Twelfth Bough

i run my own damn think tank

Archive for February, 2008

But remember, Israel is a ‘democracy’

Feb 27

Posted by Marlena in Injustice, Israel | No Comments

That’s what we’re always told. Israel is a democracy, and not only that, but the only democracy in the whole Middle East. It’s a civilized place. Just don’t look in that corner over there, where they keep the Palestinians. Because it’s dirty, and it smells. But other than that, it’s just the greatest democracy you can imagine. You betcha.

The new station receives up to 40,000 cubic metres of waste water every day, and it should pump 120 cubic metres an hour through each of six water pumps.

However, only three pumps were installed in the station because the Israeli closure and blockade since June 2007 had prevented the essential parts needed to build the remaining three from entering Gaza.

Power cuts have also been affecting the efficiency of the station. The emergency generator is not functioning well as it requires maintenance and spare parts are lacking. The limited amount of fuel that is let into Gaza is not enough to run the generator for long hours.

…This station was supposed to be a blessing for the neighbourhood but it turned out to be a curse, a health hazard for us all.

Sewage water is filling the streets surrounding the station and flooding nearby houses.

The stench is unbearable.

Tenants in ground floor flats were forced to move in with neighbours on higher floors. People are now using sand bags to absorb the sewage water which continues to seep into their houses.

The amount of children who have been taken ill has increased considerably. Cases of diarrhea are mounting by the day. Even now, children continue to play outside amongst the raw sewage – where else can they go?

And we are now facing a public health crisis.

What disgusts me is that this could all have been prevented had the Israelis opened one checkpoint to allow the spare parts and fuel through.

…Despite the blockade, we have to continue our daily lives, otherwise we will have nothing left. When the crisis started, some families bought their children gasoline lamps to study by when electricity was cut. Now that fuel is not available and very expensive, children do their homework and study for their exams in candle light.To add to the deplorable situation, a friend of mine heard on the news yesterday that the course books for the new term will not reach us for at least another month.

They have been stuck at the Israeli checkpoints along with spare parts, fuel, food, and medical supplies; people are not let in or out. Gaza has now become a prison for us all.

When a Hamas rocket falls near Sderot, the Israelis are rushed to the hospital via ambulance and treated for shock. A single injured or killed Israeli civilian will be reported around the globe as a tragedy worthy of harsh retribution. But in the same country, Israel, 1.5 million Palestinians live in a cage. Palestinian children play outside in raw sewage and do their homework by candlelight.

The Palestinians live in a third-world ghetto that Israel has explicitly set aside and created for them via destructive and malicious policies. These policies have been specifically designed to prevent the Palestinians from making any sort of normal life for themselves. The Israelis complain that the Palestinians are such a burden, but of course they have created this very situation and do everything possible to exacerbate it. It would be ridiculous if it weren’t so tragic.

Israel calls itself a democracy, but that is a sick joke. Israel’s cruel and vindictive behavior toward the Palestinians must be named by it’s proper name. Israel is an apartheid state. Anyone who continues to insist that Israel is a democracy enables that government’s continued abhorrent behavior which violates international law and basic human decency.

Originally published 2/25/08.

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The Inside of Blogging

Feb 27

Posted by Marlena in Civil Rights, Media, Surveillance | No Comments

For years I read blogs and occasionally commented. Blogging is better. However, there is the issue of getting readers and finding out who they might be. This involves checking stat logs. By spending a little time checking IP addresses, a blogger can find out when ‘persons of interest’ stop by, you know like Pentagon, CIA, Quantico, psyops, military, etc. To my disgust, I have noticed that whenever I have written about or linked to military technology and certain other sensitive subjects, lo and behold our government seems to have plenty of people on hand to have a look-see. No lowly blogger escapes the eye of Big Brother. Oh no. They have deep pockets for this crap, courtesy of the US taxpayers. We hand them the money they use to despoil us of our civil rights.

