Lying Time for Obama/Media, Dying Time for Gitmo Detainees (4-1-13)

One of my favorite though admittedly depressing quotes of wisdom:

“Hope was the last temptation of Christ.”

This being Easter it seems relevant.

It is also the 54th day of a mass hunger strike of Gitmo detainees hoping -- and actually risking their lives -- to have their BASIC human rights finally respected by this not so bastion of human rights -- this United States.

To have their BASIC human rights FINALLY respected by the present, politically scaredy-cat to appear soft on terror, surreally peace prize winning and shamelessly prevaricating President Barack Obama along with so many craven Congresspeople willing to politically grandstand their own anti-terror toughness on the “faux-worst-of-the-worst.”  Still milking that lie to a gullible or indifferent majority of American citizenry, enabled by an amoral and/or stupid corporate media.

Then there is a Pentagon/CIA network that doesn’t seem to regard foreign peoples as precious human life forms.  As statistics to be celebrated as conquest? How about bugsplats or pawns to be discarded or maimed or shoved around in a vast addictive geopolitical bloodbath and ruthless game of chicken chess?

Jesus Christ preached, “What you do to the least of us, you do unto me.”

Christ was about reality and empathy.

Christ didn’t operate from a patriarchal power and control, amorally competitive, ends justifies the means anti-spiritual spirit -- FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!!  Christ operated within the humanist paradigm of COOPERATION, PARTNERSHIP AND EMPATHY!

Obama, like Bush and Cheney, is all about impression management and manipulations of political will.  Again, the soul-less political gamesmanship which requires profound lying and secrecy to an irrelevant U.S. population as well as the even more harshly treated irrelevant victims having their basic human rights assaulted over and over and over for eleven long years going most likely to the end of their ruined lives!

These say-anything power brokers, Bush, Cheney, Obama, et al. presumed or presume to spin their own surreality, declaring it “real” to so many bobble-headed, jingoistic Americans via a naive, stupid and/or cronyistic and craven corporate media.

Even if, say, the reality of the anti-human rights actions and innocence of the men at Gitmo do manage to reach some of our population in spite of our monopolizing, propagandizing corporate media, will an indifferent majority citizenry react with:  “Well, it could be worse.  It could be happening to me!  What can you do?  Meh.”

Look at this Iraq War tenth year anniversary month with all the lies being highlighted and exposed, even by the nearly-statute-of-limitations-running-out superstars of prevarication themselves.  They are minimizing their own roles or in-your-face bragging about the outrageous lies that ensured the endorsement of an illegitimate and grossly incompetent war to be waged and which kept on brutalizing and killing (even when its illegitimate launching had been revealed) for an entire decade.  Duh, America?  It was, after all, about stealing OIL.  Blood for oil!  “American interests” are bottom line sociopathic, don’t you know?

The garden path to the Iraq War was strewn with lies.  Such similar garden paths we are being led down now and WITH EVEN LESS AWARENESS AND PROTEST THIS TIME AROUND!  WTF?

These liars, whose lies have killed and/or keep killing or brought or keep bringing profound suffering to hundreds of thousand of people, are walking about unchallenged and unprosecuted.  UNIMPEACHED!

Meanwhile, in the nightmare of Gitmo, innocent men stay locked up because of, one more time (with feeling?), POLITICAL SOUL-LESS GAMESMANSHIP.  Or, in a word, LIES!!!!

How many Americans seriously care that innocent men are starving themselves right now to the point of death to have the nightmare injustice they have been caged in for 11 long years with no release in sight heeded or, at worst, finally escaped?  

Of course, it has been confirmed by a secretive and minimizing military that the official number of hunger strikers as of this day is 31 at Guantanamo Bay.

Lawyers for the detainees speculate the number may be as high as 100 out of the 166.

Who are you going to believe? The folks that brought you the Iraq War?  The folks that ask no accountability from the aforesaid war criminals, but instead are willing to cage innocent men for over a decade because … because … because … YOU TRY TO FILL IN THE BLANK!  Maybe full throttle zero tolerant raging Islamaphobia, or the posturing of it, will make them popular among the morally comatose?  One more time, personality over principle????

Many of these men at Gitmo could die soon, even though some are enduring the rape-like violence of force-feeding from guards to stop their protest. Apparently a new crew of super-macho guards has helped trigger the defiance. Guards who seriously and immediately want to show ‘em who's really boss. After 11 years of surreal injustice? WTF I ask again?

Obama and Congress and the Pentagon are still counting on low information Americans to believe their bullshit about the detainees being “the worst of the worst” or faking the starvation protest.  Or they are counting on passivity of the U.S. population no matter how some of its citizens may feel sympathy.  Citizen passivity has been a sure thing thus far.

Our "powers that be" are bottom-line shameless, gutless and murderous.  Yet, still seemingly so popularly enabled!

As the world watches.  As the international media reports the reality of the Gitmo spiritual/physical death camp, our own President and media are silent for the most part.

