Stephen Lendman

Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot, The New York Times headlining:

"Kennedy is Dead, Victim of Assassin; Suspect, Arab Immigrant, Arraigned; Johnson Appoints Panel on Violence"

Sirhan Sirhan was the alleged assassin, convicted, and serving a life sentence at (no pun intended) Pleasant Valley State Prison, CA, despite convincing evidence of his innocence.

In his October 17, 2008 article "The Assassinations of the 1960s as 'Deep Events,' " Peter Dale Scott discussed the killings of both Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, saying:

"The more that I look at these deep events comparatively, ranging over the past five decades, the more similarities I see between them, and the more I understand them in the light of each other."

With respect to both Kennedys and King, official accounts obscured the events, suppressed key facts, enough to question the guilt of the alleged suspects, concealing the real culprits and why men of this stature were assassinated - what Scott called "some continuing and hostile force within our society..."

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Matthew Nasuti

A wounded U.S. soldier receives first aid inside a bunker in Bargematal,
Afghanistan, on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009. (Photo: Oleg Popov / Reuters)

[Part 1] "American soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen face the worst of two worlds. First, they continue to be supplied with cheap and substandard equipment (which has become a Pentagon tradition), while military contractors and war profiteers linked to Administration officials become rich. Second, when they are injured, their courage and actions are not recognized. Their injuries are many times not treated or acknowledged, and they are abandoned by the country they risked everything to protect. It is a shameful spectacle."

In Afghanistan, the light at the end of the tunnel is an exploding Taliban IED. The Pentagon has been given nine years to win its war and it has failed to do so. Last week the American public was given a status report by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who told Time Magazine that he is “pretty confident” that in six months the U.S. military will have made “sufficient progress” in the war.

This vague and hardly inspiring characterization (in which the Secretary commits to nothing) sets the stage for December 2010, at which time the military will cherry-pick positive news, as it minimalizes the bad news. The resulting concoction will be trumpeted as “progress.”

In order to continue to prosecute its lackluster war efforts and to deflect criticism regarding the competence of the military’s general officer corps, the Pentagon long ago realized that casualty rates had to be kept low. As they did not remain low, the statistics were adjusted. The procedure is simple. The Pentagon does not count 95% of the injured soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen as casualties. “Fudging the numbers” was adopted as the solution. All that matters is that Congress continues to fund the Pentagon’s wars.

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William Dalrymple

As Washington and London struggle to prop up a puppet government over which Hamid Karzai has no control, they risk repeating the blood-soaked 19th-century history of Britain’s imperial defeat.

In 1843, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain, Reverend G R Gleig, wrote a memoir about the First Anglo-Afghan War, of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote, "a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has Britain acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated."

It is difficult to imagine the current military adventure in Afghanistan ending quite as badly as the First Afghan War, an abortive experiment in Great Game colonialism that slowly descended into what is arguably the greatest military humiliation ever suffered by the west in the Middle East: an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world utterly routed and destroyed by poorly equipped tribesmen, at the cost of £15m (well over £1bn in modern currency) and more than 40,000 lives. But nearly ten years on from Nato's invasion of Afghanistan, there are increasing signs that Britain's fourth war in the country could end with as few political gains as the first three and, like them, terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government that the war was launched to overthrow.

Certainly it is becoming clearer than ever that the once-hated Taliban, far from being swept away by General Stanley McChrystal's surge, are instead regrouping, ready for the final act in the history of Hamid Karzai's western-installed puppet government.

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David Ray Griffin

I wish to thank Tod Fletcher and Elizabeth Woodworth for considerable help with this essay.

There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be "Obama's Vietnam."1 This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.

Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the "lessons of Vietnam"? The US government learned one: If you're going to fight unpopular wars, don't have a draft hire mercenaries!

There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?

This question has thus far been considered off-limits, not to be raised in polite company, and certainly not in the mainstream media. It has been permissible, to be sure, to ask whether the war during the past several years has been justified by those attacks so many years ago. But one has not been allowed to ask whether the original invasion was justified by the 9/11 attacks.

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Anne McClintock

In the Gulf, the forever spill has become the forever war. A calamity of untold magnitude is unfolding and, alongside it, a strange militarization has emerged, as the language for managing the crisis becomes the language of war.

