Kevin Barrett

ISIL Takfiri militants, tools of Zionists || After 9/11, the US declared war on al-Qaeda. Then it declared war on Saddam Hussein. No evidence was presented linking al-Qaeda to 9/11, and no substantial proof was presented that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs. But the American people were terrorized into compliance.

On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush, a deserter from the military, dressed up in military uniform and declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq. Later on May 2, 2011, Obama declared that Osama bin Laden had been assassinated and then thrown into the ocean “according to Islamic custom.” Mission accomplished? Saddam hanged? Bin Laden thrown to the fishes? Iraq and Afghanistan happy, peaceful, prosperous democracies? - Hardly.

Afghanistan has become a narco-terrorist playground and a failed state. The US is tripping over its own feet and bombing its own soldiers as it tries to find a way out of the “graveyard of empires.”

And now a “too extreme for al-Qaeda” spin-off called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has taken over Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and much of Nineveh Province. It has menaced Tikrit and plans to march to Baghdad. This band of fanatical terrorists is backed by remnants of Saddam Hussein’s old loyalists. It is also backed by America’s supposed Mideast ally, Saudi Arabia. Many wonder whether the US itself and its partner-in-crime, Israel, are also secretly supporting ISIL. The American people have good reason to wonder what is going on.

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Stephen Lendman

On April 23, a New York Times editorial headlined, "Quick Help for the Gulf," mocking grave environmental damage as well as affected communities and residents in typical Times cavalier fashion, saying:

BP's April 21 announced "$1 billion down payment on its obligation to restore the Gulf of Mexico to good health is such welcome news that it seems almost churlish to offer caveats" or question its motives.

In fact, BP committed America's greatest ever environmental crime, destroying the entire Gulf, as well as the welfare, livelihoods, health and futures of millions of coastal residents, a disaster perhaps no amount of money can restore, but don't expect BP even to try.

However, saying "(l)ong-term restoration is a goal we have backed ever since Hurricane Katrina," The Times dismissively suggested $1 billion "is enough for now just to get started." In fact, it's inconsequential pocket change for the incalculable human, economic and environmental toll. But don't expect Times editors to explain.

Others do, however, including Dahr Jamail, detailing Gulf "toxicity, suffering and death" on April 16, and on April 20, its "criminal negligence," discussing mounting lawsuits for what BP won't pay.

Ryan Lambert is one of many affected. Jamail quoted him saying:

"I'm seeing people starving to death and BP won't pay them....They know what they did is wrong and they still won't pay me (or most others). I'm done playing their games. All they are doing is starving people out and trying to get them to take (pocket change settlements to) give up their right to sue. I know thousands of people in the fishing industry, and I don't know one person who has been made whole yet."

In previous articles, Jamail covered similar ground, highlighting the plight of Gulf residents stonewalled by BP and Kenneth Feinberg's firm, paid nearly $1 million a month to administer compensation by denying it, a dirty expertise he developed years ago handling previous settlement cases.

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Stephen Lendman

As best we know it, the shocking truth is that preventable disasters keep proliferating life destroying contamination globally. Yet news about them is suppressed, so few people everywhere are unaware how calamitously they're being harmed.

As a result, distinguished environmental researcher, Dr. Ilya Perlingieri, now warns to stay out of rain because it's likely radioactive. So is drinking water, food and air with unknown levels because governments like America and Japan won't say.

However, Norwegian Institute for Air Research static and dynamic maps show radiation contamination across the Northern Hemisphere with estimates of potential releases, increasing daily. Access them through this link. Also, Radiation Network.com gives levels across America, accessed through this link.

Minimally, the danger is extreme and worsening as Fukushima releases are expected to continue for months, perhaps years.

Reporting what little is known about Japan, Kyodo News headlined an April 21 article, "Radioactive leaks into sea were 20,000 times above limit: TEPCO," saying:

In early April, "an estimated 5,000 terabecquerels of radioactive substances," amounting to 520 tons were released over a six-day period alone. However, leakage began on March 11 and continues daily in unreported amounts. One terabecquerel = one trillion becquerels. Already, contamination levels are disastrous.

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Paul Mitchell
WSWS

John Pilger has reported on six wars, beginning in Vietnam in 1967, and produced more than 55 documentaries. His new film, The War You Don’t See, examines the media’s role in war and asks whether it has become part of the propaganda machine of the state. The documentary focuses in particular on the practice of “embedding” journalists in military units, which has helped virtually destroy independent war reporting.

The War You Don’t See opens with the sickening video clip released by WikiLeaks earlier this year, in which US troops in an Apache gunship revel in their indiscriminate slaughter of innocent bystanders in Iraq. Pilger asks,

“Why do so many journalists beat the drums of war, regardless of the lies of government, and how are crimes of war justified?”

