US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption

US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield abstains during a vote to approve a resolution that “demands” all sides in the Israel-Hamas conflict allow the “safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale” at UN headquarters in New York on December 22, 2023.

(Photo by Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images)

The $1.5 trillion in military outlays each year is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Commo n Dreams, Dec 26, 2023

On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.

In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders.

Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.

What gives?

The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money.

As a result, the American people are losing big. The failed wars since 2000 have cost them around $5 trillion in direct outlays, or around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent in the coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly incurred by Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high costs suffered abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of destruction to property and nature in the war zones.

The costs continue to mount. US Military-linked outlays in 2024 will come to around $1.5 trillion, or roughly $12,000 per household, if we add the direct Pentagon spending, the budgets of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the budget of the Veteran’s Administration, the Department of Energy nuclear weapons program, the State Department’s military-linked “foreign aid” (such as to Israel), and other security-related budget lines. Hundreds of billions of dollars are money down the drain, squandered in useless wars, overseas military bases, and a wholly unnecessary arms build-up that brings the world closer to WWIII.

Yet to describe these gargantuan costs is also to explain the twisted “rationality” of US foreign policy. The $1.5 trillion in military outlays is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA.

Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign Policy division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays totaled an astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per household, by far the highest health costs in the world, while America ranked roughly 40th in the world among nations in life expectancy. A failed health policy translates into very big bucks for the health industry, just as a failed foreign policy translates into mega-revenues of the military-industrial complex.

The more wars, of course, the more business.

The Foreign Policy division is run by a small, secretive and tight-knit coterie, including the top brass of the White House, the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate, and the major military firms including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. There are perhaps a thousand key individuals involved in setting policy. The public interest plays little role.

The key foreign policy makers run the operations of 800 US overseas military bases, hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, and the war operations where the equipment is deployed. The more wars, of course, the more business. The privatization of foreign policy has been greatly amplified by the privatization of the war business itself, as more and more “core” military functions are handed out to the arms manufacturers and to contractors such as Haliburton, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CACI.

In addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, there are important business spillovers from the military and CIA operations. With military bases in 80 countries around the world, and CIA operations in many more, the US plays a large, though mostly covert role, in determining who rules in those countries, and thereby on policies that shape lucrative deals involving minerals, hydrocarbons, pipelines, and farm and forest land. The US has aimed to overthrow at least 80 governments since 1947, typically led by the CIA through the instigation of coups, assassinations, insurrections, civil unrest, election tampering, economic sanctions, and overt wars. (For a superb study of US regime-change operations from 1947 to 1989, see Lindsey O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change, 2018).

In addition to business interests, there are of course ideologues who truly believe in America’s right to rule the world. The ever-warmongering Kagan family is the most famous case, though their financial interests are also deeply intertwined with the war industry. The point about ideology is this. The ideologists have been wrong on nearly every occasion and long ago would have lost their bully pulpits in Washington but for their usefulness as warmongers. Wittingly or not, they serve as paid performers for the military-industrial complex.

There is one persistent inconvenience for this ongoing business scam. In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth. (A similar contradiction of course applies to overpriced healthcare, government bailouts of Wall Street, oil-industry perks, and other scams). The American people rarely support the machinations of US foreign policy when they occasionally hear the truth. America’s wars are not waged by popular demand but by decisions from on high. Special measures are needed to keep the people away from decision making.

In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth.

The first such measure is unrelenting propaganda. George Orwell nailed it in 1984 when “the Party” suddenly switched the foreign enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia without a word of explanation. The US essentially does the same. Who is the US gravest enemy? Take your pick, according to the season. Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Hamas, have all played the role of “Hitler” in US propaganda. White House spokesman John Kirby delivers the propaganda with a smirk on his face, signaling that he too knows that what he is saying is ludicrous, albeit mildly entertaining.

