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(SteveWatson) – Elected Reps. chose to hide details from American public for fear of reprisals from “the big forces�? that run the media and the presidencyRead the rest of this entry »
(GlobalResearch) – Crimes by Israel, Sanctions for Iran
The Iranian nation is not unfamiliar with the double standards of the superpowers. The history of Iran’s relations with the western and eastern superpowers is filled with deceitfulness, dishonesty and fraudulence. The recent U.S.-proposed, Russia-backed United Nations Security Council resolution against Iran over its nuclear program is simply one example out of hundreds of instances which demonstrate that the big powers have not ever been honest and sincere with Iran. Read More Here
(GlobalResearch) – “The War is Worth Waging”: Afghanistan’s Vast Reserves of Minerals and Natural Gas – Michel Chossudovsky
The 2001 bombing and invasion of Afghanistan has been presented to World public opinion as a “Just War”, a war directed against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, a war to eliminate “Islamic terrorism” and instate Western style democracy. The economic dimensions of the “Global War on Terrorism” are rarely mentioned.
While Afghanistan is often acknowledged as a strategic hub in Central Asia, bordering on the former Soviet Union, China and Iran, at the crossroads of pipeline routes and major oil and gas reserves, its huge mineral wealth as well as its untapped natural gas reserves has remained, until June 2010, totally unknown to the American public. Read More Here
(CatBird) – James Petras: Afghanistan – The Longest Lost War
Despite almost a decade of warfare, including an invasion and occupation, the US military and its allies and client state armed forces are losing the war in Afghanistan. Outside of the central districts of a few cities and the military fortresses, the Afghan national resistance forces, in all of their complex local, regional and national alliances, are in control, of territory, people and administration. Read More Here
(DailyBeast) – WikiLeaks Founder Has Massacre Video
Julian Assange, who the Feds fear may release State Dept. secrets, denies having them—but he’s readying video of a deadly U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan.
After several days underground, the founder of the secretive website WikiLeaks has gone public to disclose that he is preparing to release a classified Pentagon video of a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan last year that left as many as 140 civilians dead, most of them children and teenagers. Read More Here
(PeaceByTruth) – The Role of “Mental Imagery�?: Giving a “Human Face�? to Racism, Genocide and War
For the corporate elites to continue practicing genocidal predation for power and profit in developing countries, it is necessary that the predation be cast in a false cover of humanitarian aid, democratic development, solidarity, progress, and the like, and that the most overtly murderous practices be cast as necessary in a fight against evil. Read More Here
(Uruknet) – Private Contractors and Covert Wars in Latin America – Read More Here
REPOST - (WRH) – Osama bin Laden: A dead nemesis perpetuated by the US government
Osama bin Laden is dead. The news first came from sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan almost six months ago: the fugitive died in December [2001] and was buried in the mountains of southeast Afghanistan. Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, echoed the information. The remnants of Osama’s gang, however, have mostly stayed silent, either to keep Osama’s ghost alive or because they have no means of communication. Read More Here
(InformationClearingHouse) – How do wars begin? With a “master illusion�?, according to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA’s pioneers in “black propaganda�?, known today as “news management�?. In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an “incident�? that became the “conclusive proof of North Vietnam’s aggression�?. This followed a claim, also fake, that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.
“The CIA,�? he said, “loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons—the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place, and they brought in the American press. Based on this evidence, two Marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam.�? An invasion that took three million lives was under way.
