Stephen Lendman

Rhetoric substitutes for real change. Believing it's forthcoming is fool's hope. Nothing suggests otherwise.

The media didn't surprise. Media scoundrels support his worst policies. His neoliberal harshness is endorsed. His alliance with monied interests gets no coverage. His crimes of war, against humanity and genocide go unmentioned. His partnership with Israel against Palestine isn't explained. His systematic disdain for rule of law principles gets ignored.

Responses to his Thursday speech were largely positive. Challenging them follows below.

New York Times editors headlined "The End of the Perpetual War," saying:

"For the first time, a president stated clearly and unequivocally that the state of perpetual warfare that began nearly 12 years ago is unsustainable for a democracy and must come to an end in the not-too-distant future." "(T)here is no underestimating the importance of that statement." [Obama] "told the world that the United States must return to a state in which counterterrorism is handled.primarily by law enforcement and the intelligence agencies." [He] "announced important shifts in the policy of using unmanned drones" to kill targeted individuals." [He] "called on Congress to remove the restrictions (on) transfer(ing) detainees from the prison in Cuba." [He] "pledged to create new protections for Americans' civil liberties." [He] said a " 'free press is essential for our democracy.'" "There have been times when we wished we could hear the right words from Mr. Obama on issues like these, and times we heard the words but wondered about his commitment." "This was not either of those moments."

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Stephen Lendman

His doublespeak duplicity reflects the last refuge of a scoundrel. He's the worst in recent memory. Perhaps the worst ever. Forked tongue rhetoric can't disguise it.

Throughout his tenure, he governed lawlessly. He's done so at home and abroad. He spurns rule of law principles and other democratic values. Nothing suggests change. Business as usual continues. War on humanity is policy. Rogue leaders govern that way. Obama threatens everyone.

On May 23, he spoke at Washington's National Defense University. He defended what he urged changing four years earlier. More on his Thursday address below.

On May 21, 2009, he spoke at the National Archives. He addressed national security. He said America can't be safe "unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values."

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Joseph Kishore

In his speech on Thursday at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, US President Barack Obama offered a tortured defense of extra-judicial assassinations, for the first time publicly acknowledging the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, in September 2011.

Obama’s remarks were characterized by an essential contradiction. He sought to defend drone assassinations, while at the same time essentially acknowledging their illegality and the illegality of much of what the American government has done over the past decade.

A tone of nervousness and defensiveness pervaded Obama’s remarks, reflecting awareness within the ruling class that what they are doing is not only illegal, but also increasingly unpopular. Significantly, the speech was repeatedly interrupted by a woman who denounced the administration’s policy on drone assassinations and the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

Obama’s admission that he had ordered the killing of Awlaki is part of an effort by the administration to bring the assassination program “into the open,” to institutionalize it and turn it into a permanent feature of US policy.

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Stephen Lendman

Imperial warriors, apologists and supporters never say they're sorry. They want more nations attacked. It's the American way.

Perhaps publishing it was strategically timed. It comes with John Kerry in the Middle East. He'll be there through Sunday.

He met with foreign ministers of 11 so-called Friends of Syria countries and opposition group representatives. In Jerusalem, he discussed Syria with Netanyahu.

At the same time, the suspicious Woolrich London killing occurred. Another article suggested a possible false flag. The Journal op-ed urges war on Syria. So did others discussed below.

On May 22, Journal editors gave Jack Keane and Danielle Pletka feature op-ed space. They took full advantage. They headlined "How to Stop Assad's Slaughter." Keane's a retired general. Formerly he served as US Army's vice chief of staff. Pletka is the American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) foreign and defense policy studies vice president. AEI has enormous influence. It advances Washington's imperial agenda. It's consistently hawkish. It was a leading Bush administration foreign policy architect. It was instrumental in promoting war on Iraq. It supports regime change in Syria and Iran. More on the Keane/Pletka article below.

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Jim Lobe

If you want to get some insight into how the Washington Post’s editorial board increasingly thinks of the world and the U.S. role in it, editorial page editor Fred Hiatt’s column in Monday’s newspaper provides a good idea. While Hiatt is generally not as ideological as his deputy, Jackson Diehl (although he did hire Jennifer Rubin), his basic belief in U.S. exceptionalism, his rejection of “retrenchment” and “limitations” (on U.S. power), and, above all, his implicit equation of international “engagement” with military intervention demonstrates how his version of liberal internationalism is so easily co-opted by neo-conservatives:

But the dominant impression among foreign officials [read Hiatt himself] is of a policy of retrenchment. They see a steady reduction in the size of U.S. armed forces that will mean less ability to intervene and influence. They watched Obama withdraw all troops from Iraq, failing to negotiate an agreement that would have preserved some U.S. role in that now-unraveling country. They see him preparing to withdraw most — or all, his spokesman has said; the size of any residual force has not been announced — troops from Afghanistan. [Emphasis added.]