The propaganda is amplified by the Washington think tanks that live off of donations by military contractors and occasionally foreign governments that are part of the US scam operations. Think of the Atlantic Council, CSIS, and of course the ever-popular Institute for the Study of War, brought to you by the major military contractors.

The second is to hide the costs of the foreign policy operations. In the 1960s, the US Government made the mistake of forcing the American people to bear the costs of the military-industrial complex by drafting young people to fight in Vietnam and by raising taxes to pay for the war. The public erupted in opposition.

From the 1970s onward the government has been far more clever. The government ended the draft, and made military service a job for hire rather than a public service, backed by Pentagon outlays to recruit soldiers from lower economic strata. It also abandoned the quaint idea that government outlays should be funded by taxes, and instead shifted the military budget to deficit spending which protects it from popular opposition that would be triggered if it were tax-funded.

It has also suckered client states such as Ukraine to fight America’s wars on the ground, so that no American body bags would spoil the US propaganda machine. Needless to say, US masters of war such as Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, and McConnell remain thousands of miles away from the frontlines. The dying is reserved for Ukrainians. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) defended American military aid to Ukraine as money well spent because it is “without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,” somehow not dawning on the good Senator to spare the lives of Ukrainians, who have died by the hundreds of thousands in a US-provoked war over NATO enlargement.

This system is underpinned by the complete subordination of the U.S. Congress to the war business, to avoid any questioning of the over-the-top Pentagon budgets and the wars instigated by the Executive Branch. The subordination of Congress works as follows. First, the Congressional oversight of war and peace is largely assigned to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which largely frame the overall Congressional policy (and the Pentagon budget). Second, the military industry (Boeing, Raytheon, and the rest) funds the campaigns of the Armed Services Committee members of both parties. The military industries also spend vast sums on lobbying in order to provide lucrative salaries to retiring members of Congress, their staffs, and families, either directly in military businesses or in Washington lobbying firms.

It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon.

The hacking of Congressional foreign policy is not only by the US military-industrial complex. The Israel lobby long ago mastered the art of buying the Congress. America’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid state and war crimes in Gaza makes no sense for US national security and diplomacy, not to speak of human decency. They are the fruits of Israel lobby investments that reached $30 million in campaign contributions in 2022, and that will vastly top that in 2024.

When Congress reassembles in January, Biden, Kirby, Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, McConnell, Blumenthal and their ilk will tell us that we absolutely must fund the losing, cruel, and deceitful war in Ukraine and the ongoing massacre and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, lest we and Europe and the free world, and perhaps the solar system itself, succumb to the Russian bear, the Iranian mullahs, and the Chinese Communist Party. The purveyors of foreign policy disasters are not being irrational in this fear-mongering. They are being deceitful and extraordinarily greedy, pursuing narrow interests over those of the American people.

It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon. This overhaul should start in 2024 by rejecting any more funding for the disastrous Ukraine War and Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Peacemaking, and diplomacy, not military spending, is the path to a US foreign policy in the public interest.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Jeffrey D. Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

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‘𝐖𝐞 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜 𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠’—𝐏𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐚𝐳𝐚

Israel is determined to punish the Palestinians for daring to resist

By Sophie Squire, Socialist Worker, 11 October 2023

“Israel is targeting everybody, no one knows when they’ll be next,” says Arrej—one of 2.3 million Palestinians facing the Israeli state’s murderous onslaught on the Gaza Strip.

“The scale of this attack is worse than in 2014 and 2021,” she told Socialist Worker as bombs rained down on Deir al Bala in central Gaza. “Israeli ships are firing at us indiscriminately, and in Al Qarara the Israelis have used phosphorus bombs.

“The fear now is that the Israelis want to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt.”

That’s little surprise after Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said Palestinians were “human animals” on Monday.

The Israeli state—humiliated, shaken and scared—is determined to inflict a collective punishment on millions of people in Gaza because they dared to resist settler colonialism. The Palestinian resistance’s attack from Gaza on Saturday showed that Israel, a state armed to the teeth by Western imperialism, isn’t all-powerful.

