A CHANGE IN WAR POLICY?
The bottom line for our time is: Believe NOTHING the powerful tell you, especially when the message comes from their main shills, like Barack Obama
Regime Change in Libya
This policy has nothing to do with liberation or humanitarian concerns, as is peddled to the public. It is entirely based on the cold calculations of geo-political politics guided by the interests of corporate profit and the intimidation of anyone who tries to impede these interests. In the case of Libya, it is not difficult to determine what is involved in these calculations.
However, this move led to falling living standards and growing inequality which, in turn, greatly contributed to the discontent that sparked the uprising against Qaddafi. This uprising was part of the Arab Spring that has overturned U.S. friendly regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and posed a potential threat to European and U.S. business arrangements in the region. It was necessary for these powers to find a foothold in diverting the Arab Spring away from challenging these profitable relations. Seeing that Qaddafi was unable to control the internal situation in Libya, the U.S. and some NATO member states orchestrated military incursions to secure their own interests and to make sure to remind those rebel Libyans who was really in charge.
Peace and Occupy Movement
If a fundamental change is to be made regarding a less militaristic foreign policy, the powers behind the presidency will have to be confronted. Wars abroad, though used to divert the people in the U.S. from their real enemies, are also an extension of the war on workers at home. They are the byproduct of a system geared to enrich a tiny elite at the expense of those whose collective labor produces all wealth.
This is why the Occupy Movement and its re-energizing of the unions presents such a potential force for ending the wars and mobilizing working people to defend themselves against corporate attack. By placing the interests of all working people and their allies in direct opposition to Wall Street, this emerging movement is challenging the forces that profit from war and is establishing the basis for genuine international solidarity.
Mark Vorpahl is a unionist and anti-war activist and writer for Workers Action. He may be reached at portland@workerscompass.org
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Bill Blum: The crime of making Americans aware of their own history
The Anti-Empire Report
The crime of making Americans aware of their own history
Is history getting too close for comfort for the fragile little American heart and mind? Their schools and their favorite media have done an excellent job of keeping them ignorant of what their favorite country has done to the rest of the world, but lately some discomforting points of view have managed to find their way into this well-defended American consciousness.
First, Congressman Ron Paul during a presidential debate last month expressed the belief that those who carried out the September 11 attack were retaliating for the many abuses perpetrated against Arab countries by the United States over the years. The audience booed him, loudly.
Then, popular-song icon Tony Bennett, in a radio interview, said the United States caused the 9/11 attacks because of its actions in the Persian Gulf, adding that President George W. Bush had told him in 2005 that the Iraq war was a mistake. Bennett of course came under some nasty fire. FOX News (September 24), carefully choosing its comments charmingly as usual, used words like “insane”, “twisted mind”, and “absurdities”. Bennett felt obliged to post a statement on Facebook saying that his experience in World War II had taught him that “war is the lowest form of human behavior.” He said there’s no excuse for terrorism, and he added, “I’m sorry if my statements suggested anything other than an expression of love for my country.” (NBC September 21)
Then came the Islamic cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, who for some time had been blaming US foreign policy in the Middle East as the cause of anti-American hatred and terrorist acts. So we killed him. Ron Paul and Tony Bennett can count themselves lucky.
What, then, is the basis of all this? What has the United States actually been doing in the Middle East in the recent past?
- the shooting down of two Libyan planes in 1981
- the bombing of Lebanon in 1983 and 1984
- the bombing of Libya in 1986
- the bombing and sinking of an Iranian ship in 1987
- the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in 1988
- the shooting down of two more Libyan planes in 1989
- the massive bombing of the Iraqi people in 1991
- the continuing bombings and draconian sanctions against Iraq for the next 12 years
- the bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998
- the habitual support of Israel despite the routine devastation and torture it inflicts upon the Palestinian people
- the habitual condemnation of Palestinian resistance to this
- the abduction of “suspected terrorists” from Muslim countries, such as Malaysia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Albania, who were then taken to places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where they were tortured
- the large military and hi-tech presence in Islam’s holiest land, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region
- the support of numerous undemocratic, authoritarian Middle East governments from the Shah of Iran to Mubarak of Egypt to the Saudi royal family
- the invasion, bombing and occupation of Afghanistan, 2001 to the present, and Iraq, 2003 to the present
- the bombings and continuous firing of missiles to assassinate individuals in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Libya during the period of 2006-2011
It can’t be repeated or emphasized enough. The biggest lie of the “war on terrorism”, although weakening, is that the targets of America’s attacks have an irrational hatred of the United States and its way of life, based on religious and cultural misunderstandings and envy. The large body of evidence to the contrary includes a 2004 report from the Defense Science Board, “a Federal advisory committee established to provide independent advice to the Secretary of Defense.” The report states:
“Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing, support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.”