When pressed?  When word finally gets out on, say, the 54th G-D day of the hunger strike like today (think of what condition you would be in), then the establishment folks choose to LIE.  BIG TIME!!!!

Let’s start out with some statistics of Wikipedia re the breakdown of the detainees in terms of criminality and release.  (Again, keep in mind the “worst of the worst” bullshit still being loudspeakered by the chickenhawk GWOT grand standers!):

Since January 2002, 779 men have been brought to Guantanamo.

Nearly 200 were released by mid-2004.

Although the Bush administration said most of the men had been captured in fighting in Afghanistan, a 2006 report prepared by the Center for Policy and Research, Seton Hall University Law School reviewed DOD data for the remaining 517 men in 2005 and "established that over 80% of the prisoners were captured not by Americans on the battlefield but by Pakistanis and Afghans, often in exchange for bounty payments."  The US offered $5,000 per prisoner and distributed leaflets widely in the region.

… a 2003 memo by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, "We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants ...

The Center for Policy and Research's 2006 report based on DOD released data, found that most detainees were low-level people who were not affiliated with organizations on US terrorist lists.

Eight men have died in the prison camp; DOD has said that six were suicides.

An estimated 17 to 22 minors under the age of 18 were detained at Guantánamo Bay, in apparent contravention of international law.

In July 2005, 242 detainees were moved out of Guantanamo, including 173 who were released without charge.

Sixty-nine were transferred to the custody of governments of other countries, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

By May 2011, 600 detainees had been released.  Most of the men have been released without charges or transferred to facilities in their home countries.

As of June 2012, 169 prisoners remained at Guantanamo. According to former US president Jimmy Carter, about half have been cleared for release, yet have little prospect of ever obtaining their freedom.

Actually there are 166 there now, not 169. Wikipedia hasn’t quite caught up with the present.

This from Glenn Greenwald by way of an update on the real number of detainees remaining as well as the real situation there under our supposedly lesser evil Obama:

Whatever is true about the camp, the vast majority of those detainees have been kept in a cage for years - some more than a decade - without so much as having been charged with anything. They haven't seen their families in years. Ten prisoners have died at the camp, the latest one just four months ago under very suspicious circumstances (the military claims that resort guest, despite all his luxurious amenities, committed suicide). At least half a dozen other resort guests have killed themselves, the latest being (if not the November, 2012 death) in mid-2011. …

snip

Moreover, while many conditions have improved, there have been numerous instances of vindictive treatment under the current president. In July of last year, the administration implemented what the New York Times called a "spiteful" new policy of severely restricting lawyer access to detainees (that policy was quickly struck down by a federal court as "an illegitimate exercise of executive power").

The Obama DOJ has continually appealed the habeas corpus victories of detainees - where courts ruled there was no credible evidence to justify their detention - and ultimately succeeded in imposing a virtually impossible-to-overcome standard for detainees to meet to win their release, all but rendering habeas corpus review a total illusion (the same habeas review which, after the Supreme Court in 2008 mandated it, candidate Obama hailed as "an important step toward reestablishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law").

Just last week, detainee lawyers were infuriated when camp officials canceled all commercial flights to Guantánamo, thus severely restricting their access to their clients at exactly the time that grievances over worsening treatment led to the strike.

Not only have most of those detainees never been charged, but dozens of them have been cleared for release by the US government, yet continue to languish in cages with no release possible. That inexcusable injustice is due in part to a moratorium imposed by Obama - that's imposed by Obama, not Congress - on the release of all Yemeni detainees, who compose the bulk of the remaining detainees (that includes Adnan Latif, who died at the age of 32 in the camp last November after having attempted suicide on multiple occasions, after having had his judicial victory ordering his release overturned on appeal).

As former Gitmo guard Brandon Neely pointed out last September, after the death of a former hunger striker, more detainees have died at the camp (ten) than have been convicted of wrongdoing in what he called its "kangaroo courts", meaning its military commissions (six).

So there are officially 166 on this last day of March.  For these prisoners their only escape seems through death or a miracle! A United States national community that is capable of empathy. Of responsibility and accountability.

Again, 86 of the 166 are officially cleared for release.  But Obama is unresponsive and unmoved about making this happen.  As is assuredly the majority of our Congress.  As is assuredly the majority of our population.  WTF?????

Let’s take a bit of a ride on the surreal cognitive dissonant (or more like obscene “make up the biggest lie you can think of and don’t let any non-victims close enough with REAL access to dispel your whoppers”) rollercoaster hurtling between Obama/Pentagon/corporate media propaganda, the human beings hovering near death and those with conscience trying to SAVE them and spread the word about their plight.