Israel has shut off supplies of food, fuel, electricity and other basic necessities, while airstrikes have flattened whole neighbourhoods. At least 950 Palestinians had been murdered in Israeli air strikes as of Wednesday morning—with an estimated 260 children.

“People are dying from their injuries,” says Arrej. “The full death toll is not yet known. Electricity is now cut off. Generators will not be able to function for long as the fuel supply is being stopped by Israelis. Soon our food will rot.

“People with money will manage for longer. Most will not. It’s already a desperate situation. The hospitals are going to be affected because there is no food, water, fuel or electricity. Even the electricity company has been bombed.

“People won’t be able to wash their clothes or have clean water. On the ground it’s horrible.”

“I fear the escalation will be for a long period, and it will have a big effect. I’m frightened about the psychological effects on all people in Gaza.”

Gallant has pledged that Israel would launch a ground assault on the Gaza Strip to try and wipe out the Hamas resistance group for good. The ground assault would be the first since 2014, when Israeli forces killed an estimated 2,251 Palestinians.

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has told US president Joe Biden that Israel has no option but to mount a ground attack. Biden backed Netanyahu’s plans and assured him that “additional assistance for the Israeli Defence Forces” was coming from the US.

The Tories cheered on Israel’s air strikes on Gaza. British defence secretary Grant Shapps said there was “no equivalence” between the actions of Hamas and the Israeli government. He added that the Israeli state was killing “innocent civilians” while the Israeli military was “trying to go after terrorists”.

It’s true there’s no equivalence between Israel and Palestine. Israel is the oppressor that uses violences to defend its system of settler colonialism, apartheid and racism—with the full backing of the West.

The Palestinians are a colonised people—who have the right to resist Israel. In Britain, we should turn out on the streets this Saturday to show we stand with them.

Join the March for Palestine, end the violence, end apartheid on Saturday 14 October, assemble 12pm at BBC Portland Place, W1A, London.

𝐏𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐚 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞

— Nasir Khan, Oct. 7, 2023

In normal circumstances, people side with victims of colonial oppression, even though some anti-freedom governments take a different stance. Today, many Western governments, all closely associated with Israel and supporters of Israeli crimes against its captive population, did the same as expected. They are repeating the oft-repeated old mouldy mantra of Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’.

But none of these governments, which closely follow Washington’s anti-Palestinian policies, have uttered a word about what the extreme right-wing government of Netanyahu is doing almost daily in the occupied West Bank and its refugee camps. Israeli soldiers kill, raid the Palestinian camps, arrest and terrorise all people.

Why do the US rulers and their Western allies remain totally indifferent to what the Netanyahu government is doing and what the Jewish settlers are doing with the Palestinians there? The answer is that the US rulers are quite happy with such colonial crimes. Not only that, they see such crimes and deplorable conditions imposed on the Palestinians as the right opportunity to bring Saudi Arabia under the wings of Israel.

Hamas militants started its bold military action today in response to what Israel was doing to the third-holiest shrine of Islam, Al Aqsa mosque. Where there is oppression, resistance is a natural reaction. The reaction of Gaza militants was not a mystery.

But why does no Western ruler say that the people of Palestine also have the right to defend themselves when they are being ethnically cleansed and their land gradually stolen from them?

Will President Joe Biden and his secretary Blinken set a new precedent and declare that the people of Palestine have every right to defend themselves and help them to this end? That will be something of a game changer and an unexpected shift to truth and justice.

We will soon see what they and their allies do to defend the people of Palestine.

ChinaChina Denounces US Plans to Dock Nuclear-Armed Submarines in South Korea

— Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, April 27, 2023

China on Thursday denounced US plans to dock nuclear-armed submarines in South Korea, saying that the plan runs counter to the goal of a “denuclearized” Korean Peninsula.