The report concludes: “No public relations campaign can save America from flawed policies.” (Christian Science Monitor, November 29, 2004)
The Pentagon released the study after the New York Times ran a story about it on November 24, 2004. TheTimes reported that although the board’s report does not constitute official government policy, it captures “the essential themes of a debate that is now roiling not just the Defense Department but the entire United States government.”
“Homeland security is a rightwing concept fostered following 9/11 as the answer to the effects of 50 years of bad foreign policies in the middle east. The amount of homeland security we actually need is inversely related to how good our foreign policy is.” – Sam Smith, editor of The Progressive Review
The lies that will not die
In his September 22 address at the United Nations, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad mentioned the Nazi Holocaust just twice:
“Some European countries still use the Holocaust, after six decades, as the excuse to pay fines or ransom to the Zionists.”
“They threaten anyone who questions the Holocaust and the September 11 event with sanctions and military action.”
That was it.
By the term “questions the Holocaust” the Iranian president has made clear repeatedly over the years what he’s referring to. He has commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a tragedy which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he has questioned the figure of six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, as have many historians and others of all political stripes who think the total was probably less. This has nothing to do with the Holocaust not taking place.
But, as usual, the Western media pretends that it doesn’t understand.
The New York Post (September 22) referred to the Iranian president as “the world’s foremost Holocaust denier, the would-be genocidist Ahmadinejad”.
Agence France Presse (September 22) stated: “The Iranian leader repeated comments casting doubt on the origins of the Holocaust.”
The Washington Post wrote of “Ahmadinejad’s speech suggesting larger conspiracies were behind the Holocaust and the Sept. 11 attacks caused delegates to walk out.” (September 23)
And Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! (September 23) included this amongst the radio program’s news headlines: “For the third straight year, Ahmadinejad sent delegates to the exits after questioning the Nazi Holocaust.”
Without further explanation of that incendiary term — and none was given — what can “questioning the Nazi Holocaust” mean or imply to most listeners other than that Ahmadinejad was questioning whether the Holocaust had actually taken place?
Once again I must point out that I have yet to read of Ahmadinejad ever saying simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally that he thinks that what we know as the Holocaust never happened. For the record, in a speech at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, in reply to a question about the Holocaust, the Iranian president declared: “I’m not saying that it didn’t happen at all. This is not the judgment that I’m passing here.”
Indeed, I do not know if any of the so-called “Holocaust-deniers” actually, ever, umm, y’know … deny the Holocaust. They question certain aspects of the Holocaust history that’s been handed down to us, but they don’t explicitly say that what we know as the Holocaust never took place. (Yes, I’m sure you can find at least one nut-case somewhere.)
Another enduring lie about Ahmadinejad is that he has called for violence against Israel: His 2005 remark re “wiping Israel off the map”, besides being a very questionable translation, has been seriously misinterpreted, as evidenced by the fact that the following year he declared: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.” (Associated Press, December 12, 2006) Obviously, the man was not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place peacefully.
Carl Oglesby
The president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 1965-66, died September 13, age 76. I remember him best for a speech of his I heard during the March on Washington, November 27, 1965, a speech passionately received by the tens of thousands crowding the National Mall:
The original commitment in Vietnam was made by President Truman, a mainstream liberal. It was seconded by President Eisenhower, a moderate liberal. It was intensified by the late President Kennedy, a flaming liberal. Think of the men who now engineer that war — those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President [Johnson] himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.
He insisted that America’s founding fathers would have been on his side. “Our dead revolutionaries would soon wonder why their country was fighting against what appeared to be a revolution.” He challenged those who called him anti-American: “I say, don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”
We are dealing now with a colossus that does not want to be changed. It will not change itself. It will not cooperate with those who want to change it. Those allies of ours in the government — are they really our allies? If they are, then they don’t need advice, they need constituencies; they don’t need study groups, they need a movement. And if they are not [our allies], then all the more reason for building that movement with the most relentless conviction.
It saddens me to think that virtually nothing has changed for the better in US foreign policy since Carl Oglesby spoke on the Mall that day. America’s wars are ongoing, perpetual, eternal. And the current war monger in the White House is regarded by many as a liberal, for whatever that’s worth.