War-talk is firing from the mouths of local officials, TV pundits, the Coast Guard and journalists. Campaigning frantically to protect Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal urges the TV cameras:

“We need to see that this is a war….a war to save Louisiana…a war to protect our way of life.”

Billy Nungesser, indefatigable President of the Plaquemines Parish, implores anyone who will listen:

“We will fight this war….We will persevere to win this war.”

For Ragin Cajun, Democratic strategist, James Carville:

“This is literally a war... this is an invasion…We need to hear someone say ‘We’ll fight them on the beaches….”

Retired Gen. Russell Honore, who oversaw the Katrina debacle, insists:

“We need to act like this is World War 3. Treat this like it’s an invasion...equal to what we decided about terrorists. We’ve got to find the oil and kill it.”

Find the oil and kill it? This is truly strange talk, this talk of war and killing oil. Even President Obama tried to fire up the nation by invoking 9/11, couching the spill as an invasion, a siege, an attack by terrorists. The militarization of the disaster has become the invisible norm, so much so that it is hard to see how misplaced and dangerous the analogy to war actually is.

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Stephen Lendman

Ongoing Ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem- Home demolition in Beit Safafa /
Nettoyage ethnique a Jerusalem- Demolition de maison a Beit Safafa
(Chroniques de Palestine)

First the good.

On June 22, the International Middle East Media Center reported that the UN Human Rights Council (that established the Goldstone Commission) approved "forming an international committee to probe the deadly Israeli" Flotilla attack, massacring and injuring dozens of nonviolent activists on board. Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak urged Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to shelve it, saying:

"We expressed our view that for the time being, as long as....new flotillas are in the preparation, it's probably better to leave (an investigation) on the shelf for a certain time" - in other words, postpone it long enough to forget, letting Israel's self-examination whitewash top officials' culpability, a vain hope given world outrage, mushrooming toward universally branding Israel a pariah rogue state.

The Human Rights Council (HRC) said committee officials will include lawyers and international law and human rights experts, the body to present its findings in September.

The European Campaign Against the Siege said the International Committee will contact Israel, Greece, Turkey, and the Freedom Flotilla coalition. It will also visit Gaza and urge Tel Aviv's cooperation, what wasn't given the Goldstone Commission, nor will be this time. However, with or without it, the investigation will proceed, exposing Israel's culpability.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Our petulant president’s ego can’t handle a general letting off steam. Neither can any of the spoiled children who comprise “our” government in DC, the capital of the “superpower.”

Generals have to fight wars that civilians start, either from the incompetence of their diplomacy or the arrogance of their hubris. Generals have to get young troops killed because of the stupidity or ambition or corruption of civilian government officials.

All McChrystal did was to let off steam. A real president would have realized that and let it go.

Don’t get me wrong. McChrystal is a militarist, and I am pleased to see him gone.

However, McChrystal didn’t restart America’s aggression against Afghanistan. The Obama moron did.

People elected Obama, because they were tired of Bush’s wars based on lies. So Obama gave us a new war in Pakistan and reignited the Afghan war. No one knows what these wars are about or why the bankrupt US government is wasting vast sums of money, which it has to borrow from foreigners, in order to murder the citizenry in two countries that have never done anything to us.

Just as Bush/Cheney and their criminal neocon government deceived the world that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” that threatened white people everywhere, Obama has conflated the Taliban with al Qaeda. Obama has sold the tale to white countries that unless the US determines how Afghanistan is ruled and by whom, white people are in danger of being exterminated by al Qaeda Taliban terrorists.

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Uri Avnery

NIGHT. UTTER darkness. Heavy rain. Visibility close to nil.

And suddenly – a flash of lightning. For a fraction of a second, the landscape is lit up. For this split second, the terrain surrounding us can be seen. It is not the way it used to be.

OUR GOVERNMENT’ action against the Gaza aid flotilla was such a lightning flash.

Israelis normally live in darkness as far as seeing the world is concerned. But for that instant, the real landscape around us could be seen, and it looked frightening. Then the darkness settled down over us, Israel returned to its bubble, the world disappeared from view.

This split second was enough to reveal a dismal scene. On almost all fronts, the situation of the State of Israel has worsened since the last flash of lightning.

The flotilla and the attack on it did not create this landscape. It has been there since our present government was set up. But the deterioration did not start even then. It began a long time before.

The action of Ehud Barak & Co. only lit up the situation as it is now, and gave it yet another push in the wrong direction.

