Looks Like I Was Right Again

This time about Lance Armstrong. During all the hype about his winning the Tour de France 7 times, I never believed it was possible without cheating. I figured he must be using illegal drugs. Turns out my natural skepticism was justified.

I've been right so many times over the years about things great and small that others were blind to. The fact that James O'Keefe was going to get off scot-free after being caught in the act of trying to tap the phones in the U.S. Senator's office, for example.

Or to take an example from some years back, I always loathed that phony choir, "Up With People." Cloying bullshit like that always fills my nostrils with the stench of sanctimonious hypocrisy. In that case, it turned out that they were secretly backed by one of the most evil, mass murdering organizations in [pre-] human history, the CIA.

Too bad few people are interested in seeing reality the way it really is. It is painful to do so, given the subhuman, indeed in many ways anti-human state of the world. (Not the Armstrong example- that's small beer.)

"Incredible India" Sets World Record!

For an electricity blackout, that is. 22 of 28 states, 720 million people deprived of power. Wow! That's impressive.

You have to wonder, why with all the hype about India's faaa-bulous economic "development," no one thought to prepare for increased electricity demand.

Actually the blackout was all the farmers' fault. You see, thanks to an absence of rain, those crazy farmers all turned on irrigation pumps so their crops wouldn't die. What were they thinking! Those pumps are just for decoration, not actual use.

Here's a quote I found noteworthy:

"India has more poor people than all of Africa combined." -Gardner Harris, NY Times New Delhi correspondent , speaking on NPR news, 8/1/12, Morning Edition.

Somehow the capitalist Panglossians who spew the economic hype about "emerging economies" never mention facts like that.

U.S. Media Blacks Out Indian Perspective On Attack On Fishing Boat

You pretty much have to go to foreign media to find out that India is calling for an investigation of the U.S. Navy's attack on a small Indian fishing boat. You won't know from U.S. media that India has a beef. (India is just some unimportant country anyway, with a tiny population of only one billion one hundred million people.) You won't know that the dead fisherman has left behind a grieving wife, if you get your "information" from the U.S. media.


Aljazeera is now reporting that the boat was 500 meters from the U.S. ship when it was lethally fired on. 


The U.S. media is still blacking out the fact that the U.S. Navy ship blithely, indifferently sailed away from its victims after machine-gunning them.


There apparently is no need for apologies, or regrets, much less compensation. Since this story, after one day, is being virtually blacked out by the U.S. media, tossed down the memory hole, we don't have to think about it anymore.


Being the World's Only Superpower means never having to say you're sorry.

["India seeks action over UAE boat shooting," Aljazeera, 7/18/12.]

The Lies Already Started On U.S. Navy Murder Of Indian Fisherman

U.S. and lackey U.K. media are already parroting (without doing any investigating) the U.S. Navy's version of why it shot up an Indian fishing boat off the coast of Dubai.

The USN claims a small boat was charging straight at it, ignored "repeated" warnings, including warning shots, and that the Navy had no choice but to fire a machine gun at the boat, killing one and wounding several more people.

Interestingly, the NY Times and UK Independent published basically identical versions. Both omitted any details about what these alleged "warnings" consisted of, except for the "warning shots." ["Navy Ship Fires on Boat in the Persian Gulf," NY Times, and "US Navy insists it had no option after killing 'fisherman' in Gulf," The Independent  UK. Love the skeptical quotes around fisherman.]

Now you can already smell a rat. Why would a fishing boat keep sailing toward a Navy ship in the teeth of bullets being fired at it? (The "warning shots.")

Go to Aljazeera, and a very different picture emerges. ["India seeks action over UAE boat shooting."]

For one thing, the Aljazeera article is centered around the Indian Government's call for an investigation and contacting the U.S. Government.

There's no mention of this in the "Western" story.

Aljazeera also did something very strange- they actually interviewed the survivors from the fishing boat. The survivors claim that there were no warning shots. Aljazeera also gives details omitted from the Western media version about what the other "warnings" were- broadcasts on radio in loudspeaker (in Indian? probably not!) and flashing lights. So you're supposed to know that "flashing lights" means "run for you life!"

Another significant detail omitted by Western media- the fishing boat was 8 km away when the Navy opened lethal fire. And this is what the U.S. Navy said, so we see a deliberate cover-up already by the swine at the NY Times et al. We're not exactly talking imminent danger here.

One more telling detail, kept secret by the Imperialist press: after shooting up the fishing boat, the U.S. Navy craft just sailed away. The victims were on their own. (Isn't that always the case for victims of the U.S.? That's just standard operating procedure.)

The New York Times, while not bothering to mention any of this, did have plenty of space to rehash the U.S.S. Cole bombing in Aden harbor (which occurred over a decade ago). And to stoke paranoia about Iranian patrol boats and Iranian belligerence [sic] generally. (By the way, Hillary Clinton is in Israel to conspire against Iran right now.) This is a sleazy way to justify in a backhanded way the murder of the Indian fisherman, by referencing the attack on the Cole. With a similar logic, one can justify shooting black men in the U.S. by police since some black men are armed criminals! Hey, there's a little boat. A little boat once blew a hole in a U.S. ship. Better open fire! (Just as U.S. cops make the streets of American dangerous places, so the U.S. Navy makes the world's seas dangerous places.)

While dredging up the Cole incident, the NYT said nothing about the murderous U.S. Navy shootdown of that Iranian civilian airliner during the Reagan regime, however. Some things must never be forgotten, and some things must never be remembered. This is called "objective journalism."

The Arafat Murder Conspiracy

We can identify a number of accomplices in the murder of Yasser Arafat. Of course Israel.

But it almost certainly was a Palestinian who put the polonium 210 in Arafat's food. As far as we know, no one else was sickened. So it would have had to be someone in Arafat's immediate circle.

This highlights a sad truth: that among oppressed peoples, there are always those who aid their people's oppressors. It was true when the Jews were being annihilated by the Nazis. It was true among blacks in apartheid South Africa. It was true in Northern Ireland, as the British had great success infiltrating the IRA, even at its highest levels.

And it's certainly been true among Palestinians. The Israeli secret police agencies (Shin Bet and Mossad primary among them) are quite competent in their dirty work.

We have learned from Aljazeera (the two-part 51 minute video program especially) that Egypt and France are accomplices, at a minimum as accessories after the fact. The Egyptian doctors who tried to treat Arafat were ordered to keep their mouths shut by the military rulers, we learned from Aljazeera, which tried to interview them for its investigation. Thirty French doctors Aljazeera contacted all stone-walled the inquiry. The French also made sure to destroy Arafat's body fluids in their possession a few years after his murder. This was done secretly- it was only learned when Aljazeera tried to obtain them for testing.