“We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality,” war correspondent Michael Herr recalled about the US military in Vietnam. “Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.”
Items of interest from a journal I’ve kept for 40 years, part V
- A Bush administration regulation on Sept. 30, 2004 said Americans cannot buy or smoke Cuban cigars even in countries where the cigars are legal, such as Canada, Mexico, Europe, indeed most of the world. The same goes for Havana Club rum and other Cuban products.
- April 26th, 2007 posting from the courageous but anonymous Iraqi woman who has, since August 2003, published the indispensable blog Baghdad Burning. Her family, she reported, was finally giving up and going into exile. In her final dispatch, she wrote: “There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends. … And to what?”
- “God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern policy and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.” — John LeCarre (London Times, January 15, 2003)
- Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq admonished his troops regarding the results of an Army survey that found that many U.S. military personnel there are willing to tolerate some torture of suspects and unwilling to report abuse by comrades. “This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we — not our enemies — occupy the moral high ground,” he wrote in an open letter dated May 10 and posted on a military Web site. (Washington Post, May 11, 2007)
- “To most of its citizens, America is exceptional, and it’s only natural that it should take exception to certain international standards.” — Michael Ignatieff, former Canadian politician and Washington Post columnist
- It is easy to understand an observation by one of Israel’s leading military historians, Martin van Creveld. After the U.S. invaded Iraq, knowing it to be defenseless, he noted, “Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.” — Noam Chomsky
- “It is easier for an American member of Congress to criticize an American president than to criticize an Israeli Prime Minister; it is easier for them to criticize an unjust and unwarranted US war than one launched by Israel.” — Jeffrey Blankfort
- Ken Livingston, Mayor of London, re: his visit to Cuba in 2006: “What really stood out for me was hearing first hand from people working in the medical services just how appalling the US blockade is. When you meet people who are treating eye disorders and blindness on a huge scale and they describe how difficult it is to get the equipment they need except through indirect routes because of the blockade you get a feel for the scale of the injustice that is being imposed on Cuba.” Livingston might have added that the “indirect routes”, even if available, are much more expensive.
- In 1965 when UN Secretary-General U Thant tried to open back-channel ties to the North Vietnamese, US Secretary of State Dean Rusk called him off by shouting: “Who do you think you are, a country?” (Washington Post BookWorld, January 7, 2007)
- George W. Bush: “Years from now when America looks out on a democratic Middle East, growing in freedom and prosperity, Americans will speak of the battles like Fallujah with the same awe and reverence that we now give to Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima” in World War II. (Associated Press, November 11, 2006)
- The National Endowment for Democracy was US Government initiated, and although ostensibly “independent,” has been continually funded by the US Congress, and its Board has included top level actors in the US Government’s foreign policy apparatus, including former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, former National Security Council Chair Zbigniew Brzezinski, and former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz.
- CBS News, September 9, 2006: Senator Jay Rockefeller says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq. Does Rockefeller stand by his view, even if it means that Saddam Hussein could still be in power if the United States didn’t invade? “Yes. Yes.” says Rockefeller. “He wasn’t going to attack us.”
- William Appleman Williams, in his 2007 book “Empire as a way of life”: Analyzing US history from its revolutionary origins to the dawn of the Reagan era, Williams shows how America has always been addicted to empire in its foreign and domestic ideology. Detailing the imperial actions and beliefs of revered figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this book is the most in-depth historical study of the American obsession with empire, and is essential to understanding the origins of our current foreign and domestic undertakings.
- Compare Washington’s reaction in recent years to popular uprisings alleging electoral fraud in the Ukraine and Georgia to its reaction to the same in Mexico in 2006 when the rightwing Felipe Calderon was declared the winner in a very questionable manner.
- Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, in his talk at the United Nations, September 20, 2006, sharply criticized US president George W. Bush’s foreign policies and Bush himself. Britain’s Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett suggested that the Chávez comments were beyond the pale of diplomatic protocol at the UN. “Even the Democrats wouldn’t say that”. However, the Guardian reported that “Delegates and leaders from around the world streamed back into the chamber to hear Mr Chávez, and when he stepped down the vigorous applause lasted so long that it had to be curtailed by the chair.”
- Only the imperialist powers have the ability to enforce sanctions and are therefore always exempt from them.
–
Contributing Editor William Blum is the author of:
- Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
- Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
- West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
- Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org
Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.
To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 [at] aol.com with “add” in the subject line. I’d like your name and city in the message, but that’s optional. I ask for your city only in case I’ll be speaking in your area.
