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What is Israel's Role in the Destabilization of Pakistan?

Jeff Gates
Opinion Maker
Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:53 EST

When waging war "by way of deception," the motto of the Israeli Mossad, well-timed crises play a critical agenda-setting role by displacing facts with what a target population can be deceived to believe. Thus the force-multiplier effect when staged crises are reinforced with pre-staged intelligence. In combination, the two often prove persuasive.

That duplicity was on display when U.S. lawmakers were induced to invade Iraq in response to the mass murder of 9-11. That crisis alone, however, was insufficient. Military mobilization required a "consensus" belief in Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi mobile biological weapons, Iraqi meetings in Prague, and so forth. Though all were false, those "facts" proved sufficient to induce an invasion of Iraq.

Such agent provocateur operations typically include collateral incidents as pre-staging for the intended main event. Ongoing incidents suggest a follow-on operation is underway. Recent history suggests we'll see an orgy of evidence that plausibly indicts a pre-staged Evil Doer. Though Iran is an obvious candidate, Pakistan is also a possibility where outside forces have been destabilizing this nuclear Islamic nation with a series of violent incidents.

Will it be coincidence if the next war - like the last - is consistent with the expansive goals of Jewish nationalists?

Glenn Greenwald
Common Dreams
Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:33 EST

The NYT columnist who has supported 4 wars on Muslims in 6 years decries the Islamic disregard for human life.

David Brooks' column today perfectly illustrates what lies at the core of our political discourse: namely, self-loving tribalistic blindness laced with a pathological refusal to accept responsibility for one's actions. Brooks claims there is a unique evil that one finds in the "fringes of the Muslim world":

Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged.

That narrative has emerged on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other. This narrative causes its adherents to shrink their circle of concern. They don't see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so.

This narrative is embraced by a small minority. But it has caused incredible amounts of suffering within the Muslim world, in Israel, in the U.S. and elsewhere. With their suicide bombings and terrorist acts, adherents to this narrative have made themselves central to global politics. They are the ones who go into crowded rooms, shout "Allahu akbar," or "God is great," and then start murdering.

But Brooks himself was a vehement, vicious advocate for the attack on Iraq, which caused this:

Israel National News
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:53 EST

Republican Whip Eric Cantor reminded the 2009 General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America in Washington that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "the man holding the gun with which he vows to kill Israel and the Jews."

Comment: More Zionist lies and propaganda; there is indeed a player who is a major threat to world peace based in the middle-east. But who poses that threat is not what the mainstream media, or Rep. Cantor would have people believe...

Are you getting the message that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler and Iran is the Fourth Reich and they're just days away from nuking us and if we don't Shock and Awe them into regime change and install a U.S.-friendly regime that will recognise Israel and sell their oil and gas to us instead of to the Chinese then we're all a bunch of appeasing Neville J'aime-Berlin's and WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!...? Because that's what you're meant to understand. That's the new meme, to make you scared enough to support a war you wouldn't otherwise support. Once again, our fears are being manipulated by people who want a war but haven't got a justification for starting one. Last time, they brought public opinion on board with scary stories about Iraq's nonexistent nuclear weapons and Saddam's fictitious links to al Qaeda; this time around, it's Iran's nonexistent nuclear weapons and Ahmadinejad's spurious equivalence to Hitler.

And that's why unravelling the meaning of Ahmadinejad's "myth of the Holocaust" is not just an obscure academic exercise. Knowing that a propaganda offensive is underway to demonize Iran's president as the new Hitler so that we can justify an attack on his country, we need to think critically every time our mass media draws these parallels between Nazi Germany and present-day Iran and consider whether this is a legitimate equivalence or more manipulative scare-mongering to lay the foundation for a new war. Despite what Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen et al sound like when they dispassionately discuss rearranging the Middle East, war is not really like a game of Risk or a role-playing exercise in an undergraduate PolSci seminar. It is much more like young soldiers getting their limbs blown off by roadside bombs, or entire families wiped out "collaterally" by our missiles. Knowing that this is what is really at stake, we should at least make the effort to determine whether the "Holocaust denier!" and other hitlerish epithets currently being hurled at Iran are based in fact, or are just the latest work of the same misinformers who - from the safety of their Washington thinktanks - repeatedly pimp for war in the Middle East, safe in the knowledge that it will never be their friends and relatives on the receiving end of the IEDs or the so-called smart bombs.

Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch
Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:59 EST

For drone freaks (and these days Washington seems full of them), here's the good news: Drones are hot! Not long ago -- 2006 to be exact -- the Air Force could barely get a few armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air at once; now, the number is 38; by 2011, it will reputedly be 50, and beyond that, in every sense, the sky's the limit.

Better yet, for the latest generation of armed surveillance drones -- the ones with the chill-you-to-your-bones sci-fi names of Predators and Reapers (as in Grim) -- whole new surveillance capabilities will soon be available. Their newest video system, due to be deployed next year, has been dubbed Gorgon Stare after the creature in Greek mythology whose gaze turned its victims to stone. According to Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, Gorgon Stare will offer a "pilot" back in good ol' Langley, VA, headquarters of the CIA, the ability to "stare" via 12 video feeds (where only one now exists) at a 1.5 mile square area, and then, with Hellfire missiles and bombs, assumedly turn any part of it into rubble. Within the year, that viewing capacity is expected to double to three square miles.

