James Cogan

As in previous cases of military abuse, it seems the media will publicly vilify the rank-and-file troops involved in the desecration, but abstain from any commentary—let alone criticism—of the political and military establishment that created the debased climate in which this abuse took place.

A video published yesterday shows four US marines in Afghanistan urinating on the heads of three Afghan dead, joking among themselves as they desecrate the corpses. It will join the litany of images that have provided a glimpse of the inhumanity and brutality with which American soldiers are led to treat the victims of US militarism—in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.

A caption identifies the marines as members of “Scout Sniper Team 4” of the Third Battalion, Second Marine Regiment, which is based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

The 3/2 Marines were last in Afghanistan between March and September 2011, as part of the Obama administration’s “surge” of 33,000 additional US troops, and were deployed in the southern province of Helmand. At least three members of the unit were killed in Helmand in June and July last year. The weather conditions in the video suggest it was also shot during the summer months.

The video—which runs for barely 50 seconds—appears to have been consciously staged, rather than being the recording of a spontaneous act. The corpses, of men aged somewhere between 20 and 40, had been placed in a line. The marines faced the camera in a semi-circle so their desecration was obvious.

There are no AK-47s or other weapons in view that would indicate the dead Afghans were armed combatants. Instead, an overturned wheelbarrow suggests otherwise. The bare feet of one of the deceased are also visible. He had been wearing the sandals typical of a farmer, not the sneakers or boots preferred by insurgents operating in the rugged terrain of southern Afghanistan.

Coming just days after an Afghan government investigation publicly accused the US military of torturing prisoners at the detention centre at Bagram Air Base, the public revelation of more abuses by American forces has provoked fury in the Obama administration. It underscores the criminality of the entire decade-long US occupation, again exposing the official lies according to which US forces are bringing human rights and democracy to Afghanistan.

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Stephen Lendman

Washington and Israel plan regime change in Iran and Syria. Israel wants regional supremacy. Washington wants global hegemony and control of the world's strategic resources. America tolerates no independent states. Making them client ones is prioritized.

Insurgent infiltrators ravaged Syria for months. Libya's model was replicated short of NATO intervention perhaps to follow.

Washington, Israel, and rogue allies use many destabilization tactics. They include fake accusations, political and economic sanctions, isolation, covert and direct confrontation, cyberwar, targeted assassinations, and other provocations short of war perhaps planned.

Accusing Iran of developing nuclear weapons is a red herring. In December 2007, America's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) said:

"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; (perhaps it never existed); we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons..."

The NIE also said:

"We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop (them)."

"Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop (them) than we have been judging since 2005."

In February 2010, America's Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said:

"We do not know....if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons." No evidence of an ongoing program was presented.

In March 2011, the US Intelligence Community Worldwide Threat Assessment for the Senate Armed Services Committee said precisely the same thing. Nothing new suggested an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

In other words, years of sophisticated satellite, covert, and other intelligence showed nothing.

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Stephen Lendman

A breadline somewhere in the Middle East (M. Becherer)

Rosy scenario optimists ignore clear-eyed analysis. Economist Paul Craig Roberts sees hard times getting harder.

His "Dismal Economic Outlook For The New Year" article highlights what media scoundrels and mainstream analysts miss or suppress.

Decades of imperial wars, exporting America's manufacturing base and other high-paying jobs, as well as financial deregulation and corporate/government collusion "severely damaged the US economy and the economic prospects of 90%" of households. They've never had it so bad with worse coming.

It's clear from wealth distribution, unemployment, growing poverty, and millions in need losing their struggle to get by. Homelessness, hunger, lost homes, closed strip malls, empty office buildings and other facilities, "shopping mall vacancies," and "huge population losses in America's" once prosperous manufacturing cities show a nation in decline.

Lower real median income, rising consumer debt, skyrocketing federal levels, banker bailouts, permanent wars, and other wrongheaded policies assure decline and perhaps collapse.

America's economic "recovery" is "all talk and no reality." Manipulated data exaggerate growth, understate unemployment and inflation, and hide pernicious offshoring, insolvent banks, and similar federal debt problems. They also conceal troubled states and cities in crisis.

