From: charleydan 

Sun 2/15/09 2:17 PM

In reply  to LiveJournal post, "Apocalypse Nigh: Cindy Sheehan" :

What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.
George Wilhelm Hegel

I would like to stipulate for this essay that Barack Obama is honorable and really wants to do the right thing for this country and this world.

But I also want to go back in that so easily manipulated concept called "history." Barack Obama glorified the Vietnam debacle by honoring two war criminals, John McCain and Colin Powell during the coronation ceremonies in DC and he honored those who fought "for us" at Khe Sahn…so are we now officially re-writing history that Vietnam was an honorable war and that it was justified or moral in any way? That the 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese who were killed were killed for a "noble cause?" No war is honorable or noble, no matter if it is "legal or justified," but our religion of state is WAR and the robber class's god is PROFIT and if Obama was the stipulated honorable man of this essay he would reject it, not glorify it.

I realize how seductive the mantra of "looking forward" is and how tempting it would be to want to forget the history of the last eight years and move on from the horror, but we cannot move on when we are smack dab in the middle of the horror that has in no way alleviated, nor will, if we continue to put blinders on and not face reality to avert pending disaster.

President Obama was asked about the possibility of a truth commission to investigate the crimes of the Bush criminal regime and he said: "no one is above the law…but it is my general orientation to get it right moving forward." As Constitution Law Professor, Jonathan Turley said in an interview on MSNBC's Countdown about this: "if President Obama believes that no one is above the law then he cannot block a war crimes' investigation…this is not a principled position. If we fail to prosecute then Bush's crimes become our crimes and Bush's shame becomes our shame."

We cannot ignore the history of felonious behavior being perpetrated in the highest office in our country. We must not ignore that presidents have been allowed to commit the most detestable war crimes and crimes against humanity from the comfort of the Oval Office and then be allowed to build libraries and lead luxurious lives with stolen money when their sentence is up. Then when the president dies we are told to mourn a "great statesmen" instead of facing the reality that he was most probably a villain. If we continue to allow this, then we also become the war criminals.

We are living in apocalyptic (uncovering, revealing, or widespread disaster) times and certainly the American Dream, if not dead, is on life support and to millions of people in this country and millions more around the world, the Dream has turned into (or has always been) a living Nightmare.

We cannot put this country back together if we continuously ignore the malignant cancer of "poverty, racism and militarism" (Martin Luther King, Jr in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech) that is killing us and if Barack Obama stupidly turns his back on the disease by only trying to treat the symptoms, like Professor Turley says, he is no different or better than his predecessor. There can be no prosperity, equality, or peace without justice. The bloodied souls of millions of people around the world are crying out for this justice. The law is already there, it has been created to punish the Hitlers and Husseins of the world and to try and prevent the Bushes and Cheneys. We must use it on Bush and Cheney to really prevent evil in the future.

Philosopher George Santayana also famously said this: Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

This is the history that we have been doomed, or cursed, to repeat throughout the relatively brief life of the USA:

"War, economic panic, war, economic panic, war…rinse, repeat." Ad nauseum…We have a unique opportunity to break this cycle, but only if we the people work together to cure the cancer once and for all.

Another meaning of "apocalypse" is when "good triumphs over evil."

Justice is good, injustice which is followed by non-justice is a foundational evil.

Apocalypse nigh?



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Shoe bomber attacks Bush

Updates



“Thousands of Iraqis took to the streets Monday to demand the release of a reporter who threw his shoes” at President Bush during a press conference yesterday, praising the journalist as a “hero.” The television station that employs the journalist has also demanded his immediate release, saying it “fear[ed] for his safety.”
H/T thinkprogress.org/

World condemns man for missing Bush's face




Sock and Awe

Web Game: Throw shoes at Bush.Torture not included.

http://www.sockandawe.com/



V
Via Rense

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/28223089#28223089 

Independent.co.uk

Prisoners are being summarily executed in the government's high-security detention centre in Baghdad. Robert Fisk reports

Tuesday, 7 October 2008

Like all wars, the dark, untold stories of the Iraqi conflict drain from its shattered landscape like the filthy waters of the Tigris. And still the revelations come.

