ on those you disagree with you on this issue. (No Catholics were actually harmed by this commentary, I might mention) And Catholics, stop trying to force women to do dangerous things to keep from getting themseves financially sunk into a hole! They have kids to raise, you know? You’re not going to raise these kids for them. Now are you?

Fusil Contra Fusil, songs of Silvio Rodríguez

silvio rodriguezCuba’s most famous folk singer, Silvio Rodríguez, has some good music for Americans in times of trouble. If you are an anti-Communist type, then suspend your lack of knowledge for a moment or two and listen to some of his music, for a much needed change from your daily menu of US propaganda.

Fusil Contra Fusil

Yo te invito a caminar conmigo

Ojalá

Oleo de una Mujer con Sombrero

Solo el amor

Pequeña Serenata Diurnahttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMg67lyKMaI&feature=related

Hasta siempre Commandante

Ojalá
(Silvio Rodríguez)

Ojalá que las hojas no te toquen el cuerpo cuando caigan
para que no las puedas convertir en cristal.
Ojalá que la lluvia deje de ser milagro que baja por tu cuerpo.
Ojalá que la luna pueda salir sin ti.
Ojalá que la tierra no te bese los pasos.

Ojalá se te acabe la mirada constante,
la palabra precisa, la sonrisa perfecta.
Ojalá pase algo que te borre de pronto:
una luz cegadora, un disparo de nieve,
ojalá por lo menos que me lleve la muerte,
para no verte tanto, para no verte siempre
en todos los segundos, en todas las visiones:
ojalá que no pueda tocarte ni en canciones.

Ojalá que la aurora no dé gritos que caigan en mi espalda.
Ojalá que tu nombre se le olvide a esa voz.
Ojalá las paredes no retengan tu ruido de camino cansado.
Ojalá que el deseo se vaya tras de ti,
a tu viejo gobierno de difuntos y flores.

Human Rights Watch part of a Pentagon propaganda campaign against Russia

George SorosThat is GEORGE SOROS, main mover and funder behind the self styled “Human Rights Watch.” The US government is on a bipartisan campaign to label Russia a brutal imperialist country, blaming it for war crimes by Russia’s coming to the defense of its own national defense interests on its Southern border. And heading up its propaganda campaign is the so-called US based and funded human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, which has been bombarding the Western press with accusations against Russia that the country has supposedly been violating international ‘norms of civilized warfare’ in the recent fighting with Georgia.

These HRW accusations are that Russia has been using cluster bombs in the fighting and the one and only source for these claims seems to be Human Rights Watch. Why only they then? And why is this the Human Rights Watch’s focus and not the placing of US nuclear weapons systems in Poland to threaten Russia with a nuclear first strike? Is this just the first instance of such imbalance in commentaries and campaigns by Human Rights Watch, or is this an endemic style of theirs?

The short answer is that this is far from being the first time that Human Rights Watch has been on the front lines of propaganda warfare for the US government, as has been documented well in the past by many. Edward S. Herman for example, a co-thinker and coauthor with Noam Chomsky, wrote this about Human Rights Watch’s record in regard to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq….

‘But despite these and countless other constructive efforts (to avoid a war with Iraq), the organization has at critical times and in critical theaters thrown its support behind the U.S. government’s agenda, sometimes even serving as a virtual public relations arm of the foreign policy establishment. Since the early 1990s this tendency has been especially marked in the organization’s focus on and treatment of some of the major contests in which the U.S. government itself has been engaged—perhaps none more clearly than Iraq and the Balkans. Here, its deep bias is well-illustrated in a March 2002 op-ed by HRW’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, published in the Wall Street Journal under the title “Indict Saddam.”[7] The first thing to note about this commentary is its timing. It was published at a time when the United States and Britain were clearly planning an assault on Iraq with a “shock and awe” bombing campaign and ground invasion in violation of the UN Charter. But Roth doesn’t warn against launching an unprovoked war—though wars of aggression had been judged by the Nuremberg Tribunal to be the “supreme international crime” that “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”[8] On the contrary, Roth’s focus was on Saddam’s crimes, and provided a valuable public relations gift to U.S. and British leaders, diverting attention from and putting an apologetic gloss on their prospective supreme international crime.’

This is part of a 35 page work tha Herman did in investigating Human Rights Watch’s connections with the US government and the entire publication is well worth reading. See Znet’s copy of Human Rights Watch in Service to the War Party which was published back in February 2007.

Also of note is Michael Barker’s Hijacking Human Rights which like Herman’s much longer analysis, reviews the funding of Human Rights Watch and show how it is so well connected to the propaganda work they do for the US State Department and Pentagon. He focuses on the role of George Soros in creating today’s Human Rights Watch.
Both Barker and Herman (and his coauthors) study this funding of HRW and take it apart in detail and show its role in the structure of HRW’s work in pushing pro- US government propaganda to the press.

It is important for people to know more about Human Rights Watch because many people see ‘human rights’ or ‘united nations’ in a name and they think automatically that that is what these organizations are connected with serving. That is not always the case, no more so than that because the word ‘Christian’ is in a name automatically denotes that leaders of these groups have anything to do with true the ideals and beliefs of Christianity.

