Bill Van Auken & David North

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Ten years ago, the world watched the “shock and awe” bombing campaign light up the nighttime sky of Baghdad with billowing clouds of flame and smoke.

This campaign and the bloody ten years of occupation that followed had a devastating impact on what was once among the most advanced societies in the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and millions were made homeless.

The American military’s conduct of the war produced crimes of staggering dimensions. This included the turning of Fallujah, a city of 350,000 people, into a free-fire zone, the bombarding of its occupants with white phosphorus shells, banned by international law, and the summary execution of wounded prisoners. Ten years later, the rates of child cancer and birth defects in Fallujah are similar to those in Hiroshima following the US atomic bombing.

The leaking of stomach-turning photographs from Abu Ghraib lifted the veil on the barbaric character of the war, which included the systematic use of torture, death squads and sectarian massacres to terrorize the Iraqi population into submission.

People in Iraq continue to die from the sectarian violence unleashed by the war as well as from the destruction of infrastructure that has deprived them of clean water, health care and other essentials of life. One million children under the age of 18 have lost one or both parents, and hundreds of thousands suffer from grievous wounds.

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Stephen Lendman

Israel's Fascist Government [Part I]

On March 18, Israel's new government was sworn in. Doing so hardened fascist rule. A previous article explained. Israelis elected their most extremist government ever. It's hugely over-the-top. It's militantly hardline, racist and unscrupulous. It menaces the region. It supports state-sponsored terrorism, belligerence, neoliberal harshness, and unlimited settlement expansions.

Troika partners rule. Netanyahu remains prime minister. He's an embarrassment to democratic governance. He spurns rule of law principles. He deplores peace. Expect more conflict on his watch.

Yair Lapid emerged a surprise partner. He's more showman than politician. He's more con man than legitimate. He's more demagogue than democrat. He's amateurish, shallow and disingenuous. He's more image and mirage than real. He's a ne-er-do-well wannabe. He's ignorant, callous, uncaring and racist. He's a media personality turned politician.

Naftali Bennett represents settler interests. He's the son of American immigrants. He's one of Israel's super-rich. He heads Habayit Yayehudi. It's Israel's third most powerful party. Earlier he led Israel's Yesha Council. It's a hardline umbrella group. It represents settler interests. It replaced Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful). It replicates its extremism. It's militantly hardline. It's ideologically over-the-top. It's committed to unlimited settlement expansions. It wants Palestinians displaced. It wants Greater Israel exclusively Jewish. Expanding settlements reflects core Israeli policy. Hardline ministers are committed to do so.

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Michael Albert

John Pilger Interviewed by Michael Albert

Michael Albert: 1. As a person very well known for both video work and writing work - I wonder if you could tell us how you got started in each, so people know a bit more about your history.

John Pilger: My journalism began in Australia when I started a newspaper at Sydney High School. It was called 'The Messenger' and I was 12 years old. Or perhaps it began a year or two earlier when I would get up before sunrise to deliver newspapers, only to be chastised by my employer for wasting his time reading them. Journalism certainly helped bring the world to me as I grew up; the antipodes are ruled by a tyranny of distance; I tried to imagine the rest of humanity so far away.

I grew up in Sydney, in what was then quite a poor industrial city, in a family that was considered "political": that is, we were "on the side of the underdog", as my mother would say. Australia was a society divided deeply by class, religion and silence, as Mark Twain recognised on one his visits. He described our colonial history as "like the most beautiful of lies". The indigenous people, the oldest continuous culture on earth, about whom almost no one spoke, did not exist; the likeness with South Africa was too disturbing.

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Matthew J. Nasuti

U.S. Service Members Killed in Afghan Suicide Bomb Attack:
US soliders, right, carry a body from the site of a suicide car
bomber in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Ahmad Jamshid/AP Photo)

Victory usually goes to the side with the highest dedication. Unfortunately for NATO, that side is the Taliban and al-Qaeda. If one dispenses with all the propaganda, the use of suicide attackers, whether they be bombers or insider turncoats, has objectively been a stunning success. The reality is that an opponent who is willing to die for his or her cause has a significant tactical advantage over a foreign army consisting of troops whose main priority is to survive their war zone tours.

