...EN KYK HOE LYK HY NOU...

Imperial Decline: Multi-Billion-Dollar Terrorists and the Disappearing Middle Class

by James Petras

July 10, 2011

The US government (White House and Congress) spends $10 billion dollars a month, or $120 billion a year, to fight an estimated “50 -75 ‘Al Qaeda types’ in Afghanistan ”, according to the CIA and quoted in the Financial Times of London (6/25 -26/11, p. 5).  During the past 30 months of the Obama presidency, Washington has spent $300 billion dollars in Afghanistan , which adds up to $4 billion dollars for each alleged ‘Al Queda type’.  If we multiply this by the two dozen or so sites and countries where the White House claims ‘Al Qaeda’ terrorists have been spotted, we begin to understand why the US budget deficit has grown astronomically to over $1.6 trillion for the current fiscal year. During Obama’s Presidency, Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment has been frozen, resulting in a net decrease of over 8 percent, which is exactly the amount spent chasing just 5 dozen ‘Al Qaeda terrorists’ in the mountains bordering Pakistan . It is absurd to believe that the Pentagon and White House would spend $10 billion a month just to hunt down a handful of terrorists ensconced in the mountains of Afghanistan .  So what is the war in Afghanistan about?  The answer one most frequently reads and hears is that the war is really against the Taliban, a mass-based Islamic nationalist guerrilla movement with tens of thousands of activists.  The Taliban, however, have never engaged in any terrorist act against the territorial United States or its overseas presence. The Taliban have always maintained their fight was for the expulsion of foreign forces occupying Afghanistan .  Hence the Taliban is not part of any “international terrorist network”.  If the US war in Afghanistan is not about defeating terrorism, then why the massive expenditure of funds and manpower for over a decade? Several hypotheses come to mind: The first is the geopolitics of Afghanistan :  The US is actively establishing forward military bases, surrounding and bordering on China . Secondly, US bases in Afghanistan serve as launching pads to foment “dissident separatist” armed ethnic conflicts and apply the tactics of ‘divide and conquer’ against Iran , China , Russia and Central Asian republics. Thirdly, Washington’s launch of the Afghan war (2001) and the easy initial conquest encouraged the Pentagon to believe that a low cost, easy military victory was at hand, one that could enhance the image of the US as an invincible power, capable of imposing its rule anywhere in the world, unlike the disastrous experience of the USSR. Fourthly, the early success of the Afghan war was seen as a prelude to the launching of a sequence of successful wars, first against Iraq and to be followed by Iran , Syria and beyond.  These would serve the triple purpose of enhancing Israeli regional power, controlling strategic oil resources and enlarging the arc of US military bases from South and Central Asia, through the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean . The strategic policies, formulated by the militarists and Zionists in the Bush and Obama Administrations, assumed that guns, money, force and bribes could build stable satellite states firmly within the orbit of the post-Soviet US empire.  Afghanistan was seen as an easy first conquest the initial step to sequential wars.  Each victory, it was assumed would undermine domestic and allied (European) opposition.  The initial costs of imperial war, the Neo-Cons claimed, would be paid for by wealth extracted from the conquered countries, especially from the oil producing regions. The rapid US defeat of the Taliban government confirmed the belief of the military strategists that “backward”, lightly armed Islamic peoples were no match up for the US powerhouse and its astute leaders.    Wrong Assumptions, Mistaken Strategies:  The Trillion Dollar Disaster Every assumption, formulated by these civilian strategists and their military counterparts, has been proven wrong. Al Qaeda was and is a marginal adversary; the real force capable of sustaining a prolonged people’s war against an imperial occupier, inflicting heavy casualties, undermining any local puppet regime and accumulating mass support is the Taliban and related nationalist resistance movements.  Israeli-influenced US think-tanks, experts and advisers who portrayed the Islamic adversaries as inept, ineffective and cowardly, totally misread the Afghan resistance.  Blinded by ideological antipathy, these high-ranking advisers and White House/Pentagon civilian office-holders failed to recognize the tactical and strategic, political and military acumen of the top and middle-level Islamist nationalist leaders and their tremendous reserve of mass support in neighboring Pakistan and beyond. The Obama White House, heavily dependent on Islamophobic pro-Israel experts, further isolated the US troops and alienated the Afghan population by tripling the number of troops, further establishing the credentials of the Taliban as the authentic alternative to a foreign occupation. As for the neo-conservative pipe dreams of successful sequential wars, cooked up by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, Libby et al, to eliminate Israel’s adversaries and turn the Persian Gulf into a Hebrew lake, the prolonged wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan has, in fact, strengthened Iran’s regional influence, turned the entire Pakistani people against the US and strengthened mass movements against US clients throughout the Middle East. Sequential imperial defeats have resulted in a massive hemorrhage of the US treasury, rather than the promised flood of oil wealth from tributary clients.  