The Independent has learnt that secret executions are being carried out in the prisons run by Nouri al-Maliki's "democratic" government.

The hangings are carried out regularly – from a wooden gallows in a small, cramped cell – in Saddam Hussein's old intelligence headquarters at Kazimiyah. There is no public record of these killings in what is now called Baghdad's "high-security detention facility" but most of the victims – there have been hundreds since America introduced "democracy" to Iraq – are said to be insurgents, given the same summary justice they mete out to their own captives.

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War Is A Racket, by Major General Smedley Butler, 1935

David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster

Published: Friday October 3, 2008

On Thursday's edition of The Colbert Report, bestselling author Naomi Klein argued that the Bush Administration creates crises in order to "enrich themselves and their friends," drawing parallels between the torture of prisoners and the economic bailout being provided to Wall St. by US leaders.

Previously, Klein called out the sprawling economic crisis as just another example of the Bush 'shock doctrine,' a key component to the ruling regime's corporate agenda.

"Now, the name of your book is 'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,'" said host Stephen Colbert. "Okay now, what is the 'shock doctrine'? 'Cause, that sounds like a great way to get information out of a prisoner."

--MORE WITH VIDEO--

Update
Iraq: They Make It a Desert and Call It Peace


Whose War Will Win the Election -- McCain's or Obama's?

By Ira Chernus

In 1932, in the midst of a disastrous economic meltdown, Franklin D. Roosevelt made "the forgotten man" the centerpiece of his presidential election campaign. Far more than we suspect, this year's election may turn not on a forgotten man, but on a forgotten war in a forgotten country.

Even before the present financial meltdown hit the news, the Iraq War had slipped out of the headlines and off the political stage. Now, as investment houses totter and bailout plans fill the headlines, it will be even harder for Iraq to get major media attention. Yet the war remains just beneath the surface of the presidential campaign, and so is sure to affect the outcome in ways too complicated to fully grasp.

Think of that war not as one, but two currents, affecting the coming election all the more powerfully because they are out of sight, out of mind, and -- interacting in unpredictable ways -- out of anyone's control.

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Remember Iraq?
The drop in violence has made the war an afterthought -- and allowed McCain to claim we're "winning." Here's why we're not -- and we can't.

By Gary Kamiya

Sep. 30, 2008 | With Congress rejecting the $700 billion bailout package, the Dow falling 700 points and the U.S. economy on the edge of a cliff, no one is paying much attention to Iraq. Money talks, and incomprehensible and endless wars walk. From a purely financial perspective, that dismissive attitude makes no sense. The Iraq war has already cost almost $700 billion, and as Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes have argued, its total cost, factoring in huge back-end costs like disability payments, could end up exceeding $3 trillion. As Tom Engelhardt and Chalmers Johnson point out on TomDispatch, the money we've poured and are continuing to pour down the bottomless pit of Iraq, to the tune of $10 billion a month, could have bailed us out many times over.

But of course, the Iraq war is about a lot more than money. It's about the 146,000 U.S. troops still stationed there, and their families. It's about the stability of the Middle East, and our vital national interest in ensuring that it does not explode. It's about the overall direction of our foreign policy. It's about how America is perceived throughout the world. And it's about the fate of Iraq itself, a nation that our invasion devastated and that we owe our best efforts to rebuild.

Along with fixing our economy, then, what we should do about Iraq is the most important issue facing the country. And the choices offered by the two presidential candidates could not be more different. John McCain will continue the same policies as George W. Bush. He insists that Iraq remains "the central front in the war on terror," claims that the surge was a decisive turning point and that we are now winning the war, and warns that if America elects Barack Obama, we will lose, with catastrophic consequences. Obama argues that the war was a mistake to begin with, that it led us to "take our eye off the ball" and allow Osama bin Laden to escape and al-Qaida to regroup, and that it has strengthened Iran. He says that if elected he will withdraw American troops in stages over a 16-month period.