Consider the logic of this passage. He seems to be saying (through his unnamed “foreign officials”) that U.S. influence in world affairs is directly correlated with the size of its military and the willingness of its commander-in-chief to use it to intervene in foreign countries. In this very Kaganesque view of the world, hard power is really the only power that really counts. The notion that military power must necessarily rest on a strong economic foundation — or even that “soft power” may also play an important role in gaining influence overseas — seems to him or his foreign officials to be secondary at best.

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Adam Larson

A week from now it will be one year since the world first heard about the horrors of a place in Syria called “Houla.” On the afternoon and evening of Friday, May 25, 2012, a reported 108 civilians were massacred there. They were executed inside their homes, with guns and “sharp tools,” and maybe a little bit from shelling as well. As the reader might recall, most of the victims were entire families, included some 49 younger children and even babies. Anyone who had to watch the video results might recall having the bottom drop from their stomach with dread, and the lingering depression after. Many people, naturally, wanted revenge for that.

According to activists, all of the victim families were Sunni Muslim. It was of course blamed on the Syrian Arab Army – the only ones with artillery, if blades aren’t so clear - and their allied “Shabiha,” militias from surrounding villages, of the same Alawite faith of president Assad. None of these features was completely new, but this was by many measures the worst, most massive, most unambiguous massacres of innocents to date.

Western and Gulf Arab states took the events in Houla as clarifying the urgency of toppling the perpetrators; they expelled Damascus’ diplomats and otherwise moved to isolate Syria in the kill box. U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice said it had become clear that the “wheels were coming off” of Kofi Annan’s peace plan. The same point was made more aggressively by rebels shaking dead babies on video – no compromise was possible after this. Military aid to the rebels and talk of increasing it increased.

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Bill Van Auken

While ostensibly touring the Middle East to discuss a joint US-Russian proposal for peace talks between the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and Western-backed “rebels,” Secretary of State John Kerry met with US allies to prepare for region-wide war.

Stopping first in Oman, Kerry held talks with the ruling Sultan, one of the string of monarchical dictators that constitute, together with Israel, the foundation of US influence in the Middle East. The secretary of state’s visit coincided with the signing of a $2.1 billion deal between the absolute monarchy and Raytheon Corp. for the sale of advanced weapons systems, including Avenger fire units, Stinger missiles, and Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles, part of a ring of steel that Washington has sought to erect around Iran.

From there, he flew to Amman, Jordan for a meeting Wednesday of the “Friends of Syria,” a US-led “coalition of the willing” that is fomenting the war for regime change in Syria. It consists of Washington, its European NATO allies, led by Britain, Turkey, Egypt and the various sheikhdoms and sultanates of the Persian Gulf, including the major arms suppliers to the anti-Assad militias: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

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Wayne Madsen

We all have common foes in the greedy and environmentally-destructive capitalist corporations and their puppets who run the governments of Canada and the United States.

By all measures of governing standards, the Conservative government of Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper embodies the same racist policies as that of the governments of the former Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. The Harper government’s patronizing policies over Canada’s First Nations is a case in point. Coupled with Canada’s abhorrent support for Israel’s expansionistic Zionist policies at the expense of the people of Palestine, the Harper government’s attempt to wrest control of resource-rich lands from Canada’s indigenous peoples for exploitation by multinational corporations is reminiscent of the same policies that saw native lands of South Africa and Rhodesia crudely exploited by DeBeers and British American Tobacco…

The Harper government represents the most right-wing government in the recent history of Canada. With its Anglo-Canadian base, it has alienated the French-speaking province of Quebec, where independence sentiment has been renewed; Muslims and Arabs, with its pro-Zionist policies; and Canada’s First Nations, with its attempt to grab native lands protected by treaties.