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Is Syria Next?
By Stephen Lendman
America’s business isn’t just war and grand theft. It’s also regime change by whatever means. A previous article mentioned General Wesley Clark, from his book, “Winning Modern Wars,” saying that Pentagon sources told him two months after 9/11 that war plans were being prepared against Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Somalia, Sudan and Libya. Months earlier, they were finalized against Afghanistan.
Clark added:
“And what about the real sources of terrorists – US allies in the region like Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia? Wasn’t it repressive policies of the first, and the corruption and poverty of the second, that were generating many of the angry young men who became terrorists? And what of the radical ideology and direct funding spewing from Saudi Arabia?”
“It seemed that we were being taken into a strategy more likely to make us the enemy – encouraging what could look like a ‘clash of civilizations’ – not a good strategy for winning the war on terror.”
On September 5, Nil Nikandrov’s Global Research.ca article asked if “After Libya: Is Venezuela Next?” saying:
NATO insurgents attack on Venezuela’s Tripoli embassy and compound narrowly missed claiming casualties as “ambassador Afif Tajeldine and the embassy staff moved to a safer location at the last moment and left Libya shortly thereafter.”
Nikandrov added that Venezuela’s embassy was the only one looted, suggesting perhaps a message threatening Chavez as America’s next target.
He certainly was in April 2002 for two days by a Washington instigated coup, aborted by mass street protests and support from many in Venezuela’s military, especially from its middle-ranking officer corp.
Later in December 2002 and early 2003, he was again by a general strike and oil management lockout, causing severe economic disruption, and by an August 2004 national recall referendum he won handily with 59% of the vote. Chavez knows Washington targets him for removal, yet he remains Venezuela’s democratically elected president since first taking office on February 2, 1999, and still popular.
Nonetheless, last June, the Republican controlled House Foreign Relations Committee wanted the Obama administration to aggressively “contain (his) dangerous influence (and) his relations with Iran,” according to Rep. Connie Mack (R. FL), chairman of the Subcommittee on Foreign Affairs for the Western Hemisphere.
He and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R. FL), another right-wing extremist, got the White House to impose sanctions on Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), its state oil company even though America relies on imported oil it supplies.
They and others also want Venezuela designated a supporter of state terrorism with greater consequences if they succeed, unfriendly to US business interests very much opposed.
As a result, whether other actions follow bears close watching. Moreover, Venezuela’s late 2012 presidential election is important, especially with Chavez recovering from cancer, so perhaps is more vulnerable than earlier.
Ahead of the precise date to be announced, Washington is funding his opposition as done previously, meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign country, what’s illegal in US elections.
Since 2002, in fact, America’s State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) directed over $100 million to anti-Chavez groups, candidates, and media campaigns.
Despite America’s debt and budget problems, it continues perhaps in amounts greater than known, and may increase substantially next year as part of a greater regime change campaign.
Are more aggressive actions planned? Only the fullness of time will tell, but given the Obama’s penchant for regime change, events ahead bear close watching.
In Syria also since externally generated uprisings began last March, then intensified, suggesting regime change there as in Libya. Both countries were targeted with violence, so far, however, without NATO intervening against the Assad government or able to get a Security Council resolution passed to facilitate it.
However, according to National Security Council director of strategic communications Ben Rhodes, the Libya model is a template for future US/NATO interventions, but “(h)ow much we translate to Syria remains to be seen. The Syrian opposition doesn’t want foreign military forces but do want more countries to cut of trade with the regime and break with it politically.”
By opposition perhaps he means Washington, NATO allies, and supportive regional regimes, not Syrians or its business leaders, harmed most by sanctions and other tactics.
On August 31, Corbett Report editor James Corbett told Russia Today that manipulated video footage is being used to falsify events on the ground, saying:
“There’s even been the implication that some of the images being shown have been digitally manipulated,” online reports discussing it. One instance cited video footage from Bahrain. Claimed to be from Hama, various stations airing it used different digitally “dropped in backgrounds.”
“So there are some very strange things going on, and unfortunately we live in an age when media manipulation is so easy.”
It’s thus harder to distinguish between reality and fiction. It was true in Tripoli when alleged rebel-supportive euphoric celebrations were, in fact, produced at a Doha, Qatar Green Square Hollywood-style sound stage mockup. In other words, they were staged and untrue. Apparently, the same deception is now repeated in Syria.