What we're talking about here is the gaze of the gods, updated in corporate labs for the modern American war-fighter -- a gaze that can be focused on whatever runs, walks, crawls, or creeps just about anywhere on the planet 24/7, with an instant ability to blow it away. And what's true of video capacity will be no less true of the next generation of drone sensors -- and, of course, of drone weaponry like that "5-pound missile the size of a loaf of French bread" meant in some near-robotic future to replace the present 100-pound Hellfire missile, possibly on the Avenger or Predator C, the next generation drone under development at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. Everything, in fact, will be almost infinitely upgradeable, since we're still in the robotics equivalent of the age of the "horseless carriage," as Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution assures us. (Just hold your hats, for instance, when the first nano-drones make it onto the scene! They will, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, be able to "fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.")

Michael Payne
OpEdNews
Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:39 EST

The state of Israel can do no wrong in the eyes of the U.S. and the Congress. Time and time again, when Israel has been cited by the UN or by other international organizations for military actions that have violated international laws, the Congress has looked the other way and given it a pass. The House of Representatives has just made a mockery of justice when it voted to condemn the Goldstone Report by a vote of 344 to 36.

The Goldstone Report cites both Israel and Hamas for violating international laws involving human rights. Judge Goldstone, a much respected South African jurist and his team, undertook an in-depth investigation of the Gaza War, including events before, during and after that bloody conflict. They spent much time in Gaza looking into alleged human rights violations against Gaza and its civilians but Israel barred them from doing the same in their country. Israel refused to cooperate in any way.

Since the report was criticized by various elements of our government, Judge Goldstone offered to meet with U.S. officials and members of Congress to answer their objections but he was not given that opportunity. Here was a report that contained numerous facts and evidence to back up its assertions but the governments of both Israel and the U.S. would not even discuss it with Judge Goldstone.

Stephen Lendman
Baltimore Chronicle
Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:47 EST

Today's major media journalism is biased, irresponsible, sensationalist reporting that distorts, exaggerates or misstates the truth. It's misinformation or agitprop disinformation masquerading as fact to boost circulation, readership, viewers, or listeners, and on vital issues lies about or suppresses uncomfortable truths to provide unqualified support for state and/or corporate interests - to the detriment of the greater good that's always sacrificed for profits and imperial aims.

As a result, major media sources produce a daily propaganda diet and what Project Censored calls "junk food news," and get most people to believe it. In their landmark book, Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explained the "propaganda model" that controls the public message by "filter(ing)" disturbing truths, "leaving (behind) only the cleansed residue fit to print" or air.

Today the media is in crisis and a free and open society at risk at a time fiction substitutes for fact, news is carefully controlled, dissent marginalized, and on-air and print journalists support powerful interests as paid liars, or what famed journalist George Seldes (1890 - 1995) called "prostitutes of the press."

Sott editors
SOTT.net
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:23 EST

Terrorism has been defined as "a criminal act that influences an audience beyond the immediate victim". We agree, but the question is, what entity today has the greatest capacity to carry out criminal acts and influence an audience beyond the immediate victim? Figure that one out, and you've got the real terrorists.

But first, let's look at some of the influences we've all come under during the month of October. Vaccination season has kicked off in US, Canada and UK and Obama has declared the swine flu a national emergency! Well, if Mr. Charm, Change and Hope says so, it must be true! Right? Read on and we'll take you through the talking points...

Alex Knight
The End of Capitalism
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:26 EST

This Halloween season, there is no book I could recommend more highly than Silvia Federici's brilliant Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia 2004), which tells the dark saga of the Witch Hunt that consumed Europe for more than 200 years. In uncovering this forgotten history, Federici exposes the origins of capitalism in the heightened oppression of workers (represented by Shakespeare's character Caliban), and most strikingly, in the brutal subjugation of women. She also brings to light the enormous and colorful European peasant movements that fought against the injustices of their time, connecting their defeat to the imposition of a new patriarchal order that divided male from female workers. Today, as more and more people question the usefulness of a capitalist system that has thrown the world into crisis, Caliban and the Witch stands out as essential reading for unmasking the shocking violence and inequality that capitalism has relied upon from its very creation.

Comment: Read also the two related SOTT Focus pieces:

Control of Uppity Women Behind Witchcraft Accusations?
Wars, Pestilence and Witches

Daniel Tencer
Raw Story
Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:09 EST

KBR may have exposed as many as 100,000 people, including US troops, to cancer-causing toxins by burning waste in open-air pits in Iraq, says a series of class-action lawsuits filed against the company.

At least 22 separate lawsuits claiming KBR poisoned American soldiers in Iraq have been combined into a single massive lawsuit that says KBR, which until not long ago was a subsidiary of Halliburton, sought to save money by disposing of toxic waste and incinerating numerous potentially harmful substances in open-air "burn pits."

Global Research
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:41 EST

Here is the speech by George Galloway MP at the War Crimes Conference & Exhibition that took place at the Putra World Trade Centre in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia on 28th October 2009 (parts one, two and three):

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"The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty" Adlai E. Stevenson

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"This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths." Simon Heffer in The Daily Mail, 7 June 2000

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