March 29, 2016

Deadly Blowback from Neo-Imperial Wars - Consortium News

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/03/25/deadly-blowback-from-neo-imperial-wars/


Exclusive: The E.U.’s crisis – with the post-World War II project to unify Europe spinning apart amid economic stress, refugees and terrorism – can be traced back to E.U./U.S. neo-imperial wars in the Arab world, says Jonathan Marshall.

By Jonathan Marshall

In what may be the most dramatic blowback yet from Western military intervention in the Middle East, terrorism and the mass influx of foreign migrants are now putting the very existence of the European Union at risk. Foreign wars fanned by European and American interventionists in the name of democracy and humanitarianism now threaten those same values in Europe as never before since the end of World War II.

This threat comes at a time of popular discontent over the region’s chronic economic weakness, caused by Germany’s austerity policies and the straightjacket of the euro monetary union. The region has been further buffeted by the rise of right-wing parties, confrontations with Russia over Ukraine and NATO expansion, and the potential withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the E.U. In short, Europe faces a perfect storm.



2nd excerpt:

The crisis in the E.U. has many self-inflicted causes. One was President George W. Bush’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was opposed by France and Germany but supported most notably by the British government. That war gave birth to ISIS, whose bloodthirsty tactics now bring terror to millions in Europe as well as the Middle East. The Iraq War also drove 1.2 million refugees into Syria, ravaging its fragile economy and helping to trigger the outbreak of war in 2011.

Another contributor to E.U.’s crisis was the equally catastrophic NATO intervention in Libya in the spring of 2011. It was demanded most adamantly by the French government, with support from London and Washington. The intervention opened a major arms pipeline into Syria and propelled hundreds of thousands of North African refugees — including jihadists — into Europe. The continued anarchy in Libya poses an ongoing threat of terrorism, drug smuggling, and human trafficking to the European Union. The E.U.’s foreign policy chief warned recently that nearly half a million displaced people in Libya “could be potential candidates for migration to Europe.”

March 29, 2016

Syrian Arab Army takes back UNESCO heritgate sites of Palmyra and Homs from ISIS

Planning overview of how the operation took place.

March 28, 2016

Unbelievable voter suppression - Arizona voting line stretches over a mile

Unbelievably Long Line in Arizona Polling Location

Published on Mar 22, 2016
Election officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, consolidated multiple polling locations in the days leading up to the Arizona primary. This means thousands of citizens are needlessly waiting long hours in the hot sun just to be able to register to vote. (Video from Geoff Woods' Facebook account)

People at the front of the line stated they had been waiting over 3 hours.


Arizona Voting Chief Blames Voters For Screw Ups In Embarrassing Interview
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March 28, 2016

Wikileaks release of Hillarys emails reveals Google, al Jazeera aided overthrow of Syrian government

WikiLeaks reveals Hillary, Google, al Jazeera all conspiring against Syria.

http://truepublica.org.uk/global/google-able-effect-regime-change-appears/

Last week truepublica reported that four months ago, Google created a new holding company called Alphabet and that Eric Schmidt the new Executive Chairman of Alphabet, and therefore Google had decided to accept the offer of leading the Pentagon advisory board with a view to “bringing Silicon Valley innovation and best practices to the US military.” We questioned the ethics and moral judgement of both Schmidt and Google in joining forces with the biggest killing machine in modern times, certainly since the world wars.

We pointed to the meeting between Eric Schmidt and Julian Assange back in 2011, supposedly organised to discuss a book Schmidt was writing who was unexpectedly accompanied by a Jared Cohen. Cohen had moved to Google from the U.S. State Department in 2010. He had been a slick ideas guy at two U.S. administrations, known to be something of a courtier from the world of policy think tanks sympathetic to US foreign policy. He was a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton.

Assange asserts that Schmidt was acting directly on behalf of Washington with a documented relationship that put him close to President Obama and Clinton and as Assange puts it: “Cohen’s directorate appeared to cross over from public relations and “corporate responsibility” work into active corporate intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s “director of regime change.”


DU link to post on the emails and what they are related to. http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016148397

March 27, 2016

Saudi Arabia funds and exports Islamic extremism:The truth behind the toxic U.S. relationship -Salon

“Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.” So advised world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky, one of the most cited thinkers in human history. The counsel may sound simple and intuitive — that’s because it is. But when it comes to Saudi Arabia, the U.S. ignores it.

Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading sponsor of Islamic extremism. It is also a close U.S. ally. This contradiction, although responsible for a lot of human suffering, is frequently ignored. Yet it recently plunged back into the limelight with the Saudi monarchy’s largest mass execution in decades. On Jan. 2, Saudi Arabia beheaded 47 people across 13 cities. Among the executed was cleric Nimr al-Nimr, a leader from the country’s Shia religious minority who was arrested for leading peaceful protests against the regime in 2011-12.