According to a recent scholarly study, the military cost of the wars in Iraq , Afghanistan and Pakistan have exceeded $3.2 trillion dollars (“The Costs of War Since 2001”, Eisenhower Study Group, June 2011) and is growing at over ten billion a month.  Meanwhile the Taliban “tightens (its) psychological grip” on Afghanistan (FT6/30/2011, p. 8).  According to the latest reports even the most guarded 5-star hotel in the center of Kabul, the Intercontinental, was vulnerable to a sustained assault and take over by militants, because “high security Afghan forces” are infiltrated and the Taliban operate everywhere, having established “shadow” governments in most cities, towns and villages (FT 6/30/11 p.8). Imperial Decline, Empty Treasury and the Specter of a Smash-Up The crumbling empire has depleted the US treasury.  As the Congress and White House fight over raising the debt ceiling, the cost of war aggressively erodes any possibility of maintaining stable living standards for the American middle and working classes and heightens growing inequalities between the top 1% and the rest of the American people.  Imperial wars are based on the pillage of the US treasury.  The imperial state has, via extraordinary tax exemptions, concentrated wealth in the hands of the super-rich while the middle and working classes have been pushed downward, as only low paid jobs are available.  In 1974, the top 1% of US individuals accounted for 8% of total national income but as of 2008 they earned 18% of national income.  And most of this 18% is concentrated in the hands of a tiny super-rich 1% of that 1%, or 0.01% of the American population, (FT 6/28/11, p. 4 and 6/30/11, p. 6). While the super-rich plunder the treasury and intensify the exploitation of labor, the number of middle income jobs is plunging:  From 1993 to 2006, over 7% of middle income jobs disappeared (FT 6/30/11, p. 4).  While inequalities may be rising throughout the world, the US now has the greatest inequalities among all the leading capitalist countries.  The burden of sustaining a declining empire, with its the monstrous growth in military spending, has fallen disproportionately on middle and working class taxpayers and wage earners.  The military and financial elites’ pillage of the economy and treasury has set in motion a steep decline in living standards, income and job opportunities. Between 1970 -2009, while gross domestic product more than doubled, US median pay stagnated in real terms (FT 7/28/11, p. 4).  If we factor in the added fixed costs of pensions, health and education, real income for wage and salaried workers, especially since the 1990’s, has been declining sharply.   Even greater blows are to come in the second half 2011:  As the Obama White House expands its imperial interventions in Pakistan, Libya and Yemen, increasing military and police-state spending, Obama is set to reach budgetary agreements with the far right Republicans, which will savage government health care programs, like MEDICARE and MEDICAID, as well as Social Security, the national retirement program.  Prolonged wars have pushed the budget to the breaking point, while the deficit undermines any capacity to revive the economy as it heads toward a ‘repeat recession’. The entire political establishment is bizarrely oblivious to the fact that their multi-hundred- billion-dollar pursuit of an estimated 50-75 phantom Al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan has hastened the disappearance of middle income jobs in the US . The entire political spectrum has turned decisively to the Right and the Far-Right.  The debate between Democrats and Republicans is over whether to slash four trillion or more from the last remnants of our country’s social programs. The Democrats and the Far-Right are united as they pursue multiple wars while currying favor and funds from upper 0.01% super-rich, financial and real estate moguls whose wealth has grown so dramatically during the crisis! Conclusion But there is a deep and quiet discomfort within the leading circles of the Obama regime:  The “best and brightest” among his top officials are scampering to jump ship before the coming deluge: the Economic Guru Larry Summers, Rahm Emmanuel, Stuart Levey, Peter Orzag, Bob Gates, Tim Geithner and others, responsible for the disastrous wars, economic catastrophes, the gross concentration of wealth and the savaging of our living standards, have walked out or have announced their ‘retirement’, leaving it to the smiling con-men - President Obama and Vice-President ‘Joe’ Biden - and their ‘last and clueless loyalists’ to take the blame when the economy tanks and our social programs are wiped out.  How else can we explain their less-than-courageous departures (to ‘spend more time with the family’) in the face of such a deepening crisis?  The hasty retreat of these top officials is motivated by their desire to avoid political responsibility and to escape history’s indictment for their role in the impending economic debacle.  They are eager to hide from a future judgment over which policy makers and leaders and what policies led to the destruction of the American middle and working classes with their good jobs, stable pensions, Social Security, decent health care and respected place in the world.