A September 3 Corbett Report video with Michel Chossudovsky focused on destabilizing Syria, suggesting a greater global war could result, involving Russia and China.
“Whatever the nature of the Syrian government,” he said, falsely intervening based on “the doctrine of the responsibility to protect is a derogation of the sovereign rights of a country,” according to fundamental international law prohibiting it.
In fact, Western media suppress reports of well armed insurgents, brought in from the outside, stoking violence since last March. At the same time, Assad’s forces were blamed for responding.
In all anti-government demonstrations, disruptive “Islamists, snipers, and armed gangs are involved in acts of arson directed against government buildings,” including a “court house and the agricultural bank in Hama.”
At the same time, nonviolent civilians, legitimately protesting grievances, are trapped between waring sides, resulting in deaths and other casualties.
At issue, however, is “an armed insurrection, spreading from one city to another. We now have very firm evidence that both Turkey and Israel are” supporting militia groups (financially and with weapons), some of them, in fact, used as death squads.
At the same time, “they’re using this a pretext to demonize the Syrian regime, and demand the resignation of Bashar al-Assad,” perhaps heading toward NATO intervention and greater war.
On September 2, Chossudovsky’s Global Research.ca article headlined, “The Al Qaeda Insurgency in Syria: Recruiting Jihadists to Wage NATO’s ‘Humanitarian Wars,’ Part III,” saying:
Despite its authoritarian nature, Assad’s government is “the only (remaining) independent secular state in the Arab world. Its populist, anti-Imperialist and secular base is inherited from the dominant Baath party,” supportive of Occupied Palestinians as is Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
At issue is the US/NATO plan to “displace and destroy the Syrian secular State, displace or co-opt the national economic elites and eventually replace the” current government “with an Arab sheikdom, a pro-US Islamic republic” or US-style democracy meaning one in name only.
As always, America’s pack journalism produces one-sided falsified report, supporting US imperial wars and disruptive insurgencies preceding them.
As a result, accounts and commentaries suppress information about efforts to recruit thousands of jihadist “freedom fighters” like earlier in Afghanistan against Soviet Russia, and currently a de facto NATO invasion force in Libya, massacring anyone thought to be pro-Gaddafi.
Already battling an outside instigated insurrection, is Syria’s turn next, a topic MK Bhadrakumar addressed in his August 30 article, saying:
If earlier events in Iraq and current ones in Libya are “any indication, the future of (Syria’s) sovereignty might be hanging by a thread.” In fact, as he and others believe, regime change in one form or other is core regional US policy for strategic gains against rivals Russia and China.
Images from Syria now are all too familiar, including falsified reports hyping them, as well as claims about people yearning for Western liberators to free them. As a result, expect Libya to replicate post-Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, highlighted by protracted conflict and violence, including insurgent forces warring amonst themselves, innocent civilians harmed most as a result.
Moreover, British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg ominously said:
“I want to make it absolutely clear: the UK will not turn its back on the millions of Arab states looking to open up their societies, looking for a better life?”
After destroying and preparing to loot Libya, did he mean Syria is next? Surely not Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, other Gulf States, Yemen, or other loyal regional allies, according to Bhadrakumar and other analysts.
Although accomplishing regime change in Syria may be harder than in Libya, never underestimate the ability of Western plotters to find a way. Perhaps what’s now ongoing mere prelude to greater planned disruption politically, financially or by direct military intervention.
“Sustained efforts are afoot to bring about a unified Syrian opposition.” A Turkey-held meeting, “third in a row, finally elected a ‘council’ ostensibly representing the voice of the Syrian people.”
In fact, it represents predominantly Western interests as well as Turkey’s and Israel’s. “The fig-leaf of Arab League support is also available,” pro-West autocratic regimes now “in the forefront” for regime change in Syria.
Key ahead is getting another Security Council mandate for intervention. “The heart of the matter is that regime change in Syria is imperative for the advancement of” America’s Middle East strategy.
It includes delinking Syria from Iran, then Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, isolating the Islamic Republic, while at the same time, strengthening Israel’s position, and weakening that of Russia and China.
Portraying both countries as being on the “wrong side of history,” Bhadrakumar calls the strategy a “clever ideological twist to the hugely successful Cold-War era blueprint that pitted communism against Islam.”
Western body language and supportive media rhetoric suggest “no conceivable way the US would let go the opportunity (for regime change) in Syria.”