Sheikh al-Nimr was known throughout the Islamic world for his staunch opposition to sectarianism. The outspoken Saudi dissident firmly insisted that Sunnis and Shias are not enemies, and should unite against the sectarian regimes oppressing them. “The oppressed should unite together against the oppressors, instead of becoming tools in the hands of the oppressors,” he declared.
By executing a dissident who challenged sectarianism, the Saudi monarchy was only further fomenting it.

Human rights organizations condemned the executions. Amnesty International said the Saudi regime is “using the death penalty in the name of counter-terror to settle scores and crush dissidents,” sentencing activists “to death after grossly unfair trials.” Amnesty called this “a monstrous and irreversible injustice.”

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/06/saudi_arabia_funds_and_exports_islamic_extremism_the_truth_behind_the_toxic_u_s_relationship_with_the_theocratic_nation/


David Cameron questioned heavily over UK and US making Saudi Arabia head of the UN Human Rights Council.

March 27, 2016

Highlighting Western Victims While Ignoring Victims of Western Violence - Glenn Greenwald/Intercept

Glenn Greenwald
Mar. 25 2016, 1:17 p.m.

FOR DAYS NOW, American cable news has broadcast non-stop coverage of the horrific attack in Brussels. Viewers repeatedly heard from witnesses and from the wounded. Video was shown in a loop of the terror and panic when the bombs exploded. Networks dispatched their TV stars to Brussels, where they remain. NPR profiled the lives of several of the airport victims. CNN showed a moving interview with a wounded, bandage-wrapped Mormon American teenager speaking from his Belgium hospital bed.

All of that is how it should be: That’s news. And it’s important to understand on a visceral level the human cost from this type of violence. But that’s also the same reason it’s so unjustifiable, and so propagandistic, that this type of coverage is accorded only to Western victims of violence, but almost never to the non-Western victims of the West’s own violence.

A little more than a week ago, as Mohammed Ali Kalfood reported in The Intercept, “Fighter jets from a Saudi-led (U.S. and U.K.-supported) coalition bombed a market in Mastaba, in Yemen’s northern province of Hajjah. The latest count indicates that about 120 people were killed, including more than 20 children, and 80 were wounded in the strikes.” Kalfood interviewed 21-year-old Yemeni Khaled Hassan Mohammadi, who said, “We saw airstrikes on a market last Ramadan, not far from here, but this attack was the deadliest.” Over the past several years, the U.S. has launched hideous civilian-slaughtering strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and Iraq. Last July, The Intercept published a photo essay by Alex Potter of Yemeni victims of one of 2015’s deadliest Saudi-led, U.S.- and U.K.-armed strikes.

You’ll almost never hear any of those victims’ names on CNN, NPR, or most other large U.S. media outlets. No famous American TV correspondents will be sent to the places where those people have their lives ended by the bombs of the U.S. and its allies. At most, you’ll hear small, clinical news stories briefly and coldly describing what happened — usually accompanied by a justifying claim from U.S. officials, uncritically conveyed, about why the bombing was noble — but, even in those rare cases where such attacks are covered at all, everything will be avoided that would cause you to have any visceral or emotional connection to the victims. You’ll never know anything about them — not even their names, let alone hear about their extinguished life aspirations or hear from their grieving survivors — and will therefore have no ability to feel anything for them. As a result, their existence will barely register.

That’s by design. It’s because U.S. media outlets love to dramatize and endlessly highlight Western victims of violence, while rendering almost completely invisible the victims of their own side’s violence.

https://theintercept.com/2016/03/25/highlighting-western-victims-while-ignoring-victims-of-western-violence/

March 27, 2016

Are we the Baddies?' Mitchell and Webb Funny Nazi Scetch

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US support for Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Ukrainian neo-Nazis, Libyan warlords and Syrian jihadists begs the question "Are we the baddies in WW3?"

March 27, 2016

Zbigniew Brzezinski at 2016 US Senate hearing on Russia Ukraine NATO Baltics

New UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn : We need to strongly challenge NATO supremacy and oppose its exercise in Ukraine



Russian President Vladimir Putin Tells Everyone Exactly Who Created ISIS

March 27, 2016

The world war on democracy – John Pilger

http://truepublica.org.uk/global/world-war-democracy-john-pilger/

Excerpt:

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America’s and Britain’s war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders’ abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the “bunker-busting” bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its “rendition” victims and called it Camp Justice.

What was done to Lisette’s paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its democratic facade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, “it never happened even while it was happening”. Last July, American historian William Blum published his “updated summary of the record of US foreign policy”. Since the Second World War, the US has:

– Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.
– Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
– Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
– Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
– Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The “enemy” changes in name – from communism to Islamism — but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands. The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy (“Operation Cyclone”) is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed “our man” by Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as “the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century”, the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine guns.