OORDEEL WEER EENS SELF

London Bombings Were An Inside Job (And So Was 9/11) Says British Police Analyst

Monday, 11 July 2011 11:57

'A Principal Intelligence Analyst for South Yorkshire Police has spoken out about the July 7th 2005 London Bombings. Tony Farrell who has served for the police since 1998 is convinced as he can be that the bombings were a false flag attack carried out by intelligence agencies. In July 2010 he was asked to compile a threat assessment report for South Yorkshire Police.

His own research lead him to believe the major threat in the UK today is from an "internal tyranny" which the public are slowly finding out about. He believes the public's reaction to these facts may present a threat of public unrest. He was dismissed from his post last year because his views were considered untenable, but the police officers who sacked him did not disagree with his views! In fact they seemed to encourage him to appeal the decision. He is now awaiting a tribunal for unfair dismissal taking place in September 2011.'

Part one

Part two

Part three

HOE WEERLÊ JY DIÉ VERMOEDE/HOW DO YOU REBUT THIS PRESUMPTION?

The courage to face tomorrow 


NEW CONTOURS OF POLITICAL REALITY 

Teams announced for the biggest game of all time:
Jews vs. humans (predator vs. prey) 

(Latest score update, with two minutes left in the game of Planet Earth: Jews 5,761, humans nothing) 

Note to readers: Hitler was innocent; U.S. started WW2; but we believed Jewish media; Saddam was innocent; The Taliban were innocent; Qaddafi is innocent; America is a robotized killer state. 

27th June 2011 




BREAKING NEWS: You can either be a Jew or a human being, but you can't be both. This is what the Jews themselves say in their supposedly holy book, The Talmud. They claim to be the only real human beings on the planet, and all the non Jews are, according to former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, "beasts." You've doubtless seen the many stories out of Israel affirming this is true, with one rabbi after another repeating that non Jews are only here to serve the Jews. 

Can you think of a clearer parallel to this 360 degree herd culling now going on? 

Jews can't defend their position — because it's insane. Narcissistic megalomania would be the correct term to use in the science Jews created, which is psychology. Judaism is the disease psychology was invented to cure — but it failed totally. Religions failed for the same reason: failure to identify our relationships with others as the most important part of our lives. Religion hijacked our primary allegiance into outer space with an imaginary god. Psychology took us into our own minds and abandoned us there without a shred of hope, drugged and duped in the service of alienation and exploitation. 

I repeat: Jews can't defend their position because it's insane. That's why they inevitably resort to slander and evasion. The Holocaust propaganda myth has been exploded. Both World Wars were planned and conducted to create the State of Israel, the crime capital of the world. All those hip Jews, pretending such sincere concern over the fate of the country they happen to be living off, can only respond weakly: "You're a bad person for saying that!" "Surely you don't know what you're talking about." 

Guess again, Moishe. As I survey the cyberhorizon, I might be the only one who does. 

Have you ever noticed that when you really piss off a Jew that he reverts to the most scatological slurs he can sputter and scalds you with the most offensive profanity? That's the real programming coming through, baby. It's reflected in their cowardly and dishonest responses to legitimate criticism. The profit scheme is their prime directive. It's simply blasphemy to oppose it, subject to Talmudic death penalty. 

Why do you think they keep the Talmud so secret? Because in amongst the many horrors contained in that monument to self-destructive perversity is the command: "Any non Jew who reads the Talmud must be killed." This is an admission of all Jews of the shame they really feel but suppress about the insane dogma that rules their lives. 

Because we have all been hypnotized, transfixed and mystified by centuries of Jewish-imposed population control plans — from newspapers, art, music and movies to universities, encyclopedias, sciences and pop trends — we no longer have the tools to identify what is real and what is spin. 
The stain on civilization emanating from the Hebrew prophets is far more pervasive than any of us realizes — or perhaps, can realize. The breadth of the Jews' parasitic penetration into our minds and bodies is breathtaking. The way we think was even invented by a Jew. 
Judaism is nothing else but a parasitic self destructive virus that has badly infected both Christianity and Islam with its poisoned misinformation, but the crux of the matter (pardon the pun) is that the effects it has caused in the world is now culminating in a scenario none of us (we thought) could be so hateful and so depraved as to even imagine happening to us — mass extermination by the people we at least said we trusted — our leaders! Just ask the Afrikaners!

Henry Ford was right. "The only things Jews are afraid of is the truth." 

Because Jews are so scared everyone will find out they're just like everybody else — nobody. 

I don't know why they're so scared of that. I rather enjoy it. It's called being human and respecting your own life. 

I have long believed that the Book of Revelation contains coded subconscious instructions for our destruction, and we — guided by the insane hand of the Jews — are witnessing before our very eyes right now that programming coming to fruition. 

By believing in a lie and then fighting over minor points of it for two thousand years, we have poisoned our own home and guaranteed our own extinction, which in case you haven't noticed, is imminent. 

Did I mention that all the American presidents (9) and all the Russian czars (7) who were assassinated were all assassinated by Jews? 

Did I mention that the people who guided the Roman emperor Constantine on his death bed to convert to Christianity were all Jews? 

And if you still have any doubts about the innocence of Adolf Hitler, did I mention that Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were all Jews? 

PRACTICAL ADVICE: Do you know what to do when you're railing about the Jewish penetration of reality, the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, or the wars for Israel America is fighting in every country in the Arab world, and a Jew resorts to his primary fallback position, which is "Of course it's not all Jews!" 

The proper response to this is: "Really? Which 99 percent do you mean?" 

And then you might want to add: "Israeli soldiers like shooting children in the back of the head and then harvesting their organs." It's important to remember that Israeli soldiers are Jews, just like your "neighbors" who live down the street and are always so busy in social and political affairs. In fact, many of your "neighbors" have actually been Israeli soldiers. 
• • • 

No one can ever be happy unless they live in a country, in a society, they can believe in. The great French lawyer Frederic Bastiat said something that will stand for all of time, and I paraphrase — when a citizen has to choose between his sense of honest moral justice, or his belief in what is right, and the law, the society in which he lives is doomed. Rights precede laws. Any law that violates rights should not be obeyed. Thomas Jefferson said that, too. 