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Independent.co.uk
Robert Fisk's World: Bush rescues Wall Street but leaves his soldiers to die in Iraq

Until the elections, the people in the Middle East are yesterday’s men

Saturday, 27 September 2008

It was a weird week to be in the United States. On Tuesday, secretary of the treasury Henry Paulson told us that "this is all about the American taxpayer – that's all we care about". But when I flipped the page on my morning paper, I came across the latest gloomy statistic which Americans should care more about. "As of Wednesday evening, 4,162 US service members and 11 Defence Department civilians had been identified as having died in the Iraq war." By grotesque mischance, $700bn – the cost of George Bush's Wall Street rescue cash – is about the same figure as the same President has squandered on his preposterous war in Iraq, the war we have now apparently "won" thanks to the "surge" – for which, read "escalation" – in Baghdad. The fact that the fall in casualties coincides with the near-completion of the Shia ethnic cleansing of Sunni Muslims is not part of the story.

Indeed, a strange narrative is now being built into the daily history of America. First we won the war in Afghanistan by overthrowing the evil, terrorist-protecting misogynist Islamist crazies called the Taliban, setting up a democratic government under the exotically dressed Hamid Karzai. Then we rushed off to Iraq and overthrew the evil, terrorist-protecting, nuclear-weaponised, secular Baathist crazies under Saddam, setting up a democratic government under the pro-Iranian Shia Nouri al-Maliki. Mission accomplished. Then, after 250,000 Iraqi deaths – or half a million or a million, who cares? – we rushed back to Kabul and Kandahar to win the war all over again in Afghanistan. The conflict now embraces our old chums in Pakistan, the Saudi-financed, American-financed Interservices Intelligence Agency whose Taliban friends – now attacked by our brave troops inside Pakistani sovereign territory – again control half of Afghanistan.

We are, in fact, now fighting a war in what I call Irakistan. It's hopeless; it's a mess; it's shameful; it's unethical and it's unwinnable and no wonder the Wall Street meltdown was greeted with such relief by Messrs Obama and McCain. They couldn't suspend their campaigns to discuss the greatest military crisis in America's history since Vietnam – but for Wall Street, no problem. The American taxpayer – "that's all we care about". Mercifully for the presidential candidates, they don't have to debate the hell-disaster of Iraq any more, nor US-Israeli relations, nor Exxon or Chevron or BP-Mobil or Shell. George Bush's titanic if mythical battle between good and evil has transmogrified into the conflict between good taxpayers and evil bankers. Phew! No entanglement in the lives and deaths of the people of the Middle East. Until the elections – barring another 9/11 – they are yesterday's men and women.

--MORE--

Related
Define ‘Lacking Credibility’

When the world's largest news organizations toe the line with U.S. officials on highly unpopular government policies, you don't have a press:

you have a Ministry. In its declaration of journalistic ethics, The Associated Press demands, "Anyone who works for the AP . . . must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum." [1]

That has not prevented AP's Baghdad bureau from promoting the belligerent U.S. occupation of Iraq.

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Over 80% of Iraqis want the US to leave Iraq and 60% support attacks on US soldiers and mercenaries (aka "contractors"). A large majority of the US public also want withdrawal (not redeployment and not the fake "winning" strategies of politicians who are always behind the curve).  Get out of Iraq is what most of the world wants the US to do.  Polls show Bush with the lowest approval ratings ever (in the twentys).  Some call it Bush's war but it is also becoming clearer (at least on the internet though not in mainstream media) that the war was conceived, planned and managed by a neoconservative cabal that has taken full control of the US executive branch.   Their inspiration is the right wing elements in Israel and their goal is nothing short of subverting the US to serve what they perceive as Israeli interests.  There is overwhelming evidence of  organic links between the war on Iraq and the war on Palestine (evidence suppressed in the media by those who believe Israel must continue to dominate and oppress Palestinians and deny their internationally recognized rights including the right of refugees to return to their homes and lands).