NATO seems befuddled not only by its inability to counter the suicide attacker, but by its failure or refusal to even comprehend its foe. As a result NATO spokespersons revert back to a tired and discredited theme that suicide attackers are uneducated religious fanatics brainwashed in Madrassa schools in Pakistan by unscrupulous mullahs. The truth is that most suicide attackers are educated and apparently consider themselves dedicated patriots combating a foreign invader with the only weapon they have, which is themselves.

Two weeks ago it was announced that Tahir Ashrafi, the leader of the Pakistan Ulema (religious) Council, had formally endorsed the use of suicide bombers against American and NATO forces. He adopted the Taliban saying that, “suicide bombers are the atomic weapons of Muslims.” This ruling emphasizes that the suicide attackers represent mainstream Islam. It is the same with Christianity. In the Book of Judges 16:30, Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines” and he proceeded to pull down a Philistine temple on himself and on the Philistine rulers. Samson is a hero of the Bible.

One of the difficulties that these attackers present to the West is that the most dedicated and courageous fighters seem to be on the other side. Just as with the Vietnam War, the enemy is dedicated to victory at all cost, while Afghan security forces seem less so.

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Stephen Lendman

High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay (left) and
President of the Human Rights Council Remigiusz A. Henczel
at the High-Level Segment of the Council. (UN Photo/Martin)

In 1945, the UN was established:

• "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war;
• reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights;
• (support) equal rights of men and women....of nations large and small;
• establish conditions under which justice....can be maintained;
• promote social progress;
• practice tolerance and live in peace; and
• (promote) economic and social advancement of all peoples."

It failed on all counts. It's largely a US imperial tool. It's been so from inception. With few exceptions, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) marches in lockstep with Washington. It does so shamelessly. Poland's Remigiusz Henczel serves as president. America's waging hot war on Syria. It does so politically, economically and other ways against Iran. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon aides and abets Washington's agenda. So does the Human Rights Council. Former Maldivian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ahmed Shaheed, serves as Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Iran. He does so dishonorably. He takes State Department blood money.

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Kourosh Ziabari

Interview* with public policy scholar Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

Kourosh Ziabari – Sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and its allies are “immoral and illegal – and cowardly”, public policy scholar and researcher Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich says.

Sepahpour-Ulrich, who has a Master’s in Public Diplomacy from USC Annenberg for Communication, made the remarks during an exclusive interview with the Tehran Times this week.

“I believe that there should be no mistake about the reality that sanctions are warfare without the military involvement,” she added.

Sepahpour-Ulrich is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on U.S. foreign policy. Her articles have been published by several online publications.

Following is the text of Sepahpour-Ulrich’s interview with the Tehran Times.

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Paul Craig Roberts

A country built on lies is like a house built on sand

Over a decade during which the US economy was decimated by jobs offshoring, economists and other PR shills for offshoring corporations said that the US did not need the millions of lost manufacturing jobs and should be glad that the “dirty fingernail” jobs were gone.

America, we were told, was moving upscale. Our new role in the world economy was to innovate and develop the new products that the dirty fingernail economies would produce. The money was in the innovation, they said, not in the simple task of production.

As I consistently warned, the “high-wage service economy based on imagination and ingenuity” that Harvard professor and offshoring advocate Michael Porter promised us as our reward for giving up dirty fingernail jobs was a figment of Porter’s imagination.

Over the decade I repeated myself many times: “Innovation takes place where things are made. Innovation will move abroad with the manufacturing.”

This is not what corporations or their shills such as Porter wanted to hear. Corporations were boosting their profits by getting rid of their American employees and replacing them with lowly paid foreigners. Porter’s job was to reassure the sheeple so that no outcry would materialize against the greed that was hollowing out the US economy.

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Bill Van Auken

In this 1973 photo released by the El Salvador School, Priest Jorge Mario Bergoglio, left, and priest Pedro Arupe give a Mass at the church in the El Salvador school in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Bergoglio was elected pope on Wednesday, March 13, 2013, making him the first pope ever from the Americas. Bergoglio, who was born in 1936, chose the name Pope Francis.