Who among us here now still believes in America, with its war machine going full speed slaughtering Jewish enemies all over the world at the expense of millions of human lives. No matter how deceived we may have been by Jewish propaganda throughout our lives, all of us here remember being an American, feeling American, willing to defend our country against all enemies at any time. Who among us believes that now? 
Would you go to war and fight to the death for Barack Obama? Or George Bush? Or Bill Clinton? Or George Bush? Or Ronald Reagan? This is how long the current neocon tyranny in America has lasted. So would you mind telling me, if you gave your life fighting for Barack Obama, what would your sacrifice be for? 

All our leaders should be in prison. They're mass murderers. You know all this. 

• • • 

The most important piece of information I can give you is what I call the Mullins/Ramsay meme. It is the description of the modern Jewish world financial monster as it evolved from the killing of the king by Oliver Cromwell in England in the mid-1600s. The first Bank of England was formed shortly thereafter and to this day controls the world of finance. 

A hundred years later in concert with Jewish money from Germany and Italy, Lord Palmerston's British intelligence engineered the French Revolution, which is the bloodiest of them all, where neighbor slaughtered neighbor with meat cleavers and all the political configurations kept changing as the slaughter was going on so that nothing was left of what France used to be. 

In the American Revolution, Haym Solomon, the Henry Kissinger of his time, paid James Madison a regular salary and George Washington got substantial contributions from Jewish slave trader Aaron Lopez in Newport. Rothschild counted the coins of Prince William of Hesse, who furnished the soldiers to fight for the British against the American rebels. The kicker: Prince William never paid the troops, a massive fortune. Partners with Amschel Rothschild, who founded the dynasty that is now thoroughly destroying the world, Prince William died mysteriously at age 25, according to Eustace Mullins. 

I'll skip over the American Civil War. Long story. Complex Jewish accomplishment. 

It took hundreds of years, the assassination of seven czars, and the arming of Japan before the Jews finally took over Russia, and they never could have done it without the army of maniac anarchists that Jewish bankers in Brooklyn sent over with Trotsky to give Lenin $40 million in gold. The result of this Jewish false flag revolution was, according to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 66 million non Jewish dead. 

The brutal murder of the czar and his family in 1917 was the culmination of a process triggered by staged stock market crashes and massive immigration of Russian Jews from 1900 on, who all registered to vote and gained the election of Woodrow Wilson as president, the "peace candidate" who brought America into World War I as soon as the Balfour declaration was signed, promising Israel to the Zionist Jew financial monsters who were and are manipulating reality. 

Wilson further betrayed his country by shepherding the passage of landmark legislation that changed the character — and the health — of America forever. Income tax, Federal Reserve, direct election of senators destroying democracy. Wilson admitted it. "I have unwittingly ruined my country." Asshole. Tradition among presidents. Except one. 

I was never a believer until now. He told us everything, and we couldn't hear him above the preplanned manipulated white noise din of Jewish mass media. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZYfeYhQ9eU This near 50 year old video tells us how profoundly we have been anesthetized by white noise in the last half century. 

All the wars since WWI have been Rothschild-Rockefeller-Schiff-Warburg enterprises. 

Very important to understand Ramsay's "The Nameless War." It's on my website. Easy read, about 80 pages, curl your toenails. 

••• 

This is my belief. What we believe is what we do. 

Call me naive, but I believe we're all working for the same God. The Hindus have 3,300 names for god, but they're all aspects of the same one. Muslims fervently pray to Allah, Christians devotedly tend their statues, it's all the same god. 

What you believe is what you do. We're all working for the same God — err, except those who worship G-d, which really should be G$d. 

In no way, shape nor form is the God of the Talmud or the Old Testament the god of the Trifid Nebula or the first words a baby speaks. Jehovah is a venal beast, justifying crimes against humanity for the sheer satisfaction of his bloodthirsty control. We all have to come to grips with this, and take Frederic Bastiat's maxim about nations up to species level. 

Humanity has yet, and may never, come to grips with the sad fact that the greatest empires are compiled, and the greatest heroes worshipped, since the dawn of time, have been the greatest killers. 

What do we do when the God we worship, shackled and distorted by profit-seeking priests, becomes the devil our heart tells us to avoid? 

Whatever we may wish to think about these things, it is important to remember that all humans worship the same god, and possess the same aspirations, except for that one poisoned group. We must not let sly social engineering and media manipulation deflect us from our goal of individual liberty as the cornerstone of all rights and laws. This benevolent paternalistic attitude of the state is a false pose that has led us dangerously far down the road to irremovable totalitarian tyranny. I'll take a man with his rifle over a bureaucrat with a pen any day. 

In this day and age of intense Jewish infiltration of what began as anti Jewish groups, I know it is difficult to assess others whose differences may be slightly different than your own. We've all been burned so many times by Jews pretending to be our friends and allies. Don't be put off too quickly by token differences. It is essential to identify intruders and fakes but don't exclude potential allies too quickly. 
My formula is I try to keep all Jewish information out of my data base, because three thousand years of history have shown that information to be false and manipulative, no matter how nearly convincing the rhetoric may be. 

