The Anti-Empire Report: Things which don't go away.
September 1st, 2010 by William Blum www.killinghope.org
Iraq
Enough to make him forget.But no American should be allowed to forget that the nation of Iraq, the society of Iraq, have been destroyed, ruined, a failed state. The Americans, beginning 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, killed wantonly, tortured … the people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile ….
....Iraq. Love it or leave it..PanAm 103..But how many of our wonderful leaders are upset that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi (left) spent eight years in prison despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that he had anything to do with the bombing of flight 103? The Scottish court that convicted him knew he was innocent. To understand that just read their 2001 “Opinion of the Court”, or read my analysis of it at killinghope.org/bblum6/panam.htm.
.Why do they hate us?Passions are flying all over the place concerning the proposed building of an Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks from 9/11 Ground Zero in New York. Even people who are not particularly anti-Muslim think it would be in bad taste, offensive. But implicit in all the hostility is the idea that what happened on that fateful day in 2001 was a religious act, fanatic Muslims acting as Muslims attacking infidels. However — even if one accepts the official government version of 19 Muslims hijacking four airliners — the question remains: Why did they choose the targets they chose?..Somehow, American leaders have to learn that their country is not exempt from history, that their actions have consequences..Afghanistan.The women of Afghanistan will never know how the campaign to raise them to the status of full human beings would have turned out, but this, some might argue, is but a small price to pay for a marvelous Cold War victory..CubaWhy does the mainstream media routinely refer to Cuba ..Is Cuba a dictatorship because it arrests dissidents? Thousands of anti-war and other protesters have been arrested in the United States in recent years, as in every period in American history. Many have been beaten by police and mistreated while incarcerated. And remember: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. (This is documented by Cuba in a 1999 suit against the United States detailing $181.1 billion in compensation for victims: the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding or disabling of 2,099 others. The Cuban suit has been in the hands of the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the United Nations since 2001, a committee made up of all 15 members of the Security Council, which of course includes the United States, and which may account for the inaction on the matter.)..The terrorist list..Meanwhile, the five Cubans sent to Miami to monitor the anti-Castro terrorists are in their 12th year in US prisons. The Cuban government made the very foolish error of turning over to the FBI the evidence of terrorist activities gathered by the five Cubans. Instead of arresting the terrorists, the FBI arrested the five Cubans (sic)..Steroids.ABOUT THE AUTHORSenior Editor for US Foreign Policy William Blum is the author of:
• Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2• West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir• Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American EmpirePortions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.orgPrevious Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.Notes1. Washington Post, August 19, 2010 ↩2. Associated Press, August 21, 2010 ↩3. Newsweek, July 13, 1992 ↩4. See chapter one of Blum’s book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower↩5. US Department of the Army, Afghanistan, A Country Study (1986), pp.121, 128, 130, 223, 232 ↩6. See Brzezinski’s Wikipedia entry ↩7. See Anti-Empire Report of September 25, 2006, 3rd item, for more information about the Cuban election process ↩8. For a detailed discussion of Cuba’s alleged political prisoners see article ‘Cuba and the Number of “Political Prisoners”‘, Huffington Post, August 24th 2010 ↩9. Rogue State, Chapter 9 ↩10. See State Department: www.state.gov/s/ct/c14151.htm ↩11. The Examiner (Washington, DC), August 20, 2010 ↩