Greenwald in all his sarcastic glory recently went after Robert Johnson, Military and Defense Editor of Business Insider, who under the guise of a news article took a junket to Gitmo for a day to eagerly and obligingly report “a near vacation paradise” there.   Greenwald:

... Robert Johnson. He recently took a trip to Guantánamo - approved and arranged by the US military. He saw parts of the camp - the parts the US military showed him and wanted him to see. He spoke with camp officials and guards, but not any detainees.

snip

If you're looking for a fun activity-filled resort to take your family for a summer vacation, you simply cannot do better than Club GTMO, … Scrumptious meals. Video games galore for the kids. Outdoor sports. Newspapers from your hometown delivered by smiling bellhops to the front door of your villa. Picturesque Caribbean vistas. All that and more can be yours - provided that you're "compliant". What more could vacationers - or prisoners kept in a cage for more than a decade with no charges thousands of miles away from their family - possibly want? They are, proclaims Johnson, treated "absurdly well". Not just well: absurdly well. They are, he actually writes, lavished with "resort treatment".

snip

Tasty. Two weeks ago, he also posted a pictoral tour of the camp's "surprises", including stunning tropical skies, funny iguanas, and colorful floor stains from the camp's art classes.

Manipulating gullible, vapid, subservient "journalists" to spout Potemkin Village propaganda like this, with military-arranged visits, is nothing new. It's been going on almost since the camp opened. During the Bush years, right-wing outlets such as the Weekly Standard and National Review were repeatedly taken on fun day trips to the resort, and they then produced agitprop mocking the camp as "Club GITMO". …

Greenwald then has this to say about what the Gitmo detainees’ lawyers are reporting as reality:

… Lawyers for the detainees say the hunger strike was triggered "as a protest of the men's indefinite confinement without charge and because of what they said was a return to harsh treatment from past years, including more intrusive searches and confiscation of personal items such as mail from their families." That includes, the lawyers say, a lack of sanitary drinking water which has "already caused some prisoners kidney, urinary and stomach problems". Detainees also complain about the recent manhandling of Korans. One lawyer for 11 detainees, Carlos Warner, identifying himself as a "liberal" supporter of Obama, told CNN that the detainees are now deprived of some privileges they had all the way back in 2006 and said the situation there was "dire".

Greenwald goes on:

The kind of mindless servitude to government and military claims on display from Business Insider's Robert Johnson is one of the country's most serious problems. Nobody doubts that conditions at the camp have improved in many ways from its darkest days of 2002 through 2005. But it is reckless in the extreme to resolve conflicting claims about detainee treatment in favor of the military, and to proclaim detainee grievances baseless, all from a highly selective visit managed by camp officials and by treating official claims as truth. And it's nothing short of demented to talk about Guantánamo as anything other than a shameful travesty, let alone glorify it as a luxury ocean "resort".

snip

Whenever the issue of Guantánamo is raised, there are instantly deceitful efforts to relieve President Obama of any responsibility for the ongoing disgrace that is the camp. That is accomplished with the claim that Congress blocked him from closing the camp, a claim that is true but extremely misleading: as I've documented many times before, and as the ACLU has often noted, Obama's plan was not to "close" the camp but rather to re-locate it and its core, defining injustice - indefinite detention - to Illinois (what the ACLU called "GITMO North"). Indefinite detention - being kept in a cage with no charges and with no end in sight - is one of the prime grievances driving this hunger strike, and Obama - completely independent of Congress - fully intended to preserve that system.

Andy Worthington:

Kristine Huskey, a lawyer with Physicians for Human Rights, was appalled. “The hopelessness and despair caused by indefinite detention is causing an extremely pressing and pervasive health crisis at Guantánamo,” she told IPS. “A person held in indefinite detention is a person deprived of information about their own fate. They are in custody without knowing when, if ever, they will be released. Additionally, they do not know if they will be charged with crimes, receive a trial, or ever see their families again. If they have been abused or mistreated, they also do not know if this will happen again.”

Kelley B. Vlahos, as Greenwald, writes of the colossally craven propaganda from members of the US “establishment” about conditions at the base.

From Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas:

“A swanky high-dollar soccer field for criminal terrorist detainees at Gitmo. And of course, Americans are picking up the $750,000 tab for the recreation facilities for these criminals,” he said. “These radicals should be doing hard time, not soccer time. Our government has no business building this tropical Caribbean recreation facility for terrorists. It is disrespectful and insulting to all who are victims of these killers. What’s next at this terrorist playground? A tiki hut and bar on the beach?” Poe said.

snip

But Hotel Gitmo is a shopworn canard. It’s more like Hotel California and we all know it. This is all a distraction of course – a simple rhetorical gambit to convince the domestic audience that we shouldn’t care that individuals are being held indefinitely without charge because after all, they are provided creature comforts that "most Americans are accustomed to (we’re also accustomed to the Rule of Law here, too, by the way)." …

snip

It all seems pretty perverse now that reports are coming in describing the weight loss among the inmates as "alarming." A Friday Associated Press report directly mentions Wingard’s client, al-Kandari, who appeared to a lawyer visiting Gitmo as having lost 25 pounds and barely able to stand. "Several other attorneys have reported similar accounts after meeting or speaking with prisoners in recent days," said the AP.

snip

Officially, we know that at least eight of them have been chained to chairs and hooked up to feeding tubes that force liquid sustenance through their noses. Two more have been hospitalized and are being force-fed, too. We know because the military has admitted this much to reporters.