Now his widow Suha is calling for Arafat's body to be exhumed for testing. The "Palestinian Authority" (U.S.-Israeli stooge Palestinian "leadership") is saying "fine" to this. Specifically, the two head flunkies of their people's oppressors, "President" (of a non-existent state) Mahmoud Abbas and former head "negotiator" with the Israelis Saeb Erekat, both have come out publicly saying they agree with this. (Erekat's brief interview on Aljazeera was quite revealing in terms of his body language and facial expressions. It's obvious he's not at all happy with this turn of events. He's even shaking his head "no" at one point while saying Yes to exhumation. He even gets tongue-tied towards the end and becomes semi-incoherent, trying to make sentences out of fragments of boilerplate rhetoric he keeps stored in his brain.)


To refresh your memory on Erekat's and Abbas' attempt to surrender to Israel, which Netanyahu rejected as not enough, since apparently it didn't include all the land to the Jordan River and a Palestinian promise to march their people into the sea, see "Palestine Papers: The Secret Negotiations."


Oh, one more accomplice needs to be mentioned. The New York Times. Their first reaction to Aljazeera's great expose was to run a short, despicable piece full of disinfo, dishonesty, and disingenuousness, by one Rick Gladstone. ("Al Jazeera Says Arafat Might Have Been Poisoned, 7/3/12.) But what can you expect from motherfuckers who still promote the absurd Warren Commission lies? The NYT is a political propaganda rag above all else, masquerading as a newspaper.Just look how they kept secret the NSA domestic spying story for a year and a half because the Bush regime wanted them to? Among innumerable other examples. Like the "Pope Plot." And "Yellow Rain." And a story they once ran about 8 people permanently blinding themselves by staring at the sun on an acid trip- totally fictitious, just like the previous two examples I mentioned. They even fabricated the Kitty Genovese murder story. That was exposed on On the Media.

Arafat Murder Conspiracy Unraveling Under Investigation

Aljazeera conducted a nine-month investigation to try and determine the cause of Yasser Arafat's death. His widow Suha gave them a copy of his extensive medical dossier, and his personal effects, on which was discovered the poloniium 210 that killed him. In a 51 minute video in two parts posted on Aljazeera's website, they detail the events surrounding his death and the medical forensic inquiry undertaken by Aljazeera.

Shortly before the hit was undertaken, various Israeli officials made threats against Arafat, including then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who publicly revoked his promise not to murder Arafat, and then Minister of "Communications" Ehud Olmert, who explicitly threatened Arafat's life.

The gang of Western-Israeli stooge Palestinians in the top echelon of the PLO were already maneuvering to seize the spoils before Arafat was even dead. Until his condition was critical, the medical care provided by the Palestinians themselves was oddly indifferent and inept. After his death, his successors showed no interest in getting to the bottom of what happened.

Since he suddenly became violently ill 4 hours after eating, we can presume that the polonium was planted in his food. Polonium is well known to cause severe gastrointestinal symptoms.

So now there's yet another reason for "the West" to hate Aljazeera. Guess the U.S. will have to kill some more of their reporters. Maybe they'll poison them this time instead of bombing them, to "send a message," as gangsters like to say.

See the videos at "Arafat's widow calls to exhume his body."

Arafat's Bones May Provide Clues To Exact Origin of Murder Polonium

The polonium 210 used to murder Yasser Arafat came from a nuclear reactor. That much has been established by Swiss scientists. Of course the particular reactor would be either in Israel or the U.S. The radioactive signature of the polonium which could be recovered from Arafat's bones in an autopsy could  possibly point to the specific source, according to Aljazeera. ["Arafat's widow calls to exhume his body," aljazeera.com]

Following Arafat's demise, his secret police killers made sure to spread rumors about causes of his death to cover their tracks. One of those rumors played into Arab homophobia, claiming he died of AIDS. Nice. First the physical assassination, then the character assassination. (Of course Arafat was subject to vilification during his lifetime too, for daring to use violence in his people's cause, the same as Ben Gurion, Begin, Shamir, Sharon, and all the general-Prime Ministers of Israel. They should try nonviolence! Well, they do, and have, at least since 1967, and today. The Israeli response to Palestinian protests is consistent: violence repression, arrests, imprisonment without trial of "protest leaders," and so forth. So can the pseudo-Gandhian lectures, bourgeoisie. By the way, Martin Luther King, Jr. preached nonviolence, and his payback was to be shot down by the CIA. I love when some of the most violent gangsters in world history preach nonviolence to the people they oppress.)

Arafat Was Murdered

This was obvious to me even before he died, when he came down with a "mystery illness." Then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was publicly kicking himself for dealing with Arafat, and the Israelis declared there could be no "progress" in the "peace process" as long as Arafat was on the scene. They and the U.S. decided that a more pliable Palestinian "leader" was needed. (Mahmoud Abbas has indeed proven more pliable, aiding Israeli assassinations within his West Bank quasi-Bantustan, and making secret, exorbitant concessions to Netanyahu, which Netanyahu rejects since he is pursuing the long range Israeli strategy, in place since 1967, of ultimately absorbing most or all of the territory between the 1967 Israeli border and the Jordan river.)

Now Aljazeera has revealed that Arafat was murdered with polonium-210, from a nuclear reactor. Irony of ironies, this is the exact same radioactive substance the Russians used to murder Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. ["Tests hint at possible Arafat poisoning," an entirely too cautious headline, given the definitive content of the story, in video and print on Aljazeera's website.]

The CIA and Mossad wired Arafat's encourage with infiltrators years ago, so slipping polonium into him presented no great challenge. Swiss lab analysts hired by Aljazeera discovered polonium 210 on his clothes and toothbrush. (A microscopic amount is enough to be lethal.)

Conveniently, no autopsy was performed on Arafat. Muslim custom blocks autopsies. And the French were providing Arafat's medical "care." The French are no friends of the Palestinian people.

For years Israelis in the "security establishment" mooted the possibility of murdering Arafat. Veterans of the Israeli military and secret police spoke ruefully of missed opportunities to eliminate Arafat, which their political superiors considered not in Israel's interests at the times. Sharon kicked himself for not murdering Arafat earlier.

Add another one to the list of stunning Western hypocrisies. The Western propaganda system never tires of taxing the Russians with Litvinenko's murder. These Americans and their Euro-stooges are OH SO CIVILIZED. They find it SHOCKING that anyone would assassinate somebody!