Whether it’s coming, only time will tell. In the meantime, regional violence continues subverting Arab spring aspirations everywhere from blooming.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
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The rape of Libya
By Bill Van Auken, Senior Analyst, WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization
Five days after “rebels” entered Tripoli, under the cover of NATO bombing and led by foreign special forces, the abject criminality of imperialism’s takeover of Libya is becoming increasingly evident.
Fighting continues to rage throughout the Libyan capital, whose two million residents have been made hostages of the armed gangs and Western special forces troops that have seized control of the city’s streets.
The focus of NATO operations has become a frantic effort to hunt down and murder Muammar Gaddafi, who has ruled the country for 42 years. A $2 million bounty has been placed on his head, and the British media now openly boast that SAS special forces troops are leading the search for him and his family. A vast array of US armed Predator drones, AWACS spy planes and other surveillance equipment has been concentrated on the North African country to facilitate the manhunt.
The pretense that the US and its European NATO allies were intervening in Libya to “protect civilians and civilian populated areas from threat of attack,” as stated in the United Nations Security Council resolution, has effectively been abandoned. Behind the fig leaf of this resolution the naked imperialist and colonial character of the war has emerged.
The Security Council’s stipulations that ground troops not be introduced into the country, that an arms embargo be kept in place and that mercenaries be prevented from entering Libya have all been flouted in this criminal operation to seize control of an oil-rich former colony and loot its resources. There is barely any attempt to hide the fact that special forces, intelligence agents and mercenary military contractors have organized, armed and led the “rebels”, who have not made a single advance without the prior annihilation of government security forces by NATO warplanes.
After being terrorized for five months by NATO bombs and missiles, the people of Tripoli are now facing sudden death and a looming humanitarian catastrophe as a result of the NATO campaign to “protect civilians”.
Kim Sengupta of the Independent reported Thursday from the Tripoli neighborhood of Abu Salim, which the “rebels” stormed under the cover of NATO air strikes. Known as a pro-Gaddafi area, its residents have been subjected to a reign of terror.
“There was no escape for the residents of Abu Salim, trapped as the fighting spread all around them,” Sengupta reported. “In the corner of a street, a man who was shot in the crossfire, the back of his blue shirt soaked in blood, was being carried away by three others. ‘I know that man, he is a shopkeeper,’ said Sama Abdessalam Bashti, who had just run across the road to reach his home. ‘The rebels are attacking our homes. This should not be happening.
“‘The rebels are saying they are fighting government troops here, but all those getting hurt are ordinary people, the only buildings being damaged are those of local people. There has also been looting by the rebels, they have gone into houses to search for people and taken away things. Why are they doing this?’”
Asked why local residents were resisting the NATO-led force’s takeover of the city, Mohammed Selim Mohammed, a 38-year-old engineer, told theIndependent, “Maybe they just do not like the rebels. Why are people from outside Tripoli coming and arresting our men?”
Meanwhile, other reports laid bare war crimes carried out by NATO and its local agents on the ground in Tripoli. Both the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies documented a massacre perpetrated against Gaddafi supporters in a square adjacent to the presidential compound that was stormed and looted on Tuesday.
“The bodies are scattered around a grassy square next to Moammar Gadhafi’s compound of Bab al-Aziziya. Prone on grassy lots as if napping, sprawled in tents. Some have had their wrists bound by plastic ties,” AP reported.
“The identities of the dead are unclear but they are in all likelihood activists that set up an impromptu tent city in solidarity with Gadhafi outside his compound in defiance of the NATO bombings.”
AP said that the grisly discovery raised “the disturbing specter of mass killings of noncombatants, detainees and the wounded.”
Among the bodies of the executed the report added were several that “had been shot in the head, with their hands tied behind their backs. A body in a doctor’s green hospital gown was found in the canal. The bodies were bloated.”
Reporting from the same killing field, Reuters counted 30 bodies “riddled with bullets”. It noted that “Five of the dead were at a field hospital nearby, with one in an ambulance strapped to a gurney with an intravenous drip still in his arm.” Two of the bodies, it said, “were charred beyond recognition.”
Amnesty International has raised urgent concerns about the killing, torture and brutalization of people being rounded up by the “rebels,” particularly African migrant workers who have been singled out for retribution because of the color of their skin.
In a report from a makeshift detention camp set up by the NATO-led forces in a Tripoli school, Amnesty stated:
“In an overcrowded cell, where some 125 people were held with barely enough room to sleep or move, a boy told Amnesty International how he had responded to calls by al-Gaddafi’s government for volunteers to fight the opposition.