I'm still waiting for some hotshot Jewish writer like Gordon Duff, Gilad Atzmon, or Michel Chossudovsky amongst the many so heavily promoted by all these supposedly hip websites to address my main concerns, which apparently no Jew has the courage or candor to attempt. I charge that the words "Jew" and "integrity" are mutually exclusive. You can trip up any Jew instantaneously by simply asking him to recite Jewish history. He will not be able to avoid lying. 

If you try to include Jews in a coalition fighting for freedom around the world, that coalition is doomed to fail. If you try to build a stable society, Jews will gain control of it and ruin it. How much fucking evidence do you need? 

Answer me this, hotshot Jewish writers who pretend to be on the side of patriots fighting for genuine freedom. 

Would you believe anything a person said who professed belief that his particular . . . call it any kind of group you like: ethnic, religious, racial, cultural . . . group had the right and duty to kill (and rob, I like that part, very religious) any non Jew in the world, whose holidays all commemorate the slaughter of non Jews, and who took an oath every year to lie about everything they do? Of course you wouldn't. That would make you a goy. 

It's your choice: Defaming the memory of the dead, or erasing the lives of the living. 

The logical end point to the Jewish philosophy is that the Jews will keep killing until there's nobody left to kill but themselves. 

For this wonderful world we inhabit and for the people we love, we non Jews must not let them do that, nor must we accept any help from any Jews who pretend to be on our side, because then, as you know, the job will not get done. 


John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, urging people to understand that no problem in the world can be authentically addressed without first analyzing tangents caused by Jewish perfidy, which has subverted and diminished every aspect of human endeavor throughout history. Support for his work is wholly derived from people who can understand what he’s saying and know what it means. 

250 N. McCall Rd. #2,
Englewood
FL 34223
USA 

DIE OPPERGESAG VAN DIE REG -- EIE REG

A World Overwhelmed By Western Hypocrisy

By Paul Craig Roberts

June 29, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- -- -- - Western institutions have become caricatures of hypocrisy.  

The International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank are violating their charters in order to bail out French, German, and Dutch private banks. The IMF is only empowered to make balance of payments loans, but is lending to the Greek government for prohibited budgetary reasons in order that the Greek government can pay the banks. The ECB is prohibited from bailing out member country governments, but is doing so anyway in order that the banks can be paid.  The German parliament approved the bailout, which violates provisions of the European Treaty and Germany’s own Basic Law. The case is in the German Constitutional Court, a fact unreported in the US media.

US president George W. Bush appointed an immigrant, who is not impressed with the US Constitution and the separation of powers, to the Justice (sic) Department in order to get a ruling that the president has “unitary powers” that elevate him above statutory US law, treaties, and international law.  According to this immigrant’s legal decisions, the “unitary executive” can violate with impunity the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which prevents spying on Americans without warrants obtained from the FISA Court. The immigrant also ruled that Bush could violate with impunity the statutory US laws against torture as well as the Geneva Conventions. In other words, the fictional “unitary powers” make the president into a Caesar.

Constitutional protections, such as habeas corpus, which prohibit government from holding people indefinitely without presenting charges and evidence to a court, and which prohibit government from denying detained people due process of law and access to an attorney, were thrown out the window by the US Department of Justice (sic), and the federal courts went along with most of it.

As did Congress, “the people’s representatives”.  Congress even enacted the Military Tribunals Commissions Act of 2006, signed by the White House Brownshirt on October 17.

This act allows anyone alleged to be an “unlawful enemy combatant” to be sentenced to death on the basis of secret and hearsay evidence not presented in the kangaroo military court placed out of reach of US federal courts.  The crazed nazis in Congress who supported this total destruction of Anglo-American law masqueraded as “patriots in the war against terrorism.”

The act designates anyone accused by the US, without evidence being presented,  as being part of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or “associated forces” to be an “unlawful enemy combatant,” which strips the person of the protection of law. Not even George Orwell could have conceived of such a formulation. 

The Taliban consists of indigenous Afghan peoples, who, prior to the US military  intervention, were fighting to unify the country.  The Taliban are Islamist, and the US government fears another Islamist government, like the one in Iran that was blowback from US intervention in Iran’s internal affairs. The “freedom and democracy” Americans overthrew an elected Iranian leader and imposed a tyrant. American-Iranian relations have never recovered from the tyranny that Washington imposed on Iranians. 

Washington is opposed to any government whose leaders cannot be purchased to perform as Washington’s puppets. This is why George W. Bush’s regime invaded Afghanistan, why Washington overthrew Saddam Hussein, and why Washington wants to overthrow Libya, Syria, and Iran.

America’s First Black (or half white) President inherited the Afghan war, which has lasted longer than World War II with no victory in sight.  Instead of keeping with his election promises and ending the fruitless war, Obama intensified it with a “surge,”

The war is now ten years old, and the Taliban control more of the country than does the US and its NATO puppets. Frustrated by their failure, the Americans and their NATO puppets increasingly murder women, children, village elders, Afghan police, and aid workers.
A video taken by a US helicopter gunship, leaked to Wikileaks and released, shows American forces, as if they were playing video games, slaughtering civilians, including camera men for a prominent news service, as they are walking down a peaceful street. A father with small children, who stopped to help the dying victims of American soldiers’ fun and games, was also blown away, as were his children. The American voices on the video blame the children’s demise on the father for bringing kids into a “war zone.” It was no war zone, just a quiet city street with civilians walking along.