That’s right, the bastards know whenever anyone gets near to their criminal activity. Nine million blogs to sort through? No problem. It’s pretty obvious, once you start blogging about anything important, that the government must be spending lots of money on data-mining capabilities in order to find every needle in every haystack on the internet. These are your tax dollars at work, paying for government employees to spy on bloggers and intimidate them into staying quiet so that you, dear reader, may not come to a proper understanding of the crimes committed in your name. They don’t care about terrorists. They made that whole thing up to justify spying on you and your fellow Americans, especially the bloggers and activists who they consider the real terrorists.

The people in the DC, Virginia, and Maryland area spend lots of time reading blogs. Yes. They are busy as bees sucking up all that alternative news nectar, ascertaining just how much we scrappy bloggers, citizen journalists and news junkies have figured out. And then they go back to their propaganda hives and make more of that psychedelic honey. They decide how to spin the next pitch to the networks, when to send the next email chain letter (pass it on or else!!), when to have another ‘incident’ to scare the crap out them and stir up their fears and hostilities. The drones just eat it up and do what they’re told.

I think it’s the dirty little secret of blogging: they are watching us, and we know it. Do you know it, dear reader? You should.

Does that freak you out? It freaked me out. But listen, you can turn off the computer and run away, or you can grab somebody who thinks this is all a big haha and start cluing them in. The more people who understand what’s really happening to our country, the better off and safer we will all be. It’s as simple as that. Nothing will change until we change it. There is safety in numbers, and there is power in the Truth.

If your neighbor will not come to the Truth, bring the Truth to your neighbor. And do it now.

Originally published 2/23/08.

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Thomas Merton on Sin

Feb 27

Posted by Marlena in 9-11, Religion, Unreality | No Comments

Thomas Merton wrote wonderful things, and I find many prescient insights in his work. Consider that he wrote the following passages around 1959. What a testament to the incredible clarity of vision that a human being can achieve through a lifelong pursuit of God, Who is Truth. (Excerpts from The Inner Experience, Chapter 13, The Sense of Sin.)

Guilt is a sense of oppression from the outside, an anxiety one feels when he thinks he is going to be called to account for a misdeed. The anxiety of guilt is a sign of moral alienation. It becomes active within us when we interiorize a reproof suggested by the presence of an authority whose edicts we have violated.

…The sense of sin is something deeper and more existential. It is not merely a sense of guilt referred to the authority of God. It is a sense of evil in myself. Not because I have violated a law outside myself, but because I have violated the inmost laws of my own being, which are, at the same time, the laws of God Who dwells within me. The sense of sin is the sense of having been deeply and deliberately false to my own inmost reality, my likeness to God. Sin is a radical evil and sickness of the spirit. Indeed, serious sin is more than that — it is the death of the spirit. To have a sense of sin is to realize myself to be not only morally but spiritually dead. Moral death would savor rather of guilt — I have been “killed” by the violation of a law. But spiritual death is the sense of having separated myself from truth by complete inner falsity, from love by selfishness, from reality by trying to assert as real a will to nothingness.

To put this in simpler terms, guilt is the admission that we’ve done evil things. When we ask ourselves honestly why, however, we’ve done evil things, then we confront our sin. We realize that we do evil things because a part of us is evil. That realization will be far more humbling than any admission of guilt. We must face our own willful separation from God, even if it seems completely impossible for us to control the problematic sides of our personalities. There is no way to correct these deepest breaches without first assessing them dispassionately. This soberest of tasks cannot be done by the histrionic.

The sense of sin is therefore something far deeper and more urgent than the prurient feeling of naughtiness which most pious people have trained themselves to experience when they violate the taboos of their sect. There is something scandalous about the religiousity of popular piety. All the empty gestures of people who do not do good and avoid evil, but make signs of the good, go through gesticulations which symbolize good intentions, and allay their guilt feelings with appropriate grimaces of piety. All these gestures are performed with scrupulous fidelity and accompanied with the right degree of optimism about God and man: but at the same time the most terrible of crimes are accepted without a tremor because they are, after all, collective. Take, for instance, the willingness of the majority of “believers” to accept the hydrogen bomb, with all that it implies, with no more than a shadow of theoretical protest. This is almost unbelievable, and yet is has become so commonplace that no one wonders at it anymore. The state of the world at the present day is the clearest possible indication that the whole human race is full of sin — for which responsibility becomes more and more collective and therefore more and more nebulous.