Pilger traces the growing integration of the state and media back to World War One. In the US, the secretive Committee on Public Information was set up in 1917 by US President Woodrow Wilson to “sell the war to the masses”. One of its most influential members was public relations-propaganda pioneer Edward Bernays. “The intelligent manipulation of the masses is an invisible government which is the true ruling power in this country”, Bernays wrote. The “hide the facts and manipulate emotions to scare the hell out of people” philosophy lay behind First World War posters such as “Destroy this Mad Brute” (1917).

Pilger fast-forwards to 2003 and the Iraq war. The creation of illusions, he says, has come a long way since Bernays’s time. Today, the Pentagon spends $1 billion a year on such activities. US Assistant Secretary of Defence Bryan Whitman describes how the Iraq war introduced the practice of embedding and saw some 700 journalists attached to army units. He says it was necessary because the US was up against an enemy, Saddam Hussein, who was “masterful at misinformation…disinformation”.

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Angola 3 News interviews Dahr Jamail

Bradley Manning, suspected source of Wikileaks

Independent journalist Dahr Jamail spent nine months reporting directly from Iraq, following the US invasion in 2003. His stories have been published by Antiwar.com, Inter Press Service, Truthout, Al-Jazeera, The Nation, The Sunday Herald in Scotland, the Guardian, Foreign Policy in Focus, Le Monde Diplomatique, the Independent, and many others. On radio as well as television, Dahr reports for Democracy Now!, has appeared on Al-Jazeera, the BBC and NPR, and numerous other stations around the globe.

Jamail is the author of two recent books: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From An Unembedded Journalist (2008) and The Will To Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse To Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (2009). He also contributed Chapter 6, "Killing the Intellectual Class," for the book Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered (2010). Learn more at dahrjamailiraq.com

Angola 3 News: On April 4, 2010, WikiLeaks.org released a classified 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter in Iraq, firing on civilians and killing 11, including Reuters’ photojournalist Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, 40 year old Saeed Chmagh. No charges have been filed against the US soldiers involved.

In sharp contrast, a 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning has been accused of leaking the classified video. Arrested in May and facing up to 52 years in prison for a range of charges, Manning is now being held under what lawyer/journalist Glenn Greenwald has termed "inhumane conditions."

Manning’s support website declares that "exposing war crimes is not a crime." Indeed, the Nuremberg Laws, established after the horrors of WWII, declare that soldiers have a legal obligation to resist criminal wars. Let’s please take a closer look at this issue of US war crimes. What do you think are the strongest arguments that have been made for why US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are criminal?

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Dirk Adriaensens
War Is A Crime.org

Forced disappearances and missing persons: The missing persons of Iraq. -Always someone’s mother or father, always someone’s child.

A forced disappearance (or enforced disappearance) is defined in Article 2 of the Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly On 20 December 2006, as the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law. Often forced disappearance implies murder. The victim in such a case is first abducted, then illegally detained, and often tortured; the victim is then killed, and the body is then hidden. Typically, a murder will be surreptitious, with the corpse disposed of in such a way as to prevent it ever being found, so that the person apparently vanishes. The party committing the murder has deniability, as there is no body to prove that the victim has actually died. [1]

Article 1 of the Convention further states that No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for enforced disappearance.[2]

Neither Iraq, nor the USA have signed or ratified this convention.[3]

The United States refused to sign, saying that the text "did not meet our expectations", without giving an explanation.[4]

Once again the United States placed itself outside the provisions of International Humanitarian law.

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The BRussells Tribunal

We, the undersigned, defending the right of Iraq to independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity, rejecting the attempts of Iraqi puppets promoted by the US occupation to trade the national rights of Iraqis and to institutionalise via census the criminal demo-graphic engineering they have pursued by force, declare that:

From the first day of the US-UK occupation of Iraq, the occupation began to undertake a series of measures, directly or through its local allies, to destroy Iraq as a state and a nation and to partition it along ethnic and sectarian lines.

Today, the puppet government of the occupation and its Kurdish partners are trying to hold a population census in Kirkuk province whose aim is to give a permanent legal character to the criminal social engineering, ethnic cleansing and demographic changes that have been implemented under occupation.[1] This could unleash a full blown civil war across Iraq, and potentially lead to its partition and a consequent regional war.

In addition to the death of more than one million Iraqis, the ethnic cleansing and other means pursued by the United States, United Kingdom and their allies in order to implement the process of partitioning Iraq, in its cities and regions, have caused the forced migration of 2.5 million Iraqis out of Iraq and the forced displacement of 2.5 million others from their homes inside Iraq.