While there has always been at a half dozen or so who have refused to eat, prisoners and their attorneys have openly blamed what they say has been a "crackdown" on attorney-client privilege, prisoner privacy, and general conditions at the camp for the tensions that led to a surge in strikers.

While reports from defense lawyers pinpoint the "last straw" being changes in detainee search policies instituted in February by a new commander of camp operations, Army Col. John Bogdan, this writer has been following the shift in conditions over the last year, speaking with several defense attorneys in early 2012 about their own restrictions and fears they could not represent their clients effectively in a legal environment that appeared completely stacked against them. Turns out the government (prosecution) has nearly unfettered access to their emails and electronic files, and has been tapping their phone lines too. Prison guards began intercepting and searching legal mail sent to detainees last year, and even attorney visits to clients have been more restricted since the Obama Administration took over in 2009.

snip

Despite the tightly controlled talking points the hunger strike has allowed Wingard and scores of other human rights activists and outside defense attorneys new opportunities to shed light on the fact these guys are in purgatory, and the administration has apparently stopped trying to find homes for the 86 who are cleared. In fact, in January, the administration closed the office that was supposed to be pursuing that mission.

THE ADMINISTRATION CLOSED THE OFFICE THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PURSUING THAT MISSION!

Duh, you don’t think that might have had anything to do with the hunger strike?

Vlahos:

In a rare, candid moment last week, Marine Corps General John Kelly, commander of Southern Command, which overseas Guantanamo Bay, admitted to the House Armed Services Committee that this and other disheartening news has added to the despondency of the camp population.

“They had great optimism that Guantanamo would be closed. They were devastated apparently … when the president backed off, at least (that’s) their perception, of closing the facility,” Kelly testified.

And there is even more outrageous callousness:

Vlahos:

On March 14, an impressive group of human rights lawyers advocating for and representing the detainees, signed a letter to new defense secretary Chuck Hagel. They said they feared for the lives of strikers who, some of them witnessed personally, had already lost upwards of 30 pounds. They implored Hagel to address the hunger strike, and requested an opportunity to work with him "more broadly to help your office and this Administration fulfill its important commitment to closing the prison."

So far, they have had no response. Meanwhile, Wingard points out that shortly after the letter went to the secretary of defense, the Navy canceled commercial flights to Cuba, the only way most of the advocates and defense lawyers can get to Guantanamo. Officials say the decision was based on an old regulation that had been "overlooked," but the fact remains, the only other flights there are on a weekly defense department shuttle for which there is limited room and passengers must be cleared by the DoD.

This indicates, said Wingard, that "there are movements afoot to make the men incommunicado … once you cut them off from the rest of the world it makes things like hunger strikes harder to communicate."

So, Obama and the military operatives will lessen or remove access to the struggling and dying Gitmo victims from their proactive representatives with conscience, and let a lying media along with grandstanding or platitudinous hypocritical politicians bullshit the rest of us with an Orwellianly extreme opposite version of what is actually happening there.

I’ve got two words for you, Barack.  "COVER UP!"

Okay, ONE more.  "RESPONSIBILITY" a/k/a “the ability to respond.”

On this Easter, as far as I am concerned, Obama resembles more the other “J” historical figure.

[cross-posted on open salon]

Obama Wants Turkey/Israel to Help Bomb Shit Outta Syria (3-27-13)

Some people still don’t get that Obama is a pragmatist with a heart of stone. Both domestically and internationally speaking.

Internationally speaking, according to Melkulangara Bhadrakumar, Obama got what he wanted from the trip to Israel when at the very end of it he played catalyst to Turkey's and Israel's “making up” after the killing of nine Turkish nationals by Israeli commandos in the 2010 Turkish flotilla on a humanitarian mission to help the Palestinians of Gaza.

Erdogan and Netanyahu cooperated with Obama for a win/win/win scenario that means more horror for the hapless Syrians and eventually, if these three hegemonic monsters have their way, the Iranians.

As far as Turkey and Israel are concerned, the enemy of my enemy can be my friend, pragmatically, holding-the-nose speaking, which is what Obama was bargaining for.

What Obama wants is to “take out” the Assad regime ASAP to get on with the steamrolling U.S. hegemony and Obama's next target, Iran, and the ever-shadow target, China.

NATO’s top military commander Adm. James Stavridis told the US Armed Services Committee last Monday that the US has to take a stronger “posture” against Syria to help with regime change. Of course, Sen. John McCain was the most enthusiastic.

Stavridis went on to explain that the NATO Patriot missiles now deployed in Turkey ostensibly for the sake of defending Turkish airspace has the capability also to attack Syrian air force in that country’s air space and that any such a NATO operation would be a "powerful disincentive" for the Syrian regime.