"Mubarakism WIthout Mubarak"

That was the title of my post of April 30th on this page. Now the Egyptian military junta has given us more confirmation that the military oligarchy established in 1952 with the overthrow of King Farouk by the CIA-backed "Free Officers" (led in part by Nasser, who became the first military dictator) is intact.Col. Nasser was followed as dictator by a two more generals, Sadat and then Mubarak. Now the generals left prefer for the time being to operate somewhat in the shadows, grey men hiding behind stooges they appoint, such as the "commission" that suddenly came out with a "constitution" making the military wholly independent of any civilian pseudo-government, and giving itself the power to make laws. (That should come in handy, since the Mubarak high court, still in power, just disbanded the Parliament by fiat, leaving no legislative body in the country,) Just before the "winner" of the Presidential "election" is determined ,the generals have also let it be known that the new "President" will be virtually powerless. (That's fair, after all, whoever it is, the Muslim Brotherhood guy or Mubarak's Prime Minister, isn't a general! Can't have a "President" with dictatorial powers, like Mubarak/Sadat/Nasser had, if he isn't even a general- or at least a colonel.)

Having already imprisoned 10,000 political prisoners after mock "trials" in military "courts" AFTER the removal of Mubarak, there should have been no doubt that the military still rules Egypt- and it shows no sign of allowing that to change. Its dismantling of the U.S. "democracy" organizations in Egypt was a shot across to bow of the U.S. in this regard, an omen of the generals' intentions.

jasonzenith.blogspot.com
taboo-truths.blogspot.com

How The Walker “Win” In Wisconsin Bodes Ill For The U.S. Economy

Illegitimate Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker “won” a recall election (by spending only seven times as much as his Democratic challenger’s backers). He got 53% of the vote. Very impressive.⁽¹⁾

Now the GOP will be validated in their destructive economic policies. More cuts in Government spending, more loss of Government jobs.

 GOP demagogues screech that unless “spending” is slashed (but ONLY on human needs- the GOP is already double-crossing the Democrats on the “cuts” [smaller increases] in the military budget) and taxes on the rich are cut, the U.S. will end up like Greece. Actually what the GOP is going to do will push the U.S. down the Greek path. An economic death spiral of cutting Government spending, causing a shrinking economy, which in turn shrinks Government revenues, thus increasing Government deficits, leading to more slashes in Government spending and activity, further shrinking the economy and revenues, further, etc. The GOP “medicine” is poison, and as the patient gets sicker and sicker, the GOP will pour more poison down the patient’s gullet.  Paul Krugman has been making this case, but it seems as if he’s yelling into the wind. He points out that the U.S. can borrow money at record low interest rates, making it a good time to borrow in order to stimulate the economy via Government spending. The state governments especially are in dire need of funding. Their deficits, cuts, and mass firings have created a huge economy drag, more than offsetting the paltry job creation in “the private sector.”

This election result underlines, once again, the decrepit, enervated state of organized labor- unions- in the U.S. (Unions made a big push in the recall campaign.) A lot of this is because unions were long ago captured by the worst kind of corrupt, phony, sellout, class collaborationist traitors. Just look at the American Institute for Free [sic] Labor Development, which was an unholy alliance of U.S. unions, the CIA, and big corporations designed to kill genuine worker movements abroad (especially in Latin America).  In fact, going back to the days of Samuel Gompers (boss of the AFL, a guild for the labor aristocracy of craftsmen which excluded “unskilled” workers) the U.S. labor movement has been morally corrupt and bankrupt in terms of its values. (Gompers was a militaristic shill during World War I, doing all he could to herd workers into the army.) 

The unions' narrow focus on “bread and butter issues” ignores the important issues of power and control. And by helping destroy workers’ movements in Latin America, the U.S. unions laid the groundwork for the massive immigration into the U.S. of desperately immiserated Latinos, driving down wages in the U.S. for all workers. What a bunch of jackasses these labor bosses are! And since U.S. unionism pits workers against each other, “jobs go overseas” because wages are lower there. Thus has the U.S. labor “movement” (It’s not a movement, it’s a bunch of corrupt, featherbedding union bureaucrats- think the notorious George Meany and his gang, a bunch of notorious Vietnam War hawks to boot- in Gompers’ tradition of feeding the workers into the Imperialist war meat grinder- or Albert “Chancre” Shanker, another nasty Vietnam War promoter.)

If workers were represented on corporate boards, as they are in Germany, for example, could pirate speculators like Mitt Romney swoop in and destroy productive companies? (The pirate method is to swoop in, “buy” the company, laden it with debt to pay themselves back for buying it, in effect making the victim company buy itself, slash payroll and investment to produce quick profits for themselves from cash flow, then let the torpedoed ship sink. Alternatively they sell off the company after slashing workers. This is called “increasing efficiency and productivity,” i.e. slave-driving. Power is what matters, not a few cents an hour more in wages. 

Of course, hardly any U.S. workers outside of the governments (Federal, state, local) are unionized anymore. That’s the workers’ fault for not organizing themselves. And for not getting rid of politicians who enact laws that attack their economic and class interests. (Like cynically deceptively misnamed "Right To Work" laws, and the Taft-Hartley anti-labor law, never overturned in decades, even when Democrats had overwhelming majorities in Congress. But like a beaten wife, the unions loyally stick by the Democratic Party of Big Business.)  

But then, class-unconscious sheep can hardly be expected to organize themselves, now can they? And organized labor won’t talk about class and the class interests of the people they purport to represent. That would be “Marxist,” and hence “UnAmerican.” Insofar as “American” is reactionary and fanatically pro-capitalist, that part is true.

Now a word on polls. As the polls “predicted” Walker’s win, we would be “paranoid” and “conspiracy theorists” to question the vote. Given the large number of reactionaries in the U.S., (and Wisconsin did give us Senator Joe McCarthy, after all), Walker may well have won without having to steal votes this time, like the GOP did to keep Prosser on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a necessary step in ramming through the GOP’s legislative agenda. Yet when exit polls- the most reliable kind of poll- showed that John Kerry won in Ohio in 2004, and the GOP stole the election, we were told to pay no attention to those polls.

1)      I call him illegitimate because he’s nothing but an agent for plutocrats like the Koch brothers, who fund him and to whom he answers. The fact that stupid people who aren’t rich vote against their own class interests doesn’t legitimize an oligarchy. As far as his election victory, it was hardly a fair election. Outspending one’s opponent over sevenfold* would seem to virtually guarantee a win, as propaganda has been proven over centuries to be an effective method of mind control and manipulation. People are mainly non-rational, emotional, and irrational beings. That is why propaganda is so effective. Logic and facts are very weak persuaders by comparison. (Although propaganda also uses selected facts and specious logic in a tendentious fashion, to create sophistry.) I would note that the media has downplayed this gigantic money and propaganda advantage.  This is done to legitimize Walker and by extension GOP economic dogma and attacks on the working class. Unfortunately most people do not realize they are in fact members of the working class. They think they’re something called “middle class,” an amorphous and virtually meaningless term that refers to the bulk of the income scale. This class unconsciousness on the part of the masses of sheep is what allows the rich to wage one-sided class warfare virtually unopposed.

