Ray McGovern

When soldiers die, the politicians who sent them to their deaths typically use euphemisms and circumlocutions — like “lost,” “fallen,” or “ultimate sacrifice.” On one level, the avoidance of blunt language can be seen as a sign of respect, but on another, it is just one more evasion of responsibility for the snuffing out of young lives.

There has been unusually wide (and for the most part supportive) reaction to my article of Aug. 9 (“They Died in Vain; Deal With It“) on the killing of 30 American troops when their helicopter was shot down over Afghanistan [during one night recently]. One website posting the article clocked 181 comments; scanning through them, I found many substantive, helpful ones.

Let me share one telling comment, which seemed to me particularly — if sadly — apt:

“Two lemmings are chatting while standing in the line to the cliff. One says to the other, ‘Of course we have to go over the edge. Anything else would dishonor all the lemmings that have gone before us.’”

And so it goes, thought I, with our lemming in chief (LIC) Barack Obama … and those who lemmingly follow him.

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Gilad Atzmon

Ibrahim (12 year old) and Mohammed (will be 15 in 2 days) are cousins.

They were playing on the street in front of their house an hour before Iftar during the fast of Ramadan on August 19th 2011, as Israel was sporadically bombing Gaza.

An unknown person in a control room kilometers away from them launched a missile from the drone flying over their heads. The result was devastating. Words cannot express the catastrophe and the anguish for the boys and their family. After ten days in al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, they were transferred to an Israeli hospital for a much needed medical treatment which is unavailable in Gaza.

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Chris Floyd

They don’t want a system. They want to keep that turf as a fixed post -- then, whenever the government becomes weak, they want to say, ‘We control here.’

For days, weeks on end, we have been bombarded with earnest disquisitions on the “meaning” of 9/11, its implications for America and the world ten years down the line. Oceans of newsprint and blizzards of pixels have been expended on this question. But in all the solemn piety and savvy punditry surrounding the commemoration of the attacks, almost nothing has been said about the place where the true “legacy of 9/11” can be seen in its stark quintessence: Somalia.

That long-broken land is, in so many ways, a hell of our own creation. Year by year, stage by stage, American policy has helped drive Somalia ever deeper into the pit. Millions of people have been plunged into anguish; countless thousands have lost their lives. It seems unimaginable that the situation could get even worse – and yet that is precisely where we are today: on the precipice of yet another horrific drop into the abyss.

By now it should go without saying that the Nobel Peace Laureate in the White House has continued, entrenched and expanded his predecessor's failed and corrupt policies in Somalia, as he has in so many parts of the degraded American imperium. And it is in Somalia that our serious, savvy bipartisan elite -- and their innumerable enablers on both sides of the political fence -- are building up what may turn out to be the mother of all blowbacks: generations of implacable hatred sprung from unfathomable suffering, inflicted on innocent people by vicious warlords in the pay of the CIA, by America's own death squads ranging through the land, and by the entirely predictable (indeed, predicted) extremist insurgencies that arise in the chaos our elites create in their imperial marauding. Here, if anywhere, is the true legacy of 9/11.

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Boris Dolgov

The Syrian crisis is being actively affected from abroad. Various reports confirm that there is a plan aimed to divide Syria into several parts, with some areas annexed to Turkey, the Golan Heights going to Israel, and probably separate Kurdish and Druze territorial entities…

Anti-government protests in Syria have added more fuel to the fire of the Arab Spring.The unrest broke out in March, 2011, in the city of Daraa on the Israel-Jordan border, and soon spread to other districts, turning into clashes with the army.

On Match 29th tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Aleppo, Latakia, Homs and Hama to express their support to President Bashar Assad. However, the anti-government protests continued, mainly in areas bordering Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, and grew even tenser. The bloodiest incidents took place in Jisral-Shughour with the population of 50,000, on the Turkish border: then some 120 police and army officers were killed. Some 10,000 residents of Jisral-Shughour fled their homes toward the Turkish border, fearing bloodshed as troops with tanks approached, under orders to hit back after the government accused armed bands there of killing its security men. Some of the refugees, however, returned home soon afterward.