It has been remarked that the more totalitarian a society is, for example, that of Russia or of Hitler’s Germany, the less its members feel any sense of sin. They can commit any evil without remorse as long as they feel they are acting as members of their collectivity. The only evil they fear is to be cut off from the community that takes their sins upon itself and “destroys” them. This is the worst of disasters, and the slightest indication of disunion with the group is the cause of anxiety and guilt.

This is the way our world is going, and in such a world the spirit and the spiritual have no more meaning because the person has no meaning. But it is the vocation and mission of the contemplative to keep alive the spirit of man, and to nurture, at least in himself, personal responsibility before God and personal independence from collective irresponsibility.

It’s astonishing that Merton wrote this almost fifty years ago. How much lower we have fallen since then. Our collective crimes are now far beyond comprehension and counting. Now the United States can take the place of Russia or Hitler’s Germany, with our phony right-wing religiosity, our collective irresponsibility and our anesthetized consciences. We live in a country where corporations have superior rights to people, where we have started illegal wars and, most importantly, where many people actively refuse to face the truth, truth which can be apprehended with the slightest effort. In fact, people must now go out of their way to avoid the truth that 9/11 was an inside job perpertrated to lure us into much greater crimes against many more innocent people. 9/11 was a lie, the Iraq war is a lie, the economic expansion was a lie, and on and on. This grand plan has been hatched and executed by insanely greedy people who have separated themselves entirely from God, and who lust after power and feast on gratuitous violence. To follow them at all has been a dire mistake with worldwide, tragic consequences. Countless innocent people have suffered and died for Americans’ inability to discern truth. How many more have to die to preserve the illusion?

The hysterical calls for God and patriotism ring hollow because they are hollow. The people who gladly followed this plan and demand obedience also scream the loudest about supporting the troops and making a police state here at home. These people truly suffer from terror. They are terrified of being held accountable for their sins, for their evil glee in supporting these plans and partaking of the spoils. They talk about personal responsibility, but when it comes to shouldering the guilt for our nation’s crimes against humanity, personal responsibility is the very last thing they want. They want the guilt spread around as far as possible. Their zealous scapegoating testifies to how desperately they want it all to be somebody else’s fault. Anybody but them. It is slightly encouraging that the leader and cheerleader of this unreality, George W. Bush, has a 19% approval rating. More and more Americans have tired of the lies and can now feel the weight of responsibility bearing down on our own, personal shoulders. It’s becoming a heavy burden, but we have to carry it.

The fact remains that personal responsibility is the only way forward if we are to survive. The longer we allow this collective hallucination to continue, the more innocent people die, and the greater our sin and accountability before God. Those of us who have eyes to see must help our friends and family confront the truth. Remember that they are terrified, but do what you can to make them see. Don’t think that by merely understanding and naming the evil our work here is done. Not at all. That’s just the beginning. We still have to face it and carry the burden of responsibility we generated. And we have to take our friends by the shoulders and turn them around to face it with us. And they have to carry their share of the burden. Nobody here should be allowed to shirk this load, especially not those who enthusiastically piled it so high with suffering.

Originally published 2/23/08.

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Blackmail, black bags, black hearts

Feb 27

Posted by Marlena in Bush/Cheney, Civil Rights, Corruption & Crime, Politics, Surveillance | No Comments

Paul Craig Roberts has an accurate and brutally honest piece up about the abhorrent Protect America Act.

President George W. Bush and his director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, are telling the American people that an unaccountable executive branch is necessary for their protection. Without the Protect America Act, Bush and McConnell claim, the executive branch will not be able to spy on terrorists, and we will all be blown up. Terrorists can only be stopped, Bush says, if Bush has the right to spy on everyone without any oversight by courts.

He goes on to handily undo this claptrap, and along the way he offers this explanation for certain confounding events:

As the lawmakers who gave us FISA understood, spying on people without warrants lets a political party collect dirt on its adversaries with which to blackmail them.