How does the new landscape look in the light of Barak’s barak? (“barak” means lightning in Hebrew.)

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Denis Rancourt

Analysis of a temper tantrum gone viral

“When Liberal Party heavyweight Allan Rock took over as president at the University of Ottawa this September [2008], many wondered what would be in store for Denis Rancourt.” ~ Jesse Freeston, journalist [1]

“We conclude that the charges advanced against Denis Rancourt are a contrived pretext, that they are preposterous as reasons to summarily remove a tenured professor, and that, therefore, the real reasons must lie elsewhere.” ~ Members of College and University Workers United [2]

“I have been following, with interest, the case of Marc Kelly - an under-graduate at the University of Ottawa who appears to be the victim of an outrageous vendetta brought against him by the President of that University, Allan Rock.” ~ blogger (sophos) [3]

It is difficult to know how decisions are made because hierarchical institutions do everything they can to hide their true inner workings.

Nonetheless the chronology of events and the leakages of some documents allow one to advance plausible versions.

Until Rock became president of the University of Ottawa in 2008, the previous administration, starting in 2005, was involved only in relatively moderate schemes to contain me as a radical physics professort in my incessant applications of pedagogical advances and social justice and community outreach practices.

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Gilad Atzmon

Info about the Book of Esther

A few weeks ago the Jewish Chronicle published a list of Jewish MPs in the UK parliament. It named 24 in total, encompassing 12 Conservatives, 10 Labour, and two Liberal Democrats. Author and peace activist Stuart Littlewood elaborated on these figures and presented the following analysis:

“The Jewish population in the UK is 280,000 or 0.46 per cent. There are 650 seats in the House of Commons so, as a proportion, Jewish entitlement is only three seats. The conclusion is pretty obvious. With 24 seats, Jews are eight times over-represented. Which means, of course, that other groups must be under-represented, including Muslims…If Muslims, for instance, were over-represented to the same extent as the Jews (i.e. eight times) they’d have 200 seats. All hell would break loose.”

A question must be raised here. Why are Jews overwhelmingly over-represented in the British parliament, in British and American political pressure groups, in political fundraising and in the media?

Haim Saban, the Israeli-American, multibillionaire media mogul offers the answer. The New Yorker reported this week that at a conference last fall, Saban described his pro-Israeli formula, outlining “three ways to be influential in American politics...make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets.”

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Stephen Lendman

Two June 2010 decisions show the workings of a right wing High Court, with five Federalist Society members - Chief Justice John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel Alito.

Once confirmed, Elana Kagan will solidify their control when the Court reconvenes in October - her record exposing extremist positions, including outlandish anti-terrorism practices, unconstitutional federal litigation, and "love (for) the Federalist Society," affirming her endorsement of an organization supporting rolling back civil liberties; defiling human rights; ending New Deal social policies; opposing reproductive choice, government regulations, labor rights, and environmental protections; subverting justice in defense of privilege; and as Solicitor General, arguing against First Amendment rights without which all others are at risk - an ideology the Court endorses, one protecting privilege against the rule of law.

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Philip Giraldi

Hitlerization is the price one inevitably pays for criticizing Israel or opposing its policies.

Does anyone remember the movie The Boys from Brazil? It told the story of how a group of top Nazis had moved to Brazil where they made a number of clones of Hitler-as-a-child that were being strategically placed around the world to eventually bring about a Fourth Reich. The movie ended ambiguously, with many of the Hitler children still alive and evidently expected to eventually turn into Hitler adults. The movie makers were clearly on to something because there have been a lot of Hitler sightings by Israel and its friends over the past few years. Saddam Hussein was described as a new Hitler while Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been depicted in even more heinous terms as a reborn Nazi leader preparing a new Holocaust. More recently Israel demonstrators have displayed effigies of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with the hairline altered and a moustache added to create a caricature of Hitler.

The Turkish prime minister’s Hitler-like leanings first appeared when he dared confront Israel’s President Shimon Peres at an international meeting in Davos in January 2009. Referring to the slaughter of Gazan civilians earlier that month, Erdogan told Peres "…you know well how to kill." But if there was any lingering doubt, Erdogan definitely became Hitler through his support of the flotilla that sought to bring aid to Gaza three weeks ago followed by his denunciation of the massacre initiated by Israeli commandos. His diabolical intent was made manifest when he then demanded justice for the nine Turkish citizens who were murdered. Hitlerization is the price one inevitably pays for criticizing Israel or opposing its policies.