The video documents American crimes against humanity as powerfully as any evidence used against the Nazis in the aftermath of World War II at the Nuremberg Trials. 

Perhaps the height of lawlessness was attained when the Obama regime announced that it had a list of American citizens who would be assassinated without due process of law.  

One would think that if law any longer had any meaning in Western civilization, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, indeed, the entire Bush/Cheney regime, as well as Tony Blair and Bush’s other co-conspirators, would be standing before the International Criminal Court.

Yet it is Gadaffi for whom the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants. Western powers are using the International Criminal Court, which is supposed to serve justice, for self-interested reasons that are unjust.

What is Gadaffi’s crime?  His crime is that he is attempting to prevent Libya from being overthrown by a US-supported, and perhaps organized, armed uprising in Eastern Libya that is being used to evict China from its oil investments in Eastern Libya.

Libya is the first armed revolt in the so-called “Arab Spring.” Reports have made it clear that there is nothing “democratic” about the revolt. http://www.english.rfi.fr/print/95867?print=now  

The West managed to push a “no-fly” resolution through its puppet organization, the United Nations. The resolution was limited to neutralizing Gadaffi’s air force.  However, Washington, and its French puppet, Sarkozy,  quickly made an “expansive interpretation” of the UN resolution and turned it into authorization to become directly involved in the war. 

Gadaffi has resisted the armed rebellion against the state of Libya, which is the normal response of a government to rebellion. The US would respond the same as would the UK and France.  But by trying to prevent the overthrow of his country and his country from becoming another American puppet state, Gadaffi has been indicted. The International Criminal Court knows that it cannot indict the real perpetrators of crimes against humanity--Bush, Blair, Obama, and Sarkozy--but the court needs cases and accepts the victims that the West succeeds in demonizing.

In our post-Orwellian times, everyone who resists or even criticizes the US is a    criminal. For example, Washington considers Julian Assange and Bradley Manning to be criminals, because they made information available that exposed crimes committed by the US government. Anyone who even disagrees with Washington, is considered to be a “threat,” and Obama can have such “threats” assassinated or arrested as a “terrorist suspect” or as someone “providing aid and comfort to terrorists.”  American conservatives and liberals, who once supported the US Constitution, are all in favor of shredding the Constitution in the interest of being “safe from terrorists.” They even accept such intrusions as porno-scans and sexual groping in order to be “safe” on air flights.

The collapse of law is across the board. The Supreme Court decided that it is “free speech” for America to be ruled by corporations, not by law and certainly not by the people. On June 27, the US Supreme Court advanced the fascist state that the “conservative” court is creating with the ruling that Arizona cannot publicly fund election candidates in order to level the playing field currently unbalanced by corporate money. The “conservative” US Supreme Court considers public funding of candidates to be unconstitutional, but not the “free speech” funding by business interests who purchase the government in order to rule the country. The US Supreme Court has become a corporate functionary and legitimizes rule by corporations.  Mussolini called this rule, imposed on Americans by the US Supreme Court, fascism. 

The Supreme Court also ruled on June 27 that California violated the US Constitution by banning the sale of violent video games to kids, despite evidence that the violent games trained the young to violent behavior.  It is fine with the Supreme Court for soldiers, whose lives are on the line, to be prohibited under penalty of law from drinking beer before they are 21, but the idiot Court supports inculcating kids to be murderers, as long as it is in the interest of corporate profits, in the name of “free speech.”

Amazing, isn’t it, that a court so concerned with ‘free speech”  has not protected American war protesters from unconstitutional searches and arrests, or protected protesters from being attacked by police or herded into fenced-in areas distant from the object of protest. 

As the second decade of the 21st century opens, those who oppose US hegemony and the evil that emanates from Washington risk being declared to be  “terrorists.” If they are American citizens, they can be assassinated.  If they are foreign leaders, their country can be invaded.  When captured, they can be executed, like Saddam Hussein, or sent off to the ICC, like the hapless Serbs, who tried to defend their country from being dismantled by the Americans.

And the American sheeple think that they have “freedom and democracy.”
Washington relies on fear to coverup its crimes. A majority of Americans now fear and hate Muslims, peoples about whom Americans know nothing but the racist propaganda which encourages Americans to believe that Muslims are hiding under their beds in order to murder them in their sleep.

The neoconservatives, of course, are the purveyors of fear.  The more fearful the sheeple, the more they seek safety in the neocon police state and the more they overlook Washington’s crimes of aggression against Muslims. 

Safety uber alles. That has become the motto of a once free and independent American people, who once were admired but today are despised.