The Israelis have played this murderous game since 1948. The massacre of peace activists in international waters on 31 May was “spun�? to the Israeli public for most of last week, preparing them for yet more murder by their government, with the unarmed flotilla of humanitarians described as terrorists or dupes of terrorists. The BBC was so intimidated that it reported the atrocity primarily as a “potential public relations disaster for Israel�?, the perspective of the killers, and a disgrace for journalism. Read the rest of this entry »
(Uruknet) – “Perfectly Safe: It Just Kills Plants … ” – Agent Orange and the Third Generation
It is not news that American troops fighting for the U.S. military in Vietnam were told by their commanders that the defoliants and herbicides sprayed by the U.S. Air Force were “perfectly safe…[they] just kill plants.” Read More Here
(AP) – NATO general in Afghanistan: Taliban train in Iran
The commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan said Sunday there is “clear evidence” that some Taliban fighters have trained in Iran. Read More Here
(Haaretz) – Report: Gaza aid flotilla changes course to avoid confrontation with Israeli warships
Israel Navy ships reportedly made contact earlier with the six-ship flotilla, which is carrying 10,000 tons of supplies. Read More Here
(WPost) – Analysts question Korea torpedo incident
How is it that a submarine of a fifth-rate power was able to penetrate a U.S.-South Korean naval exercise and sink a ship that was designed for anti-submarine warfare?
Such questions are being fueled by suggestions in the South Korean and Japanese media that the naval exercise was intended to provoke the North to attack. The resulting public outcry in the South, according to this analysis, would bolster support for a conservative government in Seoul that is opposed to reconciliation efforts. Read More Here
(CounterPunch) – Vietnam MIAs: Ghosts Return to Haunt McCain and the US Press
The ghosts that haunt Senator John McCain are about 600 in number and right now they are mustering for an onslaught. Read More Here
(LewRockwell) – Is the U.S. Government Planning War to Quell the Tide of Economic Unrest?
In my opinion and in a word: Yes!
Headlines:
* “READY FOR WAR,�? “U.S. Military told to get ready in Korea Standoff, Obama orders commanders to prepare ‘to deter future aggression.’�? By Drudge and MSNBC
* “U.S. Begins Massive Military Build Up Around Iran, Sending Up To 4 New Carrier Groups In Region�? by Tyler Durden
* “Clinton: Korea Must Face ‘Consequences’ For Sunken Warship�?
* Homeland Security, Northeast Intelligence Network: “The Syrian Missile Crisis: Threat of War Very Real�?
* “The Expanding U.S. War in Pakistan�? by Jeremy Scahill
* “Yemen, Latest War Front?�? by CBS News Read More Here
(IrishTimes) – Predators, Warriors and Ravens: the CIA Drones Wage War
With 5,456 US servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Afghan war going badly, the US military celebrates what it can. Unmanned Aircraft Systems, also known as Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles but referred to as drones, are the military’s most important technological asset. Last year the CIA’s director, Leon Panetta, called the Predator drone programme “the only game in town�?. Read More Here
(C4L) – Too Many Wars Waged
The “War on Drugs,” like the “War on Terror,” ends up being an undertaking with no definable victory in sight. No matter how vigorously the federal government prosecutes its “war” on drugs, people will still use drugs. No matter how vigorously the federal government pursues the “war” on terror there will still be those who want to commit terrorist acts to get their points across.
Thus, we have two “wars” with infinite reach that use the threats engendered by their very own existence to justify their actions. Read More Here
(RussiaToday) – Video: “Attack against South Korean ship looks like false flag operation�? – Wayne Madsen
While international investigators have accused North Korea of sinking a South Korean patrol corvette in March, China has taken a more cautious position.
Investigative journalist and RT contributor Wayne Madsen says it is because Beijing suspects there was greater deception at work.
“The Cheonan [navy corvette] was sunk by this torpedo that was later to be discovered to have been of German manufacture. Germany said it sells no military weapons to North Korea. This thing is starting to look like a classic false flag operation,�? Wayne Madsen says.
“Kim Jong-Il who very rarely travels – and when he does, he only travels by train – went to Beijing. My sources in Beijing say that he went to Beijing, that Chinese authorities said that North Korea did this, he denied it. They were satisfied with his response,�? Madsen adds. “Now the Chinese are very suspicious of the US’ intentions in richening things up in the Korean peninsula.�?