*About seven and a half to eight and a half times, actually. Walker spent $30-34 million, Barrett, the lame Democrat opponent, $4 million. But “outsider” spending, i.e. money spent on their behalf outside their campaigns, by late May came to roughly $45.6 million for Walker, vs. about $17.9 million for Mr. Barrett, a mere two and a half times as much; this according to data from the “Wisconsin Democracy Campaign,” a “nonpartisan”  group that tracks spending. (“Nonpartisan” means not aligned with either of the two parties that count in U.S. politics because they hold a monopoly on political power, enforced by non-proportional representation and winner-take-all elections, unlike in Europe, where there is representation for many more people than in the U.S.)

Jasonzenith.blogspot.com     taboo-truths.blogspot.com

Brace For Another Stolen Election In Wisconsin

In April 2011 the Wisconsin GOP stole a recall election for State Supreme Court Judge David "The Strangler" Prosser. (Prosser choked a female State Supreme Court Judge- a Democrat- in chambers.) Oddly, only the website of rightwing plutocrat magazine Forbes covered this.

Now, if the millions of plutocrat dollars buying saturation advertising for their stooge Governor, Scott Walker, isn't enough, it will be close enough to enable them to steal this election too. As the Democrats and their auxiliaries such as the gangs centered around the magazines The Nation and The Progressive always roll over and play dead when the GOP steals elections, the GOP has no reason to fear. Since Dems and their lackeys are gutless, and fear for delegitimizing the system by exposing election stealing, the GOP will never be deterred from this behavior. (Recall they stole the Presidential elections in 2000 and 2004. Yes, 2004. See what they did in Ohio.)

"Questions Surround Votes Found [sic!] In Waukesha County," Forbes online, 4/7/11.

"Something Smells In Waukesha County, Wisconsin-- And It's Not The Cheese," Forbes online, 4/13/11.

"Wisconsin Set To Disenfranchise Likely Democratic Party Voters," Forbes online, 5/10/11.

Assange and Pinochet: Two Revealing Extradition Cases

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and hate object of the U.S. establishment, has lost his latest appeal in Britain to keep him out of the clutches of Sweden, from where he will most likely be handed over to the tender mercies of the U.S. Government and the vindictive Obama regime.

Assange has lost at every stage of the legal process in Britain. But allowing the process to drag on and on with much complicated rigmarole allows the perception of fairness and due process.

Augusto Pinochet, the fascist mass murdering U.S.-installed dictator of Chile and international assassin, also had an extradition case in Britain, pursuant to an arrest warrant issued by a Spanish judge over Spanish citizens murdered by Pinochet. (Pinochet murdered at least 4 U.S. citizens, and the U.S. didn't give a fig[1]) The holding of Pinochet on a country estate while the matter was disposed of provoked howls of outrage from the likes of Margaret Thatcher, who is treated as a Reaganesque icon by the U.S. media and is the subject of a sympathetic biopic starring Meryl Streep, for which she received an Oscar. Thanks, "liberal" Hollywood!

Pinochet was NOT extradicted, despite his undisputable crimes.

Yet in Assange's case, who hasn't even been charged with a crime, and is wanted only, ostensibly, for questioning (oddly, the Swedish prosecutor who is making the extradition demand- not even a judge!- refuses to question him in Britain, as Assange and his lawyers have repeatedly offered), extradition is approved.

So tell me again how there's nothing political in this?

The BBC has been running propaganda stories on the theme that there's no political interference on either Britain's or Sweden's part. What bunk.

And recall that Sweden helped the CIA kidnap at least one Muslim man out of Sweden to be tortured elsewhere in "secret." So Sweden has proven its willingness to "cooperate" with the Godfather of "the West" in "the War On Terrorism."

Well, I guess it could be worse. Many among the U.S. elites have openly called for Assange's execution or assassination.[2] Of course, once he's in a U.S. prison, he can easily be murdered, either by putting carcinogens in his food (as happened to Jack Ruby) or having another prisoner knife him in the shower, etc., etc. There are soooo many ways for them to kill their prisoners. Given the open, rabid hatred of the U.S. political and media classes for Assange, his life is in real danger in the U.S.

1) The four were:

Charles Horman, for years the only known victim. Somehow the fact that Frank Teruggi was murdered at the same time was kept secret by the U.S. media. Apparently his family had less pull.

 Frank Teruggi Jr., a student on the FBI's shitlist for attending a "Conference on Anti-Imperialist Strategy and Action'' held by former Peace Corps volunteers who, the FBI said, ``espouse support of Cuba and all Third World revolutionaries.'' Well he obviously deserved to die for that!

These two were murdered by the Chilean military after getting a green light from a U.S. Army Colonel in Chile. So nice to have the U.S. military protecting "our" security.

Ronni Karpen Moffitt, murdered for riding in a car with Orlando Letelier, who CIA bombmaker Michael Vernon Townley targeted on instructions from DINA, Pinochet's secret police. The Cuban exile terrorists who planted the bomb got off scot-free, and Townley served a mere three years in U.S. prison.

Boris Weisfeiler, a mathematics professor who "disappeared" in 1985. The military seized him while he was hitchhiking in Chile. His body has never been recovered. He was 44. I only ever heard of this victim while doing research for this post! Man, the U.$. media does a good job keeping these crimes quiet!

But boy, an official enemy kills some Americans, and the howls of outrage never cease! 

Double standard, anyone? 

See also "F.B.I. Helped Chile Search For Leftists, Files Show," NY Times, 2/10/99.

2) Among those who bellowed for Assange's death were "nice" Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Republican Congressman Peter King, foreign toadies of U.S. Imperialism like Canadian "political scientist" Tom Flanagan, an adviser to right wing megalomaniac Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and, predictably, Murdoch's Minions at Fox "News."

Numerous bloodthirsty politicians and neo-fascist windbags have called for Assange's death, including Representatives Mike Rogers and Sarah Palin, William Kristol (spawn of Irving Kristol, an intellectual godfather of "neoconservatism" who urged Nixon to crush campus anti-war protests in the days before the Kent State massacre), and so has Democratic Party poohbah Robert Beckel.

There's also a list at http://www.peopleokwithmurderingassange.com/the_list.html

Given Obama's micromanaging of assassinations (now he's putting teenage girls on his death list, as the NY Times revealed 5/28 online and in print 5/29/12) it may come down to his personal decision whether Assange lives or dies, at least until Obama's out of office. [NY Times, "Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will." What a weird title!]

If there ever were a Nuremberg trial for Obama, he can't pretend he was unaware of the drone assassinations as he personally approves every victim on the list. Oh, and now he's given the CIA carte blanche to murder any "military-age" males spotted in certain geographical regions. Amazing.