“He said that he was driven to a military camp in Az-Zawiya, where he was handed a Kalashnikov rifle that he did not know how to use.
“He told Amnesty International: ‘When NATO bombed the camp around 14 August, those who survived fled. I threw my weapon on the ground, and asked for refuge in a home nearby. I told the owners what happened, and I think they called the revolutionaries [thuuwar], because they came shortly after.
“‘They shouted for me to surrender. I put my hands up in the air. They made me kneel on the ground and put my hands behind by head. Then one told me to get up. When I did, he shot me in the knee at close range. I fell on the ground, and they continued beating me with the back of their rifles all over my body and face.
“‘I had to get three stitches behind my left ear as a result. In detention, sometimes they still beat us and insult us, calling us killers.’”
A pro-Gaddafi soldier told a similar story, recounting that he was captured August 19 while bringing supplies to his unit. “He said that he was beaten all over his body and face with the backs of rifles, punched and kicked. He bore visible marks consistent with his testimony.”
Amnesty said that “rebel” leaders estimated that one-third of the detainees were “foreign mercenaries,” meaning sub-Saharan Africans. “When Amnesty International spoke to several of the detainees, however, they said they were migrant workers. They said that they had been taken at gunpoint from their homes, workplaces and the street on account of their skin colour.” Several said that they feared for their lives and that guards had told them that they would be “eliminated or else sentenced to death.”
Among those detained were a family of five from Chad, including a minor, who were taken off of a truck while being driven to a farm to collect produce. A 24-year-old man from Niger who had worked in Libya for five years told Amnesty that armed men had seized him from his home, handcuffed and beaten him and thrown him into the trunk of a car. “I am not at all involved in this conflict,” he said. “All I wanted to do was to make a living. But because of my skin colour, I find myself here, in detention. Who knows what will happen to me now.”
The human rights group also cited a report from a Reuters reporting team which saw a “rebel” pickup truck carrying three black men in the back. One of them told Reuters he was Nigerian. “He sobbed as he said: ‘I do not know Gaddafi. I do not know Gaddafi. I am only working here.’”
News reports and statements from international aid agencies warn of a humanitarian catastrophe in the city as a result of the NATO siege. Reporting from a local hospital, the Telegraph said: “As battle raged in the Tripoli streets hundreds of casualties were brought in, rebel fighters, Gaddafi’s soldiers, and unlucky civilians, laying next to each other in bed and even on a floor awash with blood, screaming or moaning in agony. Many died before they could be treated.”
The paper interviewed Dr. Mahjoub Rishi, the hospital’s Professor of Surgery: “There were hundreds coming in within the first few hours. It was like a vision from hell. Missile injuries were the worst. The damage they do to the human body is shocking to see, even for someone like me who is used to dealing with injuries.” Most of the casualties, he said, were civilians caught in the crossfire.
The Telegraph reported that Tripoli’s two other major hospitals were similarly overflowing with casualties and desperately understaffed, as were all of the city’s private hospitals.
The aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) warned that the city is facing a medical “catastrophe”.
The group told Reuters that “Medical supplies ran low during six months of civil war [i.e., NATO bombardment] but have almost completely dried up in the siege and battle of the past week. Fuel supplies have run out and the few remaining medical workers are struggling to get to work.” The lack of fuel means that hospitals that have kept their power by running generators can now no longer do so.
Health officials in Tripoli report that blood supplies have run out at the hospitals and that food and drinking water is unavailable over whole areas of Tripoli.
Meanwhile the governments of Algeria, Venezuela and South Korea have all reported that their embassies in Tripoli have been attacked and looted by “rebel” gunmen. While the governments of Algeria and Venezuela had opposed the NATO invasion and supported Gaddafi, South Korea, a close US ally, had taken no such positions.
The universal euphoria of the US and much of the European media, which is “embedded” with NATO and its “rebels,” cannot conceal the brutal reality that a war waged under the pretense of human rights and protecting civilians has unleashed immense death, human suffering and destruction.
Far from a “revolution” or struggle for “liberation,” what the world is witnessing is the rape of Libya by a syndicate of imperialist powers determined to lay hold of its oil wealth and turn its territory into a neo-colonial base of operations for further interventions throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
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Corporate Tax Holiday in Debt Ceiling Deal: Where’s the Uproar?
By Matt Taibbi | Taibblog
Have been meaning to write about this, but I’m increasingly amazed at the overall lack of an uproar about the possibility of the government approving another corporate tax repatriation holiday.