Obama knows that U.S. troops put on the ground in Syria may finally elicit some serious blowback from a seemingly morally comatose but war-weary U.S. citizenry. (Would that Obama seriously respected the sanctity of human life.) Bhadrakumar claims that as Obama sees it, the U.S., NATO and Israel can give air cover and launch “devastating missile attacks” on the Syrian government's command posts. Obama calculates that if ground forces are needed, Turkey can handle that end of it, since it is a Muslim country that belongs to NATO.

Bhadrakumar adds:

However, the crucial operational aspect will be that in order for the US-NATO-Turkish operation to be optimal, Israel also needs to be brought in. A close cooperation between Turkey and Israel at the operational level can be expected to swiftly pulverize the Syrian regime from the north and south simultaneously. Hence the diligence with which Obama moved to heal the Turkish-Israeli rift.

PULVERIZE THE SYRIAN REGIME.

WTG, Barack. Enjoying that peace prize?

Both Turkey and Israel have political scores to settle with Syria, so once again ends justifies the means and again, the enemy of my enemy is my pragmatic and nose-holding friend!

Bhadrakumar:

In sum, Obama’s mediatory mission to Israel and his stunning success in healing the Turkish-Israeli rift resets the compass of Middle Eastern politics. In a way, American regional policies are returning to their pristine moorings of perpetuating the western hegemony in the Middle East in the 21st century, no matter how.

In the process, the Palestinian problem has been relegated to the backburner; Obama didn’t even bother to hide that he feels no particular sense of urgency about the Middle East peace process. The resuscitation of the Turkish-Israeli strategic axis gives the unmistakable signal that the Obama administration is shifting gear for an outright intervention in Syria to force «regime change». Thereupon, the strong likelihood is that Iran will come in the US-Israeli-Turkish crosshairs...

A few more words about Obama’s realpolitik detachment from the plight of the Palestinians:

Lawrence Davidson writes:

Israeli forces have sprayed Palestinian homes in the village of Nabi Saleh with Skunk as punishment for organizing weekly protests against the Apartheid Wall built on occupied land. Human rights watchdog B’Tselem  published a video showing Israel’s armored tanker trucks fitted with “water canons” [spraying] the foul fluid.

Skunk is a fluid so offensive smelling that people automatically retreat from anywhere or anyone doused with it.

This is not the first time the Israelis have used such noxious tactics. Zionist settlers are fond of diverting the sewage from their illegal settlements, which are usually placed on high ground,  into the fields and towns of Palestinians living in the valleys below. This is apparently done with the knowledge and approval of the Israeli state.

snip

President Obama had an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 TV station on 15 March 2013, just before he left to visit that country. In the interview he stated that he admires Israel’s “core values.” The Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who has an honest nose for these things, editorially asked Obama, ... which values he was talking about? The dehumanization of the Palestinians? The attitude toward African migrants? The arrogance, racism and nationalism? Is this what he admires? Don’t separate buses for Palestinians remind him of something? Doesn’t two communities living on the same land, one with full rights and the other with no rights, ring a bell . . . ?

To admire “core values” while knowing we’re talking about one of the most racist countries there is, with a separation wall and apartheid-like policies, means betraying the core values of the American civil rights movement that made the Obama miracle possible.

Nonetheless, upon arriving in Israel, President Obama said that U.S. support for the very same Israel Levy describes will “be forever.” It might be added that, at the same time, the president insisted that the Palestinians cease demanding a halt to the building of settlements, with their targeted open- sewer policies, before any further “peace” negotiations with the Israelis.

When it comes to Israel, President Obama, and most of the Congress as well, can’t tell the difference between fair and foul. That is because they live in a peculiar professional world whose parameters, in reference to Israel and Palestine, are defined by a Zionist lobby with Orwellian powers. In this special world, double-think abounds. Racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and the tactical use of Skunk and raw sewage disappear and are replaced by imaginary “core values” that smell like roses.

Norman Pollack on Obama and the irrelevance of the Palestinian plight to him

Israel is merely one instance, a support of broadly conceived counterrevolution, with respect to its surroundings, and as the facilitator of US penetration, from securing oil to natural resources, throughout the hemisphere and encroaching still further East.

snip

... Obama’s performance in Israel mirrors his domestic performance: promises meant to be broken, talk of peace while engaging in war, and when the accumulated deceit is about to burst open, provide the purgative with more words of unctious platitudes.

Obama-Brennan and Obama-Netanyahu (what I refer to below as compatible bedfellows) represent the face of liberal fascism, Obama the smiling face of betrayal, his partners here, the real thing of political thuggery and merciless killing.

snip

Obama’s putatively ennobling rhetoric (i.e., Ben Rhodes’s rather glib speechwriting) is not persuasive because Israel under no circumstances wants peace–and, by not taking a stand on the settlements, Obama merely reinforces that position. He loves the adulation (and support which will now come from home), but this trip is a clear example of public relations trumping substance. Perhaps we can see two further interventions (Iran, Syria), if indeed US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is finally winding down. Hints of that were dropped in his various conversations.