“The United States has put regional security at risk and intentionally used the issue of the peninsula as an excuse to create tension,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning, according to The South China Morning Post.

“What the US does is full of Cold War thinking, provoking bloc confrontation, undermining the nuclear non-proliferation system, damaging the strategic interests of other countries, exacerbating tensions on the Korean peninsula, undermining regional peace and stability, and running counter to the goal of the denuclearization of the peninsula,” she added.

The submarine deployments are part of a plan to increase nuclear weapons cooperation between the US and South Korea that was announced by President Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol at the White House on Thursday. While nuclear-armed submarines patrol waters all over the world, they haven’t docked in South Korea since the 1980s, and the move is a purposeful provocation toward Pyongyang and is sure to raise tensions.

The US removed nuclear weapons it had stationed in South Korea in 1991. President Biden said the US doesn’t plan to permanently deploy nuclear weapons in South Korea under the new deal, but “visits” by nuclear-armed submarines and other US strategic assets could become frequent.

“We’re not going to be stationing nuclear weapons on the peninsula,” Biden said in a joint press conference with Yoon. “But we will have visits to ports, visits of nuclear submarines and things like that.”

o by nuclear-armed submarines and other US strategic assets could become frequent.

“We’re not going to be stationing nuclear weapons on the peninsula,” Biden said in a joint press conference with Yoon. “But we will have visits to ports, visits of nuclear submarines and things like that.”

Did God speak to the former US President G. W. Bush? Some reflections

Nasir Khan, August 8, 2015

“God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.”
— George W. Bush, quoted in Lancaster New Era, July 16, 2004

Such was the claim of the former US President. He said this after the US armed forces had invaded and occupied two large countries, Afghanistan and Iraq. At that time, he was the most powerful leader of the mighty militarist superpower as well as a ‘divinely’ elevated person because God communicated with him. To my knowledge, in modern history we do not find another instance when a mortal man and the immortal God joined forces for U.S. to unleash two destructive wars! However, the implications of his pronouncements had a direct bearing on his political stature and his policies. Even though, he made his policies and issued his executive orders with the help of his close neoconservative advisers and secretaries but in doing so he was doing God’s work. God was speaking through him; therefore, God mandated whatever he did. God had chosen the right man to do His work!

If we accept the claims of divine guidance, for the sake of argument, that he, in fact, made on many times, then we can point to the results he achieved by his genocidal wars. Under his leadership, the US armed forces invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq in the most brutal way. They killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghans who had no quarrel with the people of the United States or posed any threat to the global U.S. hegemony and power. The destruction of Iraq was systematic. The Bush administration undertook the destruction of Iraqi state and its infrastructure as a necessary step to imposing the imperial diktat in the Middle East. It uprooted the social and administrative structure of Iraq and replaced it with sectarian puppet regimes that followed the orders of Washington and the Pentagon.

To make the imperial take-over easy and to neutralise any resistance to the new geopolitical order in this vast and oil-rich country, imperial masters used sectarian discord of the population as a convenient tool. How did it matter to Bush if Sunni and Shia turned against each other and started terrorist violence against their own people – the people of Iraq? Religious fanatics and miscreants were free to weaken Iraq while the occupiers could have an easy task to control the country and its resources. Thus, the US occupation could continue with greater ease while the country was drenched in bloodshed and mayhem that is still going on.

Through his destructive policies in the occupied Iraq, the Bush administration destabilised the whole region and played with the lives of millions of Iraqis by reducing them to destitution, poverty, homelessness and helplessness. The rampant killings in Iraq have claimed the lives of uncountable victims. In the first 7 years of US occupation, about 1.3 million Iraqi died. The main source of this incredible catastrophe that engulfed Iraq in 2003 was the US invasion. The ultimate responsibility of the present cycle of violence and bloodshed remains with Mr Bush.