I’ve been in and out of DC a few times in recent weeks and one thing I keep hearing is that there is a growing, and real, possibility that a second “one-time tax holiday” will be approved for corporations as part of whatever sordid deal emerges from the debt-ceiling negotiations.
I passed it off as a bad joke when I first saw news of this a few weeks ago, when it was reported that Wall Street whipping boy Chuck Schumer wasseriously considering the idea. Then I read later on that other Senators were jumping on the bandwagon, including North Carolina’s Kay Hagan.
This is what Hagan’s spokesperson said:
Senator Hagan is looking closely at any creative, short-term measures that can get bipartisan support and put people back to work. One such potential initiative is a well-crafted and temporary change to the tax code that encourages American companies to bring money home and put it towards capital, investment, and–most importantly–American jobs.
For those who don’t know about it, tax repatriation is one of the all-time long cons and also one of the most supremely evil achievements of the Washington lobbying community, which has perhaps told more shameless lies about this one topic than about any other in modern history – which is saying a lot, considering the many absurd things that are said and done by lobbyists in our nation’s capital.
Here’s how it works: the tax laws say that companies can avoid paying taxes as long as they keep their profits overseas. Whenever that money comes back to the U.S., the companies have to pay taxes on it.
Think of it as a gigantic global IRA. Companies that put their profits in the offshore IRA can leave them there indefinitely with no tax consequence. Then, when they cash out, they pay the tax.
Only there’s a catch. In 2004, the corporate lobby got together and major employers like Cisco and Apple and GE begged congress to give them a “one-time” tax holiday, arguing that they would use the savings to create jobs. Congress, shamefully, relented, and a tax holiday was declared. Now companies paid about 5 percent in taxes, instead of 35-40 percent.
Money streamed back into America. But the companies did not use the savings to create jobs. Instead, they mostly just turned it into executive bonuses and ate the extra cash. Some of those companies promising waves of new hires have already committed to massive layoffs..
It was bad enough when lobbyists managed to pull this trick off once, in 2004. But in one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington, companies immediately started to systematically “offshore” their profits right after the 2004 holiday with the expectation that somewhere down the road, and probably sooner rather than later, they would get another holiday.
Companies used dozens of fiendish methods to keep profits overseas, including such scams as “transfer pricing,” a technique in which profits are shifted to overseas subsidiaries. A typical example might involve a pharmaceutical company that licenses the rights or the patent to one of its more successful drugs to a foreign affiliate, which in turn manufactures the product and sells it back to the U.S. branch, thereby shifting the profits overseas.
Companies have been doing this for years, to incredible effect. Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker estimated that Google all by itself has saved $3.1 billion in taxes in the past three years by shifting its profits overseas. Add that to the already rampant system of loopholes and what you have is a completely broken corporate tax system.
And the whole thing is predicated on that dirty little secret – the notion, long known to all would-be major corporate taxpayers, that there would come a day when there would be another tax holiday.
That time, they hope, is now. According to Drucker, lobbyists met with President Obama last December to ask for another holiday. And now the drumbeats are rolling on the Hill for a new holiday to be included in the debt-ceiling deal.
Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the same Senator who produced the damning report of corruption on Wall Street, has been trying to fight the problem, introducing a measure that would prevent companies from accessing offshored money through correspondent accounts and branches of offshore banks.
Levin’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has also been investigating how companies might use the cash they save from a tax holiday, surveying companies like DuPont, presumably to find out just how many of these firms really intend to create new jobs with their tax savings.
I’m shocked there isn’t more of an uproar about this. Could you imagine what the Tea Party would be saying right now if there was a law on the books that allowed immigrants to indefinitely avoid taxes on income sent back to family members in the old country, in Mexico and Venezuela and India?
As it is, leading members of the Senate are seriously considering giving the most profitable companies in the world a total tax holiday as a reward for their last seven years of systematic tax avoidance. Hundreds of billions of potential tax dollars would disappear from the Treasury. And there isn’t a peep from anyone, anywhere, on this issue.
We’re seriously talking about defaulting on our debt, and cutting Medicare and Social Security, so that Google can keep paying its current 2.4 percent effective tax rate and GE, a company that received a $140 billion bailout en route to worldwide 2010 profits of $14 billion, can not only keep paying no taxes at all , but receive a $3.2 billion tax credit from the federal government. And nobody appears to give a shit. What the hell is wrong with people? Have we all lost our minds?
MATT TAIBBI is an investigative journalist with Rolling Stone. He gives gravitas to that magazine.
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