For over a week, the media has subjected the public to a tidal wave of euphoric banality on the Roman Catholic Church’s selection of a new pope.

This non-stop celebration of the dogma and ritual of an institution that for centuries has been identified with oppression and backwardness is stamped with a deeply undemocratic character. It is reflective of the rightward turn of the entire political establishment and its repudiation of the principles enshrined in the US Constitution, including the wall of separation between church and state.

What a far cry from the political ideals that animated those who drafted that document. It was Thomas Jefferson’s well-founded opinion that “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”

Jefferson’s view—and the reactionary character of the media’s sycophantic coverage—finds no more powerful conformation than in the identity of the new pope, officially celebrated as a paragon of “humility” and “renewal.”

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Joseph Kishore

Shuttered homes and businesses in downtown Detroit, Michigan.
More than 100 American cities could go bust next year as the debt
crisis that has taken down banks and countries threatens next to
spark a municipal meltdown (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

With the appointment of an emergency manager on Thursday, Detroit became the largest city in US history to be taken over by the state government. The new manager, bankruptcy lawyer Kevin Orr, will have vast powers and one essential task: to carry out a brutal assault on the jobs and living conditions of the working class.

What is taking place in Detroit has national and international significance. The Financial Times of London cited one person involved in the discussions on the imposition of a financial manager as saying, “This will be the best case study of what it means to restructure a city.” In an editorial, the newspaper called for “radical—and unpopular—action” to address Detroit’s financial woes, a position shared by virtually every mass circulation newspaper in the US.

The “restructuring” of Detroit is a euphemism for a slash and burn policy of destroying city jobs, cutting wages and pensions, gutting social services from sanitation and firefighting to health care and education, and handing over city assets to private bankers and speculators. The very social forces responsible for the city’s present state are utilizing the crisis of their own making to step up their plundering of public resources and further redistribute the wealth from the bottom to the top. Exhibiting the ruthlessness that is a hallmark of American capitalism, the ruling class, in the pursuit of its program of social counterrevolution, is dispensing with the trappings of democracy and imposing a bankers’ dictatorship over the city.

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Stephen Lendman

Israel's Fascist Government: Part II

On January 22, Israelis voted. Results hardened fascist rule. Dominant right-wing parties control 102 of 120 Knesset seats.

Israelis have themselves to blame. They elected their most extremist government in history. Belligerence, state-sponsored terrorism, militarized occupation, racist persecution, settlement expansions, and neoliberal harshness reflect official policy. No party won a majority. Weeks of negotiations followed. Expect coalition partners to be announced shortly.

Netanyahu remains Prime Minister. He'll serve as Foreign Minister. He'll do so pending the outcome of Avigdor Lieberman's trial. He's charged with fraud and breach of trust.

Netanyahu's a world class thug. He spurns rule of law principles. He abhors democratic values. He prioritizes stealing all valued Palestinian land. He deplores peace. He calls pursuing it a waste of time. He presides over 22 ministers. Eight deputy ones join them. They represent Israel's smallest government in decades.

Coalition partners include Netanyahu's Likud/Yisrael Beteinu, Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid, and Naftali Bennett's Habayit Yayehudi. Tzipi Livni's Hatnuah had token participation. Together they won 67 of 120 Knesset seats. They reflect hardline extremism. They're ideologically over the top. They represent what demands condemnation.

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Paul Craig Roberts

The US elites know what is coming. That is why they created a Nazi-style Ministry of the Interior known as Homeland Security, armed with enough ammunition to kill every American five times and with tanks to neutralize the Second Amendment rights of Americans.

On March 5, 2013, Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela and world leader against imperialism, died. Washington imperialists and their media and think tank whores expressed gleeful sighs of relief as did the brainwashed US population. An “enemy of America” was gone.

Chávez was not an enemy of America. He was an enemy of Washington’s hegemony over other countries, an enemy of Washington’s alliance with elite ruling cliques who steal from the people they grind down and deny sustenance. He was an enemy of Washington’s injustice, of Washington’s foreign policy based on lies and military aggression, bombs and invasions. Washington is not America. Washington is Satan’s home town.