Partly his motivation is to prevent a "terrorist incident" from spoiling his reelection. He just better hope that his vicious crimes don't boomerang on him by provoking retaliation against American civilians.

Dominique “The Satyr” Strauss-Kahn Sues His Victim

One of his victims, that is, namely the hotel maid he forced to perform oral sex on him in New York City. He blames her for the loss of his cushy IMF gig and what he regarded as his sure-thing election as President of France.

How’s that for gall by the super-sexed Gaul?

Monsieur Rocketpants wants a cool one million dollars from the maid (which I’m sure she could easily pay after several lifetimes of wage slavery) for spoiling his “reputation.” 

Funny, I thought he was proud of his promiscuity.

Prior to this, the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, sued The Satyr after the chickenshit punk politico Manhattan D.A., Cyrus Vance Jr. (who was born into the nomenklatura, son of the late Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, someone the New York Times would be calling a “prince” if he was an offspring of the Chinese political elite) dropped the case out of fear of losing. *

Le Grand Ladies Man had tried to kill her suit by claiming diplomatic immunity, a ploy the judge called a “Hail Mary” pass attempt, which he rejected on the grounds that 1) Strauss-Kahn was no longer employed by the IMF, and;  2) he did not invoke diplomatic immunity during the aborted criminal case, as he was in the U.S. on personal business.

Recently, as part of his counteroffensive, Strauss-Kahn has gone on French television to push a conspiracy theory, that what happened in the hotel in NY was all a setup by French intelligence acting at the behest of Sarkozy. (Sarkozy, by the way, gave DSK the IMF job. Which just goes to show what a devious conspiracy it must be!) Known CIA tool Edward Jay Epstein promoted this nonsense with a bunch of pseudo-factoids.+ 

Meanwhile, back in France, land of sophisticated lotharios, Dominique is sinking deeper into trouble around his now-exposed history of participating in international orgies with prostitutes. Strauss-Kahn has already been charged with “aggravated procurement in an organized gang,” meaning procurement, in Lille, France. 

The very desirable DSK claims he had no idea that this regular stream of beautiful young pliable women were being paid. How could he have guessed?  Why would it cross his mind that there isn’t a limitless supply of luscious women just dying to have sex with a fat, old, ugly gnome, year after year, in cities around the world, including D.C.? After all, it’s a privilege to sexually service him, you know. He’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn! A Very Important Man! A mover and shaker, as we say. One of the elite who run the world! That must explain why he bellowed “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?” at the hapless hotel housekeeper when she resisted his attempt to rape her.

Furthermore, according to French daily Libération, two Belgian prostitutes questioned in the Lille probe described Mr Strauss-Kahn as using violence during sex at the W Hotel in Washington and forcing a sexual act on one of them over her protests. A bit of “rough stuff.”  Sounds familiar from Nafissatou’s account. Methinks DSK is a bit of a dominator and sadist.

But don’t worry. I’m sure DSK has seen as much of the inside of a jail cell as he’ll ever see. As far as his fellow French ruling class members are concerned, he’s suffered enough. He missed a chance to be President of France, the grandest position on earth. And his reputation! 

I hope he takes that ungrateful housekeeper for all she’s worth!

*To be fair, there is something wrong with Manhattan juries. They refuse to convict rapists for rape. For example, the infamous case last year of the two cops and the drunken woman, where the cops kept returning to her apartment and one raped her; and the case just concluded of a drunken cop who kidnapped a woman at gunpoint and raped her in a backyard. Witnesses called the cops and he was nabbed on the scene. They apparently refused to believe that the woman could tell his penis was in her! They convicted him of sexual assault but not on the rape charge. Luckily the judge still gave him a long prison sentence. In the latter case most of the jurors did want to convict for rape.  A white male lawyer on the panel refused. 

+Epstein was one of the early CIA disinformationists posing as a Warren Commission skeptic in order to muddy the waters and misdirect people. Later he became an open conduit for propaganda from James Jesus Angleton, the demented head of CIA “counterintelligence,” which also ran the totally illegal domestic repression operations of the CIA. Later, Angleton-Epstein disinfo pushed the line that Oswald, the CIA patsy set up as the fall guy and fake “Cuban agent” with an eye to provoking a U.S. invasion of Cuba after the JFK killing, was a Soviet agent. There’s more, but this isn’t the place to deconstruct that particular CIA bullshit. Of course the CIA assassinated both Kennedys, with the FBI, military, and Dallas police as accomplices, and the media as accessories after the fact to this day. But I digress…

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How Many Assassinations Does It Take For Obama and Karzai To Get The Message?

Yet again, the head of Karzai's “Peace Council” has been assassinated by the people he's trying to make peace with. This is the second time this has happened in less than a year. One side is trying to negotiate a peace deal, and the other side is murdering the negotiators!

The victim was formerly with the Taliban. So that “sends a message” (i.e. terrorizes) any other Taliban who might be tempted to “reconcile” with the Karzai regime.

Another sign of how well the U.S.’ “strategy” is working in Afghanistan.

I don't think the Taliban, their fellow-traveler terrorists, and their Paki sponsors/aiders/abetters/protectors/accomplices are looking for peace, reconciliation, or power sharing. Kinda obvious, isn’t it? ⁽¹⁾

Yet Obama and Karzai persist in their delusional strategies. Obama offers the American people the prospect of endless semi-occupation of Afghanistan. Karzai is- well, he's Karzai, a slippery hustler who just wants to snooker the West into continuing to prop him up and shovel billions into the pockets of himself, his relatives, his cronies, and a horde of Afghan leeches.

In 2011, the “Central Bank” of Kabul admits that four billion six hundred million dollars in cold, hard cash, actual physical money, was taken out of the country through Kabul “International Airport.” The thievery is absolutely naked, yet the U.$. media is very quiet about it.

Of course, not every last cent is stolen. Most of the rest is frittered away in Potemkin-village-style demonstration projects and wheel-spinning. And stuff that the Taliban blows up as soon as it gets the chance.

The U.S. is taking billions of dollars of our money and putting it directly into the pockets of looters. For what? To keep up a facḁde of “fighting terrorism” and this paper organization Al-Qaeda, which supposedly barely exists any more. The Obama regime is constantly bragging about the latest terrorist bigwig they’ve assassinated, yet the villains are never defeated. It's an endless comic book war against cartoonishly evil fiends.

The truth is, the U.S. strategy is one of quiet desperation. Like LBJ and Nixon in Vietnam, Obama doesn't want to “lose” a war. The asshole could have pulled out right after his election, by saying “Al-Qaeda was driven out of Afghanistan, and the Taliban were overthrown.” Why is the U.S. obligated to determine the regime in Afghanistan?

