William Blum

The horrors reported each day from Syria and Iraq are enough to make one cry; in particular, the atrocities carried out by the al-Qaeda types: floggings; beheadings; playing soccer with the heads; cutting open dead bodies to remove organs just for mockery; suicide bombers, car bombs, the ground littered with human body parts; countless young children traumatized for life; the imposition of sharia law, including bans on music … What century are we living in? What millennium? What world?

People occasionally write to me that my unwavering antagonism toward American foreign policy is misplaced; that as awful as Washington’s Museum of Horrors is, al-Qaeda is worse and the world needs the United States to combat the awful jihadists.

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote. “They are different from you and me.”

And let me tell you about American leaders. In power, they don’t think the way you and I do. They don’t feel the way you and I do. They have supported “awful jihadists” and their moral equivalents for decades.

Let’s begin in 1979 in Afghanistan, where the Moujahedeen (“holy warriors”) were in battle against a secular, progressive government supported by the Soviet Union; a “favorite tactic” of the Moujahedeen was “to torture victims [often Russians] by first cutting off their nose, ears, and genitals, then removing one slice of skin after another”, producing “a slow, very painful death”.[1]

With America’s massive and indispensable military backing in the 1980s, Afghanistan’s last secular government (bringing women into the 20th century) was overthrown, and out of the victorious Moujahedeen arose al Qaeda.

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Julie Hyland

Mark Duggan, whose death sparked the Tottenham riots,
pictured with his sister. (Photo: M. Argles / The Guardian)

The eight to two verdict by a coroner’s inquest that Mark Duggan was lawfully killed by London’s Metropolitan Police is a travesty of justice.

The jurors arrived at their findings despite unanimous agreement that the 29-year-old father of six was unarmed when he was shot twice in Tottenham, north London by an armed police officer on August 4, 2011.

Duggan’s killing was the spark for riots that began just two days later in Tottenham after a protest over the young father’s murder and which quickly spread across the country.

From the start, the powers that be had been reluctant to hold any investigation into Duggan’s shooting—not least because of their insistence that the riots were not the result of yet another instance of police brutality, but were down to “criminality”.

As in case of previous police killings, most notoriously the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent Brazilian worker murdered by police in July 2005, misleading information as to Duggan’s shooting was initially given to the press.

The misnamed Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPPC), which has been involved in the cover-up of every police shooting, briefed the media that when three police cars blocked the taxi in which he had been travelling, Duggan leapt out of the vehicle and began firing at police. A police officer had only narrowly escaped death, it was claimed, when one of the bullets fired by Duggan lodged in his radio.

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Philip Giraldi

As usual official Washington is lining up on the side of the Israelis while pretending to be an "honest broker".

A picture is indeed sometimes worth a thousand words. A photo of Secretary of State John Kerry disembarking from his plane in Tel Aviv showed chief US negotiator Martin Indyk walking along at his side with a grin on his face as if he had just heard a new Palestinian joke in the plane on the way over. It looked like Israel’s American legal team had arrived and just couldn’t wait for the first photo op with a glowering Benjamin Netanyahu. They may even have been chuckling over what might be the funniest line ever uttered by an Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu greeting their arrival by claiming that "There’s growing doubt in Israel that the Palestinians are committed to peace. In the six months since the start of peace negotiations, the Palestinian authority continues its unabated incitement against the State of Israel."

Netanyahu, who insists that the Palestinians declare Israel to be a Jewish State as a precondition for further talks and that Israel be able to maintain a permanent military occupation of the Jordan River valley, certainly knows all about "unabated incitement." And he has plenty of friends hanging on his every pronouncement. US Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were already in Israel when Kerry arrived, consulting with the Israeli government and coming to the conclusion that there are serious concerns about any possible peace agreement with the Palestinians, nearly all relating to "Israel’s security." More fool I to think that Graham and McCain were elected to represent the people of South Carolina and Arizona, but as some have observed politics is the art of the impossible.

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