Sy Hersh isn’t the only one to challenge the assertion that the Syrian government is using chemical weapons. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have raised serious questions about the US narrative. As far as a weak army leveling the playing field, the alleged attack in April that led to Trump’s Cruise missile attack made neither strategic nor tactical sense for the Syrian army. But as a false flag it made eminent sense.
Please speak to the probability that the US will use its alliance with Kurds to support carving away Syrian territory to hand to a US and fossil fuel corporation compliant regime. Is there not evidence in the fact that US is attacking Syrian government and allied troops that are also heading to retake Raqqa? US policy to overthrow Assad to be replaced with a government friendly to the US elites has so far failed and isn’t the consolation prize a friendly Kurdish corridor in the north that will no doubt house US military bases?
Syrian president Assad has called the US an invader, which it is by violating International Law and the UN Charter. Success in the eyes of the US establishment means inserting a compliant dictator or creating chaos that somehow the US can more or less manage. The US realizes that Syria with its allies is moving to win against the ongoing war of aggression against Syria by the US and its allies. The US is desperately seeking to prevent that victory by denying Raqqa to the Syrians. Thus it is expanding the number of troops and heavy weaponry.
Every day ISIS and Al Qaeda have to indoctrinate Syrian kids and every day those kids don’t have schools and community to teach otherwise leads to the growth in support for the extremists for the next generations. Juan’s statement opposing the Syrian government and its allies fighting to remove the extremists from East Aleppo, “This move is not justified in any defensive way,” it appears does not deal with the reality on the ground.
These sectarian religious terrorists were supported by the US when they fought to overthrow the Afghan government in the 1980’s. They were the enemy only after the 9/11 attack on the US. The US unleashed them in Iraq and Libya. And now they are supported again by the US as they join the US/NATO in trying to overthrow the Syrian government so that the US can install military bases there, deny Russia its naval base and turn over control of Syrian oil and pipelines to the US-based fossil fuel giants. Were it not for the complicity, funding, fueling, weaponizing and cover the US and its reactionary allies provide, the terrorists would fade away. Is it not terrible that the last thing the US wants to see in the Middle East is democracy?
If Mateen wanted to terrorize a population he hated, would that not also be terrorism? Is it not terrorism when drones buzz over a village day and night and the community is constantly worried when and where the next missile will strike? Are they not terrorized? What is sacred about Federal Code?
Where on the Turkey-Syria border are the fundamentalist fighters crossing into Syria? It’s the threat that the Syrian Arab Army and the Russians will stop the movement of the foreign fighters, their supplies and oil booty across that border that has Erdogan upset. It says a lot about US policy that the Obama administration hasn’t pressured Turkey to fill in the pores.
Too many Generals decry what they did only after retiring. Too many countries have been overrun by imperialism with disastrous consequences to assign these actions as mistakes. Invading countries, overthrowing governments, assassinating leaders has been and continues as long-term US policy. The US government and corporations are highly allergic to democracy. All the high school Civics lessons are indeed turned upside down.
20% of Israel's citizens are nonJewish - Palestinians left in Israel proper after the 1948 Nakhba. They are treated as second class. This extensive discrimination has been affirmed by major US Jewish organizations as government policy - in housing, education, health care, jobs, where one is allowed to live. In addition some of the Jewish extremists in the government and elsewhere keep calling for expulsion of Palestinians, certainly an ongoing and real threat. So while the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank are treated miserably as Juan says, within Israel proper there is also Apartheid, or Jim Crow, at work.
The US also has nuclear weapons in the Middle East - in Turkey and on ships. A zone free of nukes would require the US to remove its own. A conference to create such a zone was mandated by the 2010 UN Conference reviewing the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty. It was supposed to take place in Helsinki, Finland, in 2012 but the US unilaterally cancelled it. The Middle East nuke-free zone conference was a prerequisite to the next NPT review conference scheduled for April 2015. The NPT regime is now in question mainly because the major nuclear weapons powers, led by the USA, have refused to seriously pursue Article 6 of the NPT, which requires them to negotiate nuclear weapons abolition. With Obama's trillion dollar budget for nuclear weapons upgrades, subcritical weapons testing that subvert the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, GW Bush's renunciation of the ABM Treaty, continued R&D on and testing of nuclear capable missiles, surrounding Russia with first-strike permitting antimissile missiles and the prevention of movement on a nuke-free zone in the Middle East, the field is ever clearer for global nuclear weapons proliferation rather than abolition and for nuclear exchange - intended or accidental - between nuclear weapons states. The United States and Russia foremost, but others certainly as well. Support for the counter conference and participation in demonstrations proposed for next April, during the UN's deliberations on the NPT, will indicate how well the people's movements recognize the extreme danger civilization faces not just from inevitable climate warming but also the expanding threat of nuclear annihilation.