As Bush illegally spied a long time before word of it got out, blackmail might be the reason the Democrats have ignored their congressional election mandate and have not put a stop to Bush’s illegal wars and unconstitutional police state measures.

Perhaps the Democrats have finally caught on that they cannot function as a political party as long as they continue to permit Bush to spy on them. For one reason or another, they have let the Orwellian-named Protect America Act expire.

This is not the first time we’ve heard this, so I’d just like to put a couple of things in closer relation to one another.

The first time I heard this was in Luke Ryland’s January 6, 2008 post about Sibel Edmunds.

The article notes that Larry Franklin was one of those implicated in the scheme. However, Sibel has previously noted that Franklin was essentially a pawn in the system. More significant is the fact that high-level Pentagon officials were maintaining ‘dossiers’ on the sexual and financial proclivities of their underlings in order to be able to blackmail them.

I know that many of you have been (rightly) concerned about FISA, and many of you have (rightly) been confused by the inexplicable behaviour of Democrats in Congress, and wonder why they behave as though they are being blackmailed.

Now you know.

If any American journalists/media wants to step up, please remember that the nuclear black market story covered by The Times is just one element of Sibel’s case.

Could this dossier program on our elected officials and on other Americans, done via the illegal wiretap program, be the unnamed thing that caused the forceful, principled pushback from Ashcroft, Mueller and Comey? A comment to one of Glenn Greenwald’s many posts about this lawbreaking noted the heavy involvement of the FBI sheds a little more light:

Note that nowhere in Comey’s story are NSA officials mentioned. But FBI Director Robert Mueller was a central player in the drama — he even met personally with President Bush — and also was one who threatened resignation. This indicates that, whatever was going on before the program was modified, those activities were being conducted by the FBI, not just the NSA. That could mean purely domestic unwarranted wiretaps, unwarranted black-bag jobs, or similar misconduct.

Being a law-abiding citizen generally unfamiliar with FBI slang, I had to look up black-bag jobs. In the old days they involved the FBI illegally sneaking into people’s homes and offices. Today the options for sneaking around have expanded dramatically. This analysis from 10/07 asks whether the Senate FISA bill immunizes black-bag jobs. Um, yes? Just a guess.

Perhaps even Ashcroft, Comey and Mueller could see that nobody is safe. Not even them.

Originally published 2/22/08.

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Total Unreality

Feb 27

Posted by Marlena in Bush/Cheney, Iran, Israel, Media, Nuclear Weapons, Unreality | No Comments

Here’s a little spin for you.

Six major powers are to meet Monday in Washington for fresh talks on how to make Iran give up its contested uranium enrichment activities, a top US diplomat official said Friday.

The State Department’s number three Nicholas Burns said foreign ministry officials of the six — the five UN Security Council permanent members plus Germany — would review a proposed third UN sanctions resolution against Iran.

“We will review our strategy (launched at the United Nations) in New York, the pace of the resolution,” Burns told reporters.

The six powers want Iran to stop enriching uranium, a process which they suspect Tehran aims to use to develop nuclear weapons. Iran insists it is only seeking nuclear power for civilian purposes.

Britain’s and France’s ambassadors to the UN on Thursday formally submitted to the Security Council members the text of a resolution for new sanctions, which they hope to see passed as soon as possible.

The poposed sanctions include economic and trade restrictions and a travel ban against officials involved in the nuclear program.

The five permanent council members are Britain, the United States, France, China and Russia.

The UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, complained in a recent report that the Islamic Republic had supplied only patchy details of its activities to its inspectors.

Is that right? Because it seems to me that just two days ago ElBaradei said he would release a clean report on Iran which would ‘rule out the possibility’ that Iran is pursuing a nuclear arms program.

So where is this little IAEA ‘complaining’ episode about ‘patchy details’? Which ‘recent report’ did that come from, or did somebody just pull this spinning turd out of his arse to bolster the evidentially-impaired case against Iran?

Here in Reality, the six powers can ’suspect’ all day long, but they’ve got nothing.

Originally published 2/22/08.

