Showing posts with label weapons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weapons. Show all posts

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Beyond Treason: Depleted Uranium & Anthrax Vaccines [Full Film]

Film discusses how United States government has betrayed our soldiers through the use of chemical weapons, but did not educate or  provide protection to solders. In addition, millions of innocent Iraqis have suffered disease, deformities and death from the USA's use of chemical weapons. Film discusses how USA sold to Iraq many of the weapons, which the USA later used as an reason for invading Iraq. I doubt our "brave" Peter King, Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, will be investigating this.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

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.

Saturday, April 04, 2009

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

Friday, May 16, 2008

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

President Bush and King Abdullah
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.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Thanks for Nothing Halliburton

This video shows how Halliburton overcharges for everything, but the soldiers are living under poor conditions. If this is how they are treating Americans, image how they are treating the Iraqis. Is there any wonder why there are Iraqis still fighting the Americans?



This is from the film Iraq for Sale

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Bombs Away Over Iraq

Normalizing Air War from Guernica to Arab Jabour
by Tom Engelhardt

A January 21st Los Angeles Times Iraq piece by Ned Parker and Saif Rasheed led with an inter-tribal suicide bombing at a gathering in Fallujah in which members of the pro-American Anbar Awakening Council were killed. ("Asked why one member of his Albu Issa tribe would kill another, Aftan compared it to school shootings that happen in the United States.") Twenty-six paragraphs later, the story ended this way:
"The U.S. military also said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. The strikes targeted buried bombs and weapons caches.
"In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of explosives on the area, which has been a gateway for Sunni militants into Baghdad."

And here's paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph January 22nd story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times:
"The threat from buried bombs was well known before the [Arab Jabour] operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.'s."

Farrell led his piece with news that an American soldier had died in Arab Jabour from an IED that blew up "an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq."
Note that both pieces started with bombing news -- in one case a suicide bombing that killed several Iraqis; in another a roadside bombing that killed an American soldier and wounded others. But the major bombing story of these last days -- those 100,000 pounds of explosives that U.S. planes dropped in a small area south of Baghdad -- simply dangled unexplained off the far end of the Los Angeles Times piece; while, in the New York Times, it was buried inside a single sentence.

Neither paper has (as far as I know) returned to the subject, though this is undoubtedly the most extensive use of air power in Iraq since the Bush administration's invasion of 2003 and probably represents a genuine shifting of American military strategy in that country. Despite, a few humdrum wire service pieces, no place else in the mainstream has bothered to cover the story adequately either.
Continued at http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m40642&hd=&size=1&l=e

Note: the article mentions what happened in 1937 Guernica; here is an article that points out that Western countries were already bombing Arab and Muslim countries before 1937. See http://www.brushtail.com.au/july_04_on/bombing_arabs_history.html

Monday, January 14, 2008

Israel to get "smarter" U.S.-made bombs than Saudis

Sun Jan 13, 2008 9:10am EST

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The United States has agreed in principle to provide Israel with better "smart bombs" than those it plans to sell Saudi Arabia under a regional defense package, senior Israeli security sources said on Sunday.

Keen to bolster Middle East allies against an ascendant Iran, the Bush administration last year proposed supplying Gulf Arab states with some $20 billion in new weapons, including Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb kits for the Saudis.

The plan has angered Israel's backers in Washington, who say the JDAMs, which give satellite guidance for bombs, may one day be used against the Jewish state or at least blunt its power to deter potential foes. Israel has had JDAMs since 1990 and has used them extensively in a 2006 offensive in Lebanon.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government dropped its objections to the proposed Saudi deal in July after securing U.S. military aid grants worth $30 billion over the next decade.

Rest of article at http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL1339881820080113

Sunday, December 30, 2007

The role of the United States and other countries in fueling the violence in Darfur

Keith Harmon Snow writes,
Conflict in Darfur escalated in 2003 after in parallel with negotiations “ending” the south Sudan war. The U.S.-backed insurgency by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the guerilla force that fought the northern Khartoum government for 20 years, shifted to Darfur, even as the G.W. Bush government allied with Khartoum in the U.S. led “war on terror.” The Sudan Liberation Army (SLA)—one of some 27 rebel factions mushrooming in Darfur—is allied with the SPLA and supported from Uganda. Andrew Natsios, former USAID chief and now US envoy to Sudan, said on October 6, 2007 that the atmosphere between the governments of north and south Sudan “had become poisonous.” This is no surprise given the magnitude of the resource war in Sudan and the involvement of international interests.