Since the real problem is Pakistan, and the U.S. won't go to war with them (in fact that's another gang that's shaken down the U.S. taxpayers for billions, to arm them to menace India, which is the victim of Pakistani terrorism) the situation in fact is hopeless, and throwing billions down a rathole in perpetuity to prop up a loathsome hustler like Karzai is nauseating. Karzai has shown no inclination in over a decade of leeching off the U.S. to create an actual government, provide services for the Afghan people, or do anything other than pose as a “leader.” It's all hollow, pompous theater with that guy.

Speaking of how well things are going in Afghanistan, the newly-assassinated head of the “Peace Council” was unprotected, despite the fact that his predecessor was murdered, and that he had been receiving death threats. I guess death threats are so common in Afghanistan that they don’t merit any particular attention.

Oh, and two British soldiers were just killed by an Afghan “policeman or a man dressed in an Afghan police uniform.” (You can buy such uniforms freely in the bazaars in Kabul, e.g. Yeah, they got things under control there.)

Not to worry, the Afghan “security forces” will be ready to take over by year-end 2014. At least that’s what the U.S. poohbahs keep saying. And the line that U.$. media scribes dutifully regurgitate.

Once in awhile we hear from soldiers on the ground who seem to think exactly the opposite.

One fact- about half the Afghan “security forces” disappear/desert/quit each year. That’s sort of a high attrition rate, wouldn’t you say?

Oh, and hardly any of them can even read or write.

And their commanders are corrupt.

And lots of them are in cahoots with the Taliban or are Taliban infiltrators.

And they can’t fight their way out of a paper bag, except perhaps for the small number who are U.S. Special Forces mascots. (Shades of “South” Vietnam, where U.S. Special Forces similarly cloned Vietnamese versions of themselves, ideologically fanatical and zealous killers.)

Other than all that, everything is “on track,” in Official-Speak.

A footnote on the colossal waste of our money in Afghanistan: the Washington Post just revealed a real scandal- unlike the ginned up pseudo-“scandal” of the GSA conference cum party that didn’t even cost one million dollars, but cost the head of the agency her job, even though she was unaware of it. The State Department signed a ten year contract to build a consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. The building was finished, and then it was finally recognized what was obvious all along- this part of Afghanistan was “dangerous.” (Are there any “safe” parts of Afghanistan?) ⁽²⁾

This scandal cost $80 MILLION, but no heads are rolling- except possibly the head of the anonymous leaker who gave documents to the Post. That person risked their career, if not criminal prosecution by the vindictive Obama administration.⁽³⁾

I guess some scandals are just more scandalous than others.

It turns out that this boondoggle was the doing of the thuggish Richard Holbrooke, who bullied the State Department apparatchiks into approving this total waste.

But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that weird, controlled, Queen Bee who has spent her life shimmying up the slippery pole of state power [Notice how alike she and Obama actually are? He’s just better at it.] ran interference for the undeserved reputation of the late and greatly-lamented (by the bourgeois elites) Holbrooke, saying, ““Everything that we have accomplished that is working in Afghanistan and Pakistan is largely because of Richard Holbrooke. It may have to wait until I write my memoirs, but that is a fact.”

Well, if she says it’s a “fact,” it must be. Actual facts be damned.

Explain it to me again, Madame Secretary, what exactly is it that is “working” in that region?

And the “accomplishments”? Well, Al-Qaeda was driven out of Afghanistan- they went elsewhere. And the Taliban were (apparently temporarily) driven from power.

But Bush did that. Holbrooke had nothing to do with it.

Any other “accomplishments?”

Anyway, Holbrooke and Clinton belong to a very charmed, elite club, a mutual admiration society of made members of the U.S. nomenklatura.

Of course, aside from money, there is also the misery caused by maimed and killed Afghans, U.S. soldiers, and aid workers who try to help ungrateful, stubbornly primitive Afghans. No price tag can be put on those losses.

I truly despise the anti-human Taliban and their cynical Paki masters. But unless one is going to go to war with Pakistan, I fail to see any way to “win” this. [Mitt Romney, on the “campaign trail,” during one of the GOP candidate “debates,” attacked Obama in empty rhetorical terms and vowed that he’d attack the Taliban “wherever they are.” What a phony bastard. You’re not gonna go to war with Pakistan, Willard. What a blustering phony.]

1) But apparently not obvious enough for some- like the Obama and Karzai regimes and the U.S. media. For example, NPR, in a brief headline report on the hit (5/13/12, 11 am EST) spun it thusly: “Gunmen dealt a blow to the effort to negotiate a peace agreement with the Taliban” by shooting the Peace Council head. 

As if “gunmen” and “the Taliban” are separate entities. This preserves the illusion that there is a point in “negotiating” with the Taliban as they or their allies murder the negotiators.

But NPR let slip a couple of interesting facts. The assassination was carried out with a silenced gun, and with a single shot. I.e. it was done by highly trained professionals, and they have access to hard-to-get weaponry. To me that indicates that these hitmen are one of the ISI’s cat’s paws.

2) “U.S. abandons consulate site in Afghanistan, citing security risks,” Washington Post, undated article on their website, as all their web articles unprofessionally are, at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/citing-security-us-abandons-consulate-site-in-afghanistan/2012/05/05/gIQA9ZkD4T_story.html?tid=pm_pop

The “print”version online says “published May 5.”

For a compendium of items on waste and futility in Afghanistan, see cashiered and persecuted State Department career official Peter van Buren’s site at http://www.wemeantwell.com/

Van Buren is being kicked out of the State Department 6 months shy of retiring (and qualifying for his pension) in retaliation for publishing a book about waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq. That’s the Obama regime for you.

All those politicians and bureaucrats yammering about how they’re against waste, fraud, and abuse are apparently full of shit. They’re actually FOR it. It’s how their crooked capitalist patrons get paid (out of our pockets) and how they line up cushy post-government sinecures for themselves. More and more, the U.S. Government looks like a big criminal racket.

3) Gee, Obama sure is like Nixon. Not his personality, his behavior. The fact that he sneakily knifes people unemotionally, coldly, calculatingly, not in a frenzy of angry cursing like Nixon, merely makes him more chilling than Nixon. And he’s a much better public liar than Nixon. Nixon always licked his lips nervously and even broke out in a sweat. Apparently Nixon had a conscience, unlike, by all evidence, Obama, who’s cool as a cucumber when he lies, with oh-so-convincing tonal qualities. He’s on a par with Reagan, acting-wise.

But who remembers Nixon? Not the historically-amnesiac American people. And those who didn’t actually live through the horrible Nixon years are taught nothing but exiguous lies in their “history” classes. The same classes that indoctrinate people to view the Confederacy as a noble if misguided enterprise, not a horrible slave empire, and reviles “carpetbaggers” and irresponsible blacks who needed to be put back in their place by the KKK. And that Andrew Johnson was unfairly impeached! In fact he was a virulent racist who openly violated the Reconstruction laws enactly by Congress and thus should have been removed from office.

