Saudis Slaughtering Yemenis for 5 Years? Big YAWN. Yemenis retaliate against Saudi oil field? TIME TO FREAK OUT!!!

The political elites of the "Western world" (the U.S.-bossed capitalist bloc) and their propagandists have hit one of their disgusting low points of moral depravity and dishonesty in the aftermath of a successful attack on the main Saudi petroleum processing facility by Houthi tribe militia in Yemen, who claimed responsibility for the attack by drones. This has temporarily knocked out half of Saudi Arabia's crude oil processing capacity. The Saudis currently sell 5.7 million barrels of oil a day (although they have capacity to sell considerably more) in a world market whose daily oil consumption is 100 million barrels. Currently the U.S. and Russia are the top two exporters.

According to the propaganda campaign launched in the immediate aftermath of the attack by the Western media, politicians, and government officials, the attack wasn't an attack on Saudi Arabia, retaliation for five years of war crimes against the people of Yemen. No, it's "an attack on the world's energy supply." That's even more hyperbolic and hysterical than the other phrase the world's capitalist propagandists are ALL using, "the world's oil supply." You'd think the whole world was a communist society and we all own the oil in Saudi Arabia. Last time I checked, it's the Saudi "royal" family that owns it. (They call themselves a "government" of course.) All the world's capitalist media immediately fell into line behind Trump's Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, parroting this line. [1]

The effect of this terminology is to paint the Houthis, who are at a huge military disadvantage to the U.S.-backed Saudis attacking Yemen for the past five years, as the enemies of all humanity. It's "our" energy supply viciously attacked by "Iranian-backed" Houthis, Iran being a Demon Nation ever since 1979, when the U.S.-installed dictator of Iran, the so-called "Shah" ("King") was overthrown. Overthrowing a U.S. dictator is like spitting in the eye of America. How DARE you!

Far from an attack on "the world," on all of us, the Houthis unintentionally did the world, did all humanity, a FAVOR. Burning fossil fuels is causing a disaster by raising the temperature of our home planet! And if there's fear of an oil "shortage," TRUMP could alleviate that by the stroke of a pen by allowing two of the world's largest oil-producing countries, IRAN and VENEZUELA, to SELL THEIR OIL! (Venezuela has the world's largest oil reserves, NOT Saudi Arabia.) So this "crisis" is totally BOGUS. (The excited elite chattering about it died down in only 2 days. And all they cared about was money.)


Pompeo, a loathsome political creature created by the political machine of the malign billionaire Koch brothers of Kansas; a neo-fascist slug who has publicly called for the execution of Edward Snowden; immediately blamed the attack on Iran. This was predictable. If someone threw a brick through Pompeo's window, he'd blame Iran.

Pompeo is the guy who, after the vile Saudi tyrant, "Crown Prince" Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was butchered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, dismembered like an animal in an abattoir, and his body parts smuggled out, immediately ran to Riyadh to conspire with Salman about how to get Salman out of the jam he'd created for himself. (The Trump regime didn't even make Salman come to then!) Ever since, Trump and Pompeo have done their best to obfuscate Salman's obvious guilt.


Here they are, just after the shit hit the fan from the Khashoggi murder:

Pompeo and Salman. Salman and Pompeo. I love you Bro! -I love you too!

The attack on the petroleum facility occurred over the weekend, when the markets on which parasitic speculators set the price of oil by their trading of futures and options contracts are closed. But 24 hours a day, bid and ask prices are still posted. Before markets opened on Monday, futures indicated a 20% rise in the two benchmark oil prices, the Brent crude oil price and the West Texas Intermediary oil price. (Typically Brent trades higher than Texas.) But when trading actually began, the prices were up only 8%. Later in the day they hovered 10% higher. But that is still LOWER than the price was in late 2018. Finally oil closed up 15% on the day. And in any event, oil has languished between $50 and $60 a barrel for several years, after its crash from about $120, a crash deliberately engineered by Saudi Arabia, ostensibly aimed at putting U.S. shale oil producers out of business (which it didn't do) but really aimed at inflicting severe economic damage on Russia and Venezuela (which it DID do, especially Venezuela). Both those nations are heavily dependent on oil exports, and both have been targets of ongoing attack by the U.S. for years now. [2]