Israel reportedly provides military training to Darfur rebels from bases in Eritrea, and has strengthened ties with the regime in Chad, from which more weapons and troops penetrate Darfur. The refugee camps have become increasingly militarized. There are reports that Israeli military intelligence operates from within the camps, as does U.S intelligence. Eritrea is about to explode into yet another war with Ethiopia.

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

Here are additional articles on Darfur

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Alan Greenspan: the Iraq war is largely about oil

The US and Britain have always maintained that the war to oust Saddam Hussein was about weapons of mass destruction - not oil.

US President George Bush said Saddam was a threat to world security because he could sell the weapons on to terrorists.

But Mr Greenspan, a Republican who was boss of the US Federal Reserve for 18 years, said that was not the whole truth, according to a copy of the book seen by Associated Press.

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil," he is reported to have written.

from http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1284299,00.html

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Judith Miller and the Bloodbath in Iraq (Repeat)

Here is a reminder of Judith Miller's contribution to journalism by Jospeh A. Palermo

On April 21, 2003, Judith Miller, now working as an embedded reporter with the U.S. military's MET Alpha, wrote the story, "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert." In this piece of propaganda, Miller claims without evidence or proof that the Iraqis destroyed or shipped to Syria their vast stockpiles of WMDs. Miller's anonymous source was a guy claiming to be an "Iraqi scientist," and she tells her readers that she "was permitted to see him from a distance at the sites where he said that material from the arms program was buried. Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried."

This "Iraqi scientist," who turned out to be bogus, allowed Miller to appear on PBS's Newshour with Jim Lehrer and have the following exchange:...

complete article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/judith-miller-and-the-blo_b_57023.html

Saturday, June 09, 2007

Israel's Nuclear Double Standards

During the apartheid era of South Africa, Israel gave the country its nuclear capablities see http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Global_Secrets_Lies/Israel_SAfrica.html
(excerpted from the book Israeli Foreign Policy by Jane Hunter)

Now that Iran is developing nuclear power, Israel portrays it as the most dangerous country in the world.

United States oil imports and Saudi Arabia investments

According to http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html

in March 2007,
the top 5 countries that the U.S. imported crude oil from are
Canada 1,780,000 barrels per day
Mexico 1,621,000 barrels per day
Nigeria 1,290,000 barrels per day
Saudi Arabia 1,216,000 barrels per day
Venezuela 1,036,000 barrels per day

And the top 5 countries that the U.S. imported Petroleum from are
Canada 2,305,000 barrels per day
Mexico 1,749,000 barrels per day
Nigeria 1,346,000 barrels per day
Venezuela 1,285,000 barrels per day
Saudi Arabia 1,244,000 barrels per day

According to http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2089.htm
"Canada and the U.S. have one of the world’s largest investment relationships. The U.S. is Canada's largest foreign investor. Statistics Canada reports that at the end of 2005, the stock of U.S. foreign direct investment in Canada was $228 billion, or about 65% of total foreign direct investment in
Canada. U.S. investment is primarily in Canada's mining and smelting industries, petroleum, chemicals, the manufacture of machinery and transportation equipment, and finance. "

On the same government website it says about
Saudia Arabia at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3584.htm

During and after the Gulf War, the Government of Saudi Arabia provided water, food, shelter, and fuel for coalition forces in the region. There also were monetary payments to some coalition partners. Saudi Arabia's combined costs
in payments, foregone revenues, and donated supplies were $55 billion. More than $15 billion went toward reimbursing the United States alone.

It does not give figures about how much Saudi Arabia invests in the United States and vice versa.

Here (http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20060115-103622-3038r.htm ) is an article that says “...government sources estimate Saudi holdings in the United States at $400 billion to $800 billion.”
This particular article is warning us of the influence Saudi contributions to media outlets and Universities will have. The reality is whatever influence they have is negligible in these areas.

Another way the U.S. gets back its money from purchasing oil is by selling the Saudis sophisticated expensive weaponry. ( http://www.fas.org/asmp/profiles/saudi_arabia.htm ) The Saudis don’t have the qualified personnel to use the weaponry, which is why they and Kuwait had to look to the United States for help when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.