These days we’re told that Nixon was a liberal! The architect of massive terrorist bombing of Vietnam, of invasions and “secret” bombings of Laos and Cambodia, the architect of the Pinochet coup in Chile, backer of the fascist junta in Greece, overseer of repression and assassination programs against black “militants” and leftist opposition movements- this man is a “liberal” because, we’re instructed, the EPA was created during his term, and he saw the obvious about Russia and China- that they were adversaries, not allies- hell, they fought lethal border skirmishes with each other!- and he played on that division to “open” to China in order to try and “win” the Vietnam war. Which he failed to do.

No, I didn’t mention that little peccadillo, the Watergate burglary. That nothing event is the only black mark on his record as far as the U.S. bourgeoisie are concerned. Which tells you all you need to know about the morality of that bunch.

Trying to bug the Democratic Party? THAT warrants removal from office. Unlike instituting neoslavery via terrorism in the Confederate states!

(Nixon was forced to resign when he was informed that two-thirds of the Senate was ready to vote to convict him. To save his pension, free S.S. guards, free office, and other lifetime perks, he quit.)

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Mubarakism Without Mubarak

Muslim Brotherhood sit-in protesters outside the Egyptian Ministry of “Defense” in Cairo beaten up badly by plainsclothes “security agents.” As usual, the military dictators claim it was just angry locals beating up the victims in righteous outrage against the demonstration.

NPR pretended the military’s bullshit was true, or that it was a Big Mystery who the assailants were. BBC pointed out the pattern of plainsclothes “security agents” attacking protesters and the rulers claiming it was really outraged local citizens doing the mauling.

The sit-in was a protest against the disqualification of the Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate, on the grounds that his mother had a U.S. passport.

[BBC, NPR, 4/29/12.]

Guess That “Iranian Plot To Kill The Saudi Ambassador To The U.S.” Was a Fake, After All

How come we never hear about it? Why aren't there constant reminders? The U.S. media and Government are so intent on indicting the Iranian regime, you'd think they'd constantly harp on it if it was true- or even if it wasn't true. So that seems like a dead giveaway that it's bogus, especially since the U.S. is bullying the rest of the world into joining it in tightening the sanctions noose around Iran's throat. You'd expect them to be shouting to the rafters about this outrageous outlaw behavior by Iran- trying to assassinate an Ambassador! Can you imagine? Why, that's like, oh, I don't know, the CIA arranging assassinations of foreign heads of state! Or allowing a Chilean secret police bomb maker (Michael Vernon Townley) to sneak into the U.S. to help murder a former Chilean Ambassador (Orlando Letelier) in Washington D.C.! (Along with his young associate Ronni Karpen Moffitt- but that was “colllateral damage,” as they say.)

On second thought, maybe better that the U.S. not make those comparisons.

And the reason the U.S. government and media never mentions the FBI's Iranian “plot” anymore- not even mentions it!!- certainly can't be because it raises by implication the issue of Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. The West, and especially the U.S., is absolutely shameless in its hypocrisies and double standards. Can't see why that would inhibit them. Plus it's not as if the Israeli assassinations are a secret anymore. Besides, the U.S.just keeps saying “Moi? Those assassinations have nothing to do with us,” as a political shield from responsibility for anything its fair-haired client Israel “might” be doing.

Just for the record, I have no sympathy for the horrible, oppressive theocracy that hijacked the anti-Shah revolution and imposed another totalitarian, anti-human regime. I'm not a George Galloway type knee-jerk anti-American. Just because the U.S. doesn't like somebodies doesn't make them good guys.

It's like the former Soviet-U.S. rivalry. It wasn't a Good Guy vs. Bad Guy thing. It was like a gangland war, two rival mobs feuding for control of turf. When the Soviet Union collapsed like a rotten building, my slogan was “One Evil Empire Down, One To Go.”

Now we can find another irony, one that apparently addles the brains of some and prevents them from thinking clearly. The assorted jihadists who the U.S. backed against the Soviets and their Afghan clients

also saw both empires as enemies- first they “beat” the Soviets (as if they could have done it without U.S.-Paki-Saudi help, including an influx of foreign “fighters”) and they next set their sights on the U.S. That goes to show that the Enemy of my Enemy is NOT necessarily my Friend. The jihadists are anti-humans, and I'm pro-human. The proper attitude in their tiff with the West (and modernity) is to hope that the assholes on both sides bleed each other a lot. Maybe someday both will be weakened enough to create an opening for human forces to seize power, there and here. (Unfortunately part of what is being bled is our money- through taxes. Can't help that. But we can make sure it's not our blood, by not joining the U.S. military and raising our children to understand the Imperialist nature of that military and how to uses people as disposable cannon-fodder, and most importantly how “patriotism” is a con job.)

Yet simple-minded lefties with their Manichean, black-and-white world view think anyone the U.S. is fighting must be righteous. They're still griping about how N ATO “bombed Libya” (i.e. stopped a Qaddafi bloodbath and enabled the Libyans to overthrow him- and notice he needed foreign mercenaries on his side) as an example of Western Imperialism, lumped in with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Just last week a jackass leftist with a radio show referred to the Taliban as “the Afghan resistance.” Oh really? Those primitive fanatics who are still throwing acid in the faces of schoolgirls to stop them from being educated? What exactly are they “resisting,” basic humanity?

Take off your ideological blinders and look at reality, bub. It is more complicated than your simple-minded ideology, but it's not all that hard to understand.

Robert Bales Is A Victim Too

Robert Bales, the American Army Sergeant who went off base and killed 16 Afghan civilians in their homes, including 9 children, and then burned their bodies, is a disposable cog in a massive military machine designed for global domination, a willing tool of an Imperialist power system. Deployed four times into war zones (3 times in Iraq), separated cumulatively for years from his wife and two small children, under financial strain, and finally, seeing one of his comrade's legs blown off a day or two earlier by a mine courtesy of the ungrateful Afghans, who at a minimum protect by their silence (sometimes fear-induced) the Taliban trying to kill the Americans, he finally snapped under the strain put on him. That is, his emotions of rage overwhelmed his self-control.

Bales joined the military shortly after the flashy attention-grabbing 9/11/01 Al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. Like many people, his sense of dedication to his country and people was used against him, to make him a tool of cynical power-wielders (Bush, Obama, and the entire gang of apparatchiks constituting the U.S. Government institutional machinery), a chump, a fool, whose instincts of group loyalty and willingness to sacrifice for the group made him vulnerable to exploitation. (1)

One argument being planted in the U.S. media by anonymous military/official “sources” is that lots of soldiers have done multiple tours of “duty” in the war zones and didn't snap. That's reminiscent of the argument that not all poor people commit crimes, therefore poverty has nothing to do with crime.