As a member of the Russian delegation visiting Syria on 20-24 August, I could see the photos of the service men killed in Jisral-Shughour – many of the bodies were quartered and burnt. Witnesses said a group of armed men attacked cars 100 km outside Damascus, pulled out drivers and passengers and started beating them if the cars were decorated with Assad`s portraits or any other symbols of his regime.

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Bill Van Auken

Gen. Carter Ham, Pentagon’s Africa Command:

“The question for us now is how do we sustain that ["dropping bombs and Tomahawks, those kind of things"] so that if we would have to do this again, we’d start at a higher plateau.”

With their surprise visit to Tripoli Thursday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron signaled that the scramble by the major powers for control of Libya’s oil wealth is in full swing.

The visit was unannounced and conducted under a massive security blanket. It included a brief visit to a Tripoli hospital and a joint press conference with Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the former Gaddafi justice minister who heads up the NATO-backed National Transitional Council, and Mahmoud Jibril, the US-trained economist and former Gaddafi official designated as the NTC’s “prime minister”.

Afterwards, the Sarkozy, Cameron and the chiefs of the NTC all left the Libyan capital under heavy guard for the eastern city of Benghazi, where the NTC leaders have said they will stay until the fighting with Gaddafi loyalists in several key cities is over.

The hasty departure from Tripoli suggested that neither NATO nor its Libyan clients are confident about security in the capital under conditions in which battles are still raging for control of the coastal city of Sirte and Bani Walid, about 90 miles southeast of the capital.

Undoubtedly even more troubling for Cameron’s and Sarkozy’s security details is growing evidence that the NTC’s control of Tripoli is tenuous at best. Islamist elements leading militias patrolling the capital’s streets have denounced the NTC leadership, calling for its resignation.

In his speech in Tripoli, Cameron stressed that the NATO war on the country would continue. “There are still parts of Libya under Gaddafi’s control, Gaddafi is still at large, and we must make sure this work is completed,” said Cameron. “We must keep up with the NATO mission until civilians are all protected and this work is finished.”

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Paul Craig Roberts

As an economist I have never had much patience with Paul Krugman’s economics, stuck as he is in 1940s-era Keynesian demand-side economics. I have sometimes concluded that Krugman had rather denounce Ronald Reagan that to acknowledge that supply-side economists have established that fiscal policy has supply-side, not just demand-side, effects.

However, Krugman does display at times a moral conscience. He did so on September 11 in his New York Times column, “The Years of Shame.” Krugman wrote that 9/11 was hijacked by “fake heros” who used the event “to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight” and that “our professional pundits” lent their support to the misuse of the event.

The stuck pigs, of course, squealed loudly. The war criminal, Donald Rumsfeld, publicly cancelled his New York Times subscription, and the complicit presstitutes in Washington’s wars of aggression jumped on Krugman with spikes and hatchets.

Perhaps Krugman meant to use the plural and say “unrelated wars.” The US government has made war on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, resulting in massive destruction of homes, infrastructure, and lives of civilians, all in the name of one lie or the other. In addition, the US government is conducting military operations against the populations of three more Muslim countries--Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, with extensive loss of civilian life in Pakistan, a US ally. Drones are sent in week after week that blow up schools, medical centers, and farm communities, and each time Washington announces that they have killed “militants,” “al Qaeda,” “Taliban leaders.”

Thanks to what Krugman calls “our professional pundits” and Gerald Celente calls “presstitutes,” the American people know little if anything about the murder of countless civilians and displacement of millions of others in these six Muslim countries, which the Bush/Obama governments regard as “security threats,” or habitats of small elements that are “security threats,” to the single super-power.

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Ellen Brown

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

So went the anti-Vietnam War protest song popularized by Edwin Starr in 1970 and revived by Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s.

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.

After 9/11, the pop hit “War” was placed on the list of post-9/11 inappropriate titles distributed by Clear Channel.

Protesters have been trying to stop the military 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?