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Good News, Bad News

Feb 27

Posted by Marlena in 9-11, Bush/Cheney, Civil Rights, Economy, Military, Surveillance, Unreality | No Comments

First the bad news…

This article describes what any alternative news junkie already knows: the US government has been building camps in preparation for the ‘next’ catastrophe. We don’t know what it is yet, but we know it’s coming.

“Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the federal government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and noncitizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.” write Lewis Seiler and former Congressman Dan Hamburg of the watchdog group Voice of the Environment, Inc.

… Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.

According to diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott, the KBR contract is part of a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of “all removable aliens” and “potential terrorists.”

…Seiler and Hamburg also warn of the alarming and numerous freedom killing pieces of legislation that have been passed recently, dovetailing with the build up of infrastructure of tyranny inside the US.

…The issue gained national attention two years ago when it was announced that Kellogg, Brown and Root had been awarded a $385 million dollar contract by Homeland Security to construct detention and processing facilities in the event of a national emergency.

The language of the preamble to the agreement veils the program with talk of temporary migrant holding centers, but it is made clear that the camps will also be used “as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency.”

Following the story, first given wide attention by Prisonplanet.com, the Alternet website put together an alarming report that collated all the latest information on plans to initiate internment of political subversives and Muslims after the next major terror attack in the US.

The article highlighted the disturbing comments of Sen. Lindsey Graham, who encouraged torture supporting then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to target, “Fifth Columnists” Americans who show disloyalty and sympathize with “the enemy,” whoever that enemy may be.

…The real agenda, just as it is with Halliburton’s gulags, was to use the cover of rounding up immigrants and illegal aliens as a smokescreen for targeting political dissidents. From 1967 to 1971 the FBI kept a list of persons to be rounded up as subversive, dubbed the “ADEX” list.According to author Naomi Wolf, the National Counterterrorism Center today holds the names of roughly 775,000 “terror suspects” with the number increasing by 20,000 per month.

Obviously, the government plans on rounding up a lot of people. But if you look at it as a percentage, it’s not a lot of people. Let’s say there are roughly 300 million people in the US. If they compile a list of one million people before they run their ENDGAME, that’s still less than one half of one percent of the population.

Will those people be missed? Will the people not rounded up scream bloody murder, or will they actually believe that their neighbors are some kind of terrorists? That is the question.

Now for the good news…

In a town of 20,000 people, up to 60 people might be targeted. Suddenly the number doesn’t seem so small. I think 60 people sent off to detention camps in my town would be noticed. I really do. I think even a lot less than that would be noticed. I like to think that even one person rounded up and shipped away would be noticed. I think the government puts a wee too much faith in the power of propaganda to pull something like this off successfully, but that probably won’t stop them from trying.

Sara Robinson outlines the Seven Steps to Revolution and explains why the United States is ripe for major change after 30 years of corrupt, inept conservative-dominated rule.

1. Soaring, then crashing (of the economy, standard of living). Check.
2. They call it a class war (upper classes break faith and prey on lower classes). Check.
3. Deserted intellectuals (intelligent people not valued unless they are corrupt). Check.
4. Incompetent government (with rigged elections, not even the hope of ditching them). Check.
5. Gutless wonders in the ruling class (see Bush, GW). Check.
6. Fiscal irresponsibility (see US Congress). Check.
7. Inept and inconsistent use of force (illegal wars, police brutality, etc.). Check.

Sara comments:

It turns out that the energy of this moment is not about Hillary or Ron or Barack. It’s about who we are, and where we are, and what happens to people’s minds when they’re left hanging just a little too far past the moment when they’re ready for transformative change.

So, if (or should I say when) the next attack or catastrophe takes place, and the government executes their ENDGAME plan of martial law, which shall include rounding American citizens up under suspicion of being terrorists (when all they’re really doing is paying attention to government crimes committed in our names), either one of two things might happen, or they both might happen.

One, people will be so confused and terrified that they don’t protest their neighbors removal to detention camps.

OR two, people will say, “Now you just wait one damned minute here!” to our dear government and actually stand up and fight to get our country, America, land of the free and home of the brave, back from the brink of doom.