(Uruknet) – At 46, each year of misery seems to have etched new wrinkles around Tran Thanh Dung’s angry gaze.
When he was child in the early 1970s, Tran says he witnessed U.S. soldiers shoot his parents — both of whom were communist Viet Cong soldiers during the Vietnam War. Bent on revenge, he joined the guerrilla group within hours.
To this day, Tran weeps over the memories of bloodshed and the hellish cries of his dying friends. But one bizarre memory will haunt him forever. “The American airplanes came right toward me and dropped a mist in the jungle, and the next day, the trees were dead,” he recalled. “We weren’t scared. We were confused.”
(AP) – White House adviser: World has united against Iran
A top White House adviser says the U.S. is making progress in its efforts to find allies to hold the line on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Read More Here
(YNet) – Discharged soldiers sue for millions over Anthrax experiment
Dozens of soldiers who took part in experiment in early 1990s aimed at determining efficacy of Anthrax vaccine demand $80,000 each in damages. ‘Physical harm was passed down to our children,’ plaintiff says Read More Here
(GlobalResearch) – The Pentagon is using Haiti as a Training Ground for Afghanistan – Michel Chossudovsky
A recent report in Stars and Stripes reveals the nature of the US military operation in Haiti. Combat units from Iraq and Afghanistan have been deployed in Haiti under the banner of a humanitarian operation. Conversely, Haiti is also being used as a military training ground for forces without in-theater combat experience. Read More Here
(NYTimes) – Imagining an Israeli Strike on Iran
In 1981, Israel destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, declaring it could not live with the chance the country would get a nuclear weapons capability. In 2007, it wiped out a North Korean-built reactor in Syria. And the next year, the Israelis secretly asked the Bush administration for the equipment and overflight rights they might need some day to strike Iran’s much better-hidden, better-defended nuclear sites. Read More Here
(EconomicPolicyJournal) – Advanced Conspiracy Theory: Where Are the War Protesters?
Every once and awhile, you will see a post at a blog lamenting that there aren’t any war protesters around the way there were during the Vietnam War. Read More Here
(PoliticalTheatrics) – New research in the journal American Behavioral Scientist (Sage publications, February 2010) addresses the concept of “State Crimes Against Democracy�? (SCAD). Professor Lance deHaven-Smith from Florida State University writes that SCADs involve highlevel government officials, often in combination with private interests, that engage in covert activities for political advantages and power. Proven SCADs since World War II include McCarthyism (fabrication of evidence of a communist infiltration), Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (President Johnson and Robert McNamara falsely claimed North Vietnam attacked a US ship), burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in effort to discredit Ellsberg, the Watergate break-in, Iran-Contra, Florida’s 2000 Election (felon disenfranchisement program), and fixed intelligence on WMDs to justify the Iraq War.1 Read the rest of this entry »
In a previous article of Dec, 2009 U.S. Wars and the Opium Trade, I gave the broad outlines of how the opium trade was used as a power lever and revenue generator by the U.S. during the occupation of Vietnam, as is the case today in Afghanistan. Read the rest of this entry »
By 1967, King had become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi,” and the Washington Post declared that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.” Read the rest of this entry »
According to a think-piece in a recent edition of Newsweek, President Barack H. Obama is a “post-imperial” leader, who seeks to bring ‘balance’ to foreign affairs, and a kind of disciplined realism to interactions with other nations. Read the rest of this entry »
The presidential electoral campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, it was thought, “changed the political debate in a party and a country that desperately needed to take a new direction.�?[1] Like most preceding presidential winners dating back at least to John F. Kennedy, what moved voters of all descriptions to back Obama was the hope he offered of significant change. Yet within a year Obama has taken decisive steps, not just to continue America’s engagement in Bush’s Afghan War, but significantly to enlarge it into Pakistan. If this was change of a sort, it was a change that few voters desired. Read the rest of this entry »
Promising change after eight George Bush and Republican dominated years, Barack Obama won the most sweeping non-incumbent victory in over 50 years along with congressional Democrats gaining large House and Senate majorities. In addition, at 56.8%, voter turnout was the highest since Richard Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the Vietnam war and his “Southern” and “law and order” strategies beat Hubert Humphrey and independent George Wallace in 1968. Read the rest of this entry »
