Pentagon’s Global Reach: Around The World In 12 Days

By Rick Rozoff
11-13-09
Stop NATO

Reports from the first twelve days of November indicate the global scope of the first attempt in history by one nation to achieve uncontested worldwide military power.

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Leaked G20 Documents Shed Light on Global Carbon Tax

James Corbett
The Corbett ReporT
11-12-09

As The Corbett Report reported yesterday, veteran Bilderberg researcher Daniel Estulin has obtained documents from inside last week’s G20 Finance Minister’s meeting in St. Andrews, Scotland. The documents—including attendee lists, drafts of the conference’s communique and handwritten notes with deatils about who said what during deliberations—were snuck out of the conference by Estulin’s sources despite security measures which were high “even by Bilderberg standards.” The documents can be viewed at BilderbergBook.com and have been mirrored here in PDF format.

Listen to The Corbett Report’s exclusive interview with Estulin about these documents by downloading the mp3.

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Scott Horton Interviews Greg Palast – The Latin American War Agenda and Big Oil

Investigative reporter Greg Palast discusses the domestic political motives behind the war posturing of Venezuela and Colombia, Obama’s embrace and expansion of Plan Colombia, the demonization of Hugo Chavez and Ecuador’s escape from vassalage to the U.S. and big oil.

MP3 here.

ALSO SEE:
LATIN AMERICA
THE GEOPOLITICAL GAME PLAN:
NETWORK OF US AND NATO BASES IN LATIN AMERICA AND THEIR CONNECTION TO VITAL RESOURCES AND SOCIAL RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS

Army Sends Infant to Protective Services, Mom to Afghanistan

By Dahr Jamail
11-13-09

U.S. Army Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a single mother, is being threatened with a military court-martial if she does not agree to deploy to Afghanistan, despite having been told she would be granted extra time to find someone to care for her 11-month-old son while she is overseas.

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Myths of Our Time

By Paul Craig Roberts
11-13-09
Antiwar.com

It is conventional wisdom that it was the draft that ended the Vietnam war. According to this explanation, cowardly college students subject to the draft and their unpatriotic families, forced an end to the war. This is Karl Marx’s explanation. Material interests, not empty morality, are said to have brought the war to an end. The fact that in those days the US still had an independent media of sorts that sometimes framed the war in moral terms is ignored. Are we sure, for example, that the film of the naked little girl running in terror down the road burning with napalm was ineffectual in arousing moral opposition to the war? Are we certain that it wasn’t an aroused moral conscience that brought about the end of the war but was college students’ fears for their lives and limbs? If we ascribe ending the war to material interests, it makes ending the war look as unworthy as the war itself. Yet, virtually every conservative columnist, commentator, newsperson and politician, as well as today’s antiwar protesters and apparently the Pentagon, believes that a military draft would reduce Americans’ toleration for wars because of body bags coming home to middle and upper class parents. Apparently, the lower class doesn’t mind its kids coming back in body bags.

Those in thrall to this explanation, which derives from Marx’s materialist explanation of history, do not notice that Vietnam was our longest war. It apparently took almost forever for the material interest of students and their parents to realize itself and stop the war. Why are we afraid to say that the war stopped because American troops and the American population got tired, offended even, from killing women, children and noncombatants? Vietnam had not attacked the US. The US had interjected itself into a civil war in a far off place, as it has done in Afghanistan.

By invading Iraq the US started a civil war between Sunni and Shi’ite. In Pakistan the US has started a civil war between the religious tribal population and the secular US puppet state. In Palestine the US started a civil war between Fatah and Hamas. One continuously reads from those Americans opposed to America’s wars of aggression that the wars are possible because they don’t affect Americans, just those few who sign up for the voluntary military. Thus, there are insufficient material interests at stake to stop the war. This is a common explanation for the weakness of the antiwar movement. One could argue instead that it is the triumph of Karl Marx’s materialist thinking that has made moral protests impotent. What is morality? You can’t weigh it, define it, measure it. It can be dismissed as the whining of material interests. In contrast, material interests, such as lives, limbs, and bank accounts are real.