In America lawlessness is now complete.  Women can have abortions, but if they have stillbirths, they are arrested for murder.http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/24/america-pregnant-women-murder-charges  

Americans are such a terrified and abused people that a 95-year old woman dying from leukemia traveling to a last reunion with family members was forced to remove her adult diaper in order to clear airport security. http://www.nwfdailynews.com/news/mother-41324-search-adult.html   Only a population totally cowed would permit such abuses of human dignity. 

In a June 27 interview on National Public Radio, Ban Ki-moon, Washington’s South Korean puppet installed as the Secretary General of the United Nations, was unable to answer why the UN and the US tolerate the slaughter of unarmed civilians in Bahrain, but support the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Gadaffi for defending Libya against armed rebellion. Gadaffi has killed far fewer people than the US, UK, or the Saudis in Bahrain. Indeed, NATO and the Americans have killed more Libyans than has Gadaffi. The difference is that the US has a naval base in Bahrain, but not in Libya.
There is nothing left of the American character. Only a people who have lost their soul could tolerate the evil that emanates from Washington.

HIER IS OOK VIR ONS 'N LES-OF-WAT

‘The US has already lost the 

Afghanistan war’

Saturday, 02 July 2011

In his majestic poem “Recessional,” Rudyard Kipling was writing of the fading British Empire, but his words are as vivid and pertinent today as a century ago:

“Far-called our navies melt away –
On dune and headland sinks the fire –
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”

The objective of war is to achieve political objectives, not to kill enemies. Politically, the United States has achieved nothing in Afghanistan after 10 years of desultory, destruction, and titanic expenditure.
So in this sense, the US has already lost the Afghan conflict, its longest war. Militarily its forces have been stalemated, meaning that it has lost the all-important military initiative and is now on the strategic defensive. We have seen this before – in Vietnam.
Once more, Afghanistan fulfills its grim title as “graveyard of empires.”
The US has failed to install an obedient regime in Kabul that controls Afghanistan. It has made bitter foes of the nation’s Pashtun majority, and, in pursuing this war, gravely undermined Pakistan. Claims that US forces were only in Afghanistan to hunt the late Osama Bin Laden were widely disbelieved.

Near the end of June, President Barack Obama bowed to public opinion, approaching elections, military reality and financial woes by announcing he would withdraw a third of the 100,000 US troops from Afghanistan by the end of next summer. Pentagon brass growled open opposition. Mr. Obama should have smacked them down, but did not, adding to the growing belief that he is weak and overawed by the military chiefs.

US allies France and Germany announced similar troop reductions. All foreign troops are supposed to quit Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

This staggered withdrawal will take the US garrison roughly back to the size it was before President Obama sent 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan. This means enough soldiers to hold the main urban centers and connecting roads, but not enough to defeat Taliban guerillas in the field, or to block the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Washington currently spends at least $10 billion monthly on the Afghan war, not counting “black” payments, CIA and NSA operations. The US has poured $18.8 billion in development aid into Afghanistan since 2001 with nothing to show for the effort. Pakistan has been given $20 billion to support the Afghan War. Each US soldier in Afghanistan costs $1 million per annum, not counting full support costs.

None of these costs is covered by taxes; all are piled onto the gargantuan national debt.

The US deficit is heading over $1.4 trillion. The national debt, when unfunded pensions and benefits are added, is likely $100 trillion, according to the chief of PIMCO, the world’s largest bond trader. This means America, top-heavy with unsustainable debt, risks capsizing financially.
Forty-four million Americans now receive food stamps; the national infrastructure of roads, airports, bridges and schools is crumbling from neglect. Unemployment, officially at 9.5 percent, is probably closer to 20 percent.

The cry is being heard: “Rebuild America, not Afghanistan.”

In spite of intense pro-war propaganda, over half of Americans now oppose the Afghan War. Even US-installed Afghan president Hamid Karzai calls it, “ineffective, apart from causing civilian casualties.”

So will the US really pull out of Afghanistan? That remains to be seen. There are many contradictory signs.

Mid-level talks between the US and Taliban have been conducted for over a year. Washington’s plan was to try to split Taliban through such talks.

US Afghan supremo Gen. David Petraeus tried to buy off Afghan resistance in the same manner he had bribed Iraq’s Sunni tribes into quiescence. This gambit did not work with Taliban’s hardened warriors, for whom honor holds as much value as money.

The US will probably keep a sizeable number of its remaining 66,000 soldiers in Afghanistan after 2014, rebranding them training troops. The huge US bases at Kandahar and Bagram will be retained as permanent US fortified enclaves.

Billions more will be spent on the Afghan government army and police. They have so far proved ineffective because most are composed of Tajik and Uzbek mercenaries who are hated and distrusted by the Pashtun.

A similar process is underway in Iraq where “withdrawal” means keeping combat brigades in Iraq, renamed “training units” and “counter-terrorism units,” thousands of mercenaries, and mobile US combat forces in neighboring Kuwait and the Gulf.

New US embassies in Baghdad and Kabul – huge, fortified complexes with their own mercenary combat forces – will be the world’s biggest. Kabul will have a staff of 1,000 US personnel. Bin Laden called them “crusader fortresses.” Fortified US consulates are under construction in other parts of Afghanistan.

