"Clancy Sigal" - Divided We Fall

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/18/us-politics-common-cause
Published on Sunday, September 18, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

The work of making common cause can be endlessly frustrating, but I've seen enough of the alternative to know it's unthinkable

by Clancy Sigal

Digging into the rubble of bombed-out Frankfurt-am-Main after the second world war, I stumbled on two human skeletons who were among the last living survivors of the Hitler regime's anti-Nazi political parties. They were old, semi-starving men, working deliberately apart from each other in the corpse-smelling basement of a ruined apartment house, each of them kept alive by a fierce will to revive what had been, respectively, the Weimar Republic's mass socialist (SPD) and communist (KPD) movements. Catastrophically, their parties had refused to unite against Hitler, and both men had spent the Nazi years in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. .

I had to speak separately to each man, in my broken "Blitz German", because despite all they had suffered, they still would not speak to each other, blaming the other's organisation for pre-war errors and betrayals. It was amazing to me, as a fresh-faced young GI, how old quarrels could be kept venomous for so long, at such a human cost.

Afterwards, as a spectator at the Nuremberg war crimes trial, locking eyes with Hitler's henchman Herman Göring in a staring contest (he won), I wondered: if you don't want the worst, maybe you had better learn to work with the least worst.

That's "coalition politics", the vehicle I was raised in during the era of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. What remains today of the New Deal's welfare state – a total good, for me and my family – was rammed through by a Democratic party (with plenty of Republican sympathisers) composed of crooked big-city bosses, southern racists, small-town bigots, rightwing Catholics, blacks, Jews, progressives of all types, enlightened (or scared) capitalists and so on.

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"EU Obersavation" -Poland warns of war 'in 10 years' as EU leaders scramble to contain panic

Germany, France and the European Commission are scrambling to contain panic and "quash rumours" about a eurozone break-up amid repeated off-piste messages from other senior EU politicians.

But even amid their desperate efforts, the finance minister of Poland, the country that currently represents the EU to the world as holder of the bloc’s rotating presidency, warned of war on the continent within 10 years if the eurozone collapses.

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"Ellen Brown"- War, The Fiscal Stimulus of Last Resort

“War!  Good God, ya’ll.  What is it good for?  Absolutely nothin’!” 

So went the Bruce Springsteen pop hit of the 1980s, first produced as an anti-Vietnam War song in 1969.  The song echoed popular sentiment.  The Vietnam War ended.  Then the Cold War ended.  Yet military spending remains the government’s number one expenditure.  When veterans’ benefits and other past military costs are factored in, half the government’s budget now goes to the military/industrial complex.  Protesters have been trying to stop this juggernaut ever since the end of World War II, yet the war machine is more powerful and influential than ever.   

Why?  The veiled powers pulling the strings no doubt have their own dark agenda, but why has our much-trumpeted system of political democracy not been able to stop them? 

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"Garikai Chengdu"- Geostrategic Basis Of Libyan War -- Hydrological Warfare and Energy

From oil to water, water-boarding to arms and from gas to reconstruction the war in Libya will rake in billions of dollars for the West. Just how much will trickle down to the people of Libya remains to be seen.

People who think that the West's intervention in Libya is just another oil grab are mistaken. Broadly speaking, for Britain military intervention is mainly about arms, Italy its natural gas, France its water and for the US its counter-terrorism and reconstruction contracts. Spreading democracy and saving the people of Benghazi form merely tangential benefits used to justify these ends.

Lest we forget, Nato's bombardment began because Mr Gaddafi threatened to do to Benghazi what Mr Bashar al-Assad’s forces are doing to various Syrian cities and Nato itself is poised to do in Sirte.