For whatever the reason, morality has shown itself to be an impotent force in 21st century America. Americans show no remorse at over one million dead Iraqis and four million displaced Iraqis due entirely to an American invasion based on lies and deception. The lies and deception are now well proven. Yet, there has been no apology for the horrors that Americans inflicted on Iraq. Afghanistan is another example. Intentional lies conflated the Taliban with al-Qaeda and “terrorists.” The diverse peoples in Afghanistan who were first ravaged by Soviet bombs are now ravaged by American bombs. Weddings, funerals, children’s soccer games, people waiting for fuel or food, people asleep in their homes, people attending mosques have all been murdered and are murdered routinely by US and its NATO puppets. Each time civilians are murdered, the US denies it, only to be contradicted every time by the evidence. Why is the president of the United States contemplating sending yet tens of thousands more US troops to kill people in Afghanistan? The answer is that the United States is an immoral country, with an immoral people and an immoral government. Americans no longer have a moral conscience. They have gone over to the Dark Side. Humanity has endeavored for millennia to control evil with morality. In the American “superpower,” this effort has collapsed and failed. The United States needs to be censured for its immoral behavior, not have that behavior rationalized as being in its material interests.

Beloved Enemy: Paying for the Privilege of Perpetual War

By Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
11-14-09

Our American militarists love war so much that they even bankroll the enemy, just to keep the blood money flowing. This odd but absolutely crucial characteristic of the Never-Ending Terror War was borne out again in a remarkable story in the Guardian (with an expanded version in The Nation).  As Aram Roston reports — and U.S. military officials openly admit — American taxpayers are giving Afghan insurgents at least 10-20 percent of the war machine’s multibillion-dollar transportation contracts. Hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing into Taliban coffers every year from bribes offered to stop insurgents from attacking supply convoys — convoys which are increasingly controlled by local warlords and druglords, including convicted drug dealers in the Corleone-like Karzai family.

Of course, in Iraq, the Pentagon finally started paying insurgents as well. But in that instance, they were at least paying the enemy to stop fighting. Here, they only ask that the Taliban allow some trucks to roll through the countryside — which seems to be entirely in the hands of the insurgents, despite eight years of war and months of Obama’s “surge”. The Americans pay handsomely for the privilege — sometimes up to $1,500 per truck, depending on the cargo — even though they know the insurgents will use the money to keep fighting. It’s a nice racket all around, everybody makes out — the American militarists and war profiteers, their criminal Afghan allies, and the insurgents (who use the American money to top up the cash flow they get from American allies in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, etc.). So where’s the harm?

OK, OK, there are all those civilians being slaughtered — women and children ripped to pieces, to shreds of flesh and fragments of bone – by the bombs of the defenders of Western civilization. And yeah, there are all the American and British soldiers being killed, wounded, and brutalized, year after year, in a senseless, criminal conflict. And then there’s the looting of the American treasury by the warmongers, and the relentless and inevitable destruction of American liberties by the all-corrosive acid of perpetual war. But as Stalin liked to say: when wood is chopped, chips fly. And what are these few paltry chips – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – when there’s so much juicy loot out there?

Center for Constitutional Rights – Take Action

Silent protest during a Senate hearing on Guantanamo Bay.

CCR

1. Tell Congress It Can’t Be Judge, Jury and Executioner

   On November 12, 2009, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a lawsuit against the United States government in an effort to derail an insidious legislative move to target, attack and crush progressive organizations.

A Morally Bankrupt Military + Scott Horton Interviews Dahr Jamail

When Soldiers and Their Families Become Expendable
By Dahr Jamail
11-11-09

The military operates through indoctrination. Soldiers are programmed to develop a mindset that resists any acknowledgment of injury and sickness, be it physical or psychological. As a consequence, tens of thousands of soldiers continue to serve, even being deployed to combat zones like Iraq and/or Afghanistan, despite persistent injuries. According to military records, over 43,000 troops classified as “nondeployable for medical reasons” have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan nevertheless. The recent atrocity at Fort Hood is an example of this.