I’m sure there will be people who do some of each. But which group will be be larger? Which group will prevail? Which group will be full of the Real American Patriots, and not the Simpering Imposters? Hmm?

You know.

Originally published 2/22/08.

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Q: What scares the crap out of the evil?

Feb 27

Posted by Marlena in Israel, Unreality | No Comments

A: People with the nerve to tell the truth.

The evil are liars. They fear the truth more than anything, and so they will spare no expense to suppress it.

We can resolve many problems simply by exposing the liars and telling the truth. But it has to be done over and over and over again because vast numbers of people have become anesthetized and brainwashed. That is why we must speak the truth, and share the truth, and support those who risk their lives to confront the evil. And we have to keep doing it without fail, as if our lives depend on it, which they do.

Originally published 2/21/08.

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Turning up the heat

Feb 27

Posted by Marlena in Bush/Cheney, Iran, Israel, Nuclear Weapons | No Comments

Reported today, causing grave consternation amongst the warmongering crowd:

ElBaradai ‘to declare Iran clean’

Head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei is to release ‘a positive report’ on Iran’s nuclear activities.

The IAEA Chief’s report on Iran’s nuclear program would be positive and it would rule out the possibility that Iran may running a clandestine nuclear arms program, informed sources familiar with the UN nuclear watchdog’s issues said on Wednesday.

The sources said that the US is exerting pressure on ElBaradei’s aides to convince him to change the tone of his upcoming report and that the delay in the release of the report is a result of Washington’s efforts.

The US and its allies, including Britain and France, are reportedly planning to slam the report at the upcoming meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors, should ElBaradei go ahead with its plan and release the positive report.

The West accuses Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons but Tehran reiterates that its nuclear activities are solely aimed at peaceful purposes.

I love the use of the word ‘clean’, as that was the very word Dick Cheney used to explain why he delayed the NIE for a year. Remember? The NIE had to be purged of dissenting opinions. The NIE had to be made ‘clean’. Except in Cheney’s case, ‘clean’ means ‘dirty’, because the dissenting opinions expressed ‘truth’ and Cheney’s preferred opinions are what we call ‘lies’.

Anyway, he didn’t get away with that, and nothing has been the same since. If you look back over the events since that NIE came out in early December, world tensions have increased dramatically since that time. The simmering pot has been on high heat ever since, bringing events to a full boil. This IAEA report will infuriate the US, Israel, Britian and France. Their telegraphed reactions give credence to the ‘Mediterranean Initiative’ theory I have cited in recent days. The question is: will the pot now boil over?

Originally published 2/20/08.

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Having One’s Cake and Eating It Too

Feb 27

Posted by Marlena in Injustice, Israel, Unreality | No Comments

I would just like to pause here and point out the hypocrisy of Israel’s behavior.

Israel cannot on the one hand take billions and billions of US dollars to build a huge military capacity, brag about it, consistently behave in ways to inflict horrific abuse on the Palestinians, and in its spare time provoke its Arab neighbors with extra-curricular warmongering activity and political assassinations, while on the other hand whining about being a poor, little picked-upon isolated country who everyone hates and whose citizens are suffering and threatened.

Here’s a website devoted to innocent Israeli and Palestinian children killed in this conflict since 2000. Statistics through 2/1/08 are as follows: Israeli children killed: 119; Palestinian children killed: 982. The numbers don’t lie.

Hebrew media reported that Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni told her American counterpart Condoleezza Rice during their last meeting in Washington that Israel is preparing to wage a large-scale military operation against the Gaza Strip.

Israeli Ma’ariv newspaper’s website quoted Israeli sources that attended the meeting as saying that Livni confirmed to Rice that the Israeli government is studying the efficiency of the economic sanctions and pressures it imposed on Gaza before waging a military land operation.

In another context, the information office of the Nafha society for the defense of prisoners and human rights stated the IOF troops killed during only two weeks in February 38 Palestinians including six children and one woman 75 percent of them were killed in the Gaza Strip.

In a statement received by the PIC, the society added that the Israeli artillery and air raids killed last January 11 Palestinian women and 11 children in Gaza alone.

