Things to consider—

Since early 2011, Obama's been waging proxy war on Syria. Imported death squads masquerade as freedom fighters. The scheme's familiar. It repeats. It reflects US imperialism's dark side. In the 1980s, CIA-recruited mujahideen fighters battled Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers. Ronald Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." He characterized Contra killers the same way. —Stephen LendmanFor over a century now US ambassadors have acted as fifth columns in the nations they are embedded in, their role chiefly to foster corporate and plutocratic power and coordinate machinations against any truly pro-democratic government.•••••"The dead end identity politics of SF Pride, which sells out a peace hero like Bradley Manning to curry favor with the American ruling class, is what I had in mind. The empire loves your tameness, irrelevance and cowardice, SF Pride. You don’t bother the American ruling class — a five foot two, 105 pound soldier does because he has a conscience and because he didn’t make comfort the guiding principle of his life...." —Randy Shields

Thousands of US troops arrive near Syrian shore on USS Eisenhower

 ANNOTATED NEWS, ANTIWAR, IMPERIALISM, IRAN, ISRAEL, PUTRID CORPOMEDIA, RUSSIA, SYRIA  Comments Off
Dec 062012
 

Chemical weapons, anyone? American military might ready to pounce on Syria, only the final pretext is still missing (or is being manufactured as we write these lines).
Trust the American media (and its Western accomplices) to march in lockstep when the signal is given.

RUSSIA TODAY DISPATCH


The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier steams in Mediterranean waters south of Italy during recent NATO maneuvers.  People forget that aircraft carriers are assault vessels, designed to project power in remote locations, not defend the homeland where they are not needed. They are a classical weapon if imperialists and neocolonialists. [RT-(Reuters / Paul Hanna)]

The USS Eisenhower, an American aircraft carrier that holds eight fighter bomber squadrons and 8,000 men, arrived at the Syrian coast yesterday in the midst of a heavy storm, indicating US preparation for a potential ground intervention.

While the Obama administration has not announced any sort of American-led military intervention in the war-torn country, the US is now ready to launch such action “within days” if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad decides to use chemical weapons against the opposition, the Times reports. Continue reading »

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Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa

 AFRICA, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, CORPORATE OWNED PARTIES, COUPS & CIVIL WAR, GOVERNMENT CRIMES, GREAT HYPOCRISY, SYRIA, THE PENTAGON-MEDIA COMPLEX  1 Response »
Nov 122012
 

Book Reviews—
Maximilian C. Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa, Baraka Books, Montreal, ISBN 978-1-926824-52-9. Available November 20, 2012. http://www.barakabooks.com/

The next time that empire comes calling in the name of human rights, please be found standing idly by

By Stephen Gowans, What’s Left

Maximilian C. Forte’s new book Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa (released November 20) is a searing indictment of NATO’s 2011 military intervention in Libya, and of the North American and European left that supported it. He argues that NATO powers, with the help of the Western left who “played a supporting role by making substantial room for the dominant U.S. narrative and its military policies,” marshalled support for their intervention by creating a fiction that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was about to carry out a massacre against a popular, pro-democracy uprising, and that the world could not stand idly by and watch a genocide unfold. Continue reading »

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{Essay of the Week } Human Rights and Humanitarian Imperialism in Syria: A View From an African American Defender of Human Rights

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS, ANTI-CORPORATISM, ANTIWAR, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, CORPORATE OWNED PARTIES, GOVERNMENT CRIMES, GREAT HYPOCRISY  Comments Off
Oct 062012
 

By Ajamu Baraka, Black Agenda Report (BAR)
Thank you, BAR

Syrian irregular: Who is he? “Rebels” seem to come in many flavors, most of them unsavory.

By Ajamu Baraka
ii

Who is killing whom in Syria and why? And to whom should we be listening —- to our corporate media, State Department, and the same corps of “human rights activists” who applauded the Western invasion of Libya, and the dispatch of US special forces to Africa?

