Sean Hannity and his Holocaust Denying Friend

Talk radio host Sean Hannity always likes to describe Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a Holocaust denier, but it doesn’t seem to bother him that his good friend Pat Buchanan is a Holocaust denier. Sean has interviewed Pat several times on his show and this issue has not come up.
Here are some articles about Pat Buchanan’s views on the Holocaust:

Pat Buchanan and the Holocaust
http://www.holocaust-history.org/~jamie/buchanan/

Pat Buchanan, Antisemitism and the Holocaust
http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/buchanan.html

Sean criticizes President Obama’s willingness to talk to Ahmadinejad, but he leaves out a discussion of U.S. past actions in Iran. Such as when in 1953 the US toppled the democratically elected government in Iran, for oil in and he also leaves out how the US had given false strategic advice and sold weapons to both sided of the Iran-Iraq War. (See review of the book All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/hrj/iss17/booknotes-All.shtml and the article Fueling the Iran-Iraq Slaughter By Larry Everest http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/11715 )

This is not to say that we shouldn’t be careful and question what the Iranian President says, but considering US past actions in Iran, the Iranian leadership has a lot of reason to be suspicious of US intentions, as well.

Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror

Review of Mahmood Mamdani book by Howard French

from The New York Times, March 29. 2009
Source http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/books/30fren.html

Clearly, the African disaster most in view today is Sudan, or more specifically the dirty war that has raged since 2003 in that country’s western region,Darfur.

Rare among African conflicts, it exerts a strong claim on our conscience. By instructive contrast, more than five million people have died as a result of war in Congo since 1998, the rough equivalent at its height of a 2004 Asian tsunami striking every six months, without stirring our diplomats to urgency or generating much civic response.

More interestingly, the author maintains that much of what we see today as a racial divide in Sudan has its roots in colonial history, when Britain “broke up native society into different ethnicities, and ‘tribalized’ each ethnicity by bringing it under the absolute authority of one or more British-sanctioned ‘native authorities,’ ” balancing “the whole by playing one off against the others.”

Mr. Mamdani calls this British tactic of administratively reinforcing distinctions among colonial subjects “re-identify and rule” and says that it was copied by European powers across the continent, with deadly consequences — as in Rwanda, where Belgium’s intervention hardened distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi.

In Sudan the result was to create a durable sense of land rights rooted in tribal identity that favored the sedentary at the expense of the nomad, or, in the crude shorthand of today, African and Arab.

Other roots of the Darfur crisis lie in catastrophic desertification in the Sahel region, where the cold war left the area awash in cheap weapons at the very moment that pastoralists could no longer survive in their traditional homelands, obliging many to push southward into areas controlled by sedentary farmers.

He also blames regional strife, the violent legacy of proxy warfare by France, Libya and the United States and, most recently, the global extension of the war on terror.

This important book reveals much on all of these themes, yet still may be judged by some as not saying enough about recent violence in Darfur.

Mr. Mamdani’s constant refrain is that the virtuous indignation he thinks he detects in those who shout loudest about Darfur is no substitute for greater understanding, without which outsiders have little hope of achieving real good in Africa’s shattered lands.

Here's an article by Keith Harmon Snow with more information about Darfur that is not discussed in the mainstream media http://www.allthingspass.com/uploads/html-264THE%20WINTER%20OF%20BASHIRS%20DISCONTENT.htm

From the U.S., the ABC of Jihad

It seems its okay to teach children hate and violence when it serves the United States interest.

From the U.S., the ABC of Jihad
By Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 23, 2002; Page A01
From http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5339-2002Mar22?language=printer

In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.
As Afghan schools reopen today, the United States is back in the business of providing schoolbooks. But now it is wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism. What seemed like a good idea in the context of the Cold War is being criticized by humanitarian workers as a crude tool that steeped a generation in violence.
Last month, a U.S. foreign aid official said, workers launched a "scrubbing" operation in neighboring Pakistan to purge from the books all references to rifles and killing. Many of the 4 million texts being trucked into Afghanistan, and millions more on the way, still feature Koranic verses and teach Muslim tenets.

Look at this hilarious part of the article where it says,

A 1991 federal appeals court ruling against AID's former director established that taxpayers' funds may not pay for religious instruction overseas, said Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law expert at American University, who litigated the case for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Ayesha Khan, legal director of the nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the White House has "not a legal leg to stand on" in distributing the books.
"Taxpayer dollars cannot be used to supply materials that are religious," she said.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State were concerned about money being spent on religious books but they were not too concerned about the millions of Afghans killed or disabled by a war that was instigated by the U.S. so that the Soviet Union would get its “Vietnam.” This is why the mainstream political left is no better than the political right. Neither is conscience enough to recognize the great suffering of others. The United States recruited and trained Muslim extremists to fight its proxy war against the Russians. (See http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html ) With the defeat of the Russians came the collapse of the Soviet Union, making the United States the number one superpower in the world, but the U.S. did nothing to help reconstruct Afghanistan

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: July 2, 2008

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

rest of article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Africa’s gift to Latin America?

