Puppet MastersS


Heart - Black

Hey, hey, Barack! What do you say? How many kids have you killed today?

Dave Lindorff
thiscantbehappening.net
Sun, 27 Jan 2013 14:33 UTC
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Noor Syed, 8-year-old Pakistani girl and one of Obama's first drone victims, murdered in a US drone attack in South Waziristan, Pakistan on Feb. 14, 2009.
I personally found the president's inaugural speech not just insipid, but disgusting. It reached its gut-churning nadir near the end where he said:
"We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war...We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully - not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear...And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice - not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice."
As he spoke these uplifting phrases, US factories were cranking out, under the terms of billion-dollar Pentagon contracts (in a small part of the staggering annual $1.6 trillion the US actually spends under Obama on its military), fleets of drone aircraft that daily are raining explosives down on innocent men, women and children in countries that the US is not even at war with. Most of those drone attacks are personally approved by our Nobel Peace Laureate president, who has claimed the right -- unchallenged by either Congress or the Judiciary -- to order the liquidation of anyone he deems to be a terrorist (including American citizens), as well as those, even children, who happen to be in the vicinity of such a person. Of the 362 drone strikes in Pakistan to date, 310 were launched during the period Obama has been commander in chief.
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Eye 2

In Mali, forces backed by UN, France, and Obama slaughter civilians

Alex Newman
The New American
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 14:25 UTC
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Summary executions and mass human rights abuses targeting innocent civilians in Mali are being perpetrated by soldiers loyal to the dubious Malian regime in a campaign supported by the United Nations, the new socialist French government, and the Obama administration. According to human rights groups and witnesses on the ground, the atrocities are increasing as the number of murdered victims continues to rise - eerily reminiscent of similar tragic interventions in Libya, Syria, and the Ivory Coast.

The regime ruling southern Mali out of the capital city of Bamako, which seized power in a military coup last year led by a U.S. government-trained officer, is currently attempting to recapture the northern regions of the country. The vast swath of territory in the north was declared independent last year by a group of historically oppressed nomadic Tuareg rebels armed with weapons obtained from the recent Western-backed war on Libya.

Islamic fighters with various loyalties joined the fight against the corrupt central government, too - providing a half-baked excuse for the UN, the French government, Obama, and various African despots to enter the fray on behalf of the illegitimate regime in the south. After the UN Security Council purported to "authorize" an international invasion on behalf of the coup-installed regime, forces from France openly began their military campaign earlier this month under the guise of fighting "Islamic extremism."
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Bad Guys

The real invasion of Africa is not news and a licence to lie is Hollywood's gift

John Pilger
Information Clearing House
Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:19 UTC
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A full-scale invasion of Africa is under way. The United States is deploying troops in 35 African countries, beginning with Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger. Reported by Associated Press on Christmas Day, this was missing from most Anglo-American media.

The invasion has almost nothing to do with "Islamism", and almost everything to do with the acquisition of resources, notably minerals, and an accelerating rivalry with China. Unlike China, the US and its allies are prepared to use a degree of violence demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Palestine. As in the cold war, a division of labour requires that western journalism and popular culture provide the cover of a holy war against a "menacing arc" of Islamic extremism, no different from the bogus "red menace" of a worldwide communist conspiracy.

Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Last year, Africom staged Operation African Endeavor, with the armed forces of 34 African nations taking part, commanded by the US military. Africom's "soldier to soldier" doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

It is as if Africa's proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master's black colonial elite whose "historic mission", warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the promotion of "a capitalism rampant though camouflaged".
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Star of David

Why Palestine should take Israel to court in the Hague

George Bisharat
NY Times
Wed, 30 Jan 2013 13:21 UTC
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Last week, the Palestinian foreign minister, Riad Malki, declared that if Israel persisted in its plans to build settlements in the currently vacant area known as E-1, which lies between Palestinian East Jerusalem and the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, "we will be going to the I.C.C.," referring to the International Criminal Court. "We have no choice," he added.

The Palestinians' first attempt to join the I.C.C. was thwarted last April when the court's chief prosecutor at the time, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, declined the request on the grounds that Palestine was not a state. That ambiguity has since diminished with the United Nations' conferral of nonmember state status on Palestine in November. Israel's frantic opposition to the elevation of Palestine's status at the United Nations was motivated precisely by the fear that it would soon lead to I.C.C. jurisdiction over Palestinian claims of war crimes.

Israeli leaders are unnerved for good reason. The I.C.C. could prosecute major international crimes committed on Palestinian soil anytime after the court's founding on July 1, 2002.
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Stop

When truth tried to stop war

Ray McGovern
consortiumnews.com
Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:06 UTC
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© Photo credit: Office of Tony BlairFormer British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The year 2013 is the one-decade anniversary of the U.S. political/media system's failure to stop a criminal President from launching a war of aggression on Iraq. It was a shameful time when only a few brave individuals, like the U.K.'s Katharine Gun, did the right thing, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern reports.

Ten years ago, Katharine Gun, then a 28-year-old British intelligence officer, saw an e-mailed memo from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that confirmed for her in black and white the already widespread suspicion that the U.S. and U.K. were about to launch war against Iraq on false pretenses.

Doing what she could to head off what she considered, correctly, an illegal war of aggression, she printed a copy of the memo and arranged for a friend to give it to the London Observer. "I have always ever followed my conscience," she said, explaining what drove her to take such a large risk.