Mr Bush’s military invasion and occupation of Afghanistan resulted in large-scale deaths of Afghans. The brutal treatment of the prisoners of war and the innocent victims in the process of occupying Afghanistan is a dark chapter in the history of twenty-first century. The occupying power violated the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners of war, international humanitarian conventions and all norms of international law. All this happened because God said to Bush to do so! In fact, this is a preposterous assertion that even Al Capone would not have resorted to! Let us take a common sense view of his claim and its consequences. What that means is that the former president is not responsible for the wars and war crimes but someone else is! In legal terms, he is implying that God is vicariously responsible for his wars and war crimes. In this way, he absolves himself of any responsibility for his actions and his policies as the head of US Government! A very convenient but cheap method to deceive the world, no doubt!

There is no need for us to enter into any lengthy theological discourse on God and his attributes. It is common knowledge that most believers see God as a kind, merciful and loving power. For having such attributes, believers hold Him in high respect and praise Him. It is hard to think that the Heavenly Father, as Christians call God, could have asked or encouraged Mr Bush to start major wars of aggression and commit the most heinous crimes against other weaker nations in this century. In brief, to impute such designs to God or because of fulfilling a mission from God is a reprehensible act on the part of Mr Bush. In the eyes of any sincere believers, he is maligning God in a vicious way if he believes in Him as he seemingly professes to do.

Alternatively, what if he really believed in what he asserted about God? That is something, which we can look at cursorily from a legal point of view. In criminal law, the actions of the alleged offenders are primarily judged for the mens rea – that is, their state of mind and intentions when they committed some indictable offence. In some cases, they are entitled to the defence of diminished responsibility or diminished capacity if their mental condition was impaired in such a way that they did not fully understand what they did. If such a defence is successful, the accused are given mitigated sentences or sent for medical treatment, depending on the gravity of offences involved. In an old case of acute insanity, one person beheaded a sleeping man just to see what he would do when woke up in the morning but didn’t find his head!

There are many cases when people hear sounds or messages from some unknown sources exhorting them to do something that may amount to a criminal offence. A hallucination is a perception that is not based on objective reality. It is very much a subjective condition of mind and in this condition, people may see or visualise things that having nothing to do with reality. In this age, we come across cases when some people say they have heard God or God has given them some message. If Mr Bush is sincere in his claims about God speaking to him, then that is something for which only the professional psychologists can offer their expert views.

In case  a judicial miracle (which I don’t see taking place!) takes place and the world sees the former US president, G.W. Bush, being prosecuted for his wars and the alleged war crimes in a court of law then the question of hallucinations would certainly be an issue in any legal process. However, facts point to a different direction: That he acted with deliberation and premeditation in pursuing his policies and his destructive wars.

Israeli war on Gaza is to crush Fatah-Hamas unity and any resistance to Israeli occupation

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Nasir Khan, July 19, 2014

There are many people who think that Israel has invaded Gaza in response to the rockets from Gaza. But there is more to this scenario then many casual readers know. Therefore I present a brief account of what happened. After the killing of three young ultra-rightist Jewish settlers by some unknown people and the burning alive of a Palestinian youth by the Zionists, the Netanyahu government accused Hamas of the killings. This Hamas categorically denied and declared that such accusations were totally unfounded. Hamas had nothing to do with the killings; it also condemned such killings because it was apprehensive that the Israeli government would use it an excuse to unleash terror in the West Bank and also Gaza. That’s exactly what happened.

Israeli police and army started a large-scale crack down on all members and sympathisers of Hamas in the West Bank. They also killed many Palestinians during these operations. As a reaction to the victimisation of its members by Israel, some resistance-fighters from Gaza fired rockets into Israel without causing much damage or death. There is no credible evidence that one Israeli citizen was killed by the rocket fire. As expected by many political observers Israel used firing of rockets from Gaza as a casus belli for a full scale aerial bombardment indiscriminately that was followed by a ground invasion. But what are the real reasons for Israeli war on Gaza? One prime reason is to strike at the Palestinian unity government that the two factions Fatah and Hamas had formed after the collapse of the US charade of peace talks between the parties.