I am sick of being lied to, whether domestic or foreign policy. In this case, Obama overlooks the harshness of Israel’s occupation. The wall going up on the border between Israel and Egypt, as with the other walls (Gaza, Golan, etc.) speaks volumes about a hunkering down–Fortress Israel–rather than moving toward peace. And Obama legitimizes the charade.

But why expect otherwise? US armed drones for targeted assassination, Obama’s signature weapon, testifies to violation of international law with impunity, much as Israel too does–making for compatible bedfellows. In world opinion, the US and Israel are engaged in a race to the moral bottom via the militarization of the two societies. ...

Obama’s and Israel’s race to the moral bottom. Aptly worded. My money is on stone-hearted “liberal fascist” Obama.

[cross-posted on open salon]

US/Int’l Cronies Hypocrisy/Evil Behind Destruction of Syria (3-23-13)

Nile Bowie writes:

“There is no surer sign of a pathological mind than when one credits others with the blood on their own hands.”

Do you seriously believe that the Assad government of Syria has deliberately set out to kill over 70,000 of its own citizens? That US, NATO countries, Israel and neighboring countries to Syria like Saudi Arabia and Qatar are rallying militarily to protect the welfare of Syrian civilians? I'm thinking they care as much as they cared about the welfare of Iraqis ten years ago. Or the welfare of the Libyans in 2011?

Bowie writes:

Let’s not humor ourselves by thinking John Kerry, William Hague, Laurent Fabius or Qatari Emir Khalifa Al Thani actually care about the people of Syria. However, many casualties the Syrian conflict has incurred thus far can be attributable to the influx of foreign funds, foreign arms, and foreign fighters. It would be intellectually dishonest to deny that the tactics of Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian Arab Army have also caused widespread civilian causalities and suffering. It is an enormous challenge for a state military to quell unconventional insurgencies of the sort carried out by militants in Syria when these battles take place in densely populated residential areas.

One should not cynically credit Syrian government forces with intentionally killing their own people; this does not serve the purposes of the state in anyway. Civilian deaths that have occurred as a result of government forces engaging the insurgency should more accurately be seen as a heinous by-product of a foreign campaign to topple the Syrian government.

These international thugs’, particularly our own US thug government's, involvement in the present horror happening in Syria is bottom-line avaricious EVIL. Don’t be conned!

Can you skate over the reality that al-Qaeda forces are playing the major “shock troops” to terrorize the Syrian citizenry, supported by money and weaponry from the international imperialist mafia to hasten regime change? The “terrorists” some who were killing our troops in Iraq are NOW supported by the US and the other international thugs in Syria as faux-"freedom-fighting rebels." Craven means to justify craven ends.

The foreign jihadist terrorists are conveniently being used to exercise massive barbarism to topple another Middle-Eastern country for these unscrupulous imperialist international players. They brazenly and hypocritically blame Assad’s government for the carnage on the public stage, but are really vultures circling the dying carcass of yet another country from their machinations, ready to zoom down for the inevitable, profiteering KILL. Profits uber humanity yet again? You betcha!!!!

Bowie:

The Obama administration’s policy toward Libya and Syria eyes the same familiar endgame as what the Bush administration sought in its foreign policy adventures. The fact that many of those on the left who campaigned against Iraq and Afghanistan are now generally silent, or even supportive of Obama’s agenda, is proof that his policies have been packaged far more intelligently for mainstream consumption. The reality is that Syria is “Shock and Awe” by other means.

Ten years ago there was substantial opposition among the American citizenry to a dirty and craven Iraq War. Maybe not enough to stop it, but evidence of a substantial segment of the American population with conscience. The madness, nevertheless, continued and U.S. war criminality in Iraq continued (and spread elsewhere) these ten long bloody years despite whichever corporate party was in power in the United States. Today there is even less outcry of the citiznery than there was with Iraq over the military and political raping of Syria.

Seamus Milne sums up the present conditions in Iraq:

If anyone doubted what kind of Iraq has been bequeathed by a decade of US-sponsored occupation and war, today's deadly sectarian bomb attacks around Baghdad against bus queues and markets should have set them straight. Ten years to the day after American and British troops launched an unprovoked attack on a false pretext – and more than a year since the last combat troops were withdrawn – the conflict they unleashed shows no sign of winding down.

Civilians are still being killed at a rate of at least 4,000 a year, and police at about 1,000. As in the days when US and British forces directly ran the country, torture is rampant, thousands are imprisoned without trial, and disappearances and state killings are routine.

Meanwhile power and sewage systems barely function, more than a third of adults are unemployed, state corruption has become an institutionalised kleptocracy and trade unionists are tried for calling strikes and demonstrations (the oil workers' leader is in court in Basra on that charge tomorrow). In recent months, mass protests in Sunni areas have threatened to tip over into violence, or even renewed civil war.

This is the result of the help the United States gave the people of Iraq with that regime change agenda.

Skipping over the same kind of cess-pool regime change involvement in Libya (which deserves exploration and never got it from our media, citizenry and the international community), let’s address the present fresh hell of SYRIA.