The answer may involve our individualistic, laissez-faire brand of capitalism, which forbids the government to compete with private business except in cases of “national emergency.” The problem is that private business needs the government to get money into people’s pockets and stimulate demand. The process has to start somewhere, and government has the tools to do it. But in our culture, any hint of “socialism” is anathema. The result has been a state of “national emergency” has had to be declared virtually all of the time, just to get the government’s money into the economy.

Other avenues being blocked, the productive civilian economy has been systematically sucked into the non-productive military sector, until war is now our number one export. War is where the money is and where the jobs are. The United States has been turned into a permanent war economy and military state.

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John Pilger

[A rebel takes cover from mortar shelling in an unfinished mosque on the outskirts of Libya’s western city of Sabratha (AFP)]

The British press celebrates the triumph of Libya’s “rebel” forces. And the British arms industry toasts its continued success in expanding its markets in the Middle East.

On 13 September, one of the world's biggest arms fairs opens in London, backed by the British government. On 8 September, the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry held a preview entitled "Middle East: a Vast Market for UK Defence and Security Companies". The host was the Royal Bank of Scotland, a major investor in cluster bombs. According to Amnesty International, 98 per cent of the victims of cluster bombs are civilians and 30 per cent children. RBS has received £20bn in public money. The blurb for the bank's arms party read: "The Middle East is one of the regions with the greatest number of opportunities for UK defence and security companies. Saudi Arabia . . . is the world's top defence importer, having spent $56bn in 2009 . . . a very worthwhile region to target."

Such are the Cameron government's priorities following the great "humanitarian" victory in Libya. As Margaret Thatcher once declared: "Rejoice!" And as the bankers and arms merchants raise their glasses, let us not forget the heroic RAF pilots who made Libya ours again by incinerating countless "pro-Gaddafi elements" in their homes and cots and clinics, and the unsung stalwarts of the British drone industry at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire who, before and after lunch, provide the information for targets so that Hellfire missiles can flatten homes and suck the air out of lungs. And cheers to QinetiQ's drone testing site at Aberporth and at UAV Engines Limited in Lichfield.

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Peter Symonds

[French President Nicolas Sarkozy, right, welcomes Libyan National Transitional Council chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil, center, and Libyan Transitional National Council Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril, left,at the Elysee Palace in Paris, Thursday, Sept.1, 2011. Heads of state and top officials gather in Paris to work out how to support Libya's opposition leaders after Gadhafi's fall from power.]

The espousal of vigilantism by the man likely to be the next prime minister is the sharpest indication of the draconian measures that the NATO-installed regime will employ to deal with any political opposition.

The military push by Libya’s NATO-backed National Transitional Council (NTC) to take control of the remaining pro-Gaddafi strongholds appears to have stalled. NTC militias have encountered strong resistance in their advances on Bani Walid, about 150 kilometres south-east of Tripoli, and coastal city of Sirte, the birthplace of ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The NTC had set a deadline of last Saturday to allow for negotiations with local tribal leaders over the terms of a possible surrender. After talks failed, the first probing attacks began but were driven back. The NTC yesterday announced another two-day deadline and called on residents of Bani Walid to leave the town. The siege of the town has resulted in severe shortages of water, food and medicines.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that at least 80 anti-Gaddafi fighters had been killed during attacks on Bani Walid and Sirte over the past few days. Having encountered resistance, the NTC has presented a rather inflated picture of the military strength of Gaddafi loyalists. “Its cities are packed with weapons, missiles and ammunition depots. It is an unbelievable force,” Fadl-Allah Haroon, a militia commander, told the Associated Press.

NATO warplanes have continued to pound pro-Gaddafi strongholds. Over the four days to Tuesday, the NATO website reported that more than 450 missions had been flown involving 175 strikes, including on targets near Sirte, Bani Walid and Sabha, a town in the country’s south controlled by pro-Gaddafi forces. CNN yesterday reported clashes as a convoy of some 500 NTC fighters moved south toward Sabha.

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Stephen Lendman

In their minds, even a fig leaf is too much. Only Israeli interests matter. Palestinians must accept their status as powerless occupied people and shut up.

With the moment of truth arriving next week, rhetoric from both sides suggests Palestinians again will lose out.