Cycles of atrocities, Cycles of Shame & Regret, and Cycles of more atrocities…
This recent article by Time Magazine on Agent Orange in Vietnam opened up a floodgate of emotions I had thought I had gotten over with a year ago, after my own personal first-hand experiences there. The article was fairly well-written, that is, considering the publication. Here are some excerpts: Read the rest of this entry »
(Time) – This lonely section of the abandoned Danang air base was once crawling with U.S. airmen and machines. It was here where giant orange drums were stored and the herbicides they contained were mixed and loaded onto waiting planes. Whatever sloshed out soaked into the soil and eventually seeped into the water supply. Thirty years later, the rare visitor to the former U.S. air base is provided with rubber boots and protective clothing. Residue from Agent Orange, which was sprayed to deny enemy troops jungle cover, remains so toxic that this patch of land is considered one of the most contaminated pieces of real estate in the country. A recent study indicates that even three decades after the war ended, the cancer-causing dioxins are at levels 300 to 400 times higher than what is deemed to be safe.
With President Barack Obama’s official consent to a troop surge in Afghanistan, the White House spin doctors did their best to reassure a war-weary American public that this war won’t devolve into another Vietnam fiasco. Read the rest of this entry »
“Finish the Job”: Obama Reignites “War on Terrorism�? With Massive Afghanistan Surge
Barack Obama has declared that he and his administration will “finish the job�? in Afghanistan. In a speech that echoed, word for word, the now time-honored criminal 9/11/“war on terrorism�? and “security�? falsehoods of the Bush-Cheney administration, Obama is sending yet another “surge�? of 30,000 US troops to the slaughter. Read More Here
Obama’s War: Why is the largest military machine on the planet unable to defeat the resistance in Afghanistan
Just how powerful is the U.S. military today?
Why is the largest military machine on the planet unable to defeat the resistance in Afghanistan , in a war that has lasted longer than World War II or Vietnam ? Read More Here
Has The USA Forgotten Peace
Tonight, I will listen to the President tell me that it will take years to withdraw from Afghanistan. He will, out of political necessity tell a series of lies. He will lie by omission, failing to tell people that this war, our “good war” was, when the facts are examined, a farce. There has not been a credible word from Osama bin Laden since December, 2001, when his death was announced in the Islamic press. What other reason did we have to occupy Afghanistan and lead it into total ruin? Read More Here
(GulfNews) – WHO warns that with new H5N1 bird flu cases reported in poultry in Egypt, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, the risk of bird flu and the H1N1 pandemic swine flu virus mixing was heightened Read the rest of this entry »
(C4L) – Why do politicians so easily get away with telling lies? In large part, because the news media are more interested in bonding with politicians than in exposing them. Americans are encouraged to believe that the media will serve as a check and a balance on the government. Instead, the press too often volunteer as unpaid pimps, helping politicians deceive the public. Read the rest of this entry »
(C4L) – In the worst of times, my father always used to say, “A good gambler cuts his losses.” It’s a formulation imprinted on my brain forever. That no-nonsense piece of advice still seems reasonable to me, but it doesn’t apply to American war policy. Our leaders evidently never saw a war to which the word “more” didn’t apply. Hence the Afghan War, where impending disaster is just an invitation to fuel the flames of an already roaring fire. Read the rest of this entry »
The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15, could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300 tons), and which it has used much more extensively–and in more urban, populated areas–in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan War. Read the rest of this entry »
A CNN poll states the obvious — a majority of American believe the occupation of Afghanistan is turning into another Vietnam. “Fifty-two percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday say the eight year long conflict has turned into a situation like the U.S. faced in the Vietnam War, with 46 percent disagreeing,�? CNN reports. Read the rest of this entry »
I had just walked back into my hotel room yesterday after chaining myself to the White House fence and being arrested, when I saw White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, say that removing troops from Afghanistan was “not an option.�? Read the rest of this entry »