Needless to say, the U.S. and the Saudi "royal' family frequently engage in nefarious conspiracies together, one of the most notorious being the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers on September 11, 2001, under the guise of an Al-Qaeda aerial attack with hijacked planes. [3]

Pompeo, Trump, the Democratic and Republican members of Congress, and U.S. corporate media propagandists are not exactly the most reliable folks in matters involving Iran. Remember the last time the U.S., Pompeo, Trump, the "leaders" of both parties and any political hack who could get on TV, and the entire U.S. corporate propaganda system asserted as fact that Iran committed an "attack"? It was the damage inflicted on a Japanese and a Norwegian tanker. Even though that was definitely refuted, they still pretend it's true. [4]

These are people who are totally untrustworthy, with zero credibility. But probably Iran at least supplied the weapons. And who knows? Maybe even launched the attack themselves. But Pompeo had no proof of that in the immediate aftermath- or the U.S. military would have surely provided it.

The true context for this, the 5 year long war against the people of Yemen by Saudi Arabia, which would not be possible without U.S. support, from both the Obama and Trump regimes, is totally ignored. That is what is fundamentally dishonest about the media "coverage," which thus must be seen as propaganda, not news.

The numerous atrocities of the Saudis, using their U.S. weaponry, have been virtually ignored by Western, and especially U.S. media. (Britain, that awful relic of an evil empire, is also a major arms supplier to the Saudis.) Without U.S. weaponry, and U.S. targeting information, and even U.S. refueling craft for Saudi jets, which Obama provided, the Saudi war on Yemen would not be possible. The Saudis have slaughtered tens of thousands of Yemenis directly. They have created famine conditions for millions of Yemenis. (The UN's aid organizations have repeatedly avowed this.) They have blockaded Yemen, starving the populace, making medicines unavailable. (Bombing hospitals and clinics doesn't help either.) The world's largest cholera epidemic has been created in Yemen by the Saudis. (And their Western imperialist enablers.) (For more on the background of the current situation in Yemen, see footnote [5] below.)

None of this is to endorse the Houthis. But clearly the Yemenis should have to sort out their rivalries amongst themselves. As for Iran being the instigator, in fact it was the former longtime dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who formed a temporary alliance with the Houthis and egged them on to rebel. Iran saw an opportunity, or wanted to stop the Saudis installing the ruler the Houthis had just overthrown back in power as a Saudi client/puppet.

 

 A picture is worth a thousand words, especially words citing statistics. "Six milion Jews died in the Holocaust has nowhere near the emotional impact of a photo of skeletal concentration camp inmates, standing behind barbed wire, or a pile of their desiccated corpses. So here are three photos from Yemen in place of 3,000 words:

This Yemeni child was starved to death by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. 

 

 

 Here's another of the countless thousands of children murdered by the 

U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Reminiscent of Nazi concentration camp victims.

 

Sometimes it's more satisfying to kill children quickly, instead of having to wait for them to die slow, agonizing deaths that take months. This school bus was bombed by the Saudis, flying the jets the U.S. happily sold them (Obama and Trump both), dropping those fabulously accurate U.S. precision bombs. 51 died, 40 of them schoolchildren. That was in August, 2018. Still waiting for some war crime indictments.

It is an illustration of the utterly cynical and callous nature of "global politics" or "international relations" or "statesmanship" (the preferred term of the mass murderer Henry Kissinger) that causing so much human suffering isn't given a second thought in the pursuit of greater power by those who rule.

The U.S. (and other) media have spent the past five years of Saudi atrocities barely mentioning any of it. They've also done a bang-up job keeping the American public ignorant of the U.S. role in providing the essential tools of mass murder. But the U.S. is constantly victimizing poor people all over the planet. This fits the pattern of U.S. global class warfare. The U.S. has also directly killed civilians in Yemen, both by aerial bombings and in raids by "special" forces.