To me the most interesting misinformation disseminated both among some in the left and the right is that US foreign policy in Iraq and in supporting Israel’s destruction of Palestine are merely related to US “strategic interests.” They may differ in their formulation of the main US “interests”, but you hear the same argument from leftists like Noam Chomsky and Stephen Zunes and rightists like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.  This mistaken notion in fact was pushed and articulated by the Israeli lobby and Israeli apologists in the media for decades well before neocons and some leftists adopted it.  The Israeli lobby in Washington was never monolithic and new that to be effective it had to get into both major parties in the US.  The lobby knew that the best way to advance closer working relationship with the right would be that Israel is a good and willing “tool” for advancing US interests.  Such a formulation helps deflect criticism from patriotic Americans who worry about the growing influence of this lobby.  On the other side, left leaning Zionists wanted to work with a democratic left that occasionally complained  about “US Imperialism” and corporate interests.  In that case, it was easier to claim Israel helps US public interests or that Israel is a democratic ally.  When push comes to shove, even Zionists on the left would deflect any critique of the Zionist lobby claiming that criticism should be solely directed to the masters (corporate or other elites) who merely “use” Israel as a tool.  

Senator Fullbright, Congressman Paul Findley, Jesse Jackson, Admiral Moorer, Jeff Blankfort, Alison Weir, and hundreds of others have articulated in books and articles why the Israeli lobby’s formulation (whether cast in left or right angles) is at best misleading and at worse false and dangerous.   Clearly, those conscientious critics come at it from very different angles.  Some argued that elites and those in power in the US can and have used Israel occasionally as a gopher but that this was a net loss for US elite interests.  Israel’s role as intermediary in the Iran Contra scandal is now well known even though at the time, congressional record referred simply to a “third country”.  It is also well known that Congressional prohibition on assassination and other basic human rights violations by US forces are “bypassed” by the executive branch relying on Israel to do so.  But could such tasks have been accomplished by other puppet countries even cheaper and without hurting US interests in the Arab and Islamic world? 

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PDF

Added: September 16, 2007

John McCain thinks MoveOn's 3.3 million members should "get out of this country" because of a newspaper ad criticizing the war. This guy wants to be president? Are other politicians condemning this statement?

September 23, 2008, 15:17

U.S. funds sent from Iraq to al-Qaeda - source

A former Iraqi investigator said more then $US13 billion of the money allocated for reconstruction projects in Iraq was wasted or stolen, with some of it ending up in al-Qaeda’s coffers.


Salam Adhoob, a former chief investigator for Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity – which U.S. officials call Iraq’s equivalent of the FBI – was reporting to the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, an arm of the Democratic caucus.

He said many of the projects funded by the U.S. ‘were not needed, and many were never built’ like an electricity project in Nineveh province that an oversight agency found ‘existed only on paper’, reports the Washington Post newspaper.

Embezzlement schemes were widely used for arms procurement, according to Adhoob. In one case Iraqi Defence ministry officials helped set up two front companies to buy combat vehicles and other equipment with $1.7 billion in U.S. funds. The companies were paid, but for some items only ‘a small percentage’ of the order was delivered

--MORE--

Opinion

By Paul Findley and Don Fraser

September 22, 2008

The House Foreign Affairs Committee is conducting hearings on proposals to amend the War Powers Act of 1973. One proposal, House Joint Resolution 53, would wisely tighten restrictions on executive war-making by the president. Another, proposed by a 12-member commission led by two former secretaries of State -- Republican James Baker and Democrat Warren Christopher -- but not yet introduced as a bill, would dangerously expand the authority of the president to order acts of war without authorization by Congress. Baker and Christopher are scheduled to testify before Congress on Wednesday about their proposal.

The framers of the Constitution agreed that the president should be commander in chief of land and naval forces, but -- deeply concerned over the gravity of war and as a safeguard against hasty and needless hostilities with foreign nations -- they agreed that Congress should have the prerogative to "declare" or authorize war. The framers meant to prohibit the president from waging war without a declaration of war or specific authorization by Congress, except when necessary to repel attacks on American territory or commerce, its military or citizens. TheBaker-Christopher proposal assaults this crucial prohibition.