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Patrick Martin

The firing of General Stanley McChrystal reveals both the deepening crisis of the US war in Afghanistan, and the openly anti-democratic tendencies brewing within the US military.

The political crisis in Washington, sparked by the publication of inflammatory comments by General Stanley McChrystal, the overall commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, culminated in the firing of McChrystal Wednesday morning and his replacement by General David Petraeus, the former US commander in Iraq.

McChrystal was summoned from Afghanistan to a White House meeting where he submitted his resignation over the publication of a lengthy article in Rolling Stone magazine, in which he and his top aides were quoted making disparaging references to President Obama and nearly all the administration’s top national security officials.

Obama accepted the resignation, and McChrystal left the White House immediately. After three hours of meetings with his national security council and Pentagon brass, Obama appeared before television cameras to announce McChrystal’s ouster and the nomination of Petraeus to succeed him.

In his brief remarks, with no questions allowed from the media, Obama emphasized that he remained fully in support of the program of military escalation and counterinsurgency warfare with which McChrystal is identified. He pledged to do “whatever is necessary to succeed in Afghanistan,” adding, “This is a change in personnel but it is not a change in policy.”

General Petraeus, who was McChrystal’s superior as head of the U.S. Central Command, was closely involved in the administration’s Afghan policy deliberations and fully supported the decision last December to dispatch an additional 30,000 US troops.

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Nahida Izzat
Exiled Palestinian

In his article Alan Hart concludes that after the inevitable failure of the two-state solution there is “only two possible end-game scenarios.”

● Zionist-awakening scenario: “In one Israeli Jews come to their senses and accept that their best and actually only hope for a future with security and peace is the One State solution – a single, democratic state in which all of its citizens, Jews and Arabs, would have equal civil and political rights.”

● Armageddon scenario: “In the other foreseeable end-game scenario….. The anti-Israel outrage of citizens of all faiths and none around the world would be such that the governments of the major powers, including the one in Washington D.C., would be obliged to punish the Zionist state with boycott, sanctions and divestment” In which case the zionists threaten the world to take it down with them if they go down.

In other words Mr. Hart is telling us that the Palestinians and the world have no option but to gently and tactfully deal with zionists, otherwise any pressure on “israel” even through boycott and sanctions will cause the world demise. Therefore, in his opinion, all what the Palestinians and the world can do is to “un-brainwash” the zionists, to keep trying to “educate” them and work at healing their psychologically messed-up minds, their collective “insanity” or else… it’s Armageddon!! This is clear cut blackmail to the world.

Alan Hart conveniently omits the third scenario; namely, the Palestinian scenario.

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Georg Hodel
(Originally published Jan. 7, 1999)

[Robert Parry: Journalist Georg Hodel, who died Sunday in Switzerland, was not afraid to take on complex stories that delved back into history to make sense of today’s events, such as this article about Evita Peron and the escape of Nazi war criminals to Argentina:]

On June 6, 1947, Argentina's first lady Eva Peron left for a glittering tour of Europe.

The glamorous ex-actress was feted in Spain, kissed the ring of Pope Pius XII at the Vatican and hobnobbed with the rich-and-famous in the mountains of Switzerland.

Eva Peron, known as "Evita" by her adoring followers, was superficially on a trip to strengthen diplomatic, business and cultural ties between Argentina and important leaders of Europe.

But there was a parallel mission behind the high-profile trip, one that has contributed to a half century of violent extremism in Latin America.

According to records now emerging from Swiss archives and the investigations of Nazi hunters, an unpublicized side of Evita's world tour was coordinating the network for helping Nazis relocate in Argentina.

This new evidence of Evita's cozy ties with prominent Nazis corroborates the long-held suspicion that she and her husband, Gen. Juan Peron, laid the groundwork for a bloody resurgence of fascism across Latin America in the 1970s and '80s.

Besides blemishing the Evita legend, the evidence threatens to inflict more damage on Switzerland's image for plucky neutrality. The international banking center is still staggering from disclosures about its wartime collaboration with Adolf Hitler and Swiss profiteering off his Jewish victims. The archival records indicate that Switzerland's assistance to Hitler's henchmen didn't stop with the collapse of the Third Reich.

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