When I say that U.S. elites are immoral and despicable, that is something they themselves prove to be true every day.


"The" media is already pushing the Saudis' line that the drone strike came from Iraq or Iran, not Yemen. And maybe it was missiles, they're saying. Oh, and the drone parts are Iranian. (Probably are, as Iran has been helping the Houthis.)

Trump immediately expectorated some tough-guy bluster, declaring the U.S. "locked and loaded," and only waiting word from Saudi Arabia to confirm Iran did it to presumably pull the trigger. The same Saudi Arabia that has been trying for years (along with Israel) to goad the U.S. into starting a war on Iran. Gee. I wonder what the Saudis are gonna determine happened!

Thank heavens he fired John Bolton!

 The "Crown Prince" that swallowed the Superpower.

1] A day later, The Invisible Man, the nitwit former Texas Governor whom Trump picked to be Secretary of Energy, belatedly got in on the act, putting in his two cents which immediately sank to the bottom of the media pool without a trace. Said Rick Perry: "Make no mistake about it. This was a deliberate attack on the global economy, and the energy market." This is the same guy who campaigned for the presidency on a platform promising to abolish the cabinet Department he now heads. 

Actually, Tex, I think it was an attack on the Saudi Arabian regime.

2] Stocks on Monday, the first trading day after the attack, declined modestly.  The  S & P 500 index (500 major public companies) declined 0.3%, the Nasdaq (several thousand companies) declined about a quarter of one percent, and the Dow Industrial Average (a mere 30 stocks) fell about one-half percent. The following day, Tuesday, September 17, oil actually FELL $3. Wholesale gasoline is up 20 cents, 1-3 cents at the pump. Word is the Saudis will have the bombed site back up and running in two weeks.

3]  It would take too long to go into all that here. To start to educate yourself, watch some of the videos put out by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of over 3,000 architects and engineers who have debunked the nonsense that the towers fell because airplanes crashed into them. Oh, and Number 7 WTC fell straight down in the afternoon. All were the result of controlled demolitions, as you will learn.

4]  In brief, the U.S. claimed Iran planted mines on the sides of the ships. The crew of the Japanese tanker said there WERE no mines, but that flying objects hit their ship. The Japanese Foreign Minister was IN TEHRAN at the time of the attack, meeting with the Ayatollah, trying to help Iran. The U.S. government and the global bourgeois propaganda system would have us believe that Iran was determined to sabotage its OWN DIPLOMACY designed to try and relieve the garrote around Iran's neck that is strangling its economy.All the details, with news videos substantiating the facts, are at "Dishonest U.S. Media Lying U.S. Into Another War of Aggression," June 20, 2019. 

5]  Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world. A country without a real government, it was ruled for 33 years by a dictator/warlord with the title of "president," Ali Abdullah Saleh. Saleh was happy to play footsie with the Bush and Obama regimes in their "war on terror," pretending that U.S. drone missile assassinations were the work of his military. He also took the opportunity to have political rivals eliminated by U.S. drone strike by telling the U.S. they were "terrorists" and giving them location information. One such attack even made the front page of the Wall Street Journal, which is how I know about this practice of Saleh's. But that changed nothing.

But Saleh came under increasing domestic pressure- which in Yemen means armed resistance, the only thing that counts in Yemen- and the U.S. thought it was time to replace him before he was overthrown. Saleh resisted, but was eventually squeezed out. In November 2011, Saleh signed an agreement to leave power- then reneged on it. Eventually he was forced out in 2012. His successor as "president," Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, one of Saleh's erstwhile cronies,  took over the various rackets that take the place of an actual government in Yemen. In January 2015 the Houthi tribe rebelled, forcing Hadi to flee by shelling his palace. The Saudis decided they wanted Hadi to rule Yemen as their puppet or client, and commenced a war against the Houthis, heavily targeting civilian targets such as apartment buildings, hospitals, mosques, wedding parties, and so on. As of a couple of years ago, retired U.S. army colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the top aide to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in the Bush II regime, asserted that 5,000 of 15,000 Saudi aerial bombings were of civilian targets.  Meanwhile Hadi sits in Riyadh, content to watch "his" people being slaughtered, the country destroyed, waiting to be reinstalled as "president" of Yemen by his Saudi puppet masters.