We are way down the same kind of Iraq-War-propagandized garden path leading to Syria's doom at our and our cronies' EVIL hands to be intensified even more shortly when the U.S. makes another “humanitarian” move into deeper and more direct destructive involvement.

The NewsHour, CNN, Charlie Rose, the NYT, Washington Post, and the rest of U.S. corporate media are doing their craven propagandizing best. TOTALLY ON BOARD with framing the present bloodbath in Syria into white hats versus black hats. Too bad they have attributed the opposite of reality in the coloration of said hats in propagandizing for another “regime change” for corporate profit.

DUH, AMERICA!!!! WAKE UP AND SMELL THE EVIL -- RECYLED EVIL, WILL YA????

This from Bill Van Auken:

In reality, the Obama administration has been intimately involved in the operations to ship arms to the Syrian anti-regime militias, setting up a CIA station near the Syrian-Turkish border to coordinate arms and aid pouring in from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Earlier this month, Washington announced that it was providing its own “non-lethal” aid to these forces, including military rations, medical kits and other gear. At the same time, it has been widely reported that US special operations troops are training anti-Assad militiamen in Jordan. The Syrian government reported this week that a force of some 300 such US-trained fighters had crossed the Jordanian border into Syria.

The bulk of the fighting against Syrian government forces, however, is being carried out by Islamist militias, the most prominent among them Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliate that Washington has formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

We are in realpolitik “heart of darkness” territory. You would think after the obvious horrors of Iraq that played out, we as empathetic human beings could rally to pull back our defiant of international law and of Geneva Conventions present government to STOP ITS MADNESS!!! Especially since the bloated US military budget is devoted to mass global human cruelty. Our tax dollars and the blood of our young people spent on amoral profiteering global violence.

This is the account from RT, Russia Today, of a bold, chemical attack near Aleppo on Tuesday:

Syrian rebels have used a rocket chemical warhead in Aleppo, killing 25 people and injuring 86, says Syria's Information Minister. The attack escalates the Syrian conflict and brings the violence to a new level, believe Russian diplomats.

The Syrian government's SANA news agency reported that terrorists fired a rocket containing chemical substances in the Khan al-Assal area of rural Aleppo and confirmed that at least 25 people, most of them civilians, were killed.

A photographer working for Reuters in Aleppo reported that the witnesses of the attack complain of a strong smell of chlorine near the epicenter of the attack. Reportedly, people had breathing problems and some of them died of suffocation.

"They said that people were suffocating in the streets and the air smelt strongly of chlorine,” the photographer said, stressing that most of the victims he saw while visiting the University of Aleppo hospital and the al-Rajaa hospital were women and children.

"People were dying in the streets and in their houses," he said by phone.

A statement published on the Russian Foreign Ministry website says that “According to information coming from Damascus, the armed opposition used chemical weapons early in the morning on March 19 in the province of Aleppo” .

“This is an extremely alarming and dangerous development of events in the Syrian crisis,” believe Russian diplomats.

I suppose this nightmare visited on a collection of Syrians is what the international mafia has been praying for to justify more DIRECT involvement in Syria, now that the terrorists have done their preliminary devastation.

The Obama administration is selecting the right moment to use the “weapons of mass destruction/chemical weapons” playbook in Syria, since it was so effective back in pre-Iraq War prep-days of the Bush cabal.

This is all the more craven and crazymaking, however, since it seems it is the US-backed foreign jihadist terrorists who are the ones that got their hands on chemical weapons and are now using them on the hapless Syrian citizens and the Syrian soldiers. Still, this turn of events (with all due cognitive dissonance) sets up the US's Obama and Israel and the rest of the international vultures to posture that they MUST DIRECTLY interfere because the proverbial “red line” of dangerousness has been crossed.

The “red line” that the international mafia worked and helped so hard to create??? WTF? How brazenly craven and cynical and pathologically manipulative can you get?

This from Tony Cartalucci re the chemical weapons:

It remains to be seen where these chemical weapons came from. Should they appear to be from Libya's arsenal, NATO, especially the US and Turkey, would be implicated in supplying Al Qaeda terrorists with WMDs, the very scenario the West has been paralyzed in fear over for the past 10 years, has given up its liberties, and spilled the blood of thousands of its soldiers to prevent.

Bill Van Auken’s take of this turn of events and the U.S. government's readiness for military escalation in Syria:

The top US commander in Europe told a Senate hearing Tuesday that the US military and NATO are drawing up plans for direct military intervention in Syria.

snip

Meanwhile, the apparent use of a chemical weapon that claimed the lives of over 30 Syrians Tuesday prompted renewed demands for direct US intervention on Capitol Hill.

And this:

Lawmakers invoked Obama’s earlier threats that the use of chemical weapons in Syria represented a “red line” that would prompt US intervention. “If today’s reports are substantiated, the President’s red line has been crossed, and we would urge him to take immediate action to impose the consequences he has promised,” Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain said in a joint statement.