As the corporate media beat the drums of war with Syria, led this time by CNN and the New York Times with support from the rear coming from the confused white left/liberal likes of Democracy Now, a now familiar line is conjured up to rationalize intervention – humanitarian intervention as a basis to exercise the “responsibility to protect (R2P). David Gergen, the “soft neocon” advisor to both republican and democratic Presidents, made the claim on CNN recently that human rights groups would love to see the U.S. intervene in Syria. A claim that is probably accurate for the U.S.-based white, middle-class human rights mainstream. But this position certainly does not represent the positions of the growing, but largely ignored, “new human rights movement” of grassroots organizations of people of color, informed by an African American radical human rights tradition,19 who are reclaiming and redefining human rights as an anti-oppression, anti-imperialist “people-centered” movement. But before I touch on this new movement let me briefly explore how this new version of the white man’s burden emerged to become the main device for mobilizing public opinion in the U.S. to support war in the guise of humanitarianism. Continue reading »

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MUST READ: The struggle for hegemony in the Muslim world

 ANTI-CORPORATISM, CLASS STRUGGLE, IRAN, ISRAEL, LIBYA, PUTRID CORPOMEDIA, RELIGIOSITY & SUPERSTITION, SYRIA  Comments Off
Sep 162012
 

•••

For half of the last century, Arab nationalists, socialists, communists and others were locked in a battle with the Muslim Brothers for hegemony in the Arab world.—Tariq Ali [1]

By Stephen Gowans, What’s Left

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which played a major part in the rebellion to depose Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, may have plotted the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi which led to the death of US ambassador Christopher Stevens, according to US officials.

The Jihadists who toppled the secular nationalist Gaddafi government—and not without the help of Nato bombers, dubbed “al Qaeda’s air force” [2] by Canadian pilots who participated in the bombing campaign—are no longer disguised in the pages of Western newspapers as a popular movement who thirsted for, and won, democracy in Libya. Now that they’ve overrun the US consulate in Benghazi and killed the US ambassador, they’ve become a “security threat…raising fears about the country’s stability” [3]—exactly what Gaddafi called them, when Western governments were celebrating the Islamists’ revolt as a popular pro-democracy uprising. Gaddafi’s description of the unrest in his own country as a violent Salafist bid to establish an Islamic state was doubtlessly accepted in Washington and other Western capitals as true, but dismissed in public as a transparent ploy to muster sympathy. This was necessary to sanitize the uprising to secure the acquiescence of Western publics for the intervention of their countries’ warplanes to help Islamic guerillas on the ground topple a secular nationalist leader who was practicing “resource nationalism” and trying to “Libyanize” the economy– the real reasons he’d fallen into disgrace in Washington. [4] Continue reading »

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Going Rogue: America’s Unconventional Warfare in the Mideast

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Aug 052012
 

By Sharmine Narwani – al-akhbar.com

Pro-government Syrian fighter

The intent of U.S. [Unconventional Warfare] UW efforts is to exploit a hostile power’s political, military, economic, and psychological vulnerabilities by developing and sustaining resistance forces to accomplish U.S. strategic objectives…For the foreseeable future, U.S. forces will predominantly engage in irregular warfare (IW) operations.

So begins the 2010 Unconventional Warfare (UW) Manual of the US Military’s Special Forces. The manual attached here (TC 18-01) is an interim publication, developed to address the definition of Unconventional Warfare and some other inconsistencies in UW Doctrine. The new UW document (ATP 3-05.1) is in the initial draft and not yet available, though sources tell me it is unlikely to differ much from TC 18-01. Continue reading »

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Dissembling Concern Over Violence, UN General Assembly Takes a Side in Syria’s Civil War

 AFRICA, ANNOTATED NEWS, ANTIWAR, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, BETTER HUMANITY, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM, CORPORATE OWNED PARTIES, COUPS & CIVIL WAR, IMPERIALISM  Comments Off
Aug 052012
 

We offer comprehensive information and analysis on this important issue—

(1) By Stephen Gowans, what’s left

Professing grave concern over Syria’s escalating violence, the United Nations General Assembly on Friday demanded that “all in Syria immediately and visibly commit to ending violence.”

This would be all to the good except that the General Assembly’s idea of what constitutes “all in Syria” and what it means by “ending violence” amounts to one side in the civil war (the Republic) laying down its arms unilaterally, while President Assad steps down and cedes his authority to an interim government approved by the “international community,” which is to say, the very same countries that are furnishing the rebels with arms, logistical support, diplomatic assistance, territory from which to launch attacks, salaries for fighters, lucre to induce government officials to defect, and propaganda. Continue reading »

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