When I hear the question whether the U.S. would respond militarily if Canadians were to launch rockets over the border into the U.S., I respond with another question. Do you think that those rockets were launched from Canada in desperation because the U.S. had colonized Toronto, Quebec, Montreal and Vancouver after having violently driven the residents out of their homes and into wretched camps with no water, food, or means of survival or escape?
I understand that Turkey's Erdogan banned Twitter not because of "suspicions of outside manipulation." Rather because Twitter messages revealed and broadcast a violent false-flag operation his government was cooking up to create a pretext for Turkey to invade Syria. Erdogan was trying to cover up the revelations.
To say that China, or any other country gets a free ride, assumes that there is a credible force that would stop the movement of oil from the Gulf. In 1953, the U.S. and Britain overthrew the Iranian government, not to assure that oil would flow, but to assure that profits would flow - to U.S. and British oil giants. In 2003, the U.S. overthrew Hussein not to ensure that oil would flow but to ensure that profits would flow - to the giant oil companies. There are far more examples. The role of the U.S. military is corporate profits enforcer. The $10 trillion didn't protect China's access to oil nor did it benefit the 99% in the U.S. Arguments to the contrary justify the U.S. military grab of the world's resources for the rich.
Democracy in this oil-rich, geopolitically strategic region is the last thing the U.S. or its imperial forbears in Europe want. Imagine what the oil could do for the people if they rather than the sheikhs and despots and transnational corporations reeking from the U.S. actually controlled it.
Each U.S. government after the next has supported tyrannical governments to ensure the absence of democracy, and national control of national wealth. Israel is losing whatever democracy it might have claimed in order to ensure none of its middle eastern neighbors extracts itself from imperial control from the U.S.
The nations of South America are breaking away from the financial, political and military heel of the U.S. empire. So now too are the courageous people of North Africa and the Middle East.
Obama is carrying on the U.S. imperial tradition of command and control, but he has to learn to navigate in a new era. Sometimes he talks the talk, but as far as walking the walk he's a couch potato.
Time to cut off U.S. aid to Egypt, freeze Mubarak and his crony's assets and welcome the tyrants to Saudi Arabia to live out their days. Time to show solidarity with those fighting for their own freedom and sovereignty.
Have you ever published the names of dictators and their respective countries the U.S. does and doesn't support? And analyzed why they might fall into one camp or the other?
Have you ever published the names of democratically-elected leaders of whom the U.S. regularly denies legitimacy because he/she doesn't bow and scrape?
While there has been much coverage of the oppressive conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank, largely rebuffed with contempt by the Israeli establishment and its supporters, little is said about life for Arabs in Israel proper. Why is a 2008 report on living conditions of Israeli Arabs made by a fact finding team from major U.S., Canadian and U.K. Jewish organizations apparently so well-hidden? Sponsored by "the Inter-Agency Task Force on Israeli Arab Issues, a coalition of over sixty North American Jewish organizations, foundations and private philanthropists," a summary of this report published in a local Jewish Federation newsletter demonstrated Jim Crow like treatment of Israeli Arabs. The summary stated that "a significant amount of discrimination and neglect of the Arab community in Israel" leads "members of the Arab community [to] feel, with some substantial justification, that they are treated both officially and unofficially as second-class citizens" and "much of the treatment of the Arab citizens can be directly attributed to official government policy." Some details provide that over half of Arab citizens of Israel live below the poverty line; segregation and discrimination in education, housing, community development leave Israeli Arabs as second-class citizens and proclaimed equality for Jews and non-Jews in the dust.
Israel's actions are explicitly guaranteed by the United States. Until the U.S. administration revise its policy away from the current one, namely Israel as our military's unsinkable battleship in the Middle East and military surrogate in other parts of the world - a real peace based on a just solution is not likely. Israel sports it own villains like Lieberman and Netanyahu, but the big boss resides in Washington.