In addition, the US will still arm and finance allied Tajik and Uzbek militias in Afghanistan, and CIA-run mercenary forces. Financing Pakistan’s US-backed regimes and Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan must also continue at around $3 billion yearly. What political concessions the US is giving Moscow to allow passage of war supplies through its territory remains a secret.

The US appears to be going and staying at the same time. By contrast, Taliban’s position is clear and simple: it will continue fighting until all foreign troops are withdrawn. US Special Forces, drones and hit squads have been unable to assassinate enough Taliban commanders to make the mujahidin stop fighting.

Americans never study history, not even their own. We don’t recall founding father, the great Benjamin Franklin, who said, “There is no good war, and no bad peace.” Or that the Pashtun Taliban and its allies are dedicated, undefeated warriors who fight where they live, and have all the time in the world.

I’ve been in combat with Pashtun fighters and remain in awe of their courage and love of combat. The Pashtun mujahidin will keep fighting as long as their ammunition lasts.

America, for all its B-1 heavy bombers, strike fighters, missiles, helicopter gunships and drones, armor, super electronics, spies in the sky and all the other high tech weapons of modern war has failed to defeat some 30,000 tribal fighters armed with nothing more than light weapons and legendary valor.
The US has lost the political war in Afghanistan. It may linger there, but it cannot win.

(Eric Margolis is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination? Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. He can be reached at: Margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com)

HOE DIE WÊRELD (EINTLIK) WERK*

*Kyk ook hier

Prosecutors Back Off From Their ‘Iron-Clad’ Case Against Strauss-Kahn
By Paul Craig Roberts

July 02, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- The New York prosecutor has had to tell the judge that the police and prosecutors have lost confidence in their sexual assault case against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The judge has released DSK from house arrest and returned his bail and bond money. 

The prosecutors say that the immigrant hotel maid lied to the police about the incident and about other things, and the police have revealed that the “victim” discussed with an imprisoned man the possibility of turning the case into extortion. According to the New York Times, the maid’s jailed confidant was among a number of people who had made multiple cash deposits totaling $100,000 to the maid’s bank account. The police now suspect that the maid has connections to illegal drugs and money laundering.

The prosecutor says that he will continue to investigate the case. What that means is that the prosecutor, a politically ambitious Cy Vance, is going for a misdemeanor plea from DSK to save the prosecutor’s face from injudiciously being drawn into an extortion/reputation-destroying plot against the man who French polls indicated was the public’s favorite in the upcoming French presidential election in which President Sarkozy, Washington’s puppet, is seeking reelection. The prosecutor is sending DSK’s legal team the message that the case is being kept open and could be reinstated unless DSK’s attorneys secure DSK’s permission to negotiate a deal on a minor charge, which essentially has no punishment, but saves the faces of the NY prosecutor and police.
We will probably never know whether the maid thought the scheme up on her own or whether it came from Sarkozy’s operatives and their US allies. One indication that DSK’s political enemies are implicated is the fact, made public by the French press, that Sarkozy’s political team in France knew about DSK’s arrest before the NY police announced it. This fact did not stop the NY prosecutor and police from painting DSK as guilty in numerous public statements and in unethical if not illegal leaks to reporters. 

When police and prosecutors convict a suspect in the media before he is even charged, it typically means that there is no evidence against him and that demonization is serving as the substitute. Conviction is what is important to the system, not a determination of innocence or guilt.

On numerous Internet sites, I pointed out the problems with the case against DSK. For informing people of the obvious, I was denounced by the right-wing and the left-wing.

The right-wing gave me the finger for doubting the word and integrity of police and prosecutor. Didn’t I know that these are the honorable guardians who protect the public from crime? How dare I question anything the police and prosecutor did or do. What was I, some kind of pinko-liberal-commie?

The left-wing also gave me the finger and said that I had revealed my real self as nothing but an apologist for the rich and powerful and for men who seduce women. How much was I paid for my service to the rich and powerful and seducers of innocent women?

The feminist left denounced me as a misogynist. Only a woman-hater could take the side of a rapist against his victim. 

It is all so tiresome to endure the stupidity of people. Little wonder they are losing their liberty, their jobs and incomes, and their country and self-respect.

With DSK’s reputation in tatters and DSK knocked out of the French presidential election and removed from the IMF, where he was beginning to raise questions about the establishment’s use of the IMF to bail out rich bankers on the backs of poor peasants, the “justice system” has done its work. It is now safer for the authorities to release him than to risk a trial. The shrill bleating of the maid’s legal team signifies their agony at having lost their share of the hoped-to-be extorted millions now that a monetary settlement would clearly indicate obstruction of justice and prison for them all.

Those few who actually care about justice, not only for DSK and everyman, but also for the Greek, Spanish, Irish, and Portuguese people, can find comfort in the fact that apparently DSK had come to New York in order to speak with Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz about a more humane and democratic way to resolve the sovereign debt crisis in Europe than the one imposed by the private creditor banks.
Obviously, anyone who would consult with Stiglitz is perceived by the rich and powerful as a threat to their interest. 

However, this obvious fact has made no impression on the left-wing, which has issued its shrill cries that, once again, the money of the rich and powerful has prevailed over law and justice.