The only area where the Harper government has shown itself to be “liberal” is that of gay rights. It should be recalled that favoring rights for homosexuals is not necessarily liberal. After the 1934 Nazi Party purge of Ernst Rohm and his coterie of working class homosexual supporters, gay Nazis like Reinhard Heydrich and Baldur von Schirach who originated from the German elite were permitted to hold high office and operate more or less in the open. In the Canadian government of today, reputed homosexuals like Foreign Minister John “Rusty’ Baird and Immigration Minster Jason Kenney, sometimes called Canada’s deputy prime minister, follow in the footsteps of Heydrich and von Schirach in frolicking with fellow Tory gays at “Fabulous Blue Tent” parties in Ottawa. Similar parties in Berlin were attended by some of the Nazi party’s top lieutenants at the height of Adolf Hitler’s reign.

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Stephen Lendman

Presidential Medals of Freedom are awarded annually. They mock what they claim to represent. Many go to deplorable recipients. Previous dishonorees include GHW Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, Henry Kissinger, Tony Blair, Shimon Peres, Margaret Thatcher, Alvaro Uribe, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, and Alan Greenspan among others.

Nobel Peace Prize recipients include notorious war criminals. In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt was honored. He once said "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one." In 1919, Woodrow Wilson won. He broke his pledge to keep "us out of war." In 1953, George Marshall was honored. He helped create NATO. It's a killing machine. He was involved in aggressive war on North Korea. Other dishonorees included Kofi Annan, Al Gore, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Henry Kissinger, Barack Obama, and the EU. Peacemakers aren't considered.

Intrepid Freedom Awards are made annually. They're "presented to a national or international leader who has distinguished himself in promoting and defending the values of freedom and democracy, the core beliefs of our nation." Dishonorees include a virtual rogue's gallery of recipients. They include GW and GHW Bush, Dick Cheney, Leon Panetta, Colin Powell, David Petraeus, Margaret Thatcher, Boris Yeltsin, Newt Gingrich, Bill and Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Silvio Berlusconi, Michael Bloomberg, and Yitzhak Rabin among others.

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Wayne Madsen

It is clear that Russia’s arrest and expulsion of two CIA agents who were trying to recruit members of the Russian intelligence service fighting against Salafist separatists in the Caucasus is part of a Russian mopping-up operation directed at the CIA’s decades-long covert support for terrorists operating in the Northern and Southern Caucasus.

Russia’s Federal Security Bureau (FSB) recently arrested Ryan Christopher Fogle, a CIA «official cover» U.S. embassy Third Secretary, who was trying to recruit an FSB counter-terrorism officer for the CIA. A Russian phone intercept of Fogle’s conversation with the targeted counter-terrorism officer revealed the following offer by the CIA agent: “You can earn up to $1 million per year and I’ll give you $100,000 up front, but only if we meet right now. Yes or no?» Earlier this year, the FSB nabbed another CIA agent, yet unnamed, and quietly deported him.

The list of key U.S. Foreign Service officers, dated April 1, 2013, does not contain Fogle’s name on the list of key U.S. diplomats assigned to the Moscow embassy. Traditionally, the CIA prefers to operate under the official cover of “Political Officer” at large embassies like Moscow. In smaller embassies, the CIA presence can often be found in the deputy chief of mission. The Political Officer in Moscow is Michael Klecheski, formerly with the CIA-connected RAND Corporation and the National Security Council, who was assigned to the Moscow embassy during Soviet times. There is a good chance that Klecheski was Fogle’s local supervisor. The FSB revealed publicly that the CIA station chief for the embassy is Stephen Holmes. Another embassy Third Secretary, Benjamin Dillon, was expelled in January for activities similar to those of Fogle.

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Pepe Escobar

So Bashar al-Assad has spoken - exclusively, to Argentine daily El Clarín [1,2,3,4](.pdf) (there's a huge Syrian diaspora in Argentina, as well as in neighboring Brazil).

Cutting through the fog of Western hysteria, he made some valuable points. The record shows that, yes, the regime has agreed several times to talk to the opposition; but myriad "rebel" groups with no credible, unified leadership have always refuted.

So there's no way a ceasefire, eventually agreed on a summit - such as the upcoming US/Russia Geneva conference - can be implemented. Assad makes some sense when he says, "We can't discuss a timetable with a party if we don't know who they are."

Well, by now everyone following the Syrian tragedy knows who most of them are. One knows that the Un-Free Syrian Cannibals, sorry, Army (FSA) is a ragged collection of warlords, gangsters and opportunists of every possible brand, intersecting with hardcore jihadis of the Jabhat al-Nusra kind (but also other al-Qaeda-linked or inspired outfits).