On the day Prime Minister Gordon Brown made his “major policy speech�? on Afghanistan, repeating his surreal claim that if the British army did not fight Pashtun tribesmen over there, they would be over here, the stench of burnt flesh hung over the banks of the Kunduz River. Nato fighter planes had blown the poorest of the poor to bits. Read the rest of this entry »
I was just watching a report on CNN and after the commentator said that support for Afghanistan is rapidly dwindling (58 percent now think it’s not worth fighting), an interview with Obama was shown. Read the rest of this entry »
The right-wing accusations against Barack Obama are true. He is a socialist, although he practices socialism for corporations. He is squandering the country’s future with deficits that can never be repaid. He has retained and even bolstered our surveillance state to spy on Americans. He is forcing us to buy into a health care system that will enrich corporations and expand the abuse of our for-profit medical care. He will not stanch unemployment. He will not end our wars. He will not rebuild the nation. He is a tool of the corporate state. Read the rest of this entry »
(Dr. A. True Ott) – As the summer of 2009 winds down, the debate over “pandemic” vaccinations in the nation’s “public” schools is beginning to ramp up. Read the rest of this entry »
In the Road to 9/11 I summarized the dialectic of open societies: how from their energy they expand, leading to a higher level of more secretive corporations and agencies, which eventually weaken the home country through needless and crushing wars.[4] I am not alone in seeing America in the final stages of this process, which since the Renaissance has brought down Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. Read the rest of this entry »
(Truthout) – Sgt. Travis Bishop, who served 14 months in Baghdad with the 3rd Signal Brigade, faces a court-martial this Friday for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan. Read the rest of this entry »
August 10, 2009, was the first Orange Day organised in Vietnam – not only to be remembered by victims of Agent Orange but to mark Vietnam’s common pain. Those responsible for exposing Vietnamese citizens and US troops to toxic defoliants kept silent about known health implications, a review of documents finds. Read the rest of this entry »
These are extraordinary times. Flag-wrapped coffins of 18-year-old soldiers killed in a failed, illegal and vengeful invasion are paraded along a Wiltshire high street. Victory in Afghanistan is at hand, says the satirical Gordon Brown. Read the rest of this entry »
As in every election we’re now being bombarded with propaganda about how “your vote makes a difference�? and associated nonsense. According to the official version ordinary citizens control the state by voting for candidates in elections. The President and other politicians are supposedly servants of “the people�? and the government an instrument of the general populace. This version is a myth. Read the rest of this entry »
During the Vietnam War, GI dissent was both documented and nurtured by a slew of underground GI newspapers. Papers like “Up Against the Bulkhead,” “Harass the Brass” and “About Face” were mimeographed and passed from base to base, hand to hand. These bold, clever, ragtag papers gave voice to the soldiers’ rage against the injustices of the military and offered advice on everything from filing for conscientious-objector status to organizing anti-war protests. Read the rest of this entry »
(CNET) – The denial-of-service attacks launched on Web sites in South Korea and the United States earlier this month appear to have come from a master server in the United Kingdom, according to security researchers in Vietnam. Read the rest of this entry »
The twin vices of drug addiction and alcoholism were rampant in the U.S. military during the Vietnam war and through movies like Apocalypse Now and Platoon became the emblematic image of the armed forces during that war. But figures shows that by the end 2005, of the 104,000 who had sought medical help after serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 32,010 were suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, drug addiction or alcoholism. Proportionally, that’s three times as many as those who returned from Vietnam. Read the rest of this entry »
(Guardian) – Brazilian authorities investigating illegal deforestation have accused the suppliers of several UK supermarkets of selling meat linked to massive destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Read the rest of this entry »
From 1961 to 1971, the U.S. military sprayed Vietnam with Agent Orange, which contained large quantities of Dioxin, in order to defoliate the trees for military objectives. Dioxin is one of the most dangerous chemicals known to man. It has been recognized by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen (causes cancer) and by the American Academy of Medicine as a teratogen (causes birth defects). Read the rest of this entry »