Instead of an advocate representing them in New York, a collaborationist apparently will show up. Public statements and body language say so.

What could at last be looks likely to be denied. Instead of a new beginning, betrayal appears in the cards.

It's almost no exaggeration saying the fix is in. What'll finally emerge will be portrayed as a Palestinian win. In reality, it'll be defeat - a worthless half loaf in place of what's easily within reach.

With more than enough international support backed by international law at a time Israeli and US influence are weaker, a golden chance is slip-siding away.

The daily soap opera continues. Here's the latest.

On September 14, Haaretz writer Avi Issacharoff headlined, "Palestinians trying to dodge pre-UN vote face-off with Obama," saying:

"Next week, intense negotiations will be undertaken between the European Union, the PA and the American government regarding the specific formula of the request for Palestinian statehood recognition."

The "specific formula" says it all. Only an easily attainable one delivers statehood and full de jure UN membership. Anything less continues status quo betrayal.

Instead of going for it with overwhelming support, bet on Abbas petitioning only for reshuffling the deck chairs, leaving status quo denial in place.

Apparently he's less concerned about justice than embarrassing Washington, if Obama followed through with his threatened Security Council veto. Bet on it, and it won't be long before it's known.

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Stephen Lendman

America's First Amendment guarantees free assembly. No matter. Demonstrators for social, economic and political justice are assaulted and arrested.

For weeks, hundreds of peaceful environmental protesters in front of the White House against a controversial 1,661-mile Alberta, Canada to Port Arthur, TX pipeline have been arrested for exercising their constitutional rights - whatever the issue.

This one's important, involving TransCanada Corporation's history of spills, as well as plans to transport toxic oil from environmentally destructive tar sands.

Nonetheless, Obama backs construction to feed America's dirty oil appetite. To hell with environmental sanity and public health.

Friends of the Earth says the Keystone XL pipeline "will carry one of the world's dirtiest fuels: tar sands oil." Moreover, its route "could devastate ecosystems and pollute water sources, and would jeopardize public health."

If completed, the pipeline will double dirty tar sands oil into America, making its toxic environment more noxious. Bipartisan Washington criminals support it. So does Obama. Only profits and corporate favoritism matter. The public interest be damned as on so many other issues.

Angry protesters reacted peacefully. Their reward - arrests and for some roughed up. It's the same fate global justice, anti-war, and other demonstrators at times face. Too many times, in fact.

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Stephen Lendman

Borrowing the opening line from Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities:"

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...."

He referred to the French Revolution, promising "liberté, égalité, fraternité." Inspired by America's, it began in 1789, ending 1,000 years of monarchical rule, benefitting the privileged only. A republic replaced it.

That was the good news. The bad was the wrong people took power. The moderate Jacobins lost out to extremists, ushering in a "reign of terror."

Change doesn't always work out, but when intolerable conditions exist, trying for something better is key. It holds for Palestinians wanting freedom from Israel's repressive occupation. Statehood and full de jure UN membership is step one toward it, though no guarantee.

Palestinians have many global supporters, including Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Israeli crimes he opposes drew him closer, and he's not shy about saying it and more.

On September 13, Turkey's Today's Zaman headlined, "Erdoğan calls on Arab nations to unite, raise the Palestinian flag," addressing a Tuesday Arab League meeting in Cairo.

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Gilad Atzmon

[The title of this article alludes to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, first published in 1927. This important and influential philosopher was a Nazi. More recently the philosopher Simon Critchley asked: How did he get there? What can we learn from him? We might do well to keep these questions in mind when we read Gilad Atzmon's articles too.]

(A talk given at the 'Palestine, Israel, Germany- The Boundaries of Open Discussion Conference’, Freiburg 11th September 2011)

Dear ladies and gentlemen.

I will begin my talk with an unusual confession. Though I was born in Israel, in the first thirty years of my life I did not know much about the Nakba, the brutal and racially driven ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in 1948 by the newly born Israeli State. My peers and myself knew about a single massacre, namely, Deir Yassin but we were not at all familiar with the vast scale of atrocities committed by our grandparents. We believed that the Palestinians had voluntarily fled. We were told that they had run away and we did not find any reason to doubt that this had indeed been the case.