Sy Hersh isn’t the only one to challenge the assertion that the Syrian government is using chemical weapons. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have raised serious questions about the US narrative. As far as a weak army leveling the playing field, the alleged attack in April that led to Trump’s Cruise missile attack made neither strategic nor tactical sense for the Syrian army. But as a false flag it made eminent sense.
Please speak to the probability that the US will use its alliance with Kurds to support carving away Syrian territory to hand to a US and fossil fuel corporation compliant regime. Is there not evidence in the fact that US is attacking Syrian government and allied troops that are also heading to retake Raqqa? US policy to overthrow Assad to be replaced with a government friendly to the US elites has so far failed and isn’t the consolation prize a friendly Kurdish corridor in the north that will no doubt house US military bases?
Syrian president Assad has called the US an invader, which it is by violating International Law and the UN Charter. Success in the eyes of the US establishment means inserting a compliant dictator or creating chaos that somehow the US can more or less manage. The US realizes that Syria with its allies is moving to win against the ongoing war of aggression against Syria by the US and its allies. The US is desperately seeking to prevent that victory by denying Raqqa to the Syrians. Thus it is expanding the number of troops and heavy weaponry.
Every day ISIS and Al Qaeda have to indoctrinate Syrian kids and every day those kids don’t have schools and community to teach otherwise leads to the growth in support for the extremists for the next generations. Juan’s statement opposing the Syrian government and its allies fighting to remove the extremists from East Aleppo, “This move is not justified in any defensive way,” it appears does not deal with the reality on the ground.
These sectarian religious terrorists were supported by the US when they fought to overthrow the Afghan government in the 1980’s. They were the enemy only after the 9/11 attack on the US. The US unleashed them in Iraq and Libya. And now they are supported again by the US as they join the US/NATO in trying to overthrow the Syrian government so that the US can install military bases there, deny Russia its naval base and turn over control of Syrian oil and pipelines to the US-based fossil fuel giants. Were it not for the complicity, funding, fueling, weaponizing and cover the US and its reactionary allies provide, the terrorists would fade away. Is it not terrible that the last thing the US wants to see in the Middle East is democracy?
If Mateen wanted to terrorize a population he hated, would that not also be terrorism? Is it not terrorism when drones buzz over a village day and night and the community is constantly worried when and where the next missile will strike? Are they not terrorized? What is sacred about Federal Code?
Where on the Turkey-Syria border are the fundamentalist fighters crossing into Syria? It’s the threat that the Syrian Arab Army and the Russians will stop the movement of the foreign fighters, their supplies and oil booty across that border that has Erdogan upset. It says a lot about US policy that the Obama administration hasn’t pressured Turkey to fill in the pores.
Too many Generals decry what they did only after retiring. Too many countries have been overrun by imperialism with disastrous consequences to assign these actions as mistakes. Invading countries, overthrowing governments, assassinating leaders has been and continues as long-term US policy. The US government and corporations are highly allergic to democracy. All the high school Civics lessons are indeed turned upside down.
20% of Israel's citizens are nonJewish - Palestinians left in Israel proper after the 1948 Nakhba. They are treated as second class. This extensive discrimination has been affirmed by major US Jewish organizations as government policy - in housing, education, health care, jobs, where one is allowed to live. In addition some of the Jewish extremists in the government and elsewhere keep calling for expulsion of Palestinians, certainly an ongoing and real threat. So while the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank are treated miserably as Juan says, within Israel proper there is also Apartheid, or Jim Crow, at work.
The US also has nuclear weapons in the Middle East - in Turkey and on ships. A zone free of nukes would require the US to remove its own. A conference to create such a zone was mandated by the 2010 UN Conference reviewing the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty. It was supposed to take place in Helsinki, Finland, in 2012 but the US unilaterally cancelled it. The Middle East nuke-free zone conference was a prerequisite to the next NPT review conference scheduled for April 2015. The NPT regime is now in question mainly because the major nuclear weapons powers, led by the USA, have refused to seriously pursue Article 6 of the NPT, which requires them to negotiate nuclear weapons abolition. With Obama's trillion dollar budget for nuclear weapons upgrades, subcritical weapons testing that subvert the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, GW Bush's renunciation of the ABM Treaty, continued R&D on and testing of nuclear capable missiles, surrounding Russia with first-strike permitting antimissile missiles and the prevention of movement on a nuke-free zone in the Middle East, the field is ever clearer for global nuclear weapons proliferation rather than abolition and for nuclear exchange - intended or accidental - between nuclear weapons states. The United States and Russia foremost, but others certainly as well. Support for the counter conference and participation in demonstrations proposed for next April, during the UN's deliberations on the NPT, will indicate how well the people's movements recognize the extreme danger civilization faces not just from inevitable climate warming but also the expanding threat of nuclear annihilation.