At the same time, Washington and Wall Street's controlled Fed "ruled out permitting the banks to fail. That leaves inflation," high unemployment, and troubled times coming.

Expect it though guessing when's hard to know. However, reality eventually trumps hope based on false expectations. The "comfortable world" Americans once knew "is falling apart at the seams."

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Adnan Al-Daini

Religious flags of Shiite Imams waves while relative of
Qssim Abbas, 48, who was killed in a bomb attack take
his body for burial in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, 160
kilometers (100 miles) south of Baghdad, Iraq, Friday,
Jan. 6, 2012. (Alaa al-Marjani/Associated Press/SFGate)

In the daily carnage of today’s Iraq, with bombs and shootings targeting the innocent, one is forgiven for feeling despair at the sheer wickedness and inhumanity of these deeds.  In the midst of the misery and carnage, however, an act of heroism and sacrifice that shows the true face of Iraq has passed completely unreported by western media. 

This concerns the suicide attack on Thursday 5 January that targeted Shia pilgrims in Nassiriya, southern Iraq, causing death or injury to over 100 people.  The Arabic newspaper Alhayat (8 January) in a piece entitled “Heroes of Iraqi National Unity – Two Soldiers Attempted to Stop a Suicide Bomber from Exploding Himself”, its journalist, Abd-Alwahid  Jumma, reports the incredible bravery of two members of the Iraqi army, Lieutenant Nuzhan Saleh Al-Jebouri and Sergeant Ali Ahmed Sabih, who, having witnessed someone moving amongst the pilgrims and  acting suspiciously, ran towards the suspect, throwing themselves on him as he exploded his bomb, killing them instantly and causing the carnage. 

The figures for the dead and injured could well have been higher if Nuzhan and Ali had not taken the initial force of the explosion.  The two army personnel were Sunni Muslims from different parts of Iraq. They made the ultimate sacrifice to protect the Shia pilgrims. They acted instinctively to save fellow human beings; Shia or Sunni did not occur to them. 

Western media have covered the story of the carnage and other stories of sectarian violence and intolerance in detail, so why ignore the heroism of the soldiers?  These brave men are the true representatives of the Iraqi people.  Their martyrdom symbolizes the unity of the people in the face of of terrorists targeting the innocent, in the name of a warped and insane interpretation of the noble religion of Islam.

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Eric Walberg

"When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” ~ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871)

The lexicon of Israel and its Western lobbyists constantly needs parsing to know just what is meant. Most glaringly is the term “settlers”, which suggests peaceful pioneers wishing to integrate with the locals. In Israel, the word “settlers” is a loaded term, for they are “aggressive squatters, half a million of them in over 100 illegal colonies — ugly blots on an otherwise lovely landscape ... who terrorise local villagers, vandalise their crops, pollute their land and harass their children,” as described by Stuart Littlewood. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids that an occupying power transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

Most recently we saw casual reference to native Christian and Muslim Palestinians as an “invented people”. US Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich revived this insult, repeating Gold Meir’s quip in 1969 to The Sunday Times. At the time, Israel was basking in its devastating victory in the 1967 war, occupying all of Palestine and Sinai. The eternal Sinai Bedouin are fortunate that Meir didn’t have enough time — or gall — to claim that they too are a mere figment of some anti-Jewish schemer’s imagination. Their cousins in the Negev desert are now being expelled to make way for 10 Jewish settlements “to attract a new population to the Negev”.

Meir was extrapolating on her more famous phrase, also recorded in the same Sunday Times interview, that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land”. Not only is this a cruel lie, one intended to justify theft of a people’s land, but it is a case of plagiarism, as it was Lord Shaftsbury, an early enthusiast of using a Jewish state in the Middle East as an imperial beachhead, who first used the phrase in 1839.

Meir surely knew this, just as she knew that it is not the Palestinians, a people who can trace their heritage back to the time of the Prophet Mohammed or further, but the Israeli people who are the “invented” ones. Israeli citizenship is barely 60 years old, and Israelis are a disparate lot, made up most of East European and Russian immigrants and Arab Jews, most of whom do not share a common language or even religious practice. The Russian immigrants, many of whom are not even Jewish, are defiantly secular.

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