Watching retired Gen. Colin Powell cite Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan during Sunday’s Memorial Day ceremonies on the Mall in Washington, it struck me that Powell was giving hypocrisy a bad name. Read the rest of this entry »
I was on an airplane flying to Orange County from Sacramento to attend the al-Awda Conference; which is a Palestinian Right’s Conference. Al-Awda translates to “The Returning, “ when the Pilot voice filled the cabin to make an announcement that I think went unnoticed by most of my fellow passengers, but I heard it. Read the rest of this entry »
How long does it take a mild-mannered, anti-war, black professor of constitutional law, trained as a community organiser on the South Side of Chicago, to become an enthusiastic sponsor of targeted assassinations, ‘decapitation’ strategies and remote-control bombing of mud houses at the far end of the globe? Read the rest of this entry »
As of March, 2009 orders had been issued to 26,954 members of the IRR since September, 2001. These numbers only reflect that of the Army, not the other services. Only 48% of those recalled have actually reported for duty. Read the rest of this entry »
What impresses me in the current financial crisis is the near-total failure of so-called progressives to appreciate the magnitude of what is going on or the level of intelligence behind it. How many will say, for instance, that the crash was deliberately engineered by the creation, then destruction, of the investment bubbles of the last decade? Read the rest of this entry »
my country’s army was killing civilians. And it wasn’t just killing them. It was killing them, and maiming them, in ways that were almost unimaginable in their horror: napalm, phosphorus, anti-personnel bombs the threw out spinning flechettes that ripped through the flesh like tiny buzzsaws, the gunships that spew out random fire that kills or maims anything within the area of several football fields. I learned that scientists like what I at the time wanted to become were actually working on projects to make these weapons even more lethal, for example trying to make napalm more sticky so it would burn longer on exposed flesh. Read the rest of this entry »
I was wrong. I had been saying that it would be naïve to take too seriously presidential candidate Barack Obama’s rhetoric regarding the need to escalate the war in Afghanistan. I kept thinking to myself that when he got briefed on the history of Afghanistan and the oft proven ability of Afghan “militants�? to drive out foreign invaders—from Alexander the Great, to the Persians, the Mongolians, Indians, British, Russians—he would be sure to understand why they call mountainous Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.�? Read the rest of this entry »
Video footage of a suspected mass grave site at the National Memorial Cemetery in Phoenix, Arizona, has surfaced on YouTube. Read the rest of this entry »
I keep reading well-informed Americans complaining that the real scandal isn’t bonuses to corrupt/overpaid/incompetent executives, but the funnelling of American taxpayer money to counterparties, many of them foreign banks. I don’t think Americans are ever going to understand it. First of all, it isn’t taxpayer money. No American taxpayer is going to pay more taxes over this, at least not directly. The treasury is just going to run the printing presses a bit longer. Read the rest of this entry »
The Vietnam war is a war of colonial conquest. The US took over the french. Instructed the south Vietnam leader to boycott the elected democratic north Vietnam leader. This inevitably leads to a false flag Gulf of Tonkin and a 20 years worthless war and the destruction of Cambodia and Laos. This clip is excerpted from the full length video called “Nuclear weapon and international disorder”. Read the rest of this entry »
Washington: If the US president attempts to do what the British and the Russians did in the past, then Afghanistan could become ‘Barack Obama’s ‘Vietnam’, but it is unlikely to happen, former president Bill Clinton
has said. Read the rest of this entry »
The United States is planning to send an additional 17,000 troops to one of the world’s most battle-scarred nations – Afghanistan – long described as “a graveyard of empires”. Read the rest of this entry »
When I returned from the war in Vietnam, I wrote a film script as an antidote to the myth that the war had been an ill-fated noble cause. The producer David Puttnam took the draft to Hollywood and offered it to the major studios, whose responses were favourable – well, almost. Each issued a report card in which the final category, “politics�?, included comments such as: “This is real, but are the American people ready for it? Maybe they’ll never be.�? Read the rest of this entry »
Sure, the U.S. had sent 400 special forces to train South Vietnamese troops in 1961. And more troops were sent to police the country in 1963. And every now and again U.S. newspapers printed photos of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire in public.