Graham went further in an interview, calling for sending US ground troops into Syria to secure its chemical weapons, an operation that the Pentagon estimated would require 75,000 soldiers and Marines.

“The twisted logic of this campaign is that the two-year-old sectarian civil war that the US and its allies in Europe, Turkey and the Persian Gulf monarchies have fomented, funded and armed has weakened the Assad regime to such an extent that its chemical weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists.”

snip

America’s ruling elite is now pressing for even greater and more destructive conflicts, in the face of mass public opposition to war. In Orwellian fashion, familiar and discredited pretexts of “weapons of mass destruction,” terrorism and the promotion of “democracy” are being recycled, this time to justify war against Syria.

On Capitol Hill there was a drumbeat of calls for new Middle East wars. Adm. James Stavridis, the chief of the Pentagon’s European Command, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday on extensive planning by NATO for intervention in Syria. “We are looking at a wide range of operations, and we are prepared if called upon to be engaged as we were in Libya,” he said.

Under serious consideration, according to Stavridis, is the establishment of a “no-fly zone.” Calls for such a no-fly zone in Libya, approved by the United Nations Security Council in March 2011, led to a US-NATO bombing campaign and war for regime change.

We all know how devastating those benign-sounding "no fly" zones proved to be for Libyans.

Nile Bowie explains more of the realpolitik:

There are a myriad of reasons why Bashar al-Assad must go in the eyes of policy makers in Washington and Tel Aviv, and the destruction of his tenure could not have been possible without the financial muscle of Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s wretchedly opulent Wahhabi Monarchs.

These glittering kingdoms of disaster-capitalism are not only responsible for supplying weapons and cash; a major incentive of theirs is exporting the Wahhabist and Salafist ideologies that many of Syria’s imported jihadists subscribe to, a warped and primal interpretation of Islam that has fueled the sectarian nature of the Syrian conflict and deepened social divisions to their most dangerous point - in a country that was once renowned for its tolerance of religious diversity.

These Persian Gulf kingdoms, which are more-or-less given a trump card to commit deplorable human rights violations institutionally, are also responsible for propping up the political arm of their militant foot soldiers, and that comes in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood.

snip

.... The Muslim Brotherhood has politically dominated the Syrian National Council since its creation, in addition to organizing tactical elements of the insurgency. The backbone of the Brotherhood’s relationship with the medieval monarchies of the Persian Gulf is grounded in a firm opposition to Shia Islam, as extolled by clerical leaders in Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah; Assad himself is also an Alawite, an offshoot of Shia Islam. It should be clear enough by now how enflaming sectarian divisions in the region was a prerequisite for those bank-rolling the insurgency, aimed at demolishing the secular Syrian state.

Bill Van Auken describes U.S. government disregard for the reality of the plight of the Syrian people and its shaping of the faux-Syrian coalition government to be placed in power when regime change is accomplished:

The Obama administration brushed aside the incident [Tuesday's chemical weapon attack near Aleppo], with the White House saying it had “no evidence” that any attack had taken place. A State Department spokeswoman dismissed it as nothing more than “the regime's continued attempts to discredit the legitimate opposition and distract from its own atrocities committed against the Syrian people.”

In other words, atrocities carried out by Western-backed forces in Syria will be ignored.

Referring to Tuesday’s attack, Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi described it as “the first act by the government announced in Istanbul.”

He was referring to the meeting convened Monday by the Syrian National Coalition, a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated front cobbled together last November under the direction of the US State Department. The gathering, consisting of a total of 63 people, chose Ghassan Hitto, a naturalized American citizen and IT business executive from Texas who left Syria more than 30 years ago, as “prime minister” of what the front is calling an “interim government.”

Hitto follows in the footsteps of Abdurraheem el-Keib, installed as Libya’s prime minister following the US-NATO war for regime change in that country. Like Hitto, Keib was also a US citizen with close ties to the oil industry, who had been out of Libya for 35 years.

snip

Nothing could more graphically expose the real nature of the so-called “Syrian revolution,” whose leadership is being shaped directly by the US State Department.

Nile Bowie sums up the entire ugly scenario powerfully:

Let’s just get this straight - Assad, a leader whose presence today is a testament to the fact that he continues to enjoy majority popular support, is considered to have lost his legitimacy. On the other hand, Hitto, a man with no political experience who received 35 votes out of 49 ballots cast during a Syrian National Coalition meeting, is supposed to be legitimate representative of the Syrian people?

These realities can only be interpreted as the boot of the so-called “International Community” squashing the face of the Syrian people, imposing on them a man who does not represent them, but the business interests of multinational corporations who seek to plant their flags in the soil of a post-Assad Syria.

"The boot of the so-called 'International Community' squashing the face of the Syrian people!!!!"

Can we Americans rally to stop the evil perpetrated in our name against the people of Syria? One more nation community destroyed by our rogue, corporate-driven government using our tax dollars and soon again our young troops as cannon fodder!

ENOUGH!!!!