Unfortunately many liberals and radical types seem to be falling for it. Liberal web sites like Common Drreams and alternet are running these Human Rights Watch propaganda blasts as if they are somehow the real thing. With a record as bad as Human Rights Watch has with its continual connection of itself with paralleling US war drives, these Progressive folk really should be much more critical minded and less gullible than they are when it comes to reading the HRW material. Just follow the money trail…

Obama & McCain, both weak candidates

McCain and ObamaLet’s face it, the System has offered up two very unconvincing candidates for the general American public to have to ‘choose’ from in our US pseudo democracy. Nowhere was that underlined more than at the prayer fest that the two held last night at the Saddleback Church under ‘Pastor Rick’ (as Obama has called this huckster).

It seems that the Democratic Party fully intends to demoralize its supporters in 2008 by aping the Republicans even more than they have done in the past. Phony religion is the best way to accomplish that. We can remember quite well where Pastor Jimmy Carter prepped the nation and set it up for Ronald The Clown’s Reaganism.

This turn to religion by Obama comes precisely while the nation is most fed up with the role the Religious Right has played over the last 8 years in America’s political life, too. In some ways, this strategy of wrapping himself in a religious aura right now is the biggest betrayal of democracy that General Obama is now carrying out. He is pushing for troops to Afghanistan continuing the illegal occupation of that country by ours, and serving up his militarism with prayers and glib Christian religiosity.

This weak effort by a weak candidate will give McCain the opening to keep Republican control over the White House intact. As big a stumbling bum as John McCain is, he is equally matched with the bumbling foolishness that the Obama campaign will sport. For us out there forced to be awash in this stupidity by the constant bombardment of the corporate media propaganda machine, it is going to be a truly sickening spectacle that we will see America awash in. The corporate parties only offer the US public total sewage this year with its blast of ‘lesser of 2 evilism’ slop.

LA Times coverage of the prayerfest- Barack Obama, John McCain discuss faith, issues at Saddleback Church forum Is there really a lesser of 2 evils here, or is that merely a delusion?

How quiet the US media is about Indian Hindu brutality in Kashmir

Oh Yes, the Western corporate media would have us all believe that they are the grand champions of human rights worldwide, yet how quiet they are when it comes to reporting US and Allied atrocities in places like Kashmir. And when they even mention events in places like Kashmir, their reporting is heavily skewed and hides the reality.

For example, in Homes burn as Hindu-Muslim anger grows in Kashmir, the article feigns a neutrality in its coverage that is just plain false and not there. You see, the Indian government is heavily courted by the American government to not line up with Russia and China, but to join in with the US corporate government drive to take over control of all Asian affairs. India is offered the junior partner position. That’s why it is necessary to cover up the fact that the overwhelming majority of violence is really a Hindu one, and to pretend that Hindus might be merely responding to Muslim violence instead.

Further, the reality that Hindu nationalism in India has created pogrom after violent pogrom against Indian Muslims runs counter to the Christian global jihad story line against regions where Islam is the dominant religion. Muslims must need be always cast in the role of being the constant terrorist phantom that the Christian US Crusaders must fight against. The US media tries to keep quiet about its Hindu allies’ slaughters of Muslims in India. It is inconvenient to the militaristic propaganda in the US.

And to make things even sadder, the reality that Hindu nationalism is fascist like and brutal toward its Moslem minority population in India runs against the story line of the Liberal Christian ‘Peace’ pacifists inside the US who seem to worship the new Hindu God Ghandi every bit as much as they do Jesus. They hardly want much to speak up about these matters either. It runs counter to their worship services where they talk about ‘Peace’ a lot, but always quite in the abstract, quiet in the concrete.

Still, but there is new terror being spread by Hindu India in Kashmir these days, quiet as mouses the US media might be about covering it. US nationalism is encouraging fascist HIndu nationalism in India with its own Christian so-called ‘War on Global Terrorism’ which is a propaganda campaign designed to target Muslims. So don’t let the corporate media get away with their cover-up of silence and stay informed about Kashmir and other places victimized in media silence by the US propaganda machine. I am talking about places like Somalia and the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, too, which are also are kept in shrouds of media silence and non-reporting.

The US corporate government and media sources lie to you constantly, and their biggest lies most of the time they pull off by just being silent. Stay informed instead. Don’t be as ignorant as they would have you be. The fighting in Kashmir is another current hot spot, just as the fighting in Georgia is. Be aware of the US government connections to it.

License to kill non-combatants

When killing women and children was unpopularOn this anniversary of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, March 16, 1968, let’s remember a time when the American public was not rallying behind its soldiers as they murdered women and children in the conduct of modern warfare. We did not support the troops who shot civilians under orders, or wiped out entire communities. We did not sanction it as collateral damage, the killing we knew about.

Above is a poster from the First World War, where the Huns were demonized for their brutality. They didn’t have the current US license aparently. This was part of an enormous propaganda campaign to urge the American public to enter the war on the side of the British instead of the German. Much of the attrocities attributed to the Huns were actually contrived. The Rape of Belgium was much like the Rape of Kuwait. Talk of newborns pulled from incubators, tearfully recounted by the Kuwaiti Ambassador’s young daughter who had been stateside the whole time.

The new US attrocities in Iraq are documented, when there have been survivors. In a military town such as Colorado Springs, you can walk among the fatigue-wearing murderers. They’re not painted as red demons. You’re admonished to support them.