But, even the threat of Communism toppling regimes like dominoes wasn’t good enough to sell a full-blown war. Until August 2… Read the rest of this entry »
This speech by Dr.Martin Luther King in 1967 is as poignant today as it was back then. The names change but the nightmare remains the same. Today’s Iraq and Afghanistan replace yesterday’s Vietnam. Today’s increased level of poverty and imprisonment of a hugely disproportionate number of African Americans in the prison system, the slaughter of millions more of the world’s poor and Dr. King’s subsequent murder at the hands of his own government bear witness to exactly which initiative was taken. Read the rest of this entry »
December 11, 2008 – On November 27 the Iraqi parliament voted by a large majority in favor of a security agreement with the US under which the 150,000 American troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities, towns and villages by June 30, 2009 and from all of Iraq by December 31, 2011. The Iraqi government will take over military responsibility for the Green Zone in Baghdad, the heart of American power in Iraq, in a few weeks time. Private security companies will lose their legal immunity. US military operations and the arrest of Iraqis will only be carried out with Iraqi consent. There will be no US military bases left behind when the last US troops leave in three years time and the US military is banned in the interim from carrying out attacks on other countries from Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »
The New York Times is reporting about an “apparent evolution” in president-elect Barack Obama’s thinking on Iraq, citing his recent statements about his plan to keep a “residual force” in the country and his pledge to “listen to the recommendations of my commanders” as Obama prepares to assume actual command of US forces. “At the Pentagon and the military headquarters in Iraq, the response to the statements this week from Mr. Obama and his national security team has been akin to the senior officer corps’ letting out its collective breath,” the Times reported. “[T]the words sounded to them like the new president would take a measured approach on the question of troop levels.” Read the rest of this entry »
This tortured phrase was the key concept that became the driving force behind our failed military invasion of Vietnam. Today it is rapidly becoming the mantra that underlies the Bailout/Rescue/ Implosion of what was once the basis for US and global financial policies. The reason for turning to this moronic concept was to destroy the global economic system: What is being done now was never intended to “save” it. Read the rest of this entry »
Yes it is socialism at last. America, the great free enterprise, every man for himself, empire has at last gone and dumped capitalism. Socialism has now taken hold in the USA!
At least for the rich it has. Yes we now have socialism for the rich in America – and capitalism for everyone else. Read the rest of this entry »
Cpl. BOB DUMAS, U.S. Army (Ret.): He didn’t want nobody to check his background because a lot of the POWs that was in the camps said he was a collaborator of the enemy. He gave the enemy the information they wanted.
Dr. JAMES LUCIER, former U.S. Senate Chief of Staff: But We do know that when he was there [in the Vietnamese prison], he cooperated with the communist news services in giving interviews there, ah, not flattering to the United States. Read the rest of this entry »
John McCain was the primary opposition to the Senate Select Committee on POWs…. The POWs that might have been rescued, would have been able to give testimony about the 32 propaganda tapes that John McCain made for the communists, while in Viet Nam. Read the rest of this entry »
Until 1964, Vietnam was not a U.S. war.