This post title was inspired by Stephan Kinzer’s column titled “Iraq’s gift to Latin America” at
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/stephen_kinzer/2008/04/iraqs_gift_to_latin_america.html

He writes,

“With the United States so totally consumed by the Iraq conflict, it has no time, energy or political capital to crack down on challenges south of the Rio Grande. Sensing their historic chance, many Latin nations have embarked on experiments that the US would in past eras have instantly stepped in to crush.

The independence that many Latin American countries have shown in the last five years borders on outright defiance of US power. Yet to a degree unprecedented in modern history, Washington is allowing them to do as they please.”

While US involvement in Iraq appears in the mainstream media everyday, US involvement in Africa does not.

Here are articles about African countries that the United States is politically/militarily involved with. Using Kinzer’s way of thinking, these are gifts to Latin America

Congo

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_keith_ha_080207_the_gertler_steinmet.htm

Sudan

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=447&Itemid=1

Somolia

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m41085&hd=&size=1&l=e

Americans Tell It Like It Is to the Iraqis

This cartoon is by Ward Sutton that appears in the May 12, 2008 issue of THE NATION

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080512/sutton

In the first panel, that "average Joe's" viewpoint is held by many highly educated people. There are Senators and Congresspersons (Republicans and Democrats) who have the same point of view.

Here is information about what the US is doing in Iraq that you won;t find in the mainstream media

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/20/iraqi_american_reflects_on_five_years

Here is an article about "Regime Change: How the CIA put Saddam's Party in Power"

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/217.html

Here is an article about how the United States sold weapons and gave false strategic advice to both sides of the Iran-Iraq war.

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/11715

Why doesn't President Bush ask the Canadians or Mexicans?

Every once in a while a headline shows up where the U.S. President is asking the Saudis to increase oil production.
See this article
If the Saudis king says no, the press acts as if though the Arabs are controlling the United States. The United States imports just as much from Canada and Mexico (See See U.S. Energy Information Administration website, yet why doesn't the President ask these countries to increase oil production? If he does, how come the mainstream media doesn't report on it.

The Saudis invest trillions of dollars in the United States, but Canada and Mexico do not. Saudi Arabia buys billions of dollars worth of weapons from the United States, even though they do not have the qualified personnel to operate the weaponry. Saudi Arabia is just a storage place for weapons the United States uses in its military interventions in the Middle East and surrounding regions.

The Tragedy of Aid to the Third World

From The Tragedy of Afghan Aid at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/04/the-tragedy-of-afghan-aid/
by Andy Rowell

... in September 2002, the United States launched what would become an aggressive effort to build or refurbish as many as 1,000 schools and clinics by the end of 2004. However, Congressional figures showed that they managed to finish and hand back to the Afghan government only 40 schools by late 2005.

As Ben Jackson wrote in his book Poverty and the Planet published in 1990, “Aid is commonly thought of as handing over money to Third World governments for development. In fact, aid largely consists of funding from Western governments for services, machines, technical experts and consultants to be supplied by companies in rich countries, frequently their own.” The bottom line was that “most aid money is actually spent in the rich world.” Of the $20 billion the World Bank handed out in 1988, $15 billion went to its own contractors or consultants.

... there is a huge disparity between what America spends on war and what the international community spends on aid. The US military currently spends nearly $36 billion a year in the country, some $100 million a day; yet the average volume of aid spending by all donors since 2001 is just $7 million per day. Whilst the military budget is vast, 2.5 million Afghans face severe food insecurity, and one in five children still dies before five. Life expectancy is woefully low at 45 years. Thirdly, over half of all aid to Afghanistan is tied, by which donors often require procurement of services or resources from their own countries. Rather than go to help Afghanistan, the money just lines the pockets of Western contractors and companies. So of the aid actually spent, a staggering 40% has returned to donor countries in corporate profits and consultant salaries.

The report notes: “Vast sums of aid are lost in corporate profits of contractors and sub-contractors, which can be as high as 50% on a single contract … A vast amount of aid is absorbed by high salaries, with generous allowances, and other costs of expatriates working for consulting firms and contractors — each of whom costs $250,000-$500,000 a year.” In contrast, an Afghan civil servant is paid less than $1000 per year.