In another development, the health ministry in Gaza warned that the ambulance and emergency services stopped completely due to an acute shortage of fuel in light of the frequent Israeli attacks against the Strip and the increasing Palestinian casualties needed to be transferred to Gaza hospitals.

Again, Israel punishes the civilian population of Gaza in violation of international law. What on earth does Livni mean when she says that the Israeli government is “studying the efficiency of the economic sanctions and pressures” it has imposed on Gaza? Excuse me? Has Gaza become a laboratory? Here’s a tip: the economic sanctions and pressures cause death, including the death of innocent children. So what’s to study here, exactly? Ways to get more faster better death??

You know, when people can look on the suffering of other human beings with such cold detachment, something important in the human condition has been irretrievably lost. This attitude is the same attitude witnessed this week in the people kicking and abusing sick cows: an utter disregard for life, a bloodthirsty, vengeful lust for power over the weak. Gratuitous cruelty. In a word: evil.

None of which is to say anything about the suffering caused by and on behalf of the US. Indeed, innocent blood literally drenches the earth.

Originally published 2/19/08.

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Africa: The Final Frontier

Feb 27

Posted by Marlena in Africa, Bush/Cheney, Israel, NATO, Nuclear Weapons | No Comments

Is Africa the last continent full of easy resources to plunder and people to kill? Is that why George Bush pays attention to Africa as his disastrous reign of imperial arrogance winds down? How does Africa play into the grand plans for world domination?

First, several countries in North Africa border the Mediterranean, thereby making them strategically important. Over at Global Research you can read the second in a series of articles which lay out the plans for NATO expansion in the Mediterranean.

The Franco-German and Anglo-American agenda in the Mediterranean explains several other international developments and realities. Firstly, the objective of forming a bloc in the Mediterranean explain the earlier expansion of NATO in the area through what NATO terms the “Mediterranean Dialogue.” This so-called Mediterranean Dialogue is part of NATO’s “Mediterranean Initiative.” The framework of this relationship creates a de facto extension of NATO, which includes Israel as an informal member. Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, Tunisia, Egypt, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and Israel are all members of NATO’s Mediterranean Initiative. The only Arab nations in the Mediterranean littoral that are excluded are Libya, Syria, and Lebanon. Through this mechanism the Mediterranean Sea has virtually become a NATO lake, almost surrounded entirely by NATO members or de facto NATO members. Albania and the coastline of the former Yugoslavia off the shore of the Adriatic Sea are also controlled by NATO.

Secondly, the German naval and French land commands over NATO troops on Lebanese soil and off the Lebanese shore are explained by the categorizing of the Mediterranean as an area under Franco-German management. It should also be noted that it was in 2001 that the E.U., particularly the French, started talking about sending troops under the banner of NATO into the Eastern Mediterranean, in particular Palestine.

Meanwhile, Israel has been working diligently to force the international community to intervene. They have even come out and said it directly:

Israel is considering a large-scale incursion into the Gaza Strip during which it would present an ultimatum to the international community for the deployment of a multinational force as the only condition under which it would withdraw, defense officials have told The Jerusalem Post.

The Israelis want to offload the responsibility for policing Gaza onto the international community. Presumably this will free the Israeli military up to do other things. Actually, they have already been doing other things:

It is not by chance that Israel is a partner in Operation Active Endeavour, the force that has spawned the NATO naval armada off the coasts of Syria and Lebanon. [3] Nor is it coincidental that Israel announced it would fully participated in NATO naval exercises in May of 2006, right before attacking Lebanon. [4] This was under the pretext of a so-called “Iranian threat.”

Starting in August, 2007 Israeli ships have joined NATO warships in the Eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Black Sea in full naval cooperation. [5] This has been marked by joint Israeli-NATO exercises that have taken place in the Red Sea and the Black Sea.