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"Patrick Cockburn"- Al-Qa'ida, and the Myth Behind the War on Terrorism

Published on Sunday, September 11, 2011 by the Independent/UK
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-alqaida-and-the-myth-behind-the-war-on-terrorism-2352730.html

The atrocities against America created the image of Osama bin Laden as the leader of a global jihad upon the West. It was a fantasy that governments willingly, and disastrously, helped to perpetuate

What was the most devastating attack by al-Qa'ida in the past few months? Despite all the pious talk this weekend about combating "terrorism", few will have heard of it. It happened on August 15th when bombers killed 63 people in 17 cities up and down Iraq in the space of a few hours.

Such carnage is ignored because the US and Britain see al-Qa'ida only in relation to themselves, and because all the victims were Iraqis. The real motives of al-Qa'ida, often rooted in local struggles between Palestinians and Israelis or Sunni and Shia, are disregarded and replaced by fantasies about clashing civilizations.

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"Sherwood Ross" - Pentagon's New Slavery System Triggers Riots in Occupied States

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Pentagon-s-New-Slavery-Sys-by-Sherwood-Ross-110901-307.html

September 1, 2011 By Sherwood Ross Many of the 70,000 "third country national"(TCN) service workers employed in Afghanistan and Iraq "recount having been robbed of wages, injured without compensation, subjected to sexual assault, and held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by their subcontractor bosses," reports Sarah Stillman in a June 6th article in The New Yorker magazine titled "The Invisible Army." The arrangement, in fact, is very near to what one might describe as slavery. "These workers, primarily from South Asia and Africa, often live in barbed-wire compounds on U.S. bases, (and) eat at meagre chow halls..." Stillman reports. "A large number are employed by fly-by-night subcontractors who are financed by the American taxpayer but who often operate outside the law." Since the U.S. invasions, more than 2,000 contractor fatalities and 51,000 contractor injuries have been reported in Iraq and Afghanistan as the soaring casualty rates "are now on a par with those of U.S. troops in both war zones," Stillman writes.

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" Matthew Schofield " - WikiLeaks: Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head, U.N. says

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/08/31/122789/wikileaks-iraqi-children-in-us.html

Posted on Thu, Sep. 01, 2011

Matthew Schofield | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: September 01, 2011 01:19:34 PM

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks' website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

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"David Swanson" - The True Meaning of War and Peace -- Barack Obama versus Martin Luther King

That sounds like a crazy question, doesn't it?  Why would President Obama denounce Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Well, the reason I ask is that he's done it before.

Really?  But surely he wouldn't do it on such a solemn occasion? 

Well, the time he did it before was in a Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech.

When President Barack Obama joined the ranks of Henry Kissinger and the other gentle souls who have received Nobel Peace Prizes, he did something that I don't think anyone else had previously done in a Peace Prize acceptance speech. He argued for war.  And he opposed the position of a previous Peace Prize Laureate, namely Martin Luther King, Jr.:

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"Jason Leopold"-Air Force Cites New Testament, Ex-Nazi, to Train Officers on Ethics of Launching Nuclear Weapons

The United States Air Force has been training young missile officers about the morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons by citing passages from the New Testament and commentary from a former member of the Nazi Party, according to newly released documents.

The mandatory Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare session, which includes a discussion on St. Augustine's "Christian Just War Theory [4]," is led by Air Force chaplains and takes place during a missile officer's first week in training at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

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"Nick Turse" - A Secret War in 120 Countries – The Pentagon’s New Power Elite

Posted on August 3, 2011, Printed on August 4, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175426/

The Pentagon’s New Power Elite
By Nick Turse

Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission.  Now, say that 70 times and you’re done... for the day.  Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries.  This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed, until now.

After a U.S. Navy SEAL put a bullet in Osama bin Laden’s chest and another in his head, one of the most secretive black-ops units in the American military suddenly found its mission in the public spotlight.  It was atypical.  While it’s well known that U.S. Special Operations forces are deployed in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it’s increasingly apparent that such units operate in murkier conflict zones like Yemen and Somalia, the full extent of their worldwide war has remained deeply in the shadows.

Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency.  By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120.  “We do a lot of traveling -- a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq,” he said recently.  This global presence -- in about 60% of the world’s nations and far larger than previously acknowledged -- provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world.

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