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John Pilger

What is modern propaganda? For many, it is the lies of a totalitarian state. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her epic films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerized Germans; her 'Triumph of the Will' cast Hitler's spell.

She told me that the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above," but on the "submissive void" of the German public. Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? "Everyone," she said.

Today, we prefer to believe that there is no submissive void. "Choice" is ubiquitous. Phones are "platforms" that launch every half-thought. There is Google from outer space if you need it. Caressed like rosary beads, the precious devices are borne heads-down, relentlessly monitored and prioritised. Their dominant theme is the self. Me. My needs. Riefenstahl's submissive void is today's digital slavery.

Edward Said described this wired state in 'Culture and Imperialism' as taking imperialism where navies could never reach. It is the ultimate means of social control because it is voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom.

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Michel Chossudovsky

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen received Israel’s president Shimon Peres at NATO headquarters in Brussels on March 7.

The order of the day: to enhance military cooperation between Israel and the Atlantic Alliance focusing on issues of counter-terrorism.

“Israel will be happy to share the knowledge it has gained and its technological abilities with NATO. Israel has experience in contending with complex situations, and we must strengthen the cooperation so we can fight global terror together and assist NATO with the complex threats it faces including in Afghanistan.“

Israel is already involved in covert operations and non-conventional warfare in liaison with the US and NATO.

This agreement is of particular significance because it deepens the Israel-NATO relationship beyond the so-called “Mediterranean Dialogue”. The joint statement points to an Israel NATO partnership “in the fight against terror and the search for peace… in the Middle East and the world”.

Israel offered to assist NATO in counter-terrorism operations directed against Hezbollah and Iran. What this suggests is the participation of Israel in active theater warfare alongside NATO –i.e. as a de facto member of the Atlantic Alliance. In other words, Israel would be directly involved were US-NATO to launch an outright military operation against Syria, Lebanon or Iran.

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Wayne Madsen

The Guardian newspaper’s self-proclaimed Venezuela expert Rory Carroll has glibly categorized serious charges that Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chávez Frías was assassinated by a United States-produced bio-weapon as being in the same league with «conspiracy theorists who wonder about aliens at Roswell and NASA faking the moon landings». A number of Venezuelan and international officials believe a hostile party covertly introduced an aggressive form of cancer into the 58-year old president.

Carroll also wrote that Chávez, himself, believed that the cancers that befell former leftist leaders of Latin America, including Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, diagnosed with colon cancer and Brazilian President Ignacio Lula da Silva, treated for throat cancer, were part of a CIA plot directed against left-wing leaders. Curiously, Carroll suggests that Uruguay’s former leftist president, Tabare Vazquez, also recovered from cancer. In fact, Vazquez never had cancer. Furthermore, he is a renowned oncologist trained in France. It was Paraguay’s former president, Fernando Lugo who was ousted in a 2012 CIA-backed right-wing coup, who was diagnosed with lymphoma, cancer of the immune system. Carroll simply proclaims that because all three ex-leaders recovered from cancer, there was nothing to the U.S. cancer assassination weapon story.

Carroll conveniently omitted the cancers that have struck other Latin American leaders, including Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, afflicted with thyroid cancer, and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, struck with lymphoma. After beginning peace talks with the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia’s conservative president Juan Manuel Santos was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

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Paul Craig Roberts

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US economy created 236,000 new jobs in February. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’ll let you have at a good price.

Where are these alleged jobs? The BLS says 48,000 were created in construction. That is possible, considering that revenue-starved real estate developers are misreading the housing situation.

Then there are 23,700 new jobs in retail trade, which is hard to believe considering the absence of consumer income growth and the empty parking lots at shopping malls.

The real puzzle is 20,800 jobs in motion picture and sound recording industries. This is the first time in the years that I have been following the jobs reports that there has been enough employment for me to even notice this category.

The BLS lists 10,900 jobs in accounting and bookkeeping, which, as it is approaching income tax time, is probably correct; 21,000 jobs in temporary help and business support services; 39,000 jobs in health care and social assistance; and 18,800 jobs in the old standby – waitresses and bartenders.

That leaves about 50,000 jobs sprinkled around the various categories, but not in numbers large enough to notice.

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