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Scott Horton Interviews Dahr Jamail
11-12-09

Independent journalist Dahr Jamail discusses the Ft. Hood massacre, repeated deployments that are breaking military morale, high veteran suicide rates, the blowback from waging a civilizational war against Islam and how the political value of dead soldiers decreases in relation to their distance from home.

MP3 here. (23:49)

Armitage Part I: The Early Years & the Golden Triangle

By Sibel Edmonds
11-12-09

As mentioned earlier, Brent Scowcroft will be ending his nine-year reign as chairman of the American Turkish Council (ATC) and will be succeeded by former Bush administration Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage.

Armitage may be best remembered for leaking information to Robert Novak that exposed Valerie Plame as a covert CIA agent in a political scandal that became known as the Plame Affair. Selective amnesia on the part of the servile US mainstream media has repeatedly obscured Armitage’s curriculum vitae, which goes back decades and begins during the Vietnam conflict.

Graduating from the US Naval Academy in 1967, Armitage served four tours of duty in Vietnam before leaving the military in 1973, when he joined the Defense Attache in Saigon. It was at this time that Armitage’s association with the CIA began.

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Passing on the Mantle of Deep North American Integration

By Dana Gabriel
11-03-09

With the demise of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) of North America and the restructuring of many of its key priorities under the banner of the North American Leaders Summit, other trilateral initiatives are also passing on the mantle of deep continental integration.
 
The Fifth Annual North American Forum was held in Ottawa on October 4-6, 2009.  In a news release the group describes itself as, “a community of Canadian, Mexican and American thought leaders whose purpose is to advance a shared vision of North America, and to contribute to improved relations among the three countries.”  It goes on to say that, “They come together annually to explore linkages among the mutually reinforcing goals of security, prosperity and enhanced quality of life.”  Meetings are co-chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State, George Schultz, former Premier of Alberta, Peter Lougheed, as well as former Mexican Finance Minister Pedro Aspe.  The North American Forum has no business office and no business address.  It consists of the three co-chairs, along with their extensive network of contacts in government, business and the military, meeting privately to champion North American integration.  The news release also stated that, “This year’s meeting of the North American Forum focused on the need for Canada, Mexico and the United States to work together in responding to the global economic crisis and promoting a quick return to strong and sustainable growth.  In addition, the Forum included special sessions on two critical issues: one on energy and the environment, and the other on transnational crime, arms smuggling and drug trafficking.”  The North American Forum has been described as a parallel structure to the SPP.

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Estulin: After G20, Oligarchs Moving on African Union, Population Reduction

The Corbett Report
11-11-09

In an exclusive interview with The Corbett Report earlier today, Daniel Estulin revealed the behind-the-scenes details of last week’s G20 Finance Minister’s meeting in St. Andrews, Scotland. Many of these details come from actual G20 documents that his sources were able to sneak out of the meetings in spite of security measures which, Estulin notes, were unprecedented “even by Bilderberg standards.” These documents, which contain valuable information about the conference, are available at BilderbergBook.com and have been mirrored on The Corbett Report homepage. They were smuggled out at great personal risk and need to be disseminated widely.

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Secret State Demands News Organization’s Web Logs, Gets Slapped Down

Antifascist Calling…

When the Independent Media Center (IMC) received a formal notice on January 30 from the Department of Justice, demanding they provide an Indianapolis grand jury with “details of all reader visits on a certain day,” the feisty left-wing news aggregators fought back, CBS News reported. When queried by CBS as to what criminal investigation prompted their draconian demand for IP addresses “and any other identifying information” on IndyMedia users, U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison emailed CBS with a curt reply: “We Have no comment.” But before proceeding further, let’s be clear on one thing: since the 1970s, the federal grand jury system where the prosecutor reigns supreme, has been an instrument wielded by the secret state to target dissent and to ensnare left-wing government critics in open-ended “investigations” whose sole purpose is to harass if not prosecute alleged “troublemakers.”

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