Evacuate to a grave if there are left enough remains to bury.
When I hear the question whether the U.S. would respond militarily if Canadians were to launch rockets over the border into the U.S., I respond with another question. Do you think that those rockets were launched from Canada in desperation because the U.S. had colonized Toronto, Quebec, Montreal and Vancouver after having violently driven the residents out of their homes and into wretched camps with no water, food, or means of survival or escape?
I understand that Turkey's Erdogan banned Twitter not because of "suspicions of outside manipulation." Rather because Twitter messages revealed and broadcast a violent false-flag operation his government was cooking up to create a pretext for Turkey to invade Syria. Erdogan was trying to cover up the revelations.
To say that China, or any other country gets a free ride, assumes that there is a credible force that would stop the movement of oil from the Gulf. In 1953, the U.S. and Britain overthrew the Iranian government, not to assure that oil would flow, but to assure that profits would flow - to U.S. and British oil giants. In 2003, the U.S. overthrew Hussein not to ensure that oil would flow but to ensure that profits would flow - to the giant oil companies. There are far more examples. The role of the U.S. military is corporate profits enforcer. The $10 trillion didn't protect China's access to oil nor did it benefit the 99% in the U.S. Arguments to the contrary justify the U.S. military grab of the world's resources for the rich.
Is it the case that, Libya aside, the only "opposition" movement in the Middle East that the U.S. government supports is in Iran?
Democracy in this oil-rich, geopolitically strategic region is the last thing the U.S. or its imperial forbears in Europe want. Imagine what the oil could do for the people if they rather than the sheikhs and despots and transnational corporations reeking from the U.S. actually controlled it.
Each U.S. government after the next has supported tyrannical governments to ensure the absence of democracy, and national control of national wealth. Israel is losing whatever democracy it might have claimed in order to ensure none of its middle eastern neighbors extracts itself from imperial control from the U.S.
The nations of South America are breaking away from the financial, political and military heel of the U.S. empire. So now too are the courageous people of North Africa and the Middle East.
Obama is carrying on the U.S. imperial tradition of command and control, but he has to learn to navigate in a new era. Sometimes he talks the talk, but as far as walking the walk he's a couch potato.
Time to cut off U.S. aid to Egypt, freeze Mubarak and his crony's assets and welcome the tyrants to Saudi Arabia to live out their days. Time to show solidarity with those fighting for their own freedom and sovereignty.
Juan,
Have you ever published the names of dictators and their respective countries the U.S. does and doesn't support? And analyzed why they might fall into one camp or the other?
Have you ever published the names of democratically-elected leaders of whom the U.S. regularly denies legitimacy because he/she doesn't bow and scrape?
Doesn't history demand a scorecard?
While there has been much coverage of the oppressive conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank, largely rebuffed with contempt by the Israeli establishment and its supporters, little is said about life for Arabs in Israel proper. Why is a 2008 report on living conditions of Israeli Arabs made by a fact finding team from major U.S., Canadian and U.K. Jewish organizations apparently so well-hidden? Sponsored by "the Inter-Agency Task Force on Israeli Arab Issues, a coalition of over sixty North American Jewish organizations, foundations and private philanthropists," a summary of this report published in a local Jewish Federation newsletter demonstrated Jim Crow like treatment of Israeli Arabs. The summary stated that "a significant amount of discrimination and neglect of the Arab community in Israel" leads "members of the Arab community [to] feel, with some substantial justification, that they are treated both officially and unofficially as second-class citizens" and "much of the treatment of the Arab citizens can be directly attributed to official government policy." Some details provide that over half of Arab citizens of Israel live below the poverty line; segregation and discrimination in education, housing, community development leave Israeli Arabs as second-class citizens and proclaimed equality for Jews and non-Jews in the dust.
Israel's actions are explicitly guaranteed by the United States. Until the U.S. administration revise its policy away from the current one, namely Israel as our military's unsinkable battleship in the Middle East and military surrogate in other parts of the world - a real peace based on a just solution is not likely. Israel sports it own villains like Lieberman and Netanyahu, but the big boss resides in Washington.