Paul Craig Roberts: Agenda Prevails Over Truth

 

Paul Craig Roberts, IPE, December 28, 2012

In the Western world truth no longer has any meaning. In its place stands agenda.

Agenda is all important, because it is the way Washington achieves hegemony over the world and the American people. 9/11 was the “new Pearl Harbor” that the neoconservatives declared to be necessary for their planned wars against Muslim countries. For the neoconservatives to go forward with their agenda, it was necessary for Americans to be connected to the agenda.

President George W. Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neil, said that prior to 9/11 the first cabinet meeting was about the need to invade Iraq.

9/11 was initially blamed on Afghanistan, and the blame was later shifted to Iraq. Washington’s mobilization against Afghanistan was in place prior to 9/11. The George W. Bush regime’s invasion of Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) occurred on October 7, 2001, less than a month after 9/11. Every military person knows that it is not possible to have mobilization for invading a country half way around the world ready in three weeks.

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The Dark Side Of The Obama White House

Dan Froomkin, HuffingtonPost, July 25, 2012

The most conspicuous reaction in Washington to a series of astonishing national security revelations, many of which emerged in two new books, has come from prominent members of Congress demanding investigations into who leaked them.

One member, California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, even complained of learning more from one of the books than she did in her top oversight post over the intelligence community.

But anybody upset about finding things out this way should be angry at the people who didn’t tell them what they needed to know — not the ones who did.

In “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” New York Times reporter David E. Sanger describes in quite extraordinary detail the Obama administration’s hitherto secret cyberwar campaign against Iran, its targeted drone strikes against Al Qaeda and affiliates, and any number of other covert ops, including of course the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. As he indicates in his subtitle, Sanger concludes that the biggest surprise of the Obama presidency is just how aggressive he has been in his application of military power.

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Pentagon’s Christmas Present: Largest Military Budget Since World War II

By Rick Rozoff, opednews.com, Dec 23, 2010

On December 22 both houses of the U.S. Congress unanimously passed a bill authorizing $725 billion for next year’s Defense Department budget.

The bill, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011, was approved by all 100 senators as required and by a voice vote in the House.

The House had approved the bill, now sent to President Barack Obama to sign into law, five days earlier in a 341-48 roll call, but needed to vote on it again after the Senate altered it in the interim.

The proposed figure for the Pentagon’s 2011 war chest includes, in addition to the base budget, $158.7 billion for what are now euphemistically referred to as overseas contingency operations: The military occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

The $725 billion figure, although $17 billion more than the White House had requested, is not the final word on the subject, however, as supplements could be demanded as early as the beginning of next year, especially in regard to the Afghan war that will then be in its eleventh calendar year.

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Human Rights Day & U.S. Hypocrisy

Defensive America’s Contempt for Full Court, Press

by Nima Shirazi, Foreign Policy Journal, December 14, 2010

“The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.” – André Gide

“WikiLeaks has shown there is an America in civics textbooks and an America that functions differently in the real world.” – James Moore

Sixty-two years ago, on December 10, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 of the Declaration, to which the United States is undoubtedly beholden, affirms:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Well, except for WikiLeaks, of course.

Internet giant Amazon.com, which hosted the whistle-blowing website, dropped WikiLeaks last week, “only 24 hours after being contacted by the staff of Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate’s committee on homeland security.” Lieberman’s call for censorship was also heeded by the Seattle-based software company, Tableau, which was hosting some informational, interactive charts linked to by WikiLeaks. These graphics contained absolutely no confidential material whatsoever and merely provided data regarding where the leaked cables originated and in what years they had been written. Nevertheless, for fear of government retribution, Tableau removed the charts, explaining,

Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when he called for organizations hosting WikiLeaks to terminate their relationship with the website.

Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal have all since followed suit.

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