It should be noted that minesweepers have participated in the inaugural Israeli-NATO naval exercises. This alludes to possible action against Iran in the Persian Gulf. Many establishment figures in Germany, including those from the German Green Party, have also called for the inclusion of Israel into NATO as a full member. [6]

According to Avigdor Lieberman, an important figure in Israeli politics, “Israel’s diplomatic and security goal…must be clear: joining NATO and entering the European Union.” This is considered as the strategic path that Israel must take. [7]

Israel is expected to eventually join the European Union. The E.U.’s enlargement is tied into the process of NATO expansion. Israel and the E.U. will both manage, from an economic and political standpoint, the western outer periphery of the “Arc of Instability” under the framework of a Mediterranean Union.

Of course, this is really about energy security and therefore economic dominance. Mass murder may be required. Brights stars in the neocon constellation (Killersii Majoris) have determined that Israel could accomplish such dominance by ‘liquidating’ tens of millions of Middle Eastern people via a preemptive nuclear attack. (One can only note with horror the presence of a black abyss instead of a human soul in Norman Podheretz.)

The February 2008 issue of Commentary Magazine, the official periodical of the American Jewish Committee, has also proposed in an article by Norman Podhoretz that Israel could launch a devastating pre-emptive nuclear attack against Iran and Israel’s Arab neighbours (including the countries of Arab regimes allied to Israel and NATO like Egypt) and militarily occupy the oil fields, refineries, and naval ports of the Persian Gulf countries to establish energy security. [8]

The pieces of the grand strategy unfolding over the strategic map are becoming clearer. Podhoretz asserts that Israel could liquidate large populations in the Middle East (“tens of millions”) and that Israel could virtually annex energy-rich areas in the Persian Gulf. The substance of these diabolical statements emanate from an American think-tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which is closely linked to the formulation of the U.S. foreign policy and military agenda in the Middle East.

These statements and notions from Norman Podhoretz and the Center for Strategic and International Studies act as a window of insight into the thoughts of the Anglo-American establishment and its European and Israeli partners. There is also a link between the concept that Israel could militarily occupy the oil fields of the Persian Gulf and the 2008 Herzliya Conference’s discussions about Israel acting as an agent of E.U. and NATO energy security.

While all this takes place, Bush has decided to visit Africa, but he was restricted in which countries he could visit. From another article at Global Research:

Thus far the majority of African states have refused to host the Africa Command. Despite the aggressive military and diplomatic efforts by the US government, not even the closest “partners’ of the imperialists have supported this call for the Africa Command. There is only one state (Liberia) that has openly called for the basing of the US Africa command on African soil. Though the United States has 5,458 “distinct and discreet military installations around the world there are pressures from the military-industrial and oil complex for the USA to have more effective resources in Africa to defend US capitalism.

For the past twenty years the US government had been building political assets in Kenya to pave the way for ’security cooperation.” Kenya would have been one of the stops on this visit but the political struggles in Kenya made it impossible for George Bush to visit Kenya. It is this country that has participated in the so called extra-ordinary rendition. More than 90 persons were captured with apparent U.S. involvement after they fled fighting in Somalia. The prisoners were rendered on a plane chartered by the Kenyan government into secret detention in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Uganda would have been another stop on the visit, but the continued war in the North and the clear dictatorial character of the Museveni government made this stop undesirable.

One other undesirable ally is Ethiopia. The government of Meles Zenawi has joined in the efforts to fabricate terrorism in Somalia and has invaded Somalia. Yet, despite this alliance, Bush and the planners in Washington did not deem it safe for Bush to visit Ethiopia. Bush could not go to South Africa at this time because Jacob Zuma is the President of the ANC. He could not go to Nigeria because the Nigerians are opposed to the so called war on terror. So Bush had to find a country where he could go to. The US settled on Tanzania and Rwanda.

In West Africa, the US President is going to Benin, Liberia and Ghana. It will be the task of the political activists and democratic forces in these societies to demonstrate against the US and the plans for Africom in West Africa.

Though it sounds like Bush had to ’settle’ for visiting the B-team of African nations, any foothold would help secure the plans to control the resources of the African continent. Like a cancer metastasizing, US control over a tiny African country can spread. If it spreads northward from any of these countries Bush will visit, it will meet up with the North African nations already under NATO’s Mediterranean Initiative influence.

No matter where he goes, no matter what he does, Bush is always sowing the seeds of destruction.

Originally published 2/19/08.

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