That's just silly of course. Consider this analogy; parts in machines fail all the time. Why don't all the parts fail? Because 1) the parts have a different history of stresses on them, 2) the parts may look identical outwardly but have subtle differences on a structural and/or molecular level. People are incredibly complex. When you subject large numbers of them to stress, it is predictable that some will “snap” (break) under the stress over time.

The people calling the shots in the U.S. system are attempting to deflect blame from themselves for using loyal soldiers as cannon-fodder as they pursue a hopeless Obama “strategy” of seeking the unattainable goal of “victory,” or at least “stability” for the corrupt Karzai kleptocracy. They keep whispering in reporters' ears that Bales was drunk, and had marital difficulties- assertions denied by his family's lawyer. Already a battle of dueling narratives of who Bales is has begun, fought out on the terrain of the U.S. media. Thus has the trial already begun, in the media.

The military has a pro forma system of pseudo-mental health screening in place, purely for show. Military psychologists and psychiatrists understand, and do, their real job: making sure the maximum number of personnel are deemed “fit for duty” and deployed. This is what happens when an Empire can no longer involumtarily press men into the military to fight its wars for it. Shortages result.

The amazing thing is that there aren't more Baleses breaking under the stress. Mostly U.S. troops are keeping their resentment and hatred and fury towards the Afghans under sufficient check that it doesn't manifest itself in murder.

We must also hold open the possibility that Bales did not act alone, contrary to the U.S. media depiction of events and its tacit portrayal of Afghan claims to the contrary as hysterical and irrational. The U.S. has, throughout its Afghan “campaign,”repeatedly committed war crimes and atrocities, and then lied throughits teeth about them. [Click for examples.] Sometimes it has gotten away with it, sometimes not. (“Not” means finally being forced to do a limited hangout and admit to a watered-down version of the truth, “apologize,” and pay a few bucks to survivors. In one case, of the serial killers exposed by Rolling Stone, the soldiers were actually court-martialed, although not punished appropriately for cold-blooded murders.) Of course, this is a U.S. military pattern that extends back to Iraq, Vietnam, the conquest of the Philippines, and numerous other places. Guess you could call it a “tradition.”

In face, none other than notoriously tactless Special Forces GeneralStanley McChrystalblurtedout "We'veshot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to myknowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."

More and more, the Afghan crusade is becoming reminiscent of Vietnam. A hopeless attempt by U.S. Imperialists to impose their will on a small, seemingly weak country, using misguided patriots to do the dirty work, which inevitably degenerates into atrocities and war crimes as the war is revealed as a war against the people of the target country, with feckless, cynical, thieving indigenous “allies” the U.S. thinks it can prop up as a “Government.” Which it can't.

Once again, the hubristic American Imperialists (and the two parties are identical in this regard) think that since they are so powerful, with a military capable of wreaking such great destruction, that surely they can impose their will on the situation. They don't seem to learn the fundamental lessons from experience. Instead they continue to craft techno pseudo-solutions, as epitomized by fancy “counterinsurgency doctrines” and fancy weaponry like drones, using them to commit more murder and mayhem, which thrill then and fill them with pride. (2)

Make no mistake, Afghanistan is an awful place, with a horrible, anti-human, backward culture. Of course, that's thanks to the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, which prevented the Soviets from dragging the country kicking and screaming into the 20^th century.

Deliberately letting bin Laden escape from Tora Bora, as the Bush regime apparently did, set the stage for an endless, futile war. Bush didn't want to fight it- he immediately turned his attention to settling scores with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And as long as the U.S. Imperialists refuse to face the real problem- Pakistan, the nuclear-armed patron, sponsor, and enabler of the Taliban, which provides them sanctuary, Afghanistan can be nothing more but an unhealable wound. And if carpet bombing North Vietnam with B-52s and fighter-bombers, and invading and/or bombing Laos and Cambodia didn't solve the “sanctuary problem” in that war, it's laughable for Obama and his regime to think that a few hundred CIA drone assassinations will win this war. But the way they keep tacitly boasting about it with planted articles in the media, that's what they seem to think. They're delusional.

In fact, given that Obama is using drone warfare in a number of countries now, apparently the plan is permanent global assassinations to try and contain Islamic jihadism. My guess would be it will make it worse, as the more murders the U.S. commits, the more Muslims become radicalized and replenish the ranks of the jihadists. It's rather like the situation in The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

1. Bales has a bit of an unsavory past. In 2000, he was fined for defrauding a couple in his work as a Wall Street broker. He refused to pay the fine and was kicked out of the securities industry. (New York Times, 3/20/12.) He also has a record of an assault, which he was allowed to get away with, and a hit and run accident causing property damage, also swept under the rug, presumably because he was needed as a soldier. (Both occurred after he joined the Army.) Being white no doubt helps too.
2. In 2009, a CIA drone killed Baitullah Mehsud, head of an Islamofascist group called Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The upshot? He was succeeded by an even more vicious terrorist fanatic named Hakimullah Mehsud. (Mehsud is a Pashtun tribal name.) Now, Baitullah doesn't deserve having a single tear shed for him. Among his many crimes, he apparently arranged the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, with the connivance of then-”President” Pervez Musharraf. (Musharraf was head of the Pak armed forces who came to power in the traditional way, via a coup that overthrew the actually-elected civilian president. For awhile, he affected to call himself “President” while continuing to be the top general, until, partly due to external pressure, he figured it would look better- more legit- if he resigned his military command and just went with “President.” The U.S. media virtually never mentioned how the loathsome and extremely mendacious Musharraf came to power, so as to not embarrass him. They, like the U.S. Government, were invested in shoring up Musharraf's faux legitimacy just as Musharraf himself was.) Bottom line, the U.S. won't defeat this malign ideology via decapitation, no more than killing the President of the United States, or the CIA Director, or Secretary of “Defense,” or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would call the collapse of the U.S. Government or military or secret police. It's not like when the CIA murdered Martin Luther King, Jr, and Robert Kennedy, which ended political movements. Maybe that spoiled them.

Or it could be force of habit, as the CIA's stock in trade is preparing death lists and arranging

killings. That's what they did all over Latin America, and in Vietnam (the Phoenix program), and

even in places most Americans would be surprised to learn about, like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where they helped him exterminate communists. But that was when he was a “friend.” Oh, the CIA also fingered Nelson Mandela for capture by the South African apartheid racist regime- that cost Mandela 25 years in prison- but at least he lived, unlike literally millions of other people the CIA has helped arrange to be killed or killed directly.

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