Those early months of 2003 were among the worst of times - and not just because the U.S. and U.K. leaders were perverting the post-World War II structure that those same nations designed to stop aggressive wars, but because the vast majority of U.S. and U.K. institutions including the major news organizations and the nations' legislatures were failing miserably to provide any meaningful check or balance.
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Gold Seal

The American empire, RIP

Justin Raimondo
antiwar.com
Thu, 31 Jan 2013 12:49 UTC
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Fall of Saigon
When will historians of the future date the beginning of the decline and fall of the American empire?

The question may seem presumptuous. The idea that the American Century is a relic of the past, and we are entering a "new world order" of divided rather than hegemonic power, is relatively new, and still controversial. There are those who insist it ain't necessarily so, primarily neocons of the second mobilization such as Robert Kagan, who are quick to reassure all right-thinking patriotic Americans that we're still Number One and warn against the fatal lure of committing "superpower suicide."

To the rest of us, however - that is, to everyone outside the neocons' cultic universe - the signs of the Great American Contraction are everywhere, most noticeably in the incomes, productivity, and general economic well-being of ordinary Americans. Our own CIA - never a friend to the neocons, but that's another story - avers this condition is the single greatest threat to our national security: not Iran, not terrorism, but the very real threat of national bankruptcy. Our national debt is over 100 percent of GDP.

I would make the case, however, that the seeds of American decline were planted much earlier, during the cold war era. And if I had to pick a specific date that marked the beginning of the end, I would settle on January 31, 1968 - the day the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces began the Tet offensive, which was militarily a setback for them, but politically disastrous for the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
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Bizarro Earth

22 U.S. veterans kill themselves each day

Greg Jaffe
Washington Post
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:43 UTC
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© AP
Every day about 22 veterans in the United States kill themselves, a rate that is about 20 percent higher than the Department of Veterans Affairs' 2007 estimate, according to a two-year study by a VA researcher.

The VA study indicates that more than two-thirds of the veterans who commit suicide are 50 or older, suggesting that the increase in veterans' suicides is not primarily driven by those returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"There is a perception that we have a veterans' suicide epidemic on our hands. I don't think that is true," said Robert Bossarte, an epidemiologist with the VA who did the study. "The rate is going up in the country, and veterans are a part of it." The number of suicides overall in the United States increased by nearly 11 percent between 2007 and 2010, the study says.

As a result, the percentage of veterans who die by suicide has decreased slightly since 1999, even though the total number of veterans who kill themselves has gone up, the study says.
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Health

U.S. military struggling to stop suicide epidemic among war veterans

Ed Pilkington
Guardian
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:35 UTC
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© Photograph: Libby BusbeeWilliam Busbee was in many ways the archetype of the US soldier, and his mother feels he was let down by the army he loved so much.
Last year, more active-duty soldiers killed themselves than died in combat. And after a decade of deployments to war zones, the Pentagon is bracing for things to get much worse

Libby Busbee is pretty sure that her son William never sat through or read Shakespeare's Macbeth, even though he behaved as though he had. Soon after he got back from his final tour of Afghanistan, he began rubbing his hands over and over and constantly rinsing them under the tap.

"Mom, it won't wash off," he said.

"What are you talking about?" she replied.

"The blood. It won't come off."

On 20 March last year, the soldier's striving for self-cleanliness came to a sudden end. That night he locked himself in his car and, with his mother and two sisters screaming just a few feet away and with Swat officers encircling the vehicle, he shot himself in the head.

At the age of 23, William Busbee had joined a gruesome statistic. In 2012, for the first time in at least a generation, the number of active-duty soldiers who killed themselves, 177, exceeded the 176 who were killed while in the war zone. To put that another way, more of America's serving soldiers died at their own hands than in pursuit of the enemy.
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Sheriff

Pennsylvania governor's son-in-law gets caught stealing cash in FBI sting

Karen Araiza
NBC Philadelphia
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:24 UTC
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© GettyNarcotics officer Gerold Gibson
The narcotics officer is accused of taking money that was planted by the FBI

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett avoided answering reporter questions Thursday about the FBI and police investitgation into his son-in-law, but he did issue a brief statement.

Corbett's son-in-law is Gerold Gibson, a narcotics officer with the Philadelphia police force. He's under investigation by the feds and Philly's Internal Affairs Unit. Sources tell NBC10's Nefertiti Jaquez that Gibson was caught on hidden camera, taking money out of a car he was told to search. What Gibson didn't know, according to sources, is that that the money was planted in the car by investigators.
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V

Violence flares in Cairo as thousands protest Morsi regime throughout Egypt


RT.com
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:18 UTC
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© AFP Photo / Khaled DesoukiEgyptian protesters throw stones during clashes with riot police in front of the presidential palace in Cairo on February 1, 2013.
Protests turn violent in key Egyptian cities again on Friday, as thousands take to the streets to demand the end of Morsi's government.

Protesters threw petrol bombs and stones at the British Embassy in Cairo and clashed with the security guards, Al-Arabiya reported.

Cairo footage also showed angry crowds pushed back from the presidential palace by the police.

Al-Arabiya said there were sporadic clashes with the police in Cairo earlier, and several protesters were injured by rubber bullets.

Several thousand people have gathered in Tahrir square on Friday, RT's Bel Trew said.
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