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Gilad Atzmon

Every so often we come across a secular Jewish ‘anti’ Zionist’ who argues that Zionism is not Judaism and vice versa. Interestingly enough, I have just come across an invaluable text that illuminates this question from a rabbinical perspective. Apparently back in 1942, 757 American Rabbis added their names to a public pronouncement titled ‘Zionism an Affirmation of Judaism’. This Rabbinical rally for Zionism was declared at the time “the largest public pronouncement in all Jewish history.”

Today, we tend to believe that world Jewry’s transition towards support for Israel followed the 1967 war though some might argue that already in 1948, American Jews manifested a growing support for Zionism. However, this rabbinical pronouncement proves that as early as 1942, the American Jewish religious establishment was already deeply Zionist. And if this is not enough, the rabbis also regarded Zionism as the ‘implementation’ of Judaism. Seemingly, already then, the peak of World War two, the overwhelming majority of American Rabbis regarded Zionism, not only as fully consistent with Judaism, but as a “logical expression and implementation of it.”

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William T. Hathaway

"Comparing Evils" is a chapter from the book
RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War
by William T. Hathaway

Jamal Khan is an Afghan journalist who fled his country because of Taliban persecution and now lives in Germany. We met in the apartment of a mutual friend from the Deutsche Friedens-gesellschaft, the German Peace Society. Jamal is mid-forties, thin, with curly brown hair, tan skin, and clear green eyes that take everything in.

Hathaway: "Do you miss your country?"

Khan: "Only when I'm drunk, which isn't very often. Then I get stupidly sentimental.

"Actually I'm not a big fan of any country. They're all inhuman. They exist mainly as platforms for power. The rulers promote cultural rituals that make people identify with the place they live. Then they manipulate the people's patriotic emotions to get them to fight wars for them.

"We cling to the identification because it gives us a sense of security, of belonging to something greater. But the insecurity we feel is actually generated by the power the rulers have over us.

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Alex Kane

May 13, 2013 "Information Clearing House" -"Alternet" - The recent revelation that the Central Intelligence Agency has handed tens of millions of dollars over to the offices of the president of Afghanistan should come as no surprise. The CIA has a long history of this sort of activity. And most importantly, it’s the latest reminder of how America’s global “war on terror” has been forged through backroom deals, cold hard cash and the fostering of corruption.

From Yemen to Afghanistan to Somalia, America has prosecuted its perpetual war the usual way U.S. foreign policy is conducted: partnerships with unsavory leaders who are corrupt and commit abuses. Here are five striking examples of how the U.S. global war has been characterized by unsavory activity since 2001.

1. Bounty Payments For Alleged Terrorists

Cash payments in Afghanistan aren’t limited to the CIA paying off corrupt Afghan government officials. The lure of money played a major role at the start of the war on Afghanistan when the U.S. was looking for suspected terrorists to arrest and eventually throw in Guantanamo detention camp. The U.S. offered thousands of dollars to people to turn in alleged terrorists; 86% of all Guantanamo prisoners were people who were captured by bounty hunters, according to a report published by Seton Hall University in 2005. Many of them ended up being innocent of any crime--another clear example of how money is a corrupting tool in America’s never-ending global war.

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Johannes Stern

A makeshift oil refinery site in al-Mansoura village, al-Raqqa
province. Photograph: Reuters / The Guardian

According to a report yesterday in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, the European Union (EU) is directly funding US-backed Sunni Islamist terrorist groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. These groups are looting oil in parts of eastern Syria that they control and then re-selling it to EU countries at rock-bottom prices.

The Guardian writes:

“The EU decision to lift Syrian oil sanctions to aid the opposition has accelerated a scramble for control over wells and pipelines in rebel-held areas and helped consolidate the grip of jihadist groups over the country’s key resources.”

According to the Guardian, the main beneficiaries of the EU’s lifting of sanctions are the Al Nusra Front and similar Islamist terrorist groups.

“Jabhat al-Nusra, affiliated with Al Qaeda and other extreme Islamist groups, control the majority of the oil wells in Deir Ezzor province, displacing local Sunni tribes, sometimes by force. They have also seized control of other fields from Kurdish groups further to the north-east, in al-Hasakah governorate.”

The EU’s decision to resume trade with oil fields held by Al Nusra explodes the lie that the imperialist powers are waging war in Syria to change the repressive character of the Syrian regime. In fact, they are building up and backing deeply reactionary and oppressive forces.

These events also expose the so-called “war on terror”—the claim that Washington and the EU are fighting Al Qaeda, which served as the justification for US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as a lie. Imperialism is arming and financing Al Qaeda-linked terrorist groups that commit terrible crimes against the Syrian population, handing over its wealth to the EU and Washington.

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