U.S Secretary of State Pompeo Appoints Fascist To Bring "Democracy" To Venezuela

Elliott Abrams is U.S. Imperialism's own Reinhard Heydrich. During the 1980s he directed the U.S. campaign of murderous state terror in Central America. Now he's been assigned by Michael Pompeo to bring freedom and democracy to the Venezuelan people- so claims Pompeo, Pence, virtually all Democratic and Republican politicians, and the global capitalist media in hyper-cynical mode of maximum dishonesty.

I can't describe Abrams horrifying record of crimes against humanity any better than Allan Nairn did today on Democracy Now, so just read or watch that here.

Architects of Mass Murder: Elliott Abrams and Reinhard Heydrich

"Allan Nairn: Trump’s Venezuela Envoy Elliott Abrams Is a War Criminal Who Has Abetted Genocide," Democracy Now, January 30, 2019.

U.S. Torture To Come Roaring Back, As U.S. Continues Its Moral Degeneration. Obama Opened the Door.

Three of the top power positions of the U.S. Empire are being filled by men who are publicly and proudly pro-torture. First and foremost is the man at the very top, president-to-be Donald Trump, who during his campaign for the office promised to "bring back waterboarding and a lot worse." [1]

The designated Attorney General, head of the U.S. Department of "Justice," the racist and remorseless black vote suppressor Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, U.S. Senator from Alabama, is another public supporter of torture. Under his command will be a large part of the domestic repression apparatus of the U.S.: all U.S. prosecutors, the FBI secret police, the DEA drug and political police,  the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms police, the U.S. Marshals, and the Federal prisons- a total of about 114,000 personnel.

The man Trump picked to head the CIA, the U.S. global Gestapo, is Republican House Representative Mike Pompeo, a former U.S. Army tank officer, another torture-lover who for good measure has called on television for the execution of heroic, self-sacrificing whistleblower Edward Snowden. His new boss, Trump, also wants to use state power to murder Snowden. [2]

As the Republicans control the U.S. Senate, confirmation is pretty certain if not guaranteed for these vicious trolls. And Democrats are punks when it comes to fighting Republicans.

Looking at U.S. history, the arc of U.S. moral degeneration around torture comes clearly into view.
The U.S. has always tortured people, of course. Native American prisoners, slaves, and others of course were subjected to gruesome tortures. U.S. prisons have always been sites of torture, physical and psychological. Filipino insurgents were tortured during the invasion and subjugation of the Philippines around 1900.

The U.S. military and the CIA tortured countless thousands of Vietnamese during the invasion and occupation of Vietnam. We have a large body of evidence of military torture from the testimony of veterans.
And as part of Operation Phoenix, the CIA death squad program run by William Colby (later director of CIA), torture was routine, and at least 50,000 Vietnamese were murdered.

But officially torture was not acknowledged. Officially the U.S. didn't torture. An absurd lie, but in those days vice still felt the need to pay tribute to virtue in the form of hypocrisy.

Then came the regime of Bush the Younger (January 2001-January 2009), which pretty overtly systematized torture by the military and CIA, even issuing written directives and guidelines and instructions for carrying it out- while denying torture was torture. A phrase was cribbed from a Gestapo torture manual, "enhanced interrogation techniques," with the insistence that U.S. torture wasn't torture. To this day, the U.S. media rarely will call it by its right name, instead using the euphemism "harsh interrogation techniques." Perhaps they think this slight change proves their independence from state control.  The more daring among the commentariat and "journalists" once in awhile dart to the edge of the forbidden ideological zone and call it "brutal interrogation methods." Hint hint. (Oh, they are so brave!)