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Stephen Lendman

For months, US media reports distorted and lied about its severity, running cover for BP and the Obama administration, now practically avoiding the crisis altogether as it worsens. An August 20 Inter Press Service report is revealing, quoting Biloxi, MS fisherman Danny Ross saying hypoxia (depleted oxygen) is driving horseshoe crabs, stingrays, flounder, dolphins, and other sea life "out of the water" to escape. Another area fisherman, David Wallis said he's "seen crabs crawling out of the water in the middle of the day."

Other reports cite strange marine life behavior, sighted near the surface when they normally stay well submerged. Alabama fisherman Stan Fournier said in 40 years of work, he's never seen anything like it. "It looks like all the sea life is trying to get out of the water," unable to breathe in their normal habitat, what US media reports won't touch, instead hyping success, saying BP's well capped and most oil dissolved when, in fact, it won't degrade for decades, remaining a lethal cocktail combined with dispersants, killing wildlife and poisoning anyone eating it, assuring a coming epidemic of cancers and other diseases.

On August 19, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) senior scientist Bill Lehr, in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, retracted his earlier claim about most oil dispersed and dissolved. He now says "I would say most of that is still in the environment," as much as 90%, only 6% burned and 4% skimmed, the rest contaminating a large part of the Gulf, spreading, and devastating wildlife.

In addition, on August 19, the journal Science published a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) study, confirming a giant oil plume floating about 1,200 meters below the surface - 35 km-long (22 miles), two km wide, and 200 meters thick. Persisting "for months without substantial biodegradation," it poses a serious threat to sea life, one of the article's writers, Dr. Chris Reddy, saying, "At this point, we know the plume exists, and we know more about its potential biological activity in the future" and harm it can cause. It'll be years before the full extent of damage is known.

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Dahr Jamail

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010, t r u t h o u t

Commercial Fishing communities in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida have united to demand that local, state, and federal agencies force BP to discontinue the use of toxic dispersants and conduct better testing before reopening fishing waters.

“We need to get our government to get a handle on this situation and shut down our fishing waters until they test for dispersants, and get the use of dispersants stopped unless they can prove to us they are not harmful,” Kathy Birren, a spokesperson for commercial fishermen in Florida, told Truthout, “We are seeing fish kills. They [US Government and BP] are covering this all up.”

Since the BP oil disaster began in late April, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) was granted emergency powers to open and close fishing areas. The department recently announced the opening of three shrimp management zones for August 16. These areas include zones that have been severely affected by the oil disaster. Dates were also set to open fishing for sea trout and harvesting oysters.

These moves are being questioned by commercial fishermen, who are skeptical of the motives of the state and federal governments’ decision to begin reopening fishing areas that had been closed by the oil disaster.

Clint Guidry is a Louisiana fisherman and on the Board of Directors of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, as well as being the Shrimp Harvester Representative on the Louisiana Shrimp Task Force created by Executive Order of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.

“The government, both state and federal, is pushing to open all these fishing areas back up and say it is OK, but this is a load of shit,” Guidry, who is from Lafitte, Louisiana, told Truthout, “It’s not OK. They claim 75 percent of the oil is gone or accounted for, but there’s still oil coming in. There is more oil in many of our bays, right now, than there has ever been.”

Guidry and Birren believe it is far too early for the state or federal governments to allow fishing to resume without more testing for oil and dispersant contamination.

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David Swanson

The most massive and brutal crime committed on this planet during the past decade has been the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And we're seeking to wash the blood off our hands without so much as an "Out, damn spot!" Nowadays "looking forward, not backward" is supposed to take care of everything, even as the crimes continue. What that takes care of is the leading perpetrators who begin to sense that the coast is clear and creep out of their holes to declare, as did Karl Rove this week, that their biggest mistake was not more aggressively attacking those who pointed out their crimes.

If there's anyone who knows where that path leads, it's probably Benjamin Ferencz, who served as Chief Prosecutor for the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg in 1947 and who has just published the forward to a new book by Nicolas Davies called "Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq." It's a useful moment in which to be handed this masterful account of what we've done, not just because the liars have been ceded the floor, but also because the crime is ongoing and we will require the proper frame of mind as each deadline for withdrawal from Iraq is violated, and because the Washington Press Corpse has begun to notice the utter irresponsibility of the people we pay to tell us what is happening in the world (not to mention to spy on us, overthrow governments, kidnap, imprison, torture, and assassinate), and because we will not end the endless war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and other places unless there is accountability.

This is also the moment in which the International Criminal Court has done something Ferencz had long worked for, and determined that it will prosecute the crime of aggressive war. Even if ithe ICC cannot go back now and prosecute the most serious such crime of recent years, it can prosecute numerous US war crimes committed during the past decade, and we can address the invasion and occupation of Iraq through courts and legislatures in such a manner as to make its repetition elsewhere more likely to result in criminal charges.

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