Let me tell you that in all my years in Israel, I have never heard the word Nakba spoken. This may sound pathetic, or even absurd to you -- but what about you? Shouldn’t you also ask yourself -- when was the first time you heard the word Nakba? Perhaps you can also try to recall when this word settled comfortably into your lexicon. Let me help you here -- I have carried out a little research amongst my European and American Palestinian solidarity friends, and most of them had only heard the word Nakba for the first time, just a few short years ago, whilst others admitted that they had only started to use the word themselves three or four years ago.

But isn’t that a slightly strange state of affairs? After all, the Nakba took place more than six decades ago. How is it that only recently it found its way into our symbolic order?

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Andy Worthington

Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil

On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Washington Post provided a powerful insight into the human cost of Guantánamo, and the problems created in Afghanistan through the intelligence failures that led to innocent people being seized by mistake, and even through the unforeseen knock-on effects of America’s reconstruction efforts.

In Kabul, Staff writer Ernesto Londoño met two former prisoners, Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil (discussed below) and Haji Shahzada, a village elder in Kandahar province. About 50 years of age, Shahzada, who is a father of six, was seized in a raid on his house in January 2003, with two house guests, and held at Guantánamo for over two years until his release in April 2005.

Shahzada’s story (and that of the men seized with him) was one that had struck me as particularly significant when I was researching my book The Guantánamo Files, as it was a clear demonstration of how easily US forces in Afghanistan were deceived, seizing innocent people after tip-offs from untrustworthy individuals with their own agendas. In Shazada’s case, it has not been confirmed whether the tip-off came from a rival or from members of his family seeking to seize his assets, but the entire mission was a disgrace.

One of the men seized with him, Abdullah Khan, had sold Shahzada a dog, as both men were interested in dog-fighting, but he was regarded by the soldiers involved in the raid (and, subsequently, by US interrogators) as Khairullah Khairkhwa, a senior figure in the Taliban. The problem with this scenario was not only that Khan was not Khairkhwa, but also that Khairkhwa had been in US custody since February 2002 and was held at Guantánamo (where he remains to this day).

In addition, Shahzada, a landowner who had never liked the Taliban, endured numerous aggressive interrogations in which he was obliged to repeat, over and over again, that his friend Khan was not a Taliban commander, and that he had not been supporting the Taliban. He was also particularly eloquent in warning his captors that seizing innocent people like him was a sure way of losing hearts and minds in Afghanistan.

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Adnan Al-Daini

The people of the US and Britain have become victims of the corruption of their democratic institutions that are no longer serving the interests of ordinary people. Democracy as a system of government has been subverted to serve multinational corporations, powerful lobbyists and the military-industrial complex. The corporate media, with some notable exceptions, is recruited to keep the truth from the people and to sanitize endless wars led by the US with Britain acting as its outrider. Public discussions, and the questions asked, are manipulated as if by an invisible hand to leave the ordinary person constrained into accepting solutions that entrench the interests of such groups and enhance their profit margins. These powerful entities that perch above politics are in control regardless of which party or president is in power. If this is not an abuse of democracy, I don't know what is.

John Pilger, in the New Statesman, urges the people to develop a healthy cynicism towards the media thus:

“This acute skepticism, this skill of reading between the lines, is urgently needed in supposedly free societies today. Take the reporting of state-sponsored war. The oldest cliché is that truth is the first casualty of war. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty. Not only that: it has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship that goes unrecognized in the United States, Britain and other democracies; censorship by omission, whose power is such that, in war, it can mean the difference between life and death for people in faraway countries, such as Iraq".

Progressives, and those on the left of politics, need to find the language that resonates with ordinary people, to open their eyes to the corruption that is diminishing their lives and those of future generations. The manipulation of public opinion by the powerful in the US and Britain is corruption. Its aim is to transfer hundreds of billions of tax dollars, from the poor and middle classes, to voracious corporations and the Military-Security-Industrial complex through endless immoral senseless carnage called "the war on terror". 

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