So torture became official policy, while it was denied that it was torture. (That's called having your cake and eating it too.) When photographic evidence of torture at the U.S.' Abu Ghraib political prison in Iraq surfaced, due to the carelessness and lack of sophistication of soldiers there who weren't schooled in secret-police deviousness but had the habit of thinking that whatever they did under orders was legitimate and no shame and didn't need to be treated as a deep dark secret, the Bush regime put on a burlesque act of shock and surprise and a handful of fall guy privates and a sergeant who had been a sadistic prison guard in civilian life had to be sacrificed to military courts martial.

Barack Hussein Obama paved the way for the coming torture holocaust of the Trump regime by refusing to enforce U.S. law and treaty obligations by prosecuting the Bush regime torturers. To be sure, this would have been politically difficult and would have involved a battle royale with the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) and the establishment media, but was absolutely necessary morally and politically. Of course, it would have been exceedingly naive to expect the political hustler and con man Obama to undertake such a necessary task. His only interest was in successfully climbing the greasy pole of U.S. establishment politics and sitting comfortably at its top, perched at the pinnacle of power. Like virtually all politicians of his party, power was his end, not a means to some other end, such as justice, or making the world better. (And don't believe their hype to the contrary.)

If you allow people to break laws with impunity, deterrence against law-breaking and evil-doing is destroyed.

With the precedent established that the executive branch could get away with more or less overt torture, there is no bar to the Trump regime's bringing torture back with a vengeance.

Law in the U.S. is merely a weapon to attack the weak, target victims, and feed the insatiable maw of the prison-industrial complex, whose roots trace back to Nixon (the slogan for this repression being "law and order") and was ramped up by the Clinton regime especially.

The other use of law is to have legal lackeys like John Yoo (for Bush) and his counterparts in the Obama regime concoct tortured legal rationales for criminal policies like torture (Bush) and assassinations (Obama). Obama added the extra wrinkle of treating the rationales themselves as state secrets, not to be revealed. A real Kafkaesque touch.

With the Bush regime having established the precedent that torture could be conducted openly with just a thin veil of mendacious nomenclature to provide a means of cynical denial, Trump and his minions now dispense with even the euphemisms.

Thus the U.S. has gone from hiding its torture by pretending it didn't exist, to pretending its torture wasn't torture by slapping a Nazi label on it, to dispensing with pretense entirely. A pattern of moral degeneracy.

It needs to be mentioned that torture didn't actually stop under Obama. Torture, psychological and physical, is a daily occurrence in U.S. jails and prisons. And the UN Rapporteur on Torture officially found that U.S. Army soldier Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning was subjected to conditions amounting to torture in the Marine brig at Quantico. (Manning's treatment was highly irregular- being kept in Marine, not Army custody, being kept naked, not being tried for two years, during which time his rights were grossly violated, and more.) Obama has shown a vindictive streak numerous times, against whistleblowers, journalists who reveal state secrets (crimes), people who heckle him (he had Egyptian secret police thugs break Medea Benjamin's arm in the Cairo airport), and murdering the teenage son and nephew of Anwar al-Awlaki.

Obama is slick and smooth, Trump bombastic and crude. But both are gangsters.

What a subtle hint, Donald! From Al-Jazeera interview with Edward Snowden 
and Daniel Ellsberg. View clip here.

1]  Torture "a lot worse" means more "detainees" sadistically tortured to death, like the Afghan taxi driver chained by his wrists hanging from a wall whose legs were pulped by a club-wielding "contractor," one of those fascist military veterans the U.S. produces. (The victim was he subject of the documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side," a reference to Bush regime vice president Dick Cheney's assertion thatthe U.S. would have to go to "the dark side" in its "war against terrorism."

2] Pompeo claimed Snowden put "friends of mine" "in enormous danger" and called for his execution. After "due process," that is- see how fair Pompeo is? Pompeo told two whopping lies in this brief segment. That Snowden "released" the NSA documents to foreign powers, and the "enormous danger" canard. Obviously NO U.S. troops (who Army veteran Pompeo was referring to) were put in ANY danger, and Snowden didn't "release" the documents at all. He gave them to journalists and ONLY to journalists, and didn't retain copies. The journalists in turn are deciding what information to release to the public.
 
Watch liar Pompeo.