In recent history, an unauthorized presidential war brought calamity to the United States. Ambiguity in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 was used as a pretext for executive war-making in Vietnam not intended by Congress. That war was unjustifiable from a military or geopolitical standpoint.

--MORE--

Texas Straight Talk

A weekly column

 

On September 10, 2002  I asked 35 questions regarding war with Iraq. The war resolution passed on October 16, 2002.  Now today, as some of my colleagues try to reestablish credentials regarding spending restraint, I want to call attention to my 18th question from six years ago:

“Are we willing to bear the economic burden of a 100 billion dollar war against Iraq, with oil prices expected to skyrocket and further rattle an already shaky American economy?  How about an estimated 30 year occupation of Iraq that some have deemed necessary to "build democracy" there?”

Many scoffed at my “radical” predictions at the time, regarding them as hyperbole.  Six years later, I am forced to admit that I was wrong.  My “radical” predictions were in fact, not “radical” enough. 

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By Mary Rizzo • Sep 22nd, 2008 at 20:06 • Category: Analysis, Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Israel, Mary's Choice, Newswire, War, Zionism

WRITTEN BY RON ANDREAS

Unlike the Western oil majors, the militant Zionist proponents of greater Israel view stability and peace in the Middle East as inimical to their goals. Chaos and strife create the “revolutionary atmosphere” (as Ben Gurion one of the key founders of the state of Israel put it) in which more land and water resources can be taken under their control. This fact explains the motive behind the ceaseless provocations and destabilization that the Israeli military and secret services perpetrate.

The “iron wall” policy established by Ze’ev Jabotinsky prior to the founding of the Jewish state requires the expulsion of Christian and Muslim Arabs from Palestine. Such a goal requires war or other violent means. David Ben Gurion stated, “What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times; and if at this time the opportunity is missed and what is possible in such great hours is not carried out . . . a whole world is lost.” This reality, of the necessity for violent upheaval to achieve Zionist aims, exposes which party is the true aggressor in the Middle East.

Ralph Schoenman writes that the goal of capturing the “promised land” requires “Israel to bring about the dissolution and fragmentation of the Arab states into a mosaic of ethnic groupings.” This strategy has been put forward by Oded Yinon (an Israeli journalist with links to the Israeli Foreign Ministry) in 1982 in the World Zionist Organization’s publication Kivunim. Here’s what Oded Yinon had to say on Iraq:

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Making Monsters For My Friends
By: Spencer Ackerman Tuesday September 23, 2008 10:33 am

Matt Duss has a great Wonk Room post catching George Bush pressuring Nouri al-Maliki to delay U.S. withdrawal from Iraq to save John McCain's ass. Here's what Maliki said:

Actually, the final date was really the end of 2010 and the period between the end of 2010 and the end of 2011 was for withdrawing the remaining troops from all of Iraq, but they [the Bush administration] asked for a change [in date] due to political circumstances related to the domestic situation [in the US] so it will not be said to the end of 2010 followed by one year for withdrawal but the end of 2011 as a final date. Agreement has been reached on this issue. They are willing to respond positively because they, too, are facing a critical situation.

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When Refusing to Kill Has a Higher Sentence Than Murder

Saturday 20 September 2008

by: Ann Wright, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

An American soldier pauses before heading out to patrol near Tikrit, Iraq. According to Ann Wright, soldiers may be more severely punished for refusing to kill than for killing the wrong person. (Photo: AFP / Getty Images)

From the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States military has come under intense criticism and scrutiny for the deaths of civilians. This week, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan to "acknowledge" the deaths of innocent civilians in attacks in those countries.

In the five and one-half years of the US occupation of Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed by US military personnel at checkpoints, during convoy movements and during operations to find the "enemy." In the half-decade of US military presence in Iraq, a very small number of US military personnel and an even smaller number of CIA and contractors have been charged with manslaughter or murder in these deaths. The deaths of most civilians are counted in the "costs of war." A few dozen military have been court-martialed on allegations of mistreatment, manslaughter and murder of Iraqi civilians. With a very few exceptions, most who were court-martialed have